Compared to doing, which is always true, (in the sense that it is the basis of survival, and is alone, essential), story-telling about story-telling is like lying-about-lying. It is, (for the few with an actual pre death, non-physical destination in mind), like being constantly offered additional mis-directions every time you inquire about the original wrong ones you were given – and it does not simply come (unwittingly) from other men, but from the thoughts life normally provides to your brain.
If you do not have your own firm recognition of the difference between doing and story-telling, and are thus confused from the outset, you can expect to be even further fooled by the story-telling about story-telling. Things can only get worse: (you catch a cold and you can expect the flu). No man would argue over any matter that he could not physically touch did he not first confuse doing with story-telling, and once he has, (which everyone does), there is no turning back nor escape – not without totally extraordinary effort, born from some innate desire in only a few.
There is no standard procedure for “talking-your-way-out-of-a-fairy-tale,” regardless of what Hercules may say or no matter what wondrous stories he might tell about his life. He cannot extract himself from his imaginary existence, and this is the precise position of your automatic thinking vis a vis the world of essential reality – the world of doing. Doing, as everyone knows, can be great fun, (eating, running, fucking, fighting), doing is indeed the mother of all that is pleasurable, but in man, story-telling too can be most engaging, and recognizing its distinction in no wise prohibits this potential.
Story-telling is not wrong. For the life of an ordinary man, it is indispensable, and there is no need for him to have a consistent awareness of the difference between it and actual doing. In a routine existence, the two automatically intertwine and complement one another in such a seamless operation that men’s normal consciousness never takes note. A civilized, sophisticated, cultured and normal man lives seventy odd years, engaged-in and surrounded-by two quite separate and distinct things: doing and story-telling, and never once, in any meaningful manner, realizes it.
To be-asleep, in all its glory, is to not recognize this. To be unenlightened is to confuse story-telling with doing and that is all there is to any of this and that is all there is to everything. From one plumb view, the whole, search-for-enlightment thing is the supreme story telling.
J.