PEACE IN LETTING-GO OF STORIES.

Want to find peace? Step out of the ring & the fight, into your inner sanctuary,

solitude & quietude, and peace will find you. 😉

Aware living involves an ongoing alertness, catching and releasing, mostly of one’s reactions in the moment to events of the moment. Habitual reactions to the spinning of stories that, for that moment, bling, beckon, and bind one with mind-made dramas that would keep us living in the underworld of our conditioned desires and fears, cravings, and dreads. Of course, in watching one’s mind, we discover that it’s The Great Story Maker; it’s functional and useful too, but mostly its psychological stories are conflicted, confused, and totally conditioned.

True to its binary brain, it compares and contrasts, adds and subtracts, and all the while endlessly seeks to conclude it ‘knows’, or will know, and thus resolve all its problems, with time and effort. In short, that’s the problem. It’s not just AI that produces problematic ‘slop’; the human mind behind it all is the Grand Slop Maker. Indeed, it’s the mind’s stories using symbolic words about life that capture, color, and confine us to not really living. In truth, life and the living of it is not “One battle after another” as the Oscar-winning movie tells us, except that we make believe it is so.

Take a walk in a backwater—such as a woods, park, or perhaps a rural area—where it’s not loud or flashy; a quiet place far from the constant struggle for dominance seen in competitive business and nightly distractions. It’s a space with open land, maybe with parents, kids, and playgrounds, where life is experienced more fully because it’s lived more fully. Here, stories come later in the day; if the TV’s off, they’re shared over dinner, often about everyday experiences—not overly burdened with ego, fear, or fancy that make them irrelevant to our real lives. It might not be the most entertaining, but truly living means not escaping into distractions or stories that distance us from knowing and being truly present in the here and now.

In fine, aware living is all about letting the mind’s distractions and attractions pass in the watchful eye of that unknowing which is not a believer, believing, but more like a host in a hotel lobby, watching as people, things, and events come and go in a revolving door. The host is the quickened Constant, the light that’s always on, so to speak; the light that’s the substance of being, the foundation without which there would be – there is – no life. Some call that belief-free, non-fictional living, reality, or perhaps ‘aware-being.’ Some call it love. Whatever, aware loving is the only way to really live, yes.  All else is a story, as Shakespeare put it, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. The beauty of it all lies in the watching, totally from unattached awareness. Peace presents in and as presence.  😊

~ The Scream, by Munch, 1893

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