Fundamentals
Stories vs Experience
Direct experience is what is happening.
A story is what is added to direct experience.
It takes what is happening and names it, explains it, justifies it, judges it, worries about it, brags about it, or places it in relation to a 'me'.
Stories create a sense of a centre inside experience. They organise what is happening around a 'me' and give it meaning, weight, cause, and direction.
When stories are seen as stories, they easily fall away, and existence is simple, easy, and undramatic.
What remains is what always was and what always will be - the situation, the experience, the here and now, all part of the same whole.
Examples:
'I am disappointed in you'
Someone says 'I am disappointed in you', founded on the assumption that you caused their disappointment, as if one person can directly generate another’s inner state. What is actually present is an expectation held by them, an imagined outcome that didn’t occur, and the emotional response that arises when that expectation meets what happened. The disappointment arises through attachment to expectation and is often projected outward as blame or responsibility placed on someone or something else - you, them, the Government, a God etc. A person believing this may take on that responsibility, blame themselves, apologise, or attempt to 'make it up to' the other person. In direct experience, there is no transfer of feeling from one person to another; there is only the meeting of what occurs.
'I'm not progressing on my path'
A person claiming 'I'm not progressing on my path' assumes there is a defined path, a correct direction of change, and a measurable position relative to it. What is actually present is a stream of experience: moments of clarity, confusion, openness, contraction, interest, resistance, all appearing without a fixed reference point of advancement. The story of 'not progressing' arises when present experience is compared against an imagined model of how it should be unfolding, and the gap is interpreted as failure or stagnation.