About thirty years ago, in the days when I was leading encounter groups in England and interspersing them with whatever traini

THE ONLY STORY THAT MATTERS

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

About thirty years ago, in the days when I was leading encounter groups in England and interspersing them with whatever trainings attracted me, I participated in a 3-month intensive workshop in London. The group met twice a week and for a couple of weekends, and ended with a 5-day residential group in the countryside. It was the final Saturday afternoon of those last five days, just a day left, and I remember how lazy the atmosphere was in the group room. Someone was playing a guitar, and everyone, including the group leader, was lounging around as though nothing more would happen. I was lying belly down on a cushion, casually observing everyone and enjoying this family we had become. Suddenly my eyes came to rest on a middle-aged woman; I realized I had made no contact with her at all during the entire three months. She didn’t know I was looking at her. I was simply recognizing how much I disliked her – so much that I hadn’t even wanted to tell her; I wanted nothing to do with her, and had unconsciously erased her from the circle, made her non-existent! The fact was shocking to me, and I silently began to pay attention to what it was about her that I found so repellant. The realization of who she represented to me was like a bomb exploding through my entire psycho-physical system. I was engulfed in a black wave of horror. My head fell into the cushion beneath me, and I found myself sinking into an abyss of anguish that gradually overwhelmed me until, as though from fathomless depths I could hear myself sobbing. She was the nun who ruled the orphanage where for five years she had terrorized me as a young child. I had learned, as people do, to bury the deepest horrors of those years so that I could survive and function in life, and now, as though patiently waiting for this moment, the nightmare I had lived in came roaring out of the past.

I didn’t say a word, and I wasn’t afraid of what was happening to me. It was as though the force of what was coming was so huge that I knew resistance was futile. I think I even understood, from a place beyond intellect, that without receiving this I couldn’t open into the totality of my being. The truth is, I had chosen this when I walked out of Oxford and dedicated my life to the cause of BEING. In any case, I let myself fall all the way into my ghost of Sister Damion. That was her name. She was like Nurse Ratched (who was placed fifth on the American Film Institute's list of the 50 all-time greatest movie villains), in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. That film had come out the previous year and I vividly recall how it gripped and chilled me. It may even be that it had already helped remove some of the earth under which Sister Damion was buried. Life has a wondrous way of bringing us to critical moments in the moment that matters.

There is an old saying, “When the disciple is ready, the master appears”. I guess I had already learned to accept that the master, the teacher, can come in many forms. Our part is to receive him however he comes. And here he came, in the form of an invitation to meet my nightmare. I wasn’t in my past. My past was dramatically present to me, but with one great difference. I was safe. I was among people who loved me and could let me be. As I fell further and further into my dark ocean of tears, I could sense the presence around me of everyone in the room. I knew they were all with me. I knew I didn’t need to acknowledge them. Their hands were on me, gentle, caring, and I was in free fall. I didn’t want to save myself. I only wanted to fall all the way.

There came a point where Sister Damion and the orphanage disappeared. I was in the womb, then beyond the womb. All images evaporated. Only there was the sound of sobbing in a dark infinity; as though that was all there ever was; but now, no heaviness, no pain. A soft sweetness, like a smile, began pervading the space in which I had drowned. A deep amusement crept little by little into my sobs so that they began to laugh at themselves. I was laughing and crying at the same time, and rising, rising until I felt myself among people again, heard their laughter mingling with my own, their hands still stroking my curled body. After what seemed an age, I raised my wet face. I was shining. I could feel my own radiance.

Many things happened then. I could see clearly all that I hadn’t been living, and I found a vastly deepened trust in my own life journey. My life changed completely. I went to India, met Osho Rajneesh (he was Bhagwan in those days) and became his disciple, a sannyasin with a new name - Anand Rajen - and no past. I left England and lived in India with him for three years, then on his controversial ranch in Oregon where we built a city in the desert. Eight years later I let all that go, became Alan again, and soon after founded The Art of Being.

There are many other stories of course, and they belong to my book. What matters here-now, and the point of this story, is that I never spoke in the group about what had triggered me, or about Sister Damion. It wasn’t necessary. What mattered was the depth of the opening into being that it brought me. The one who rose up out of the abyss was different from the one who fell into it. Across these three decades I have fallen and risen many times, and each time I have become more light; light as consciousness and spirit, and light as playfulness and easiness in being this mysterious “Alan”.

WE ARE ALL SUCH MYSTERIES! And the purpose of the stories of our lives is to be continuously and ever more significantly opened through them into our boundless potential, so that we are for ever becoming richer and lighter manifestations of ourselves. This is why, in my workshops, I don’t spend time processing and analyzing what happened to participants. All that does is throw us off the path of being, and back into the clutches of the mind stuff that we get lost in – thinking life! - where we unconsciously forget how awesome and miraculous life is when we are PRESENT!

It isn’t that the stories don’t matter. It is that the story that matters is the one that is happening right here-and-now, whether it comes knocking on our door from out there in existence, or rising out of the depths of our inner world, making the past for a little while meaningfully present. To be here now doesn’t mean that we don’t have a past. One of the absurdities of the “instant-enlightenment” brigade is the belief that with a single touch or look or word from “the enlightened one”, all our stuff dissolves, the past is no more, and we become enlightened. That’s really just a paper-thin mind-game to save us from all that we’re afraid to meet in ourselves. Befriending our fears is what brings us the blessings we seek.