Frameworks and Patterns
The City of Storylines
In the first section, we talked about what a ‘storyline’ is, and why we have them. When I think about the ‘self’, sometimes it seems like a buzzing, bustling city of storylines, all crisscrossing and building a large and seemingly solid reality of ‘who I am’. Like a city, some of it is visible but much of it is invisible – behind walls, or underground. When we look, we only see the surface, and only the particular neighbourhood we happen to be looking at directly.
The vastness, complexity and invisibility of our inner frameworks, patterns, belief systems and strategies, was a real surprise to me. When I first started meditating and exploring what kept me from being present more often, I thought I knew my mind pretty well. I had not only had counseling but taken courses on counseling others. I found psychology interesting and talked with friends about emotions and motivations. But -- it turned out that I had been seeing only a small fraction of what was layered in my mind. Over the past ten years, I can honestly say that what I’ve seen in the ‘city of storylines’ has surprised me over and over again – and I know there is more to come, more that is still underground.
In a way, it shouldn’t be unexpected. As we evolved as human animals, the mind needed to correlate and sort the overwhelming amount of input it receives, and build from that an image of the world – which we then take as ‘reality’, but which is in fact subjective. There is too much information coming in to do all of that consciously.
How do we move from what was covered in the first section -- seeing the storylines inherent in individual events -- towards penetrating the larger picture of our deeper and more pervasive frameworks and patterns? First we need to see how and why we see things the way we do. Then we can start to observe and investigate, by pulling at various threads of our experience and seeing what arises.
“We need a path, not to take us from here to there, but to go from here to here.”
Jausho Kwong
What is 'Being Present'?
Our Investment in Not Being Present
What's Going On
Observing
Observation Points
Brick by Brick
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