The images I make in my head when I hear, read, remember, or even experience something...
...are not the real thing.
The real thing (if there ever was one) was of a moment in time that is GONE.
My image of it is a FICTION.
Even if it is of something “true,” the image in my head is a manufactured image of something that is gone, that I never even had direct access to. It is an invention of my imagination. The characters in my head are no more the ACTUAL characters than a finger painting of them would be. I have no way of absolutely knowing for certain who they were, what they were thinking or how they felt.
A painting of a person is not the person. Nor is a photograph of a person. Nor is my mental image. Nor is even my direct view. They are all the same level of “not-them-ness.”
If it is a memory of an event where I was present or even if I’m present at the event itself, these are still manufactured images, no more real than finger paintings. The images in my head are imaginary. They are not the event. They are representations of the event and CANNOT BE 100% accurate. They are interpreted by me and what I know about me is that both my perspective and my powers of perception are incredibly limited. The best I can do with my interpretation is to use the event as a rough model from which I create an artificial picture I mistakenly label “the event.” The fullness of the event, situation, and characters feelings, thoughts and motivations were not even objectively knowable at the TIME much less matchable to the made up images I present myself now.
When I see it this way, events and memories of events no longer have to scare me.
I see that other people’s stories are unknowable to me.
That other PEOPLE are unknowable to me.
That my past and future SELVES are unknowable to me.
The only person’s experience I can really know is my own, right here and right now in this razor-thin moment. And knowing that is all I need to know. And when I realize that the razor thin NOW is even thinner than my experience of it, I realize that I can never really know anything. I construct everything I think I know.
The only reality is the present, what is happening now, independent of my invented story.
My task is to let go of my story, to release my interpretation of all these events that I never really experience and to give myself over to the magnificent beauty and peaceful joy of now…and now…and now.