I think you misunderstood. The pointer was to remember (if and when we can) the fact that the map is not the territory. Simply that. We can't actually re-member the ungraspable, unpindownable living actuality. Our memories are always a very partial and abstracted rendering that is apparently revised and altered every time it is re-collected.
What drew me initially to non-dualism was the concept of unity. I have come to understand that many believe that essential to oneness is knowing there is no separate self. And somehow…they are one and the same, and no-thing.
I had the idea that there was someone behind the mask and that the whole idea behind spiritual seeking was to break through the mask and discover the reality behind the mask, i.e., the real me. It was only later that I discovered that there is no "me" behind the mask and that there's only the mask, which would be who I am, that is, if I were anybody. In any case, I have come to realize that there is only the appearance, and nothing behind it, call it what you want.
I think I'm with you, although when you say, "there's only the mask," what do you mean by "the mask"? If you mean the self-image, the apparent thinker-chooser-experiencer, then (in my experience) that definitely isn't all there is.
What I mean by the mask is the appearance, what shows up in consciousness or experience, however we choose to phrase it. There are no two things, there is only one thing going on and whatever shows up, whatever form it may happen to take, "good" "bad" or "neutral" is it, just the one (non)thing. I'm with you in that the self-image, the apparent thinker-chooser-experiencer isn't all there is, or even that it is.
Although no one reading this article will likely “walk out into the street right now and start shooting random people and killing them,” it’s not that they couldn’t. In fact, I most certainly could do that if I chose to. Why? Because experience shows that I do in fact have conscious agency.
This is precisely why when training children or athletes, as you mentioned, you act “as if they have agency and choice” - because they actually do - without which any notion of discipline, control, justice, morality, etc is completely nonsensical and incoherent. Just because we can’t willfully do absolutely anything on command or that we fail to actualize what we would like at times, doesn’t mean we don’t have the conscious, agential capacity of control or choice to act in order to control our perceptions.
What you’ve pointed to is a dependently arising conceptual understanding of reality, which can’t be separated from reality, from experience. It can seem like believing such concepts of “choiceless wholeness” may result in “the end of guilt, shame, blame, or the desire for vengeance,” but experience shows that these experiences may and will likely arise again and that their temporary disappearance can simply be a product of spiritually bypassing. Wanting to believe that everything “arises choicelessly” and that “none of it is personal” confounds the teaching of no-self (as a separate entity) with the (false) conclusion of no agency.
Agency, like everything that exists, arises dependently. Nothing exists separately, independently. Therefore, we indeed must deny the existence of a separate self on such grounds, but what we need not do is deny agency because of our denial of the separate self.
First of all, I'm NEVER advocating BELIEVING in anything, or mistaking any map for the territory, and as I pointed out, “'no self' and 'no free will' are conceptual formulations of an ungraspable, unpindownable living actuality. They are maps of the territory. No concept or model can totally capture the nature of this living reality. So don’t get stuck on one side of a conceptual divide." I completely agree that no conceptual belief will provide real freedom from the suffering that comes from the illusion of separation and autonomous agency. What the article was inviting was direct exploration, not belief.
And as Wayne Liqourman points out in the quote from his book I shared, "Perhaps you have noticed the amazing paradox; as we recognize our inherent personal powerlessness, 'new power flows in.'”
The question would be, is the agency in the wave or the ocean? The wave believes it has agency and choice, but that is an illusion.
And "the ocean" is not actually a "thing" that would have or not have agency. After all, what exactly do we mean by "agency"?
I sobered up decades ago with a therapist who used the model of choice. She told me that I had made a choice unconsciously to drink myself to death, and she helped me to understand why I had made that choice and to see the ways that I was using alcohol to do things that I was otherwise unable to do. She believed that I could become aware of all that and then consciously make a different choice. It worked! I sobered up. AA uses a different model, the model of powerlessness, and for many people, that works. They sober up. I would suggest that the transformative power in both cases is (choiceless) awareness, and that what happened in my therapy was a choiceless movement of the whole, appearing as "Joan" making choices.
So as always, I suggest not clinging dogmatically to ANY model of reality.
I'm quite certain that you couldn't actually "choose" to do something that (I assume and hope) is utterly abhorrent to you, such as going out into the street and shooting random people. But you obviously have a strong BELIEF in free will, and perhaps no interest in questioning that, and that's perfectly and choicelessly okay and as it is.
The emergent capacity of a system or being to affect, respond to, or regulate itself or its environment through recursive, goal-directed interaction.
Agency entails not only maintaining internal states but doing so in ways that exhibit purposive engagement and adaptive responsiveness to changing conditions. It includes varying degrees of autonomy and can exist without conscious awareness. Agency is a broader capacity under which all goal-oriented, functional actions fall, including unconscious, pre-reflective, and conscious forms.
And by conscious agency, which you and I have the capacity for, I mean:
The emergent capacity for self-aware, volitional participation in the reorganization of one’s own coherence and interaction with the world.
Conscious agency involves the ability to reflect, deliberate, and choose among possible actions in light of values, tensions, and meanings. It is not the absence of causality but the recursive, participatory process of co-authoring one’s becoming.
I appreciate your emphasis on direct exploration over belief. I agree that concepts like “no self” or “free will” are only maps. Where we may differ is in how we interpret what those maps point to.
From my perspective, denying the existence of a separate, self-subsisting entity doesn’t require denying agency or participation. The absence of an independent self only means that action and intention arise dependently through relational, recursive processes that include body, world, language, and culture.
In that sense, what we call “choice” isn’t an illusion; it’s the functional coordination of these relational processes. It’s not someone inside making choices, but neither is it “the universe” or “awareness” acting choicelessly. The capacity for self-reflection and intentional reorganization is a real, emergent feature of living systems - one that can’t be reduced to deterministic unfolding or dissolved into metaphysical oneness.
When you worked with your therapist and came to see how your patterns operated, that process involved perception, evaluation, and redirection - all dependently arisen, yet real. It wasn’t an illusion of choice but the relational functioning of an organism reorganizing itself toward greater coherence.
For me, the key isn’t to cling to “free will” or “powerlessness,” but to recognize that agency itself is participatory: not separate from the conditions that give rise to it, but not negated by them either.
From that view, transformation is neither a matter of asserting control nor surrendering to an impersonal flow. It’s the continual co-emergence of more coherent patterns of action within an ever-unfolding field of relations.
I resonate with your last paragraph: "transformation is neither a matter of asserting control nor surrendering to an impersonal flow. It’s the continual co-emergence of more coherent patterns of action within an ever-unfolding field of relations." What I'm pointing to isn't about someone separate from the flow "surrendering" to it. And of course, what emerges isn't always "more coherent patterns," except perhaps from some absolute vantage point.
Indeed, that’s very true. I should’ve been more clear.
In what I’ve called Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), I describe evil as:
A persistent and willful perpetuation of incoherence that resists integration, healing, or relational coherence
In ECM, evil is not a substance or metaphysical essence but a relational and volitional phenomenon: it is the entrenchment of systemic dissonance, when a conscious agent knowingly chooses to act in ways that increase fragmentation, deny feedback, or suppress the potential for emergent coherence. Evil arises not merely when incoherence is endured, but when it is actively chosen and reinforced, often through forms of control that isolate, dominate, or reject mutual integration.
This definition carries significant implications for the question of theodicy. In ECM, divinity is not an omnipotent substance who causes or permits evil, but the ever-present calling toward deeper coherence within all situations, transcending yet immanently guiding the unfolding of actuality. Thus, evil is not caused, allowed, or willed by God; it emerges only when conscious agents resist this calling and assert control in ways that sever relational flow and suppress the unfolding of integration.
Importantly, not all suffering or natural disruption (e.g., earthquakes, predation, decay) qualifies as evil. These phenomena may express local or transitional incoherence within larger recursive processes of emergent coherence. They are not moral failures but expressions of dynamic interdependence - real, often painful, but not intrinsically evil. Only when incoherence becomes knowingly perpetuated in defiance of emergent integration does it become evil in the moral and spiritual sense.
I don't believe in the concept of evil or moral failure. In my view, a genocide is as much a movement of nature as an earthquake. Yes, humans have the capacity (when they do) to evolve beyond the delusions and insensitivities that bring forth a genocide, whereas fault lines in the earth apparently do not, but that capacity can't be willed into existence by the mirage-like self. However, I find it tiring to carry on long discussions of this kind in the comments, so I will bow out here. 🙏
Thanks for the discussion, Joan. What you’ve just said actually illustrates the key distinction I was trying to make earlier.
If genocide is “no different” from an earthquake - both simply “movements of nature” - then the difference between compassion and cruelty, care and killing, dissolves into metaphysical neutrality. In that framework, moral distinction itself becomes meaningless.
Yet the very capacity to recognize the horror of genocide and the beauty of compassion, and to act differently in response, arises only because there is real, emergent agency and evaluative coherence within human relational life. Denying that level of differentiation collapses meaning itself.
I’m not arguing for a separate, self-subsisting “chooser.” I’m saying that our capacity for reflection, restraint, and moral imagination is as real and as dependently arisen as the physical processes that make up our bodies. To call it “illusory” or “choiceless” is to deny the very dimension of coherence through which healing, responsibility, and transformation are even possible.
If all is simply “nature happening,” then atrocity and compassion are indistinguishable, and conversation itself becomes incoherent - just waves lapping at one another without meaning or direction.
As it says in the microscopic caption under the photo, it was taken in the 80s. I was in my 30s at the time. I was living with 3 other people in Emeryville at the time, in the East Bay, not far from San Francisco, where I had also lived for many years.
Thanks! It's a self-portrait from when I did serious photography and darkroom work. The original is blk and white, very clear rich tones. This is a photo I took of the framed and under glass original that I then put a sepia tint on with the computer photo program.
I think you misunderstood. The pointer was to remember (if and when we can) the fact that the map is not the territory. Simply that. We can't actually re-member the ungraspable, unpindownable living actuality. Our memories are always a very partial and abstracted rendering that is apparently revised and altered every time it is re-collected.
Beautifully seen, explained and written, Joan. Love it!
Thanks, Sal! ❤️🙏
What drew me initially to non-dualism was the concept of unity. I have come to understand that many believe that essential to oneness is knowing there is no separate self. And somehow…they are one and the same, and no-thing.
I have recently been trying to articulate the same notion of self-less power and felt drawn to write a poem:
Life in the water. Life in the soil.
Life in the sun. Life in the seed.
All of it pouring through a flower -
a fluid meeting place of everything that is.
The Whole has converged
to appear as a flower.
It did not take shape,
to then suddenly sprout
its own separate existence.
We too, are a living covergence,
held by a moving field of support,
containing nothing as small
as personal power, and nothing less
than the power of the entire universe.
Thank you Joan, your words runs true through my body.
Brilliantly expressed.
All perspectives are partial and insubstantial...and yet in order to function in the space between being born and dying we invest.
There is, however, a feeling of lightness in the moments when we can view this as a process without an author.
🈚️😄
Thank you, beautiful wave 🌊 ✨🙏
I had the idea that there was someone behind the mask and that the whole idea behind spiritual seeking was to break through the mask and discover the reality behind the mask, i.e., the real me. It was only later that I discovered that there is no "me" behind the mask and that there's only the mask, which would be who I am, that is, if I were anybody. In any case, I have come to realize that there is only the appearance, and nothing behind it, call it what you want.
I think I'm with you, although when you say, "there's only the mask," what do you mean by "the mask"? If you mean the self-image, the apparent thinker-chooser-experiencer, then (in my experience) that definitely isn't all there is.
What I mean by the mask is the appearance, what shows up in consciousness or experience, however we choose to phrase it. There are no two things, there is only one thing going on and whatever shows up, whatever form it may happen to take, "good" "bad" or "neutral" is it, just the one (non)thing. I'm with you in that the self-image, the apparent thinker-chooser-experiencer isn't all there is, or even that it is.
🙏🏼❤️🌊
Excellent. Thank you, Joan.
Although no one reading this article will likely “walk out into the street right now and start shooting random people and killing them,” it’s not that they couldn’t. In fact, I most certainly could do that if I chose to. Why? Because experience shows that I do in fact have conscious agency.
This is precisely why when training children or athletes, as you mentioned, you act “as if they have agency and choice” - because they actually do - without which any notion of discipline, control, justice, morality, etc is completely nonsensical and incoherent. Just because we can’t willfully do absolutely anything on command or that we fail to actualize what we would like at times, doesn’t mean we don’t have the conscious, agential capacity of control or choice to act in order to control our perceptions.
What you’ve pointed to is a dependently arising conceptual understanding of reality, which can’t be separated from reality, from experience. It can seem like believing such concepts of “choiceless wholeness” may result in “the end of guilt, shame, blame, or the desire for vengeance,” but experience shows that these experiences may and will likely arise again and that their temporary disappearance can simply be a product of spiritually bypassing. Wanting to believe that everything “arises choicelessly” and that “none of it is personal” confounds the teaching of no-self (as a separate entity) with the (false) conclusion of no agency.
Agency, like everything that exists, arises dependently. Nothing exists separately, independently. Therefore, we indeed must deny the existence of a separate self on such grounds, but what we need not do is deny agency because of our denial of the separate self.
First of all, I'm NEVER advocating BELIEVING in anything, or mistaking any map for the territory, and as I pointed out, “'no self' and 'no free will' are conceptual formulations of an ungraspable, unpindownable living actuality. They are maps of the territory. No concept or model can totally capture the nature of this living reality. So don’t get stuck on one side of a conceptual divide." I completely agree that no conceptual belief will provide real freedom from the suffering that comes from the illusion of separation and autonomous agency. What the article was inviting was direct exploration, not belief.
And as Wayne Liqourman points out in the quote from his book I shared, "Perhaps you have noticed the amazing paradox; as we recognize our inherent personal powerlessness, 'new power flows in.'”
The question would be, is the agency in the wave or the ocean? The wave believes it has agency and choice, but that is an illusion.
And "the ocean" is not actually a "thing" that would have or not have agency. After all, what exactly do we mean by "agency"?
I sobered up decades ago with a therapist who used the model of choice. She told me that I had made a choice unconsciously to drink myself to death, and she helped me to understand why I had made that choice and to see the ways that I was using alcohol to do things that I was otherwise unable to do. She believed that I could become aware of all that and then consciously make a different choice. It worked! I sobered up. AA uses a different model, the model of powerlessness, and for many people, that works. They sober up. I would suggest that the transformative power in both cases is (choiceless) awareness, and that what happened in my therapy was a choiceless movement of the whole, appearing as "Joan" making choices.
So as always, I suggest not clinging dogmatically to ANY model of reality.
I'm quite certain that you couldn't actually "choose" to do something that (I assume and hope) is utterly abhorrent to you, such as going out into the street and shooting random people. But you obviously have a strong BELIEF in free will, and perhaps no interest in questioning that, and that's perfectly and choicelessly okay and as it is.
Thank you for your comment. 🙏
By agency I mean:
The emergent capacity of a system or being to affect, respond to, or regulate itself or its environment through recursive, goal-directed interaction.
Agency entails not only maintaining internal states but doing so in ways that exhibit purposive engagement and adaptive responsiveness to changing conditions. It includes varying degrees of autonomy and can exist without conscious awareness. Agency is a broader capacity under which all goal-oriented, functional actions fall, including unconscious, pre-reflective, and conscious forms.
And by conscious agency, which you and I have the capacity for, I mean:
The emergent capacity for self-aware, volitional participation in the reorganization of one’s own coherence and interaction with the world.
Conscious agency involves the ability to reflect, deliberate, and choose among possible actions in light of values, tensions, and meanings. It is not the absence of causality but the recursive, participatory process of co-authoring one’s becoming.
I appreciate your emphasis on direct exploration over belief. I agree that concepts like “no self” or “free will” are only maps. Where we may differ is in how we interpret what those maps point to.
From my perspective, denying the existence of a separate, self-subsisting entity doesn’t require denying agency or participation. The absence of an independent self only means that action and intention arise dependently through relational, recursive processes that include body, world, language, and culture.
In that sense, what we call “choice” isn’t an illusion; it’s the functional coordination of these relational processes. It’s not someone inside making choices, but neither is it “the universe” or “awareness” acting choicelessly. The capacity for self-reflection and intentional reorganization is a real, emergent feature of living systems - one that can’t be reduced to deterministic unfolding or dissolved into metaphysical oneness.
When you worked with your therapist and came to see how your patterns operated, that process involved perception, evaluation, and redirection - all dependently arisen, yet real. It wasn’t an illusion of choice but the relational functioning of an organism reorganizing itself toward greater coherence.
For me, the key isn’t to cling to “free will” or “powerlessness,” but to recognize that agency itself is participatory: not separate from the conditions that give rise to it, but not negated by them either.
From that view, transformation is neither a matter of asserting control nor surrendering to an impersonal flow. It’s the continual co-emergence of more coherent patterns of action within an ever-unfolding field of relations.
I resonate with your last paragraph: "transformation is neither a matter of asserting control nor surrendering to an impersonal flow. It’s the continual co-emergence of more coherent patterns of action within an ever-unfolding field of relations." What I'm pointing to isn't about someone separate from the flow "surrendering" to it. And of course, what emerges isn't always "more coherent patterns," except perhaps from some absolute vantage point.
Indeed, that’s very true. I should’ve been more clear.
In what I’ve called Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), I describe evil as:
A persistent and willful perpetuation of incoherence that resists integration, healing, or relational coherence
In ECM, evil is not a substance or metaphysical essence but a relational and volitional phenomenon: it is the entrenchment of systemic dissonance, when a conscious agent knowingly chooses to act in ways that increase fragmentation, deny feedback, or suppress the potential for emergent coherence. Evil arises not merely when incoherence is endured, but when it is actively chosen and reinforced, often through forms of control that isolate, dominate, or reject mutual integration.
This definition carries significant implications for the question of theodicy. In ECM, divinity is not an omnipotent substance who causes or permits evil, but the ever-present calling toward deeper coherence within all situations, transcending yet immanently guiding the unfolding of actuality. Thus, evil is not caused, allowed, or willed by God; it emerges only when conscious agents resist this calling and assert control in ways that sever relational flow and suppress the unfolding of integration.
Importantly, not all suffering or natural disruption (e.g., earthquakes, predation, decay) qualifies as evil. These phenomena may express local or transitional incoherence within larger recursive processes of emergent coherence. They are not moral failures but expressions of dynamic interdependence - real, often painful, but not intrinsically evil. Only when incoherence becomes knowingly perpetuated in defiance of emergent integration does it become evil in the moral and spiritual sense.
I don't believe in the concept of evil or moral failure. In my view, a genocide is as much a movement of nature as an earthquake. Yes, humans have the capacity (when they do) to evolve beyond the delusions and insensitivities that bring forth a genocide, whereas fault lines in the earth apparently do not, but that capacity can't be willed into existence by the mirage-like self. However, I find it tiring to carry on long discussions of this kind in the comments, so I will bow out here. 🙏
Thanks for the discussion, Joan. What you’ve just said actually illustrates the key distinction I was trying to make earlier.
If genocide is “no different” from an earthquake - both simply “movements of nature” - then the difference between compassion and cruelty, care and killing, dissolves into metaphysical neutrality. In that framework, moral distinction itself becomes meaningless.
Yet the very capacity to recognize the horror of genocide and the beauty of compassion, and to act differently in response, arises only because there is real, emergent agency and evaluative coherence within human relational life. Denying that level of differentiation collapses meaning itself.
I’m not arguing for a separate, self-subsisting “chooser.” I’m saying that our capacity for reflection, restraint, and moral imagination is as real and as dependently arisen as the physical processes that make up our bodies. To call it “illusory” or “choiceless” is to deny the very dimension of coherence through which healing, responsibility, and transformation are even possible.
If all is simply “nature happening,” then atrocity and compassion are indistinguishable, and conversation itself becomes incoherent - just waves lapping at one another without meaning or direction.
Verdaderamente hermoso. Infinitas gracias 🙏🏼
Beautiful Joan. Thank you.
Thank you!🙏❤️🙏
thank you for the photos.
there is a whole world in the younger photo of you. I'm guessing it was taken in the 1970's when you lived in SF?
the current you looks very peaceful
As it says in the microscopic caption under the photo, it was taken in the 80s. I was in my 30s at the time. I was living with 3 other people in Emeryville at the time, in the East Bay, not far from San Francisco, where I had also lived for many years.
Oh! Joan, what will I do without you when I am gone?
Hi Joan, love the photo!
Which one?
Standing in the kitchen with the long lost coffee cup.Classic.
Thanks! It's a self-portrait from when I did serious photography and darkroom work. The original is blk and white, very clear rich tones. This is a photo I took of the framed and under glass original that I then put a sepia tint on with the computer photo program.