No One Steering the Ship

No Ship, No World: A Radical Perspective

Experience takes place only in the present, and beyond and apart from experience nothing exists. – Ramana Maharshi

From the beginning not a thing is. – Hui-Neng

When belief dissolves, there is no one to save. –Toni Packer

The self is just like this clenched fist. Relax the fist and there is nothing inside. – Adi Da

We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom. – the home page of my website.

An Unfolding Discovery

It was on my first retreat with Toni Packer back in 1988 that the lightbulb went off and I realized there was no self, that the self is a mirage created by thoughts, memories, storylines, sensations and emotions. I began to notice that experience is without a center and without borders or seams—not just in my experience, but in everyone’s experience, although we might not notice this because our conceptual map often overrides our actual sensory perceptions.

This realization didn’t mean that the me-sense was permanently eradicated, never to return. In fact, every time I get defensive or frustrated or feel miffed in some way, that me-sense is back. It’s never entirely believable anymore, but it does still show up. In those moments, it feels as if “I” am being put down, or “I” am being subjected to unfair treatment, or “I” need to figure something out—whatever the story is, and the body hums along, tight and contracted. This mix of emotion, sensation and thought creates the mirage-like sense that there is a “me” here who is being attacked or threatened by something outside of me.

It’s all a cloud of emotion-thought, but when it happens, it can temporarily capture and mesmerize the attention. In my experience, there’s no finish line to waking up from the intermittent thought-sense of being a separate encapsulated little me. But what has fallen away here is the meta-idea that “I” need to eliminate the “me” experience once and for all in order for “me” to become a very special enlightened me who has no more me, or that “I” must get beyond ever feeling defensive or miffed.

Everything that arises is clearly seen to be an impersonal happening, like the weather, or like the events in a dream. It has no actual substance or enduring reality. It’s not happening “to me.” It doesn’t mean anything “about me.” It’s not actually a problem. It’s not even really happening, in the same way the events in a dream are not really happening, or the apparent forms of everyday life are not really solid and persisting in the way they seem to be.

Toni Packer invited me to watch closely as decisions and choices happened to see if I could find a chooser. All I found was thoughts popping up by themselves: “Do this, do that.” And then suddenly, a decision emerged. I couldn’t find a decider, nor could I make the decisive moment happen any sooner than it did. Thought would take credit afterwards, claiming that, "I made a choice." Later on, another thought might arise and say, “Oh no! I made the wrong choice! I should have done it differently!” As if that were actually possible in that moment.

It certainly seems as if we make choices, but the more closely we look, the clearer it becomes that every urge, every intention, every interest, every ability or lack of ability, every desire, every thought, every movement of attention, every action simply emerges. No one is making it happen. Seeing this is an enormous relief. It takes away guilt and blame. It gives us compassion for ourselves and for everyone else being the way we all are.

When we believe that, "I need to decide," it is very stressful. With any seemingly important decision, it seems that we could get it wrong and ruin our lives or the lives of our children or maybe the world. But when we realize it is all happening choicelessly by itself, it is very relaxing. We see that nothing can be other than how it is in each moment.

Nowadays, I simply wait to see what the Joan character will do when facing an apparent choice. That doesn’t mean thoughts don’t still arise about the pros and cons of the different possibilities, or that gathering relevant information doesn’t still happen, or that there’s never any sense at times of needing to make a decision, but if I simply pay attention, it’s clear that all of this is a choiceless unfolding. The one supposedly steering the ship is an illusion. It can’t be found.

In fact, the ship itself and the apparently formed world are also illusory. The world around us looks very solid, substantial, persisting and real, if we don’t look too closely and if we see it through the ubiquitous filtering of our conceptual abstractions. But the more closely we look, the more we can discover that nothing is ever the same way for even an instant, and that we can’t actually find a boundary between inside and outside or between one apparent thing and another. This present experiencing is one whole seamless and indivisible happening. There is infinite variation and diversity, and yet, it all goes together and can’t be pulled apart. This can be discovered by giving open attention to our actual present experiencing as it happens.

Of course, the apparently formed world is a very persistent illusion. Like a mirage, it continues to show up, even when you know it’s unreal. And that apparent world comes with emotional ties that pull us into the storylines, and those can still capture and hypnotize the attention even after there has been a deep realization of their illusory nature.

At first, this periodic hypnosis may seem like a personal failing, and we may believe that it needs to stop happening. But then we see that our intermittent bamboozlement is nothing personal, that it’s all part of the seamless movie of waking life, the nonsubstantial dream, the play of consciousness. It’s all simply another shape that this no-thing-ness is momentarily taking. It ceases to be a problem. Even waking up from the dream is revealed to be an event in the dream. Nothing can be grasped because all of it is dissolving in the very instant it appears, and none of it is ever what we think it is.

As children, we sang, “Row, Row, Row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” Years later, we may encounter this idea that this whole appearance is like a dream, that it is all simply an activity of consciousness with no actual substance or observer-independent existence. In one sense, this is undeniable, because we never experience anything outside of present experiencing or consciousness.

But part of me resisted this recognition for many years, and sometimes still does. After all, did this mean the suffering in war zones, concentration camps, or on factory farms was all “just a dream”? Did it mean that things like racism and sexism were only unreal dream problems? Would I be betraying all the suffering beings if I stopped believing in the substantial reality of all this and my storylines about it? This radical perspective seemed to threaten and negate many things I held sacred, and many parts of my identity.

Gradually, over the years, these concerns have been melting away in the deepening experiential recognition that none of my conceptual ideas holds up under careful scrutiny. I met Byron Katie at one point, who asked of every thought I had, “Can you really know that’s true?” And I discovered that if I went deep enough, I never could.

I also met Tony Parsons, and all my ideas about what was spiritual and what wasn't collapsed. The whole project of self-improvement, awakening, getting enlightened, letting go, doing the right thing, finding the Truth, saving the world, and so on began falling away, leaving the simplicity of what is. What a relief. There is just this, just what is, and it’s never what we think it is.

For a long time, I still thought that there were all these things—people, buildings, trees, etc.—and that they were all impermanent. But through my encounters with Zen teacher Steve Hagen, I began to see that impermanence is so thorough-going that no-thing ever actually forms to even be impermanent.

In my second book, Awake in the Heartland, I compared the forms we see or imagine to “phantasms, protean apparitions forever revising and erasing themselves. Like Rorschach inkblots, they become anything and everything. Like colored shapes in a kaleidoscope, they tumble endlessly into something new. Like the mirage in the desert, they vanish if you approach and try to catch them.”

Now I feel how dream-like this whole movie of waking life is, and I see clearly that even the subtlest experiences—those moments of tasting ungraspable emptiness or absolute spaciousness or pure consciousness—are themselves part of the dream, and that they are always fleeting. If I try to get hold of them or put a label on them, that is instantly a delusion.

There is truly no way to say what this is, and any label we give it—consciousness, unicity, radiant presence, being, the Tao, the Self, the ground, even words like emptiness, no-thing-ness, or groundlessness—tends to make it sound like something. And while this appearance is clearly not nothing—after all, here it is, obvious and undeniable, and even a dream is real as a dream—it’s not something either. There is no way to conceptualize this, and no way to see it as an object because we are this, and it is all there is. The eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself, the totality cannot step outside of itself.

I’ve noticed that the more letting go into this radical perspective happens—and of course that includes the realization that there is no letting go because there is really nothing that is not this—but the more that apparent letting go happens, the more there is an immense sense of freedom and relief. The formed world still shows up, just as the mirage in the desert sands does.

I can still apparently navigate everyday life. The dog next door still comes to visit and I still love him. My friends and I still have dinner and go for walks. I still cherish the memory of my parents and teachers who are no longer alive. I still have opinions and preferences. I can still have dark moods, lose my temper, or feel pain. I still care about the world, and sometimes my heart breaks when I see the suffering. I still have an interest in seeing through delusion and healing the bodymind. I can still write about open listening and the power of awareness. Nothing has really changed. But more and more, something sticky and painful is gone.

Most humans tend to think that everything going on in the world is really important—and that it’s very, very real. We easily bristle at the suggestion that it might all be a kind of dream-like appearance in which nothing solid, substantial or persisting is actually happening. And so, because we cling to our conceptual maps, we suffer greatly and worry ourselves sick about personal and world events. We get caught up in abstract ideas that we identify with and defend to the death.

We need conceptual abstractions to function, so I’m not suggesting we can or should eliminate them. And some abstractions are quite harmless, for example, “chairs” and “tables.” But consider your own reactions to the following abstractions that we habitually mistake for reality: “Black people,” “white people,” “Karens,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “gender,” “toxic masculinity,” “fascism,” “communism,” “Putin,” “Donald Trump,” “Kamala Harris,” “Netanyahu,” “Hamas,” “MAGA people,” “the woke left,” “Russia,” “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Iran,” “USA,” “Christianity,” “Islam,” “the rich,” “the poor,” “liberals,” “conservatives,” “Baby Boomers.”

We easily lose sight of the fact that these are all over-simplified, potentiality emotionally charged, conceptual abstractions of a reality that is actually infinitely nuanced, complex, unpindownable and inseparable from you and me and the whole universe. We lose friends and fight wars over such abstract ideas and apparent divisions. We suffer needlessly.

Reality might be compared to a boundless and shoreless ocean, and all those “things” I just mentioned are like waves that have been mentally pulled out of the ocean and frozen into a persisting form. And then we imagine that each frozen wave that thought has conceptually carved out of the whole has free will, that it can decide to go off in a direction independent of the ocean. That’s how we think, and that way of thinking generates fear, anger, conflict, guilt, blame, vengeance—the whole nightmare.

But in reality, the waves are always moving and changing. They are never the same way for even an instant, and they are inseparable from each other. They are all an activity of the ocean, all equally water, equally ocean. Each wave contains the whole ocean and is a movement of the whole. It’s like that famous sphere, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

But because we don’t see this, we tend to react differently to the suffering on factory farms or in war zones than we do to the suffering brought forth by hurricanes, because we think that factory farming and wars are human caused and therefore could and should be different, whereas the hurricanes are acts of nature. But when we really see that we are all movements of the whole, that autonomy and free will are an impossible illusion, that the people running factory farms or waging wars could not at this moment be doing otherwise, then we see that all the human caused events are just like the hurricanes. They too are a force of nature, a movement of the whole. And what we think is happening is no more real than the forms we imagine in Rorschach blots or clouds.

Seeing all this may sound heartless or dangerous, but in my experience, counter-intuitively, it isn’t heartless or dangerous at all. It is profoundly liberating. It brings forth compassion and unconditional love. And that doesn’t mean we always feel loving or always behave compassionately. Nor does it mean that we can’t or won’t respond to things that happen. But it’s all part of the show, and it’s all dream-like. We can still use words and concepts, but we begin to hold them more lightly. We are more aware of how easily they can mislead us, how the map is never the territory, albeit mapping is something the territory is doing.

In one of the dialogs in I AM THAT, Nisargadatta Maharaj responds to a question about the war and suffering in what was then East Pakistan. Nisargadatta says, "In pure consciousness nothing ever happens." The questioner is quite upset by this response and questions how Nisargadatta can remain aloof, to which Nisargadatta replies: "I never talked of remaining aloof. You could as well see me jumping into the fray to save somebody and getting killed. Yet to me nothing happened. Imagine a big building collapsing... Nothing happened to the space itself... nothing happens to life when forms break down and names are wiped out."

Yes, this is a very radical perspective. It goes to the root. And that’s the subject of this wonderful very short (less than a minute) video by John Astin, whose YouTube channel and Substacks I also very highly recommend:

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Invitation

If you find yourself bristling at this article, wanting to argue against it, feeling in some way threatened by it, maybe you might get curious about what’s going on. What are you defending? What are you afraid will happen? What feels threatened? What are you holding onto? In some way, you’re drawn to this radical perspective or you wouldn’t be reading this. And at the same time, maybe something resists it. If the interest arises, all of that is something to explore, not by thinking about it, but by actually looking, listening, seeing and feeling into how it is. For me, this is a never-ending exploration and discovery.

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Love to all…