THE DRAMA OF LIFE

Often when we are going through some life tragedy, or even when some minor event happens, we can see how thought tends to add a layer of drama on top of whatever is happening. We all have the tendency to be ‘drama queens’, believing that whatever is happening, means so much more than it really does. There is the original feeling or experience, but then there is some extra excitement, or tension that usually comes with the subtle, or not so subtle, thought story that it all means so much to or about ‘me’.

The belief about ‘me’ adds some special meaning that could be positive or negative. It could be a story of how this experience means that I am a very good or kind person, and that people will like me. Or it could be that this experience means that I have done something wrong, or perhaps that there is something fundamentally wrong with me. Whether the story is positive or negative is beside the point – it is all that extra layer of drama, and belief that what happens means something about ‘me’, and makes ‘me’ special in some way.

We get so accustomed to living with this layer of dramatic meaning on top of every experience, that we start to believe that this drama is what makes us feel alive. We even fear not having a drama or meaning, because we believe that would be so empty, boring and dead. We get used to living with this level of adrenalin rushing through our bodies, and have grown so familiar with that dramatic sense of agitation that comes along with every experience, that we even believe that the agitation itself is ‘me’. Although it is painful and exhausting to live like this, the alternative can seem so unknown and terrifying.

There is no need, and it is not possible anyway, to try to stop believing in a ‘me’ or to try to stop creating meanings. However, we can see how this whole mechanism works. We can get to know it, and start to see the whole game. In seeing it, there is already some relief. In knowing that it is just the nature of thought, to create meanings for ‘me’, we don’t expect it not to, but we also don’t take it so seriously when it does. Just because thought says that this experience means something about ‘me’, it doesn’t mean that it really does. And if this experience, whatever it is, doesn’t mean anything about ‘me’, then perhaps this also doesn’t mean that life is empty or dead (this is also an added layer of dramatic meaning). It is all just as it is, meaningless, and yet alive and enough in itself.

Unmani, 9th January 2015