無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

“I can’t dance.”

“I only date older men.”

“I can’t seem to wake up early these days.”

“I’m a morning person.”

“I can’t start my day until I’ve had my coffee.”

“I can’t sing.”

“I’m a visual person.”

“Life is unfair.”

“I’m just an amateur.”

“Why do girls always like assholes?”

“Life is an adventure.”

“I must be getting old.”

“I’ve always been lucky.”

“I can eat whatever I want and never gain weight.”

“I’m addicted to chocolate.”

We all tell little stories about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. Sometimes we don’t even really “know” something about ourselves until we say it out loud. Usually, we tell these stories when we notice a pattern of experience. We might test out an observation in conversation or thought.

“Hmm, girls with family problems seem attracted to and comfortable around me.”

Then we draw a conclusion from it.

“Spiritual practice must be paying off for me. Chicks must be sensing my peaceful vibe. [pats self on back]“

This in turn, can shape how you experience reality.

“I must be more attractive now to girls who are seeking masculine calm and stability. See? If I smile at this girl, she smiles back.”

Beliefs Form Experience Form Beliefs

We form beliefs derived from observing our own experiences in the environment. This is another interpretation of our individual => socio-cultural environment feedback loop. For our purposes here, let’s think of it as the belief => experience feedback loop.

Now the experiences we observe and the patterns we draw from them are largely colored by our emotional state and deeply held core beliefs about ourselves and reality in general. There’s rarely anything objective about it. Our individual experiences are decidedly not a good representation of the experiences of the population at large.

For example, I go to a restaurant twice in a row and happen to get bad service both times. “Oh, that place sucks,” I tell my friends. But of course, my experience is not statistically significant in the least (you’d need a sample of certain number of people, at least 30 or so, I think). We cannot yet say with any reasonable degree of certainty if any other person there would be more or less likely to experience good service (this is a scientific 3rd person perspective). I also cannot say whether this your reality without asking you (2nd person).

Note that it doesn’t mean my experience is not valid. Far from it, it colors my unique perspective of reality. To me, that the restaurant offers bad service is near-fact in my unique vision of reality. But we must not confuse this 1st perspective reality by generalizing it to then say it is true for 2nd and 3rd person perspectives as well.

Stories Color Our Reality

To look at the first example again, I could just as easily interpret my meeting girls with family problems in a different way if I was in a more negative mood and had core beliefs consistent with lower self-worth or a more cynical outlook.

“Man, why do I always meet psychos with family problems?”

I would then have expectations of the next girl I meet to have some kind of emotional problems, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy as I look for them. (Note even the more positive conclusions drawn above are generalizations based more on my beliefs than a rational understanding of my experiences.)

Of course, we can never have perfect information (it might not even exist! that would mean there was an objective, i.e. trans-perspective not 3rd person, reality and I really ain’t sure about that). We must necessarily draw hasty and illogical conclusions formed into our stories to get on with our lives, hell, even to have personalities!

Then why should we care about the beliefs about and colors of our experiences? Well, there’s no reason to care if you’re content with the experiences you have. But becoming aware of these stories we tell ourselves, we can become masters of our own fates, directing our own narrative rather than having it direct us.

A master storyteller creates her own reality.

“I create my own reality.”

I like that story.