stories

James Low on Dzogchen

We build up, layer by layer, great lasagna of meaning, and as you know, lasagna is very heavy. And that’s what we do with our life. The stories of our existence wrap around us like an umbilical cord wrapping round a baby in the womb so we can hardly breathe. In this way a great deal of our suffering is because our experience of ourselves, and the environment we live in, is mediated, is moved through, transformed by, habitual stories which have a tilt, which have a bias, a direction to them, which block many of the other possibilities that we might encounter.
The purpose of meditation is to put into question the true status of these narratives. Sometimes, when you read books about buddhism, it will say that the cause of suffering is attachment to ‘the self’ or to ‘oneself’. I think this is a bad kind of translation because our ‘self’ is not something you can be attached to. You can’t grab yourself because we keep changing. We are all very unreliable. Our moods change, somebody tells us a nice story and we start to laugh, somebody tells us a sad story and water comes out of our eyes. We have no wall around ourselves. It’s very difficult for us to keep a sense of continuity of measured sameness moment-by-moment through time. This would indicate that when we grasp at the self we are grasping at the story about the self, the construction of the self. To be not-attached is to be more present in life because you are not hanging on to these outer garments, these clothes, the opinions, the judgements that you’ve wrapped yourself in.
Meditation is designed to do two things. One is to look very clearly into the naked state of our existence, taking off the coverings, so that we experience ourselves in the direct moment of how we encounter the world. And the second function is to analyse the clothes that we wear. What is their origin?