Can you see that there is something inside of you that immediately begins to tell you what any event means and what you need to do about it? You've been with this storyteller for so long, it's an unquestioned presence in your mind. It's just part of what we call our life. But this storyteller isn't really alive. Its story is to ensure the continuation of its life -- of the memories of experiences and the content of your life up until that point -- so that all it's really ever doing is going before you to insure that somehow you don't get anywhere you haven't been before. No matter where you go, the storyteller has already been there. That's how it knows what's wrong.
Part of the way the storyteller interacts with us is to project unhappy endings if we don't obey what it tells us to do. But what is its authority in our life? We want something to rely upon. We depend upon the presence of something telling us what has happened and what will come as a result.
But inside of every human being is something that understands we are not here to be part of a story that's told and retold and that defends itself and keeps itself in place.
So wouldn't it be wonderful if you could just dismiss the storyteller? You can! You just have to be willing to experience what happens when you actually are someplace where no one else has ever been... including you. You can do it right now. In fact, I invite you to. Bring yourself back into your body, wherever you are, and be aware of all the colors, the temperature, the sounds, the forms around you, and if you're present to yourself, there is no storyteller. Awareness doesn't have a storyteller. It is the story.
The beauty of that same awareness is that it can tell the surreptitious storyteller from the living story. The living story is in the place where no one has ever been before, and no one will ever be again - a life that is "bigger" because it belongs to a continually exploring nature that discovers itself wherever it is.
If you ever come to the moment where you are aware of some unhappiness and you suddenly realize, "You know what? The pain I have right now is that I'm in the company of something telling me how I feel -- it's telling me what's wrong with you; how I'm inadequate; that I'll never know," then that means something exists apart from the storyteller and the person under its purview.
That's the living story. That's this moment. That's the presence of the Divine. It has no past. It lives in a constant state of perfecting itself by using the very properties that now form the pain. Within us is something that is intended to be part of our perfection -- part of discovering the meaning, the purpose of our existence -- but instead of that, it's become part of a dark process that pulls a person down.
You can work to dismiss the storyteller anytime you become conscious of it. If you're feeling angry and you know who or what it's all about, it's the storyteller doing the explaining. If you're feeling greedy, worried, anxious -- if there is inside of you the presence of a pernicious, persistent negative state -- that state exists because resistance produces it, and resistance is the chief characteristic of the storyteller because it can only compare what is happening to what it wants to happen and then refuse or deny events as needed. What's more, the storyteller is never going to tell you that you can dismiss it. What it's going to do is give you another story. It will send you on your way through some practice, some this or that, in a desperate attempt to seize control of the story that seems to be against you.
Your task (do it right now) is to enter into that world within yourself where no one has ever been before -- not even you -- and stay there. It's not going to happen overnight, but little by little, as you awaken to the possibility of dismissing the unconscious relationship you have with this part of you that now goes before you (seemingly full of promises but produces pain), and you begin to awaken to that, you will want less and less to know who you are as a result of something telling you about yourself. You will want the pure relationship that comes with the living story as it meets you and gives you a life -- not based on what the storyteller wants or doesn't want -- but based on life as it renews you.
Key Lesson 
