Sunday, November 22, 2009

Maybe I'll write a story

I read the following passage in one of Tolle’s publications. I'’m thinking, I want to write a story based on this pain model of his. I don’t think it is plagiarism:

“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

”The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering – and free of the egoic mind…

”In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the surface of your Being. When you are not in your body, however, an emotion can survive inside you for days or weeks, or join with other emotions of a similar frequency that have merged and become the pain-body, a parasite that can live inside you for years, feeds on your energy, lead to physical illness, and make your life miserable.

”So place your attention on feeling the emotion, and check whether your mind is holding on to a grievance pattern such as blame, self-pity, or resentment that is feeding the emotion. If that is the case, it means that you haven’t forgiven. Non-forgiveness is often toward another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition – past, present, or future – that your mind refuses to accept. Yes, there can be non-forgiveness even with regard to the future. This is the mind’s refusal to accept uncertainty, to accept that the future is ultimately beyond its control. Forgiveness is to relinquish your grievance and so to let go of grief. It happens naturally once you realize that your grievance serves no purpose except to strengthen a false sense of self. Forgiveness is to offer no resistance to life – to allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease.

”The pain-body has an extremely powerful energetic charge that can easily pull you into unconscious identification with it. You are then actively possessed by an energy field that occupies your inner space and pretends to be you – but, of course, is not you at all. It speaks through you, acts through you, thinks through you. It will create negative situations in your life so that it can feed on the energy. It wants more pain, in whatever form. It is pure pain, past pain – and it is not you.”

My idea for the story is this; two people, each with his own pain body with vastly different causes and dimensions and energy, get together and move into a relationship. At first they don’t realize that the attraction is between the two egos, the two pain energies that want to continue and perpetuate the pain in an ever worsening spiral. The two compliment one another perfectly—say the one is stuck in blame and resentment and the other in fear and approval seeking. The dance continues and deepens. Only one of them realizes how their underlying energies are destroying the relationship and tries to change habits and patterns. In the story the thoughts and journaling of the one who realizes the underlying dynamic is used to communicate this hidden plot to the reader. The rest of the story is form and what the world sees. The struggle is between the one who wants to become real and the other who unconsciously wants to remain in denial. Ultimately they either destroy the relationship or both become real and start working towards their fulfilment.

I don’t know where to start. I guess this is already a start. I got Zen and the art of writing from Brett this morning. I’ll start there. While I’m working on my motorbike restoration I’m thinking about the characters, creating images of them in my mind.