.... How could we not be immersed in our personal history, identified with it, paying it forward into a future that will eventually remove us from this theater as effortlessly as our past brought us into it; meanwhile, as we go, stacking memories like baggage receipts for a missed flight, we cling to our retrievable allotment in the hope that they add up to a life.
I don't mean to make embodied human life sound sad. There's a hell of a lot of fun to be had here, as well. Some people seem to have fun almost all the time, pursuing fun with an intensity that fundamentalists know. Much to the bewilderment of the virtuous poor, many criminal rich appear to hoard fun as successfully as they hoard money. As Blake noted centuries ago, 'Some are born to sweet delight/ Some are born to endless night.'
"Happy or sad
rich or poor
all pass through
the swinging door." -- attributed on Facebook to Willie Nelson or the Buddha.
It seems inherent in Creativity to identify itself with its creations, even when the identification involves suffering. Having played the online game, 'Second Life', I've seen how people, myself included, become so invested in and identified with their little pixel avatars that they take personally everything that happens to a bunch of ones and zeroes on a screen: an obvious analogy for what is going on in our first lives anyway.
So called real life is our second life; a theater of binary contrasts that plays out without ever improving or harming that primary awareness which is, as Nisargadatta notes, the only part of us that is truly alive. In our true First Life, nothing is happening, not even the absence of events. Paradoxically, nothing in the realm of happenings has any reality whatsoever without awareness beholding it.
