Aloha and Good Morning,

 

 Human beings are story tellers. In the absence of an audience, we’d chalk our stories on cave walls, then papyrus, then this computer screen. Those aren’t the stories I mean. I’m talking about the stories we constantly tell ourselves. The ones we make up in our heads to become chatter-fodder for the small, egoic mind.

 

 It happens like this: something occurs. Immediately our mind begins to categorize and compare the occurrence in a blazing, hyper-speed inner-process of matching for similarities, matching for differences and matching for emotional content against the brain's vast matrix of associative, contextual memories.

The mind then interlaces the matches of this exhaustive inner “googling” along with the memory of the thing that just occurred, thereby modifying our experience of it like Dr. Frankenstein sewing together his monster out of bodily bits of dead flesh robbed from the grave.

The moment of the occurrence that began this process has, after-all already passed. It is no longer a member of the Present Moment Club. The mind is now comparing memories with memories with memories and reacting both emotionally and chemically to the images and generalized conclusions these memories represent. Generally speaking, it is to this hormonal/emotional soup that we react, not to what occurred at all. This physical and emotional reaction pumps through the body, filters through our mask-self and emerges from our mouth like a raging, rabid beast over which we have no control or it explodes from our energy centers like spiky, electrical darts fired by the taser-gun of our shadow.

Perhaps, if I’m a little less dramatic, it merely causes us to misunderstand another, or withdraw into ourselves, or act negatively about our bodies or critically towards someone else. It yanks us out of the present by hooking our attention and colors our experience by slanting it, by shaping it around our images and around similarities with our past.

 

 Whew. I’m exhausted just listing this convoluted process and it’s going on ALL the time in our heads. It will continue its non-stop, endlessly negative story telling until we learn to identify with the seer and not the seen, with the witness and not that which is witnessed and can stand back, take a breath, and jump off the wheel of samsara, the pathological suffering we create with our own thinking. We'll find peace when we fire the minstrel and cast it from our mind.

 

 It sounds complicated, the way our mind compares and retrieves memories and the images hooked to them, yet we’ve perfected the process through endless, repetitive practice, generation after generation. Still, in a way, it’s an amazing testament to the magnificence of our humanness, our heritage and the potential of our brain.

 

 Here’s the short story: something occurs. We make up shit about it. Then we act and react as if our story is the truth.

 

 It’s like we create an alternate dimension, superimposed upon our physical, earthly experience and then choose to live there. The further this dimension lies away from the common intersection of everyone else’s, the more they may label it eccentric, then weird, then neurotic, then psychotic, then insane. It’s a matter of degree applied to the same process of separation from the present moment, the now, the ever-present ground of being in which our individualized intelligence recognizes Itself, sees its Original Face and surrenders into the bliss of unity, into the bliss of divine, universal Intelligence.

 

 From our stories we create. Creation is a function of intelligence. It’s inevitable that we create for we are intelligent beings, part and parcel of the Whole.

Spirit is an infinite Intelligence that can hold the whole of Itself within Its awareness simultaneously and still have enough attention to spare to unfold another galaxy, give birth to a baby, witness itself laughing, write a book, witness itself crying, combine two hydrogen atoms and one of oxygen to make rain and throw a perfect game of darts at the pub on a Saturday night over a nice glass of stout. Everything existent is an individualized expression of Spirit giving form to Itself; Spirit setting aside space within Its inner, infinite vastness in which form may arise, remain and then return.

 

 The material universe and all the subtle, energetic planes within it are the creation of Spirit origamically folding and unfolding itself into form. Matter and molecules are Spirit folding itself up one way, while energy and angels are Spirit folded up another.

 

Intelligence creates: We create our experience, our reality through the thoughts we invoke upon the Mind of Spirit like the young apprentice waving his master’s wand, unprepared for the magnitude of its responsiveness.

The Intelligence of God creates all that is, while the intelligence of you and I create the spice or flavor of how what is appears, how it tastes, how it is perceived as it unfolds around us. Spirit may create a flower or a fossil while we create our experience of that flower or our interpretation of what that fossil represents.

 

Spirit presents us with experiences of Itself, of which we are inseparably and forever both a part and the whole, and yet we create our own conclusions. Conclusions are the outcome of reducing reality into more manageable groups of symbols and then organizing them into an artificial sequence that we can hold in our awareness and make some sense of. The “sense” we make of it is determined by the degree of consciousness we have available to utilize in the organizing process. Don’t get me wrong, this process may be intrinsically reductionistic and yet it is absolutely necessary and is the way humanity functions at its current level. We haven’t transcended symbol use. In fact, we still study its development in children. Yet, a symbol isn’t the thing symbolized. It’s removed from the Source, conceptualized, contextualized, recognized and only then related to.

 

 What’s different is the number and depth of symbols that an individual is capable of operating upon simultaneously and the degree of horizontal and vertical organization that can be held within one’s awareness moment to moment.

Consider the new born child: completely incapable of caring for herself, unable to communicate or express herself beyond instinctual, languageless crying. In the physical and mental realms the child is at ground zero, the step before the step. She may come into the world “trailing clouds of glory”, and yet she lacks the capacity to be aware, beyond the most basic, gross, material recognition of matter. She can’t tell the difference between herself and her mother, herself and her crib, herself and her toes. From this humble beginning she pulls herself up in a grand, dynamic spiral of growth from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, unfolding through each stage, each cognitive reorganization, each ever more inclusive realization along the lines and levels of development that form the spectrum of consciousness.

 

The portion of her soul that is not expressing itself as the infant retains all its previously gained wisdom and power and also the karmic stuckness still to be worked out – in a similar fashion to the way that the part of God not expressing itself as her individualized soul retains all Its vastness and glory while her soul carries off a portion to re-actualize through her individual experience. So it goes as each individualized thread in Spirit’s sacred tapestry, simultaneously the Weaver and the woven, unfolds itself into ever more beautiful patterns of awareness and mutual Self-recognition.

If we use a narrow sense of the word, we could say that evolution is Spirits way of refining organic matter (external structures) into ever more inclusive and complex organisms through processes like natural selection and adaptation. Likewise, we could say that incarnation is Spirits way of refining consciousness (internal structures) into ever more inclusive forms of awareness through spiritual practices and cognitive development, which in turn leads to cultural reorganization and ever more inclusive, world-centric values.

 

 Where once evolutionary progress was a process of cleverly chipping away flakes of stone to create cutting tools and spear heads – now we chip away the unnecessary stony flakes of outmoded thought patterns, perceptions and self-limiting ideas, self-destructive language and negative inner dialog.

 

 Yes, human beings are story tellers. The choice is ours whether our story is a romance, a fairy tale or a horror story of suffering and misery. The only difference is the awareness we bring to the story we constantly tell ourselves. May yours be a best seller! May it be full of love and laughter, joy and pleasure. May the conflict you experience serve only to awaken you to your true nature, to help you find and flourish in an inner awareness of yourself as grand and magnificent, unendingly beautiful in all your humanness and flaws. May your story include an ever more integral, inclusive realization of your limitlessness and interconnection with everything and everyone. May it help you to live an unguarded, undefended, genuine, gritty life! May your soul dance defenselessly, in all its vulnerability and glory for what is there to defend and who is there to defend against? Who is it, after all, that is reading this Morning Moment? Spirit upon Spirit upon Spirit upon Spirit evermore - and I’m not quoting the raven.

 

 With love and aloha,  Holman

Contents © 2008 by  Holman R. Meyerhoffer, LMT—Project Transformation