What Story Do You Believe?

What religious story will you believe? Will you believe the story that was burned into your heart when you were young? Or the story that sounded better than all the rest when you began searching? Or the story that was told by a very powerful teacher? Or the story that challenged you to find the truth yourself? Which story will you believe?

Does it matter which story you believe as long as long as it fills that empty spot inside your heart that you cannot seem to fill from the outside? Does it matter which story you believe? Can Christ save you just as well as Buddha can save you? In your mind, what difference does it make?
 

Can you ever convert a story to your own experience? Does your story tell you how to do that? Or does your story just tell you to believe?

Are you satisfied with that? Will that initiate a fundamental shift in your consciousness that changes you irrevocably? No more anger, no more judging, no more greed, no more fear?

Can you believe deep enough what someone else has said or written so that you are able to surrender yourself 100%, where you disappear and there is only that? Can you do this, or will this be only another temporary emotional experience that eventually succumbs to the reality of what you are?

What practice does your story suggest - a journey inward or a journey outward? A clear comprehension of what you are right now or a projection of what you should be? Which will enable you to see the truth of what is? And does that truth change you?

Do you know yourself? Do you live just to eat and sleep? Or do you live just for sensual pleasure? Do you live totally within the physical body of the senses and actions, or do you live in the astral body of emotions and desires?

Do you live for power – in business, politics, family and religion – living totally in the mental body of ideas and concrete thought?

Or do you live for the arts to express your creativity?

Or do you live to discover that which transcends physical, emotional and intellectual pursuits - do you live in the causal body of abstract thought?

And after dissolution of the physical body, will you attain the higher vibrational realms of the causal body, or will you merely repeat your kamma of senses, actions, emotions, desires, ideas and thought and repeat over and over your habit patterns lifetime after lifetime in a physical body? Or perhaps even sink into the ghostly realms of confusion, the results of a life of carelessness?

Will you set goals for yourself, or will you understand the futility and misdirection of goals that prevent you from seeing what you are right now, where you are right now? Will you chase expectations in order to ignore reality, and project an illusory future onto what is the actual fact right now? Will this illusory future mistakenly become your realty?

Will you ever get beyond what you are right now by ignoring what you are, and instead placing yourself in a fairy tale? Is it possible for you to stop replacing the present with the future - replacing reality with a dream state?

When you no longer see the realty and only see the dream, are you aware of how you are living in images? Can you ever change yourself by wanting g to change, by using all your energy to change and never putting forth energy to see exactly what you truly are?

Always wanting more; more pleasurable experiences, satisfying each and every desire – physically, mentally religiously, spiritually. Never ending action and reaction, ambition and striving.

Can we disassociate with the one who is striving? Can we become dispassionate toward the more? Can we just be?

Can the more ever be captured, or is it always a moving target? Do we do this because we are disappointed with what life has to offer? Do we think that we have just not got it right yet, but when we do, then . . .?

Is life only so much? Do our expectations exceed what life can offer? When we see this as a reality, will we then set our goals higher?

Or will we drop our goals completely?

When we see what it is that sets and attains goals, will we trust that part of us with our future? Is that part of us real – or just another projection?

This now becomes a different ball game.