Nothing ever actually happens to you. Stuff happens around you. The awareness at your core - which has blithely hummed as it has peered, ever since childhood, outward from your eyes - has never wavered amid the ever-changing plot points of your life.That's a bit esoteric. Here's another, slightly more relatable, way of expressing it:
If you get so lost in a horror movie that you genuinely feel yourself suffering, the move isn't to yearn for a different outcome in the movie's plot; it's to realize you're the watcher, not the actor.
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I found that your posting was similar to some of the chatter in the first 5 minutes of Radiolab (Reality Check http://www.radiolab.org/story/reality-check/). (I'm not a fan of Radiolab - I find it a little too cutesy and patronizing - but it aligned with what you wrote).
I don't see the parallel. But I think I see the impasse.
There's a huge distinction between pain and suffering. Having a hot iron fall on your chest (like the guy in the radio show), HURTS. I'm not glibly advocating some "mind over matter" platitude for withstanding pain. That would be useless and banal.
Pain is inescapable, but suffering is strictly elective. Suffering is a dramatic coloring we choose to apply to whatever's happening (and, just as often, stuff that's happened previously or that may happen in future). It's a story we tell ourselves about what's happening (http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-stories-we-tell-ourselves.html).
It's a daft thing humans do. And, alas, one can't just suggest "stop doing that!", even though it truly is that easy.
So. like a lot of people before me who've blundered into seeing the silliness of it (in most cases from getting it wrong so many times they couldn't help but see reason), I'm trying to find clever ways to help people trick themselves into not electing to make life (or portions thereof) nightmarish.
If you'll revisit the two previous postings in this series, perhaps the context will be clearer:
"Resilience Means Giving Serendipity a Chance":
http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2015/04/resilience-giving-serendipity-chance.html
"Resilience Postscript":
http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2015/04/resilience-postscript.html
Let's take a really extreme example. Doctor tells you you have cancer. You walk out of his office a COMPLETELY different person than the person who walked in....even though you're in the same state of health as before, and the sun is just as shiny, and nothing about your actual day or your environment has actually changed. You're having the exact same day, but one word has profoundly changed EVERYTHING about who you think you are, and how you and your world seem to yourself.
The sane observation would be: wow, if perspective can change how I feel so profoundly - if one single word can do this - then why not try some other perspective, or another word? Or, at very least, recognize that reality remains the same - here I am, still me, still having the same day, still the same humming awareness of what's happening around me - and the only thing that's changed is the way I view it. And I don't NEED to make that change. I can make another arbitrary change, or no change at all.
As I said two postings ago:
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Nothing ever actually happens to you. Stuff happens around you. The awareness at your core - which has blithely hummed as it has peered, ever since childhood, outward from your eyes - has never wavered amid the ever-changing plot points of your life.
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One doesn't turn into Tragic Cancer Victim from getting cancer. One turns into Tragic Cancer Victim from deciding to be that, and by repeating this resolution (via endless repetitive brooding) until you've thoroughly identified yourself with it - just as we identify ourselves with the plot of a movie's protagonist....i.e. lost in the pretending.
It's incredibly unnatural to be told you have cancer, wish your doc a happy, sunny day, and walk out of his office the same exact person. But it's also the only sane thing to do, because you, duh, ARE the same exact person! There you are, the same humming awareness that's neutrally observed the seeming ups and downs of your life's movie plot all along. You are not the movie. You're the watcher of the movie. You don't change. You don't suffer. You can only pretend to suffer, and then get lost in the pretending. You make yourself suffer from the story you tell yourself (over and over). You suffer from the worry (over and over). You make yourself believe these things....even during a lovely day, experiencing little or no actual pain, from your vantage point of sublimely blithe and unvarying awareness.
It's all nothing but inner story-telling. Inner narrative. Inner movies. We want this story, but the story goes THAT way. The thing about human agony is that (as I wrote here: http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-key-to-happiness-is-rolling-with-it.html) "95% of the time it amounts to nothing more than: "I thought X would happen, but Y happened". And the fundamental delusion that makes mere surprise so traumatic is this: http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2012/03/toddler-and-steering-wheel.html
Yet another way of expressing it. This insight scales infinitely: http://jimleff.blogspot.com/2009/12/labeling-and-post-processing.html
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