The Illusion Of Meaning and Stories

What stories and meanings have you been attaching to people, places, yourself, and every event of your life?

Are those same stories quietly shaping the meaning you assign to every experience you’re having now?

What if each time you attached a meaning to something, you stopped to examine several other equally viable interpretations?

Would the original story begin to lose its solidity?

Would its truth soften?

In that softening would you start to see through the illusion of all stories and meanings altogether?

Out of every illusion I’ve seen so far, the most profound (short of the illusion of a separate self) is the illusion that the stories and meanings we attach to things are based in truth.

The belief that our interpretations of experiences, memories, people’s intentions, our purpose, and the events of our lives reflect reality in any inherent way is simply a trick of the ego.

When we begin to see these interpretations from enough angles, we realize just how many possible meanings there are. How equally valid each one seems. From here, it becomes apparent that any interpretation we choose only reinforces a false self and perpetuates another story about the future. Each meaning becomes empty of substance.