storyteller

Thinking mind is a storyteller

I don't know whether you've ever tried to take a step back from your own thoughts, your own stream of thoughts. Perhaps you've seen some patterns there. The thinking mind is really a storyteller. It's weaving a story out of our experiences. The experiences themselves are momentary, each experience in the moment, and it's the thinking mind that weaves these together into a narrative, into a story, with a chronology, a sense of time and continuity in time.

We are creating a story, and that story is the story of I. Of course, it involves other people and other objects, things around us, real or imagined. But really the purpose of the thinking mind is to create this story of I. And it's beautiful in its own way. Who doesn't like a good story? Fiction is amazing. It's very entertaining, stirs up emotions, gives us food for further thoughts. Storytellers have a real role to play in human life, sometimes touching on deep archetypes, often creating culture really. A coherent society needs its own stories.

So stories are central to human life and the thinking mind is the storyteller. All the thinking mind is doing is creating a story. And as long as we understand that, as long as we see that, deep, deep down, we know it with every cell of our body, that the thinking mind is a storyteller, when we really live with that profound understanding, there's no problem at all. There's a story. There's no problem with reading a work of fiction. You know it's fiction. Some story unfolds, in some places happy, in some places sad. It's a story – no need to take it too seriously.

And so it is with our thoughts, and with this great story of I that is being created, day after day, by our own thinking mind. As long as we realise it's just a story, it's a fiction, then there is no problem in it. It's beautiful, entertaining, to be enjoyed. But not to get obsessive about. Thinking mind, the great storyteller.