I Am Not the Stories of My History

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“Are you stuck in the stories of your past?” Barry asked me as we enjoyed some after work drinks.

We had just been talking about books that inspired us when we were young. I admitted that during the height of my dazed and confusing high school years I devoured Carlos Castaneda’s first four books that recounted his apprenticeship with the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan Matus. They were important books to me back then because they introduced a much larger and more fluid description of life. They were the perfect read for my teenage mind seeking guidance on how to best groove with the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

Barry noted my confusion regarding his question. “Castaneda wrote about erasing personal history as part of the path to becoming a man of knowledge, which is funny because most of us insist on defining our worth by the gauge of our personal history. How am I doing compared to yesterday? It’s like we’re frozen in the iceberg of our past. We keep looking back and can’t move into different, more infinite views of the world. We’re trapped in this self-image that we constructed from the subjective memories of our bygone days.”

Barry was a reflective person with a philosophical bent and I enjoyed spending some off hours with him to get his slant on things. It didn’t surprise me that he was familiar with those early teachings of Castaneda.

In the books, Don Juan talks about dropping our personal history as if it were a bad habit, like smoking cigarettes. By identifying with our personal history, believing that it is who we are, our life is made routine and ordinary. Our personal history sustains the belief that we actually know what life is about and our place in it because of what we have learned and done before.

As Don Juan said in Journey to Ixtlan, “You see, we only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or we don’t. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves.” This idea resonates with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that I wrote about recently.

I am beginning to suspect we have mistaken our personal history for some type of esteemed credentials in our society. Because we believe we have a clue about who we were, it’s easy to believe we have a clue about life. We have convinced ourselves that, not only do we know where the rabbit will pop out from, we even know why. We believe we are so smart because of our accomplishments in the past and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Of course, anyone paying attention to the devastating downward spiral of the living systems of our planet today, due to our ignorant choices, can see that perhaps we are more clueless than we are willing to admit. And the downward spiral of our governing systems has fully entered the realm of an insane sideshow—draining the swamp indeed! More like clogging the bowl.

The personal history of our ego makes for a very limited worldview upon which to build a functioning and sustainable society. Truly, take a thorough and awakened look around and see if you think we are acting skillfully as a species, as we lead from the exalted stories of who we believe we are.

I asked Barry if he had dropped his personal history. “There are times I can drop it completely,” he answered, “but I always seem to pick it up again when I start feeling that uncomfortable, ship without an anchor feeling. I’m getting closer to moving through that though.”

I get where Barry is coming from. It takes a great level of courage to loosen the hold of our personal history and the grip it has on our egoic self-image. It requires us to become much smaller than our egos would have us be, which is the challenge of our times.

Identifying as our personal history limits our potential to transcend the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s a great achievement when we can lighten our mental load by dropping off our judgments and the self-defining accounts of our past. What a blessing to fully embrace the life of the present moment with a clarity that doesn’t require an ego spawned self-identification. It only requires a pristine awareness.

Many wisdom teachers have assured us that when we become free from identification with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, that we can find a direct access to who we truly are underneath all those surface narratives. It’s by becoming smaller that we discover just how infinitely vast we really are!

This state of direct becoming is a gateway to enlightenment or self-actualization. And this is no small prize. The teachers suggest we just need to shrink down our lizard brain egos into a manageable size that doesn’t require us leading from its puny voice of fear-laced judgment, uninformed condemnation, and wall-building arrogance.

The description of Mushin or “the state of no-mindedness” found in Zen and Japanese martial arts is in alignment with Don Juan’s erasing personal history and the practice becoming smaller. This experience is also described as the sought-after zone that is so highly prized by athletes, artists, mystics, and visionaries, where action is born from a wisdom that transcends our meager, little selves.

“To give up the idea that we actually know who we are and how this wondrous life works, that we understand the grand purpose of this infinite and ever-expanding universe, is the first step towards a more direct, deeper, and juicier knowledge,” Barry offered. “And it’s what our planet and the grandbabies desperately want from us! We need to get out of our past and mindfully inhabit the actuality of now in order to move forward in the most skillful manner!”

Barry does enjoy the soapbox from time to time. But in this case, I couldn’t agree with him more.

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