What Do You Mean? "It's Just a
Story"
If I had not....
...had a handicapped brother in the 1950's
who had a bad habit of lighting the curtains on fire at our house.....then my
parents would not have felt he had to receive better care at a New York
State Hospital.
Had he not been sent the NYS Hospital for
the handicapped...my parents would not have seen so many parents drop their
handicapped children off and never come back....
If my parents had not seen so many parents
not come back to see their handicapped children ever, after dropping them
off...they would not have started the Sunshine League for parents of handicapped
children who did that and needed to go see their handicapped children and keep
them in their lives.
If there had been no Sunshine League...my
parents would not have met the Rosenthal family who also had a handicapped son
who felt they needed to help stopping parents from just abandoning their
handicapped kids to the State.
Had the Diehl's not met the Rosenthals,
they would not have become such close friends and even vacationed together as
adults and kids in the Adirondaks.
Had the Diehl's and the Rosenthal's not
vacationed together, Jim Rosenthal and my sister would never have met.
Had they never met, Jim would never
have asked his mom 15 years later if she knew anyone he could date when he came
home from Ranger School in Boise, Idaho.
Had he not asked and the Diehl's not known
the Rosenthal's from years earlier, she would not have suggested Diane.
Having suggested Diane, and Diane saying
yes (she could have said no) they would not have married and moved to
Idaho.
Had they not moved to Idaho they may never
have heard of the WCG and asked for a visit which ended them up attending WCG in
Boise, Idaho.
Had they not asked if I wanted to come for
a visit and had I not said "you bet," I never would have picked up the Plain
Truth during some pretty boring days visiting.
Had I not gone to church and heard a sermon
on the size of the universe and realized that I never heard a sermon like
that, I may have forgotten all about it, but I didn't.
If there had been no Vietnam war, no JFK,
RFK and MLK blown away,even though we didn't start the fire....I may not have
thought of going into the ministry.
Had I chosen Roberts Wesleyan Seminary
instead of AC I would have had a different religious experience but I went
Pasadena instead and now how that went.
Had I not been able to stop my icy slide
down the side of San Jacinto Peak 3000 feet to the desert floor in a stupid move
on a freshman field trip....
Or...missed a flight to Boise that was hit
by a fighter jet...
Or...choked to death on piece of meet at
dinner
Or...killed in a head on in Kentucky that I
still can't figure out to this day where that car headlight to headlight
went..
Or...a whole bunch of other
stuff
I'd have a different story to tell.
Or others would tell a different story about me.
But, none of us are our story because the
story could go ten thousand different ways at any point along the way. A
left instead of a right. A yes instead of a no. A wave instead of a
sneer.
Someone else making a decision about you when they could have just
as easily made it about someone else....is all it would take.
We are not our story even though if the
story is stressful enough, we have to medicate our "selves" to live with
it. If we seek counseling , what we really are doing is working through
our story. We council in how the story went. How it hurt us or made
us this way or that. We try to understand the story or rewrite the story
or maybe fix it. But all that is within the story and we all have
one.
So what do we do with our stories? I
so have to watch out starting my story these days with, "I used to be a
pastor." You see, we all identify our selves by our story and giving up
that story for a new one is not easy. Actually most never do. Most
of us hunker down in our story and repeat it over and over as if somehow some
magical change would come to make the story go away. We are all capable of
getting stuck in the muck of the anger, disappointment, fear, skepticism and
resentment our story brought to us in living color.
The mind has a wonderful trip it plays on
our true self to keep the story going or at least to keep the rancor and
bitching alive and well. It builds us a pain body that hibernates mostly
but then needs to come out and feed so that we never forget we have a story to
tell and usually how bad it all was.
Indulge me a bit on Eckhart Tolle's view of
the pain body. I find this rather hard to argue with. From a comment
by Barbara Clark...
"Our pain-bodies are the energy of our past hurts:
the bumps, bruises and scars of life that we never really dealt with fully in
the moment. The result is that we carry that pain in an energy field within us.
We all experience pain in our lives and pain-bodies are both
individualistic and collective. Whether that pain is from individual
circumstances or part of a collective pain because of our identity with a
particular group in history that has suffered, negative things do happen to
people.
Some people and groups have heavy pain-bodies and it is
precisely these people who have a better chance to awaken spiritually than
people with lighter pain-bodies.
Most people probably do not want to
recognize that there is something within them that seeks negativity, pain and
drama. But the reality is that for many, negativity is an addiction. Pain-bodies
feed on negative emotion.
Nowhere are our pain-bodies more obvious than
in our relationships. Often each partner will re-enact their drama frequently.
The pain-body knows exactly which buttons to push in your partner, and it feeds
on this drama in personal relationships.
So how do you recognize your
pain-body? Becoming aware of your pain-body is the first step in diffusing it.
However, it is not often easy to see the pain-body in ourselves, so it is often
much easier to see the pain-body in another.
How do you strive to
continually diffuse your pain-body? Author Tolle suggests that we must
constantly strive to be present. Instead of being “caught up in the mental movie making” of our
thoughts and emotions from the past or concerns for the future, he says that we
can learn to not add to our pain-bodies by becoming as present as possible in
all situations.
It doesn’t matter if these negative thoughts and
emotions are from years ago or just minutes ago: continually practicing being
present diminishes our pain-bodies because in doing so, “our very Presence then becomes our identity.”
Pain-bodies will fight hard to stay alive, so you may be thinking
how could you let go of past hurts or collective suffering? Some may argue that
we have to remember; that it is part of our collective identity as women or
minorities, for example. Alternatively, individual pain-bodies may heavily
identify with traumatic things that happened in our childhood. While there is
nothing wrong with remembering, there is a difference if we define ourselves by
our suffering. This is the pain-body feeding upon itself and in doing so, the
energy of all that suffering becomes our identity. So the challenge is to move
away from defining ourselves by our past and we do this by becoming
present."
Consider this: “Nothing ever
happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now: and if the
past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it
have?”- The New Earth-page 141
I don't know why I had to have the story I
did with WCG, but I know it was just one of thousands of possibilities. I
can't change the story that has already unfolded but I can change the one that
opens up from now on.
"Comedian" Bill Hicks said it
well.
"The world is like a ride in an amusement
park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how
powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It
has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and
it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and
they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people
have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey - don't worry, don't
be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride." And we kill those
people.
