Vachon Imagined

She lived across the street from someone she didn’t like.

It was something very simple.

An initial disagreement.

Nothing that, from the outside, seemed capable of becoming anything more than a disagreement.

And yet, somehow, it ultimately led to murder.

How?

Because she couldn’t let go of the story she was telling herself in her mind.

And how are we like her?

Because we live in mind.

We live in desire.

And desire, if it isn’t surrendered, can become its own world.

You live in a story long enough, and eventually you become the story.

A woman feels unsafe in her own mind, and eventually she wants to make someone else responsible for giving her the safety she cannot find within herself.

Be this way, so I can be at peace.

Stop doing that, so I can feel safe.

Change yourself, so I can finally live peacefully inside my own mind.

And suddenly, she is trying to steal something from another person that she believes she needs in order to be okay.

We do this constantly, only usually with much smaller stakes.

I feel hungry.

Hunger is a desire.

And now I must eat because I need the desire to be met.

I want something.

I don’t have it.

I get it.

I feel better.

And the mind learns:

This is how I become whole.

Take something from someone that isn’t happening outside of me.

Desire itself was never the problem. 

The possibility of desire was already known by life itself. 

It existed before the woman became a murderer.

It existed before she ever crossed the street.

It existed before the disagreement.

It wasn’t simply her choices that led her there.

It was the world she was living inside.

The mind.

The story.

The desire that became more real than the human in front of her.

And this is where we have to be careful, because we are all doing some version of this.

We create a world in our minds through desire and then go looking for the people and circumstances that will complete our story.

We forget that we created the demand in the first place.

We are robbing from someone to pay a debt that was already paid.

There is nothing outside of you that can finally give you what you think you are missing.

And yet the mind keeps creating the dream.

A person to blame.

A person to fix.

A person to love.

A person to hate.

A person who has what I need.

A person who is taking what belongs to me.

And we forget:

We already had it.

Walk in it.

Surrender the mind.

Surrender the self that insists on seeing the murdered as separate from the mind that imagined the story.

See the mechanism to see how easily a thought becomes a world when we forget it is just a thought.

And then something strange happens.

The person you feared becomes your teacher.

The person you judged becomes your mirror.

The murderer becomes an invitation to see the mind in yourself.

And the saint does the same thing.

Both reveal the same life.

Both reveal the same possibility.

And this is how we become free, not by pretending the murderer and the saint are the same, but by seeing that neither one exists outside of the life that allows us to experience them.

Everything is being allowed.

And underneath every story the mind tells, there is still life.

Waiting.

Because the debt is already paid.