Stories

Have you ever noticed how many stories you tell yourself every day? Every hour? It seems to be a constant stream of stories. We spend our entire lives telling ourselves various stories about everything imaginable. I think most of it is social conditioning. I feel social conditioning is a huge part of who we think we are. Depending on where you live your stories will be different. For example, stories of justice will be very different if told by a middle aged while male American vs a young female from Palestine.


  If you listen to most of your thoughts you'll notice the stories. It seems we are so used to believing our thoughts that I don't think we even notice that our thoughts are just stories. There's no inherent truth in any of them. You can actually take a random thought you are having and turn it around (Byron Katie style) and believe that the exact opposite is true. We may not believe it at first, but if we are honest with ourselves it is absolutely true. It's a very interesting exercise. I've done this many times with great success. The problem is i keep forgetting to do this. I go on autopilot like most everyone else and before I know it I'm off on some other story believing everything I'm thinking.

Then of course there's the neuroscience data that suggests that there is just a brain thinking. There's no one inside of the brain conjuring up these thoughts. That would mean there's some lived entity inside the brain that is capable of pre-thoughts. There's a ton of activity in the brain prior to the consciousness of thoughts that we are not privy to and that we had no hand in creating. Can you make a neuron fire? Can you make millions of neurons fire in quick succession? Of course you can't.
So who or what is actually doing the thinking? The only thing 'we' are conscious of is the final thought product.

So who would you be without your stories? Can you let your thoughts go without attaching to them? Can you see their non-truth?