The mind is a storyteller. That is its job. It is a processing system that evolved a very particular set of functions over a very long period of time. The mind accrues data points, identifies them in relation to previously identified data points, strings them together in a way that is coherent to itself, and interprets them by telling itself a story. The mind evolved this set of functions much in the way that a nose evolved a set of functions to navigate the olfactory matrix. Like a nose's inclination to smell, a mind's inclination to tell stories is an evolutionary adaptation to maximize the survival of the organism in question. And much like a nose will always smell (barring disease, advanced age, or catastrophic injury), the mind will always tell stories (barring disease, advanced age, or catastrophic injury). It is what it does. Remembering this can offer a glorious respite.

If you have spent any amount of time meditating, you will have become acquainted with the hijinks of the mind. There is a reason it is called the monkey mind. My mind, for example, likes to be in the know. It doesn't like feeling that there is another agent in its midst that knows more than it knows. It will fold itself into knots in order to justify its knowingness. It likes to feel that it possesses information that keeps it ahead of the curve. It has actually become quite comical to watch my mind as it changes from lawyer robes to professor robes and, finally, to sadhu robes, all in a bid to outdo itself. Then it will join in the laughter, determined to be in on the joke.

And of course, the searing question, for me at least, is whether the mind is a reliable storyteller. As a narrator, can it be counted on to tell the objective truth? External or—if you want to go there—internal? The answer is for each of us to discover, but I will posit that the question begs another: is the mind an object or a subject? If it is the latter, by its nature, can it tell the objective truth? If it is the former, would it even seek to? It dawns on me here that the one who searches for evidence of God is the very same one who will dismiss any evidence out of hand because it once decreed that God was beyond evidence. The point being this: the mind very easily becomes a dog chasing its own tail.

In some ways, the stories the mind tells you are no more reliable than the stories that Hollywood tells you, save for one glaring difference: the mind's story stars a very, very familiar protagonist, which can obscure its identity as a story. These days, the unwillingness to identify the mind's story as just a story is particularly evident in those who subscribe to certain ideologies, such as the one perpetuating, in true Hunger Games fashion, the livestreamed Gazan genocide. But make no mistake. This unwillingness is present in all of us to varying degrees. We are convinced by our stories because of our proximity to them. Beyond that, it is uncomfortable to grapple with unpleasant versions of our protagonists when we encounter them in the stories of others. 

So what is the magnum opus? It is the maximum story that the mind can comprehend. Life. The ecosystem. The matrix. Samsara. Maya. Whatever the fuck you want to call the thing that we're all doing right now. The thing populated by almost 8 billion humans, some 200,000 chimpanzees, some 6,000 tigers, who knows how many trees, a literally uncountable number of insects, all the other biological organisms, PLUS whoever is here in non-corporal form. I don't know if there is a way to engage in this sticky theater without a story. In my ontological system, we all have them. Birds have them. Plants have them. Mushrooms have them. I don't think there is one version of events that an observer would single out as the most complete or the most true or the most compelling. And I am not talking about just humans here—amongst humans, I have no problem saying that some stories are less valuable than others (i.e., the aforementioned ideology, elements of which no one is immune to, especially without investigation). What I am saying is that I do not think that the human's version of life is more complete or true or compelling than the bee's version of life. So perhaps that means something, too. I don't know. I actually don't really care. This whole exercise is itself just a story.