Chasing One's Tale

    Life is change and the human mind is our connection to the experience of living. Changes in the environment are processed through the senses and this movement or change is noted and registered into storage or memory. The self is the result of yesterday’s tree experienced again today. Or in another instance, a taste experienced and recognized as having been tasted before. It has two distinct entities or data points – sugar then and sugar now, the past and the present – and it is at this juncture that the observer “I” is born.
     Let’s try an example. When the wavelengths for red enter the eye it is processed by the brain and noted or stored as red light, although the word or ideas of ‘red’ and ‘light’ are not actually present. Just the experience prior to this naming is recorded, as it is; the raw data. Naming occurs within a different function.
    When this stored data is subsequently encountered and processed again, recall is triggered and both the present and previously experienced (memorized) data are held simultaneously in the present. In one sense the “self” is, like the color red, nothing more than a logical outgrowth of the process of memory: a meta-function. Without memory there is no foundation for a self, a past or future. Without memory there is no past, without a past there is nothing to project – no future – and no “I” to occupy it.
     It is a process within the brain that creates the illusion of a self, an “I”, which is separate from, and unique within, the objectified experience. Stated differently, the “I” is not actually separate from the experience; rather it is an illusion created by the process of memory in conjunction with the present moment. It is an illusion, because in truth there is no self who sees, separate from the act of seeing. The “I” or self is the experience itself.
     The irony for me is that the self created by, and through this natural mental process, believes that the split is real and created by an “other.” So the creator of my stress and suffering, while feeling unique and abiding, searches for the cause of its own frustration, separation, and alienation through a misty ignorance of Impermanence. We are, at the very least, destined to be tethered to this process of our own thinking and to “chase the creation of our own tale”.