We live our lives. We follow our stories as
they unfold and unravel. The story of oneself is the web we weave, like the
spider, from our body, from our notions of ourself. Our living is the very path
we make of ourselves. It a circle that continually flows from itself into
itself. And we spin seemingly eternally. It is the story of ourself, of our
life. We follow it, we are it; it flows from us. It reflects us to ourselves
and we reflect it back as ourselves, like two mirrors reflecting their images
back and forth perpetually, but the images arise only in the reflecting
mirrors, reflecting nothing but the mirror image which has no actual substance.
We are images produced as such in our own imaginations, which go so far back as
to be solidified, substantialized as memory, even as experience. We attempt to define
“ourselves” as “something,” as a substantial thing. As we either fail in that,
if we are honest, or invent a character to star in our story, we may also find
that we can be satisfied with “an idea of ourselves,” as if such an idea were
actually real rather than imagined. And we find others who think similarly and
with similar kinds of images, and then “imagine a greater image” agreed up by a
group, which provides a solidity, a path, a story one can sink one’s teeth into
and gather sustenance from it as if it were real. And this is what we do, even
who we are: figments of our own imaginations.
