written 23 November, 2025
published 30 November, 2025
At a Science and Non-Duality conference, a UC Berkeley professor of mathematics once said, "There are two things we can know for sure: I am, and something is happening. Everything else is just a story we tell ourselves."
The two things are direct personal experiences. By our belief, we make the stories we tell ourselves into a potent reality that shapes our experiences. But the infinite nature of the universe, and the finite limitation of any story, means all stories are either wrong or incomplete.
Mark Twain said, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
Dr. Gabor Maté, who works with trauma survivors, defines a trauma as something bad happening to you, or something you need, not happen to you. He figures as many as 90 percent of the population has suffered trauma. What keeps people stuck in dysfunctional behavior is the story they told themselves at the time, imperfectly trying to understand their situation, which is still active after the actual event is long gone. His successes involve helping people rewrite their internal story.
Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive aneurism in her left brain, the primary seat of the ego, describes the event in her book "My Stroke Of Insight". She experienced losing all her personal history and capacity for sequence or language, but became aware of a profound peace and connection to everything everywhere. She got medical attention in time, and over her eight years of recovery, she was able to examine the stories that had once controlled her life, editing out most of those that no longer served her.
We are all a collection of stories, some laid down even before birth. Our native language sets patterns of perception below our level of consciousness. Our family dynamics, our culture, our religious orientation, all tell stories that draw lines, make definitions, and shape our experience of what is going on. Across the globe, one of the most fundamental stories is the illusion of separation, which often expresses as greed, hatred, and violence.
Religious organizations, even those founded by prophets preaching unity and love, eventually accumulate material wealth, and to preserve it, often shift to promoting separation and domination. Hundreds of millions have died, and many more impoverished, because religious groups claim to have the exclusive truth, ordained by God, thereby justifying slaughter and oppression of the other.
Men feel entitlement over women, a story of misogyny thousands of years old, even embedded into religious dogma, disempowering half the population, and traumatizing children for hundreds of generations. Superficial skin color is the root of racist entitlement stories, because anyone different is considered suspicious.
Our economy proclaims the rich are entitled over the poor, insuring wide spread misery, anger, and rebellion, making enduring peace just a dream. To sell products, businesses tell lies in the form of advertising. To protect profits, businesses tell lies to cover corruption and defects.
A person locked into the story of separation works only for their own gain and has few, if any, true friends. Our current president typifies this, and our county, and even the planet, suffers as a result. But we all manifest some of this same separation story, because this is how we have been raised to a great extent. We know we can do better.
We can begin by examining the stories we have accumulated over time. Some near the surface may be easily examined, and changed. Deeper stories are like the water we swim in, and not easily noticed. However, if we pay attention in life, reality reflects our stories back to us as we encounter the world, for life is like a mirror. We get back what we put out, both from our conscious and unconscious being.
At the least, we can apply critical thinking, and begin examining stories as they are presented to us, rather than just embracing them whole. This is good advice for dealing with Internet scams, and it applies to life in general. Does this story actually help me, or improve my experience of life? Does this story align with other information I have come to trust? Does this make me feel better, or more at peace in this moment?
We are expressions of an infinite world, and are much more than we have been led to believe.
