Story and Its Forms
In your story, are you author, character, medium or reader?
Harry
As you read the book in your hands, you follow Harry Potter’s journey — the orphan boy becoming a wizard. The words take life in your mind. Harry learns his craft, battles dark forces, and faces the consequences of his choices. It seems this Harry leads an extraordinary life.
But in a moment of pause, with the book’s weight in your hands, you might wonder: What does this Harry experience? You might realize that Harry, the boy wizard, experiences nothing. He is a fictional character conjured by J.K. Rowling through the medium of her words. In one sense, he’s nothing more than curved lines of ink — symbols that have meaning only because you know how to read them.
In another sense, Harry is not those marks at all, but a living figure your imagination creates in response to them. If any experience is happening here, you are the one having it. You’re experiencing Harry’s adventures — an inner movie generated by the interplay between Ms. Rowling’s text and your mind. Although the story can feel vivid, you know it’s different in nature from your lived experience.
You might notice four parts in this reading experience: author, medium, story, and experiencer. Rowling’s mind conjured the story, but she knows she isn’t it. The book’s printed words are the medium through which her vision reaches you. The story is the world those words evoke: Hogwarts, Harry, wands, friends, fears.
Harry himself is woven into that story. He cannot move separately from it. If Rowling writes “Harry ran down the stairs,” that’s exactly what he does. The story binds its characters completely.
And you — sitting in your chair — are the experiencer. The words interact with your mind, your memories, your associations, to produce the only real experience involved. Harry experiences nothing. You experience Harry. The story lives in you.
You can weep or laugh for him, but deep down you know: you’re not Harry. The story binds its characters, but you, the reader, remain free.
Blanche
Not all stories come by written word. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire for the stage. Here, the actors, director, and designers all help bring the play to life. The performers are part of the medium — through their bodies, voices, and gestures, the story unfolds.
When Blanche DuBois sighs, “Whoever you are, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” the line, born of Williams, reaches you through Vivien Leigh. She embodies Blanche, but she isn’t Blanche. When the curtain falls, she goes home. Even onstage, she knows she’s playing a part. If she believed herself to be Blanche, she’d lose her mind.
Blanche, as a character, is bound by the script. She can only do and say what the playwright and actor dictate. Within the story she seems alive, yet she has no freedom of her own.
You, seated in the audience, watch and listen. Your eyes and ears take in the performance; your mind completes the alchemy. You may feel empathy, sorrow, or awe, but you never mistake yourself for Blanche. When the lights come up, you leave the theatre and return to your own story. The audience, the experiencer, remains free.
Mike26
Now you pick up your VR headset and step into Call of Duty: Battle Sense. Your avatar’s name is Mike26.
You move through a world designed by hundreds of programmers and artists, where code and human input co-create every moment.
Headset, haptic suit, and even scent and taste place you inside Mike26’s body. When a grenade explodes, you hear it, feel its shockwave, smell the cordite. You see through his eyes, act through his hands.
Yet Mike26 experiences nothing. The game engine dictates his world; you supply his awareness. The immersion is deep but never complete. You always have one foot outside.
You experience Mike26 — but you are not him.
Dream You
You fall asleep beside your partner and begin to dream.
In the dream, DreamYou walks to class, chatting with a friend about an essay due today — an essay they’ve forgotten to write. A knot forms in DreamYou’s stomach as the teacher announces the collection. Panic rises.
You are the sole creator of this story. It arises effortlessly from the spring of your mind. You didn’t choose to dream this plot, yet every detail — the classroom, the friend, the fear — comes entirely from you.
The dream is made only of mind. There are no pages, no screens, no stage. Every person, place, and event exists only as your own mental creation.
In the dream, DreamYou is convinced they are you. There’s no question about it. But when you wake, it’s obvious they never were. The forgotten essay was never a threat to you, the dreamer; it was only a problem within the dream.
DreamYou couldn’t have acted differently. As a character, they were bound by your dreaming. You needn’t scold them, and you needn’t scold yourself for mistaking them for you. You didn’t. You simply experienced the dream from inside its first-person character.
You weren’t mistaken. You experienced your dream exactly as it was.
You
Now, something to consider.
What if the you who dreamed DreamYou is itself a DreamYou?
What if the person you’ve always taken yourself to be — the one reading this — is a character in a larger consciousness?
Would that be frightening? Or would it mean that you are that greater consciousness, rather than merely this individual mind and body?
Let’s consider, as before, the four roles: author, medium, story, experiencer.
In this deepest layer, the greater consciousness — let’s call it You with a capital Y — is the author.
Like the dreamer, You create without effort or intent. The story arises spontaneously from Your infinite potential. You are not a person choosing, but creativity itself, limitless and free.
The story’s medium is also You. It’s made of nothing but experience — Your own awareness taking shape as life, form, thought, and sensation.
From the personal perspective, this story feels comprehensive. It’s everything: the universe, the life you call yours, every other being and event within it.
But the person is part of that story, not the experiencer of it. The person doesn’t experience; You experience the person and their life.
If your personal name is Bob Smith, consider that Bob experiences nothing. Only You experience Bob Smith — his thoughts, actions, triumphs, failures. You are the experiencer of the whole story, not one of its characters.
You are bound by no property or limit. Yet because the story is composed entirely of Your awareness, You are everything within it. The story is created by You, composed of You, and known by You. It is Your experience of Yourself.
Each life, each viewpoint, each universe is one of Your stories — different in detail, identical in essence. You are the same experiencer behind every “I.”
Bob may judge or forgive, but You accept all that arises.
Bob may seek pleasure or fear pain, but You hold both in perfect peace.
Bob may act or resist, but You rest in effortless freedom.
Bob may love or hate, but all opposites exist within Your unconditional love.
Bob may be born and die, but birth and death unfold in Your timeless stillness.
Bob’s ignorance and enlightenment alike appear in You.
Space and time appear in You.
All that is known — every joy, sorrow, virtue, and sin — unfolds within Your infinite awareness.
You seem to be a person living out a remarkable story.
You seem that way because the story is precisely what You are experiencing.
All experience arises as story — never from outside it, looking in. The story is You.
You experience Yourself, and thereby the world is born — not once, but in every moment.
All that can happen unfolds within Your infinite potential, eternally blessed by Your own radiant awareness.
You are. I am.