Rewriting the Self: Finding Freedom in Bigger Stories
- zacharyehelton
- Jul 27
- 11 min read
Updated: Sep 4
A talk given on July 27, 2025, for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola
A few years ago, VR headsets were coming to be the next big thing. Initially, I was skeptical. The closest thing I’d tried to a virtual reality headset was a Nintendo Virtual Boy in the 90’s—playing Mario tennis in an all-red landscape until your head ached and everything looked green. Now, the tech has improved some over the last twenty-something years, I knew that, but when our in-laws gifted us a VR headset for Christmas a couple of years ago, I wasn’t quite prepared for just what that experience would be like. I don’t know if you’ve tried one of these, but they can be utterly immersive. They’re sensitive to where you’re looking… the graphics can be hyper realistic… and if your brain isn’t used to telling the difference, it can suck you into their reality pretty fast.
A couple of months after we got the headset, we went to visit my parents. They—like me—had never tried one before, and after much coaxing, we managed to get my mom to try it out. Perhaps unwisely, the first game we tried her on was a game called “Richie’s Plank Experience.” It’s a game that places you on a virtual wooden plank several stories above the ground, then instructs you to walk carefully along the narrow beam to retrieve a piece of cake waiting at the end. If you make it to the end, you pick up the virtual cake, and you win. If you lose your balance, you fall to your death.
(Fun fact: there’s another setting where you can turn on “spider mode” and spiders start descending from the sky and appearing on the cake… but we figured, for a first-time VR tester, the plank was probably enough on its own.)
So, after some back and forth, we got her to finally put on the headset. We got the game going, and what happened next was not so much that she started having a good time as she became instantly paralyzed. She knew, in her rational brain, that she was firmly on the ground—that none of it was real, but in her deeper, reptilian, survival brain, she was suddenly over a dozen stories in the air, unable to move.
Helpfully, we all thought we could nudge her along by doing things like… you know… yelling at her to move. This—shockingly—did not work, and instead resulted in her remaining immobilized, and after a while of watching this, I got it in my head that maybe I could help her by sort of sneaking up behind her and giving her a little bump on the shoulder.
Again, perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not help her gain confidence. Instead, it resulted in a good bit of screaming, some light panic, and ultimately, her virtual body falling to her virtual death. Mostly, it resulted in her snatching off the headset and a solid resolve never to try VR again.
Now, do I own my responsibility in this? Yes, I do. But the point is, even to someone as remarkably intelligent and aware as my mom, these things can be deceptively all-immersive.
You don’t have to have tried a VR headset to have some idea what I’m talking about. In a way, it’s like those moments when you find yourself so immersed in a movie or book or show that everything else fades away. It’s like you’ve moved closer and closer until you’re an inch away from the screen or the page, and you can no longer see the rest of the world.
It might seem silly, but in a way, this is often what we do—on a spiritual level—every moment of every day. Our minds are constantly supplying us with these stories, and we become so immersed in them that reality is drowned out.
The problem is, when we get too attached to one particular story—a story about who we are… and what kind of world we’re living in… what kind of people are around us… we lose perspective. Our perception gets narrow. In short, we suffer, and we cause suffering to those around us.
This has been a topic of particular interest to just about every spiritual teacher through the millennia, in just about every tradition. “The eye is the lamp of the body—if the eye is clear, the whole body will be filled with light.” This morning, I’d like to spend a few minutes looking at just how this dynamic can work.
So, why do we get so easily bogged down in stories?
As it turns out, this isn't a fluke of the mind, but a feature. It’s what the mind has evolved to do, and it’s evolved to do it well. Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have demonstrated that the mind’s job is, in large part, is to find patterns to predict the future. In other words, it’s to keep us alive and minimize the amount of energy we use to survive. It’ll predict what’s going to happen next—what threats are likely to arise… what’s worked to navigate them before… and then it’ll come up with a story we can use to overlay on top of reality to keep us safe. It’ll tell us stories about who’s safe and who isn’t, whether we’re good or bad, whether the world is inviting or threatening, and what our experiences might mean.
Now, when it comes to keeping us alive, the mind is an incredibly handy evolutionary tool.
However, there are times it oversteps.
For example, if the mind begins telling stories that are too rigid… if it starts to see threats everywhere or stops anticipating positive outcomes… then the result may not be flourishing so much as anxiety, depression, or overall ill-being. Like a VR headset, it has a knack for pulling us into the story it wants us to see until that’s all we can see.
It will keep us safe, by God, even if it kills us.
There’s this spiritual cliche that’s been attributed to everyone from Albert Einstein to Alan Watts that says, “the mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.” Letting it run our lives is like letting a treasury advisor run the entire kingdom. The advisor may do their job well, but at the expense of some very important values. It needs balance, and balance is something we sometimes struggle to provide.
The lack of balance is typically results in one of two things:
First, we wind up attached to one particular story the mind wants to tell us. We over-attach to identities—the story that I am an American… an activist… a Unitarian… a daughter… a parent… a teacher… a male… a doctor… and sometimes that becomes all we see.
Or, on the other side of the spectrum, we can spend our lives fighting against the stories the mind tries to tell us. We immerse ourselves in a story where I am not like them… I am not like my family… I am not a bad person…
Either way, when we get caught, it’s like having that VR headset duct-taped to our face.
Michael Phelps, a swimmer and Olympic gold medalist, learned this lesson after winning eight medals in the 2004 Olympics. For years, he’d worked like crazy to get to that point. He’d seen himself as nothing but an athlete and a swimmer and a competitor… but then, after he finally made it to the Olympics and got the gold, he sank into a season of deep anxiety and depression, leading to self-destructive habits and substance abuse issues. “You work so hard for four years to get to that point,” he said in a later interview, “and then it’s like you’re […] at the top of the mountain, you’re like, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ ‘Who am I?’”
That last question is telling to me. Because that’s how the mind works, left unbalanced. It leaves you grieving, asking, “If I’m not a _____, then what am I?”
It took Phelps years of suffering, then an intentional season focusing on his mental health to come back from that place—to deal with the fallout of that attachment to the story his mind had told him for so long. This is similar to what many fundamentalists experience after they deconstruct and leave harmful religion—entering seasons of anxiety and depression after the biggest source of their identity suddenly disappears. We’re left wondering, “If I’m not that… what am I?”
When we get caught in the mind’s stories, we suffer, yet often, they’re the only things we can see.
Now, this leads us to the next question—if this is a feature of the mind, the what can we do about it?
Luckily, spiritual teachers have been exploring this question for a while. You’re probably familiar with some of their stories and the spiritual technologies they’ve developed, but even if you know them by heart, it’s helpful to revisit them every so often—to remind ourselves how to use them and keep from being sucked back into the VR headset of the mind.
One story I think of often is the story of Buddha, on the night of his enlightenment. This was before he was the Buddha, of course—when he was Siddhartha Gautama, a prince and aspiring spiritual teacher trying to get to the root of why humans suffer. For a long time, he tried to white knuckle his way to an answer—to grit his teeth and figure out what the problem was and how to fix it—but he didn’t come to a breakthrough until he sat under the Bodhi Tree one night, meditating. I don’t know how long he sat there, watching his breath, looking at the forest through half-closed eyes… but eventually something unexpectedly shifted. In his novel Old Path White Clouds, Thich Nhat Hanh narrates it like this:
Through mindfulness, Siddhartha’s mind, body, and breath were perfectly at one. His practice of mindfulness had enabled him to build great powers of concentration, which he could now use to shine awareness on his mind and body. After deeply entering meditation, he began to discern the presence of countless other beings in his own body right in the present moment. Organic and inorganic beings, minerals, mosses and grasses, insects, animals, and people were all within him. He saw that other beings were him right in the present moment. […] He saw the creation and destruction of thousands of worlds and thousands of stars. He felt all the joys and sorrows of every living being—those born of mothers, those born of eggs, and those born of fission, who divided themselves into new creatures. He saw that every cell of his body contained all of Heaven and Earth, and spanned the three times—past, present, and future. It was the hour of the first watch of the night.
Gautama entered even more deeply into meditation. He saw how countless worlds arose and fell, were created and destroyed. He saw how countless beings pass through countless births and deaths. He saw that these births and deaths were but outward appearances and not true reality, just as millions of waves rise and fall incessantly on the surface of the sea, while the sea itself is beyond birth and death. If the waves understood that they themselves were water, they would transcend birth and death and arrive at true inner peace, overcoming all fear. This realization enabled Gautama to transcend the net of birth and death, and he smiled. His smile was like a flower blossoming in the deep night, which radiated a halo of light. It was the smile of a wondrous understanding, the insight into the destruction of all defilements.
To put it slightly differently, in one moment, this man was Siddhartha—a separate person, a male, a prince, with a particular societal role and national identity, and in the next moment, he was… everything. He saw he had multitudes within and was part of a multitude outside of himself. He saw that he was part of something so much bigger, and that all was changing, all the time—interdependent with everything else. And when that happened, it did something to him. The palm of his mind released its tight grip on the stories it was telling—stories about who he thought he was and what he thought he was doing—and beyond those stories was something so much more expansive.
He was Siddhartha… and he was also the entire cosmos.
He was a teacher… and he was also a wave on the ocean of being.
And that’s what he went on to teach others—a summary of what spiritual teachers had been teaching for years, and would continue teaching for generations. He discovered that if we can rise above the small stories, the virtual reality our minds tell us, then we discover the true Reality behind them, and in that Reality, we can find an energy and creativity, and well-being that we never imagined possible.
Spiritual teacher Ram Dass had a different way of talking about this. This is adapted a bit—his teaching says it slightly differently, but according to Ram Dass, it can help if we imagine our eyes as television receivers with a little dial by the side of our eyes. (He’s ahead of his time, but what he’s describing sounds a lot like a VR headset.) He says, when the dial is set to channel one, what we see is the world around us in terms of physical forms. I am a man, she is tall, he is blonde, they are thin… whatever. This is the story the mind gives us on channel one of consciousness.
But if we reach up and change the dial to channel two, the screen in front of our eyes changes. Here, rather than just the physical forms, we see the roles we play. We are a parent or a child. A teacher or a student. A doctor or a patient. Here, we see the parts we’re living out alongside others.
Change the dial to channel three, and we start to see something else—the psychological dramas playing out around us. We see feelings and needs. We see our Enneagram numbers and the storylines we’ve inherited. Many people aren’t interested in channel three—they’re content to stick around on one and two. Fewer still, however, adjust the dial to channel four, which is where the real game starts.
On channel four, we start to see what the Buddha saw as he meditated under the Bodhi Tree. We see the One-ness of it all. We see that we’re all waves on the same sea… the same atoms swirling around in infinite, ever-changing forms… We see that we are, as Ram Dass often said, “God in Drag,” or as Alan Watts would say, “God playing hide and seek with Godself.”
Many stop here. But if we turn the dial one more time, we go even further.
On channel six, there is emptiness. This can be hard to comprehend if you’ve never practiced trying to see it. Here, there are no actors, just actions. No breather, just breathing. No self, just “Zen zenning” as some teachers will say. Here, everything is dynamic and beautiful and beyond all language and labels. Here, words dry up.
See, moving from any of these channels to the other is enough to start loosening the grip we keep on the stories our minds tell us, but the real trick is not in changing the channel from one to another. It’s not in replacing one story with another. The real trick is stepping back. It’s realizing that all of these channels exist at once—that we’re living in all of them—and holding them each in balanced, harmonious, non-dual awareness.
Yes, I am the entire cosmos—I am emptiness and an ever-changing expression of God’s being… and I’m Zach. A dad. Who likes to watch movies and play D&D, and eat junk food.
The real trick isn’t changing the image on the VR screen, but taking it off, to see it from every angle.
That is the real beauty of what the spiritual teachers offer us. It isn’t escapism—although it certainly can be used that way. There are plenty who would dial to one channel just to get away from another—who would say, Oh, no need to pay attention to that suffering, I’ll just remember that everything is impermanent and none of it matters! But to do so is just another form of aversion. Trying to avoid suffering is just to wind up right in the middle of it again. To really practice non-dual awareness of these channels isn’t to avoid suffering at all, but to be able to sustain enough perspective to actually do something when suffering happens. If we’re not mired so deeply in one particular identity or story about what’s going on in the world, then we have the freedom and perspective to go about changing those identities and stories with more gentleness, ease, and resilience. We get to say, Yes, what’s happening hurts… and it’s not the only true thing. There is more. I am more. There is freedom.
So, however we do this, whether through meditation, community, or whatever other spiritual technology you can use to take off the headset, what’s important is that we remember to do it regularly. What’s important is that we water the seeds of perspective, so that we can move in this world with the fruit of gentleness and effectiveness. What’s important is that we remember to keep the minds’s story in check—the mind which is such a wonderful servant, and such a terrible master. We have to do that faithfully, not only because the world needs it so badly, but because life becomes so much richer when we do.
Thank you.