People need to make head or tail of themselves and the world they live in through stories. Storytelling is an essential part of who you have become today. It is integral to your personal makeup, and storytelling is in your bones. The only way we can bear the gravity and reality of this world, and how we allow ourselves to comprehend profound truths, is through myths, legends, and ideas told through storylines. Through stories, we determine how we see ourselves, how we see others, and just what is possible for us if we act in certain ways and do certain things. The dragon slayer, the conqueror, and the overcomer all come alive inside us through the story.
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Why we need Pseudo Stories of the Personality
Why else do we tell stories in the East of how bad people are in the West? Why have we historically created enemies to conquer and destroy? Why have we taken these fights to the death instead of stopping for a minute and looking at ourselves? It’s because it is easier. An enemy over the sea or next door is bearable. An enemy inside is too uncomfortable a thought to bear. So we make up stories and lies and tall tales of hero and villain and slowly we fall asleep to these stories. We fall so deeply asleep that we no longer know that they are stories.
To make a long story of our childhood short. We can’t have mum or dad be bad so we make ourselves bad. That’s a story. We want to feel superior to others so we make a difference in skin colour a reason for superiority. We decide thin is better than fat, tall than short and that heroes carry machine guns not flowers. These are all stories that we tell ourselves. Pseudo-stories, fear-based stories, that we come to believe are true. This is our fiction addiction. It serves as escapism, distraction, and creates purpose and meaning. Can you see all the judgments that you have about yourself? Every judgment is just a thought, perception, and opinion — it’s just a point of view — and that point of view is the story, the narrative in your body-heart-mind.
Judgements of the personality hide in the dark corners of the mind that have fueled the story of humanity thus far. All Pseudo Stories of the Personality are stories regarding judgments of the way we think things are. We let go of judgments by recovering a sense of Contemplative Wisdom under the surface of the personality – Mark L Lockwood
Narrative creates personality. A persons life story is how they perceive and integrate their thoughts and experiences internally. Stories are how we make meaning of experience. Stories become personalities and personalities become personal realities.
Remember that narcissistic barbarians, and the list is long, all thought they would go down as hero’s. Hitler, Mussolini, Attila the Hun and the vikings, to the Christian and Muslim armies that left their own values behind for stories of heroic martyrdom. These individuals and the massive groups they represented became high and intoxicated on stories and slaughtered other people. All for nada, for nil. All for nothing at all. They did it because someone whispered a story in their ear and then they believed that story and the character they chose to play.
Listen to other people tell their story, but don’t believe them. You know that it’s just a story that is only true for them, but listen because the communication can be wonderful. Love is unknown. To open the heart in trust is unknown – Don Miguel Ruiz
Beyond the Narrative of the mind
Pseudo Stories of the Personality create a safe perception of reality for us as we grow up consciously, that is until they choke us to death. Our stories contain piled up trauma that we don’t know how to edit or narrate anymore. The obvious consequence is fear.
So why does the personality need to make up stories as we go through various stages in our lives? Because what we don’t know about threats and the unknown creates fear. It’s what we call a story composed of pseudo stories. The stories are created when we start to realize that the thoughts we are thinking are about us being harmed. This becomes a fight, flight, freeze response.
Examples of Pseudo Stories of the Personality are:
- If things don’t change soon after the new president starts his term in May it is all going to go down and we are going to lose everything.
- I didn’t tell him the truth but it is beyond my control.
- Because my father was unloving to me I am now unable to love other people.
- Because I had trauma when I was 10 years old I will never be the same again.
- Because I had such a difficult childhood and grew up in an alcoholic family, I became an alcoholic because drinking was the norm and it’s in my genes.
- My mother was depressive and so was her mother and now I am lost in a manic depressive episode I can’t free myself from. It must be fate. It must be how we suffer the sins of the mother genetically speaking.
- I have always been an anxious person, so that is how I am going to be next year.
After reading the examples above, I want you to go back and have a look at the bold type in all of the sentences in the seven story examples. They are all part truth and part story. Spiritual Awakening is how we start to see contemplatively that not everything we believe is true. So, we learn how to question it. When we question it we start to work on suffering and we start to eradicate what doesn’t work in our lives. Once again, only the truth ever sets us free. The bullshit gets us stuck, lost, afraid and leaves us feeling overwhelmed! Deeply so.
Who are you without Pseudo Stories?
Start to understand that many of the stories you have told yourself or possibly not true. Many of the stories you have told yourself for your entire life need to be questioned with a new mind that is capable of such a task. Our imagination and our memories have been founded and constructed through fight flight and freeze responses. Make no mistake we are geared first for survival. The mind does not question survival mind. Ever.
Life itself is however more about mere survival and what my first thought about something may be. A thought that if repeated often enough becomes a belief. Life is rather about conscious expansion. It is about growth and contribution. It is about understanding that although the world is flawed, ourselves included, that it is still a vast and wonderful representation of truth beauty and goodness.
You will have to understand that you don’t need to bring your self concept and self esteem into disrepute every time you don’t get a job that you applied for. You will have to realise that not every time someone does not invite you to a function or a game of Padel that you have been rejected. You will have to go beyond your personality which includes all your thoughts and feelings perceptions and the events that you have gone through, throughout your life and start questioning them. Is it True?
The power of ‘is it true’ is beyond powerful and if you are new to this work I suggest that you write this shit down. Learning to question your ‘reality’ is the doorway to a wonderful life where love predominates rather than suffering. This is why we created the Paradigm Process of Healing and Life Transformation where the 10 personality masks are recognised and then replaced by attributes of your soul. Beyond the Pseudo Stories of the Personality. Attributes of love rather than fear and of non fiction rather than fiction or pseudo stories arise when you become aware, then accept that awareness and then take new action from that position in reality.
A new ending to your autobiography
At some point we understand that we need to dismantle the stories we have told ourselves and then believed. Stories mother told us that just were not true. Sometimes it takes a lot of kicking and screaming but we know we need to do it anyway. Only the truth sets us free and nonfiction is very boring to young children, children who are formulating their personalities.
“When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.”—Brené Brown
Stories and pseudo-stories help us to experience what it would have been like to be in a particular situation, at a certain time in history, or help us to feel the emotions of the characters we hear about. Stories help us to learn and then become part of our make-up, and our make-up is our personality. But know this – you are not your personality. You are a compilation of pseudo-stories that now need new endings. Endings that you will create. You create them when you let go of the story of Victim and reveal the Creator within. You will gain control of your life, not pseudo control but authentic power and control when you release pseudo-fiction stories.
Our courses and events, retreats and wellness centre experiences are all at the core about discovering who you are without your Pseudo Stories of the Personality. Our message is clear. If you have something holding you back, or something you let go of, then you need a process to do so. Why wait to discover your Sacred Self? That’s our core message on this journey. Namaste.