The Story We Are Living
A teaching from Armand Bytton
Lecture on October 8, 2022
Everything we experience, we experience as a story.
Not because life is a fiction, but because the human mind cannot help but shape what happens into a pattern, a meaning, a thread we can hold.
A story has a pattern that it follows, something that is communicated, something that is shared. And out of those threads, we generate not only how we experience reality, but how we actually are in reality. Our identity, the very nature of who we are, is portrayed in different stories.
Some of those stories were given to us. Family, culture, history, the systems we move through, each has handed us a script we did not choose. We carry these scripts inside us long after we have forgotten who placed them there. And when the story we are narrating inside ourselves does not align with our own inner being, something quiet begins to ache.
We begin to feel lost. We begin to feel that we do not know ourselves.
There is the story given. And the story discovered.
Consider the old narrative of how civilizations rose, the idea that cities and order emerged from power, hierarchy, and the demarcation between those who had and those who did not. For a long time, that was the accepted account.
And yet newer research has shown that long before great empires, there were villages that not only survived but thrived. They developed ideas, beauty, and what we might today call progress, without the kind of elite or hierarchy that the older story insisted was necessary.
So which is true? Both, in a sense. And neither, completely. Each is a story that magnifies certain things and eliminates others. It brings our attention, personal and collective, to look at certain things. And as we look at them, we generate meaning. And it is the meaning then that we live.
Does this mean everything is relative?
No. What it means is that we all share one thing in common. Creativity.
There needs to be room for people to create. To define consciously and intentionally what that creation is, and not just suffer the consequences of inherited stories that have been pushed onto us without our knowing.
This is not a luxury for artists. This is the work of every life. We are all artists of life. And when we forget this, when we live entirely inside a story that someone else wrote for us, the result is a quiet despiritualization, a sense of meaninglessness that no amount of activity can fill.
Within the story we have been given, there is a story that is more basic, more core. Learning to enter into that place is the work.
"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems of pride."
— Pablo Neruda, as offered in Armand's teachingA love that dissolves separation.
There is a kind of loving that does not ask how, or when, or from where. It does not weigh itself against pride. It simply is. It instructs us, disciplines us, shapes us. It loves in such a way that the boundary between I and you begins to dissolve, until the hand placed upon your chest feels like your own.
Reason does not play into loving. There is no how, there is only love. There is no when, there is only eternity. There is no where, there is only everywhere. Love is the how of the why and the why of the how.
When everything that divides one person from another softens, and what is good and what is bad stop being opposites, an amorphous place opens. The poem points to it. The path walks through it.
We are in a time that asks us to love.
Not to define ourselves only as wounded, or as borderline, or as anxious, or as broken. These are descriptions, not destinies. The work is to recognize ourselves as something more than what trauma has named us.
As something that gives imagination the freedom from the trauma. That gives the trauma the freedom to guide without trying to take over. Because what we see outside is inside of us. The world and the self are mirrors of one another. The healing of one is the healing of the other.
An act of creation allows for what reason cannot resolve. The meaninglessness, the catastrophe, the question of how to live after we have looked at our life and seen that we have not really lived. Creativity is how we answer. Not only those who call themselves artists. All of us, because we are all artists of life. And it is that lovingness that will heal us, and help heal each other, and heal the planet.
Each bird within us carries a gift and a curse.
In the old Sufi poem The Conference of Birds, each bird represents an aspect of the soul. Each one is welcomed by name. Each is shown both the beauty it offers and the trap it conceals.
The one who wears a heavenly robe
It wears a celestial robe and bears a flaming necklace. The fire at its throat is the inheritance of hell. The robe is a gift from heaven. Both live in it. The lesson is to stop being defined by the duality. To walk into the fire of one's own hubris and let it become a garden.
The one who struts down from the mountain of knowing
Knowledge becomes a mountain, and from that mountain we can no longer see. We have to destroy the mountain abode of the ego to recover the beginner's mind. In emptiness, faith arrives. In faith, milk and honey flow beneath the feet, and the beloved steps out to meet us at the journey's end.
The one who soars with sharp, hungry eyes
It is fierce, watchful, accustomed to power. The teaching asks it to tie a timeless love letter to its feet and never unfold it. To trade the rational mind for the heart's knowledge. To smash its natural instincts and make the cave of oneness its home. There, the beloved of the world arrives to visit.
The one who weeps from love's pain
It softly weeps from love's pain, sighing as David did along love's path. It is asked to unveil its throat and sing the soulful melody of creation. To stop weaving chain armor around its ego, and let metal melt like wax in David's hands, until it becomes a master of art and love.
The one struck by the seven-headed snake
The seven-headed snake is the pure ego. Its whisperings exiled the peacock from Eden and darkened the heart with nature's veil. Until that snake is crushed, the mysteries of the path remain hidden. Free yourself from that serpent, and Adam will welcome you back into the garden once more.
The one who crouches in the dry well of darkness
Like Joseph, it is asked to leave the well and the prison behind, to soar from miseries' dungeon toward the sky of the beloved. To become a king in the Egypt of eminence. To remember that even darkness is part of the path, and not the destination.
The one who flies with a light heart and returns weighted with grief
Like Jonah inside the whale, it has been swallowed by the sea monster of the ego. The teaching asks it to chop off the head of that greedy fish and rise up to stroke the moon's forehead. To abandon the ego creature, so that Jonah himself may sail the eternal ocean alongside it.
The one who has tasted the world's carrion
It loves the world's leftovers and has been blinded to inner vision. The teaching asks it to tear the hood from its own head, to spread its wings, to outsoar both this world and the next. Detached from both, it finds its perch on the wrist of the beloved.
The one who enters like fire
It is asked to burn whatever comes its way and close its eyes to everything in creation. When the path is scorched clean, each moment opens a new gift from the beloved. The goldfinch becomes a flawless bird on the beloved's path, until what remains is no longer only itself, but the beloved too.
Each bird has a gift. And inside the gift, a curse.
This is the deep truth of the poem. The transformation does not happen at the arrival. It happens in the journey itself. Not in the destination, but in the long walk we call a life.
We are not asked to transform the curse by abandoning the gift. We are asked to live with both, with eyes open. To let the love be the guide. To let the fear be faced. To let the change happen quietly, from the inside out.
Anything that takes away from what is, diminishes us. It makes us less. And in our lessness, we choose a tyrant to run our inner world, and that tyrant can only produce more fear. So let us learn to love. And let us be used by love as a way to walk through the little things that attach us to the irrelevant.
You do not have to have it figured out
to begin.
The path opens itself to those who are willing to take a single, honest step. Wherever you are, whatever story you have been handed, whatever bird flies inside you, you are welcome here.
A Teaching ByArmand Bytton