Life is made up of our teaching stories.
There is a reason we continually go over teaching stories. Each time we do that we have an opportunity to learn something we have not learned before. These stories are about people and events in the world, or at least on the material plane; they are designed to reveal the lessons we must face in our own lives.
So when we go over our own stories again and again, we are giving ourselves the same opportunity to learn. But repeating stories is only of value if we want to peel the onion a little more. In our own lives we have created amazing teaching stories—if we have eyes to see them.
When I was fourteen, I was living with my mother and sister in Newton, Massachusetts. My mother was emotionally volatile and taking medication, mostly sedatives. She would go from extreme anger to extreme depression in a heartbeat. Around Thanksgiving, she kicked my sister out of the house. My sister called my aunt, and my aunt came over. I was in the living room with my aunt, telling her what had been going on with my mother. Meanwhile, my mother was in her bedroom.
When she came out, her face was swollen from crying. She looked at me with hatred. She knew I had been talking with my aunt. She then said, “Traitor, traitor.”
I looked at her and said, “Do you want me to side against myself in favor of you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I will never do that,” I said.
This story exemplifies my relationship with my mother. My task was to remain true to myself while working to feel no conflict with her. I was to find peace for myself without denying or trying to change her.
This has been my education. Each relationship, each situation, is a purposeful lesson designed to teach me to let go of my wrong understanding and grow closer to God.
What did God want me to learn from this? What did I bring to the table in this situation? These are questions I always ask myself.
As I often say, we are all on a treasure hunt. The treasure hunt is here to clean up the effects of something we once caused. The clues we encounter are guiding us to the next effect. They are moving us to freedom, to the stillness of the joy of the Self. The treasure is our true Self. The stilling of all our vibrations in the light of pure consciousness is the completion of our karma.
Our stories are our most important clues. Scripture models this. Embedded in it are the stories of saints; these not only show us how to move forward on the path but also teach us how to use our own stories to do that.
The problem is, all too often “scripture” is not living anymore. It has become an object to be worshipped, not a resource to be integrated into our practice and our lives. It’s only when we make the scripture alive again that we can see how everything in the scripture has been designed to teach us and bring us to God.
In the Bible, as in much scripture, clues are embedded in stories that revolve around fighting. Even the New Testament depicts a kind of battle; it’s just that the nature and outcome of the fight aren’t what you expect. All the characters have to make decisions and surrender and go forward in a particular way. In the Bhagavadgita, Arjuna has to make a decision whether or not to fight. In the Ramayana, Rama has to fight. If we look at our own stories, we all have battles to face.
What are all these stories showing? They reveal what we in fact have to do. But we have to live out what is revealed. And if we look at our lives with constant care, we’ll see that we have in fact been in an epic play, in a battle. Are we winning or losing? Are we going for God or not?
The story of Moses shows us how important it is to surrender completely to God’s will. Moses was a great prophet, but he did not always obey God’s commands. Because of his pride in his own sense of self, he was denied passage into the Promised Land. So often, we are like Moses: we want to do it God’s way, until we don’t. We pick and choose.
This is the problem. We read a teaching story and decide once and for all what it shows us, when we should be returning to it again and again and again. Baba used to tell the same stories over and over again, and every time I heard a story again a deeper meaning would be revealed. I got to the point where I looked forward to hearing each story again, so I could learn something new from it.
This is what we are all supposed to do with our own stories. We should revisit them again and again and again, and glean something new on each visit.
The whole purpose of teaching stories – the Bible, the Upanishads, the Bhagavadgita, the Ramayana, the Quran and Hadith, the stories of the saints of all traditions, any of them – is for us to learn and grow. To have us go forward to be with God. And each of our stories, if we really keep on looking at it without pride or resistance, will have the key for each of us to going Home.
We should remain willing to face teaching stories squarely, shine a light on them, and learn from them. We should respect them as ways in which God instructs us. If we resist the temptation to make stories rigid and static, we will then be more open to life, and to learning, and to God. The whole point is to live the scripture, live our teaching stories, and live our lives.
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