There are many connections between beliefs in stories and resistance to experience.
Both fuel and emerge from a sense of I with an Other.
Beliefs create an identity which doesn’t allow certain experiences. And resistance to experience in turn support and lends a sense of substance to those beliefs.
And yet another connection is distraction.
Whenever I want to resist experience, I find that a good way to do it is to go into and get caught up in stories. It doesn’t matter what type or flavor of story. Any will do. Stories of excitement, fascination, daydreams, judgment, blame, and so on.
Initial drafts…
I find a mutuality between beliefs and resistance. Mainly because both create and come from a sense of I with an Other, and they each fuel and support each other in different ways.
Whenever I take a story as true, there is also a resistance to experience, to allowing it and be with it as it is.
I identify with a particular view, so must resist the validity in its reversals, and also whatever doesn’t fit with the identity created from that view.
Whenever there is resistance to experience, there is a sense of split of I and Other which makes it easy to see and fuel stories as true.
And also, whenever there is the impulse to resist experience, going into stories – whatever they may be – is a good way to distract myself from, and so continue to resist, experience. Any type or flavor of stories do. Stories of excitement, fascination, daydreams, judgment, blame, and so on.
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There seems to be a mutuality of beliefs and distractions.
Whenever I take a story as true, I get to distract myself from fully allowing and being with experience, as it is here now.
And whenever I don’t fully allow experience, I am free to take stories as true.
These are two sides of the coin of an I with an Other. There is a sense of an I resisting experience, because beliefs and identities tell me they shouldn’t be there or are not me or not OK. And there is a sense of an I holding onto a story as true, creating an identity out of it, and identifying with both, which gives me a reason to resist experience, or at least create the sense of resisting experience.
I notice that when I go into stories, and take them as true, it distracts me from fully allowing experience. It allows me to not be with experience fully. And these stories can have any content…. fascination, scenarios, judgment, blame, and so on.
And I notice that when I resist experience, I need to fuel a story about them and their trigger to justify it, and remind myself to resist them. Without the stories, no resistance.