Telling stories: the fiction of our lives

Truth is I wasn't sure what to call this post as all the titles I would have loved to use had been taken, so I settled for this one as it is probably closest to what I want to write about here.

My preferred title was just 'Telling Stories' which I nicked from Tracy Chapman's remarkable song 'Telling Stories' as it accurately reflects what I want to say, you'll have to listen to that song as I won't directly be writing about it here but will incorporate its theme.

First I ask the following questions:-

1. When does fiction transcend into reality for us?
2. Do we tell tales to make our lives seem less mundane because we think it is?
3. Are we really who we think and say we are?
4. Do we fabricate our lives on a grand scale?
5. Where do we draw the line between the real and invented version of our lives and what is real?
6. Will we be less accepted if we let people know who we really are or does that mean a certain death?
7. Who are we really?
8. Why are we here?
9. Is a lie sometimes the best thing...have we been lying all our lives as a means of survival?
10. Where does the ego come to play in all of the above questions?
11. What will happen if the truth be known?
12. Will we have to lay down and die?

Right now, I am randomly interested in questions 1-7 to start with. Who are we? Will we be accepted or rejected if people know or see who we really are? If people stare and see behind the mask we show the world in different circumstances; the disguise we choose to wear for different occasions and reasons; the self that we portray wherever we go to convey a specific impression of who we want to be seen as, rather than what/who we believe we truly are.

Do we really know who we truly are?

Perhaps we have never been allowed to answer that question by ourselves...

And who do we truly believe we are as individuals? This is a billion dollar question and I'm not sure there is a straightforward answer, because simply put, we have been brainwashed from birth to assume an identity of sorts, starting with our sex and our name(s) and followed by the definitions of ' our self' that is imposed on us by our family, teachers, religion, tribe, race, friends, peers, employers, colleagues, media and government. All of these factors define us as we progress through our life's journey and try to tell us what we should or shouldn't be in order to survive.

Survival is everything! or So we believe!!

Our definition of who we are can change over time as we often assume a range of multiple personalities to present to the world in order to cope with the need for acceptance in one form or another, depending on what or whose tune or agenda we are dancing to at any given point in our lives. Unfortunately, life can seem like a series of multiple agendas and our main role can appear to be hopping from one agenda to the other in order to survive and along the way we also create our own multiple agendas.

And why do we always feel the need 'to survive' at all times? Does it boil down to the fact that man is an animal and hence our caveman instinct for self-preservation? What are we trying to preserve or protect? 
What are we running away from and where are we going?

I believe as biological beings, our need for survival stems from our overwhelming fear of death. Death accompanies us into life and follows us around like a forbidden shadow - an unseen companion, an enemy whose frightening presence we are all too aware off and which we would prefer not to acknowledge if only our lives haven't been spent trying to elude it. 

We are constantly aware of death's presence beside us, lurking darkly in the wings for its time to come because it knows (and we know) that it will prevail ultimately. But we constantly project that dark presence on to others so that we see the reflection or threat of death in them. 

Death is a frightening companion, stalking us through the eyes of people we meet, so that our instinct becomes one of not only surviving, but ultimately of preserving our lives by finding ways to eliminate the enemy before the enemy gets us. Hence lies the origin of the principle of 'warfare' in the human psyche - the need to eliminate death (others) before death eliminates us...if only for a while, as we know we must ultimately surrender. Life appears to be a gift or a borrowed item that we must preserve at all costs before it eventually gets snatched from us.

Thus right from conception, we are geared and reared to finding ways to elude death for as long as we possibly can but knowing that ultimately it will prevail and take us back to where we came from. The only certainty in life is physical death itself and we all know that and try as much as possible to prolong that certainty from happening. So we create a series of illusions, fabrications of a grand scheme which we call life, our life so far, our life as we would like it to be - to help us outmanoeuvre the certainty of death. We are constantly running through one illusion after the other, in their many different forms and guises; running away from the one thing what we know with certainty is inevitable.

So are we born primarily to run? Are we born to flee death's grasp? Is that what life is about, from conception to death, from start to end - one big game of survival, knowing that life is only for a fleeting while and during that while, we will attempt all kinds of ruses to enable us survive for one more second, for one more minute, for one more hour and for one more day...till we can no longer run, no longer hide and the inevitable happens, death catches up with us, when we can no longer fight, we surrender, hands up, white flag out, tired and weary from the battle that brought us to the end of our flight. 

What happens afterwards?

On the question of Love...

This is no doubt a question that features on the minds of many if not everyone. What is love? A hit song by Geman-Caribbean artist Haddaway links love to hurt, with the refrain  - 'baby don't hurt me no more'. I believe those words echo the fear and insecurity of many billions around the world when they think of love in relation to others - in whatever capacity we see them - individual or collective. 

Why is the subject of love sweet love most often associated with joy and most fearfully with pain and hatred? 

Why, as humans do we use love to hurt those we supposedly love or intrinsically hate? 

These are perennial questions that I'm sure philosophers both qualified and armchair have pondered through the ages.  I am not entirely sure but have to rely on my intuitive thinking rather than logical deduction, to say that the answer lies in the human ego's constant need to compete in order to survive. 

The ego, reflects the sum total of who we think we are, the jetsam and flotsam of knowledge and identities we have accumulated through life and projected unto others in our bid to survive in what we consider or are taught to consider as an individualised and hostile and unforgiving world. However, the bible and other holy books teaches us to love one another as we love ourselves and that the greatest gift of all is LOVE and that God is love and the source of love. 

But where or why have we gone wrong in implementing this most basic principle as humans? Why do we organise each other both individually and collectively into 'goodies and baddies' constantly in love or at war?

I use the term 'we' because, like it or not, we are actually one consciousness with nature and with God, but since the fall of man, we have separated that consciousness through the filtering mind of the ego into individual and collective identities in a bid to survive one against the other. Thus we purportedly love our selves as individuals or as a collective bunch of individuals (group) but hate other individuals or groups that appear physically or mentally different from us. We believe we have to negotiate our love/hate relationship with those others and to love or hate them in order to survive. We tend to love individuals or groups that reflect what we love in or about ourselves and hate those who don't. Or perhaps we hate those who love what we hate about ourselves because in essence, we are one and the same.

As humans, in this game of separate identities, in our personal and collective relationships, we are an embodiment of opposites, good and evil, love and hatred and we can switch so easily between these opposites whenever our primordial instincts for survival are triggered, hence we 'love' to survive and 'hate' in order to survive in our relationships with others. This is the essence of a human race that has separated itself from itself in order find its place and survive in an unknown, unquantifiable and hence seemingly hostile world. 

But if we are commanded to LOVE by God, the universal creator of everything and source of our collective consciousness, if we are told that we emanate from God who is the embodiment and source of Love and that we are truly one with him, then why have we developed the capacity to hate? Is it because we (in the egoic identity that we have assumed in our learning through life) have come to consider ourselves as separate and different silos of consciousness, labeled and nurtured from birth to see ourselves as such and to defend our individual identities against the threatening identities of others, in order to survive? 

If we love one another as we love ourselves then would that solve the problem? I'm not so sure that in our fallen state this is possible. Humanity is so lost to the whims and caprice of its fallen and separated egoic self that it can not see anything else outside the construct of the ego, or even if it does, it is but an unattainable idyll - something that can only be attained at a higher level of consciousness. 

I suspect that that is true, that the most basic of human instincts - pure unadulterated and unconditional love with no strings of hatred attached can only be attained when we move away from the ego into a higher state of consciousness, in which we come to realise that our consciousness is one and unseparated and that the source of that consciousness is LOVE and that this simple equation can be expressed as G=L=M=O or GOD = LOVE = MANKIND = ONE, QED.

Who am I?

I have written this article for my 'Power of living in the now' blog for many reasons, most of which I'm not going to mention here as they are personal to me, however people may read between the lines from some of the things I will be talking about.

I am interested in a range of things, but most importantly, I am interested in the question of 'Being' i.e. why we are who we think or believe we are and who are we? These are questions that have regularly baffled and intrigued me ever since I was a child growing up and having occasional insights into the person behind the outward facing me, the body-mask staring back at me in the mirror. 

The honest truth is I have never seen myself but only a reflection in the mirror and from others, hence how accurate are those reflections of me? Do people see and interpret what I show them of myself or do they really know the person behind the mask? Is it garbage out to the world and garbage back from the world? 

I've come to realise that of course, I can't ever see myself in person, what I ever get to see as a living being is a reflection of what I look like - from a mirror and from others. Perhaps only when we die do we get to step outside that body-mask to see what we really looked like in in distorted form. But by then, it would be too late, as the real (hidden) you finally gets to see the body-mask posed dead in rigor mortis - in end form.

Those insights of me behind the mask, were very brief indeed, as I would catch myself having them in fleeting moments. Those very brief moments, lasting seconds rather than minutes, were astonishing moments, which I then reflected on. During those brief moments, It was as if the mask had fallen to reveal the real person behind the 'ME' parading itself to the world.

The real person behind the mask, the actual self, who in a material sense is a 'nobody' or to put it harshly a non-entity of sorts. In those fleeting moments, I questioned my rational for 'being' and I questioned who the real me was, the person behind the mask or the mask itself. The being doing the thinking, the engine running the sleek personality machine that parades itself to the outer world. Is that the real me? 

I always felt that the person or engine behind the mask was the real me, the indisputable me but because, in a sense - what I could observe in a mirror was my physical self, embodying all the traits that the mask had come to identify with and absorb wholeheartedly over the years of its existence - my little mind and my grown mind would undoubtedly always end up accepting and identifying with the Masked Persona.

As I now know, the 'outward personality' or the 'Mask' represents the bundle of characteristics that I have been conditioned to accept about myself from birth till present. Those characteristics, starting with my name, are formed and reinforced over the years by conditioning from my parents, siblings, teachers, education, religion, history, peers, friends, partners, co-workers, neighbours, community, media, society, nation, ethnicity, race, and the world at large. That sum total or bundle of characteristics often referred to as the 'ego' by philosophers and psychoanalysts alike, forms the basis of my presentation and reaction to the world around me.