Life Without the Story - 10th November 2016

But if you refuse to, at least for some time, then you will see that this body is moving on its own, just like these words are coming out on their own. Now, I know that the mind can come and say, 'You said this, maybe you should have said that.' It can still say this kind of thing, but it has no power, you see. This comes and goes because there is no 'you' which is saying these words; they are just appearing. Everything has always been like this. It is not that I was in the starting of the sharing of Satsang; these words have just appeared. It has always been that way.

But the mind is trying to keep up with that in the past and says, 'You did this, you should not have done this, look at what you did, look at what another did.' This doership, which is just a false idea, a fancy idea. So this body has been moving, this mouth has been moving, these hands have been moving on their own, just like the movement of thoughts happened on its own. Many times when we have initially come to Satsang, we also came with the idea that 'I am thinking.' Is it true? You see that 'I am thinking this, I have so many negative thoughts, I am just thinking this.' Then we look and check: so how are you thinking? How are you creating your next thought?

I say, 'I can create my next thought,' and when we look, you see that it just arises. The thought is just arising. We cannot predict it. To predict it, you have to wait for the thought itself to come. It's just arising. In the same way, our actions are also just arising. All these words are just arising. Everything has always been moving on its own, just like the movement of an ocean and all the waves which seem to come and to dissolve in that ocean. But now the difference is that there is the power of the ocean to believe it to be a wave. What is that power? The power of belief, the power of identity.

So that which is the supreme Lord is now playing the game of believing itself to be an individual entity. God pretending to be a person is 'I believing my next thought.' So this game God is playing for its own enjoyment, and this game that it is playing also coming out of the delusion is also for its own enjoyment. That's all that is going on. So if you were to somehow drop the story, drop the past, drop our ideas of what happened to me—because even that is just made up, basically.

Note, if there were two of you, even if you were twins and you went through the same experiences... if you were to speak to the twins—I'm married to one of two twins—so you will see that they could have gone through the same experiences in childhood, but one will have a very clear idea that 'this is what happened that day, you know, when we were young at the dining table' or anything, and the other one will have a different idea. But we are so convinced, right? 'Okay, this is what it was, this is what happened with me, this is what this one said.' It is just previous chapters from the story, and mostly we are just writing our interpretation of what is happening, coming from the mind into a storybook.

So when you start, then you stop accessing this kind of mental conceptual stories, then now you will find that life is so full of freshness and wonder and joy. In a story, what do you want? We want the same things, sure, but you want them in our terms. You want them with our idea: 'Okay, this is what happened, this is what I did, and therefore I got all of these things.' But right now, what is missing? Truly, what is missing right now before you think about it? So that action only is too good.

So even if you notice, I say 'right now what is missing?' when you first have this impulse first to go to the mind and say, 'Okay, what is missing? Like, what?' No. But even before that, if you just see, if you just look, you find that there is no such thing as lack, actually. There is no such thing as bondage, and therefore there is no such thing as freedom.