Wisdom of No Choice

There is a certain wisdom to be found in not choosing, and not insisting in being in the driver’s seat. When we make ourselves believe that we are solely or entirely responsible for what is happening to us, a sense of morbid guilt and regret ensues. We feel guilty for not leading the life we feel we’re supposed to have lead up to a certain time and age in our life. We feel regret at not having fulfilled or consummated those life wishes.

Why do we feel that we are responsible for everything that happens to us? I believe because we are so often exposed to blame when we are young, and this sets us up for self-criticism. An alternate way of thinking is that, like babies, we are all learning to crawl, to walk and then to run. We cannot learn to walk until we have learned to crawl, and we  certainly can’t run until we know how to walk. Similarly, by viewing our life as a series of stages, we are spared the burden of needing to get everything right in one go or one shot.

When we are in a dream, is there any reason to emerge from it? Instead, let us enjoy it, knowing that we are not tied to what’s happening. This is a very important point that I want you to ponder deeply. Are we our bodies? Is what we are doing somehow tied to a sense of “I” or the ego?

The ego is really only a series of mental patterns. It has no form, no structure and no specific shape or color. We might confusedly think that we are “egoistic”, but let us remind ourselves that “egoistic” is not a “thing” or a reified identity. It is only a habit of deludedly thinking there is a fixed self that is behind all the phenomena around us. Even when we face criticism and blame, we should never fall into the trap that there is a fixed “self” who is the object of criticism or blame. This is because the awareness is not tied to a specific self. That self is only a creation of the mind. And, more so, the self is constantly changing. But most importantly, there is never an ultimate self that we can say “sums up” who we are. Who we are is completely beyond the phenomenal. Our original face has nothing to do with the phenomenal world.

But does that mean that we should hover over the world and stay away from it? This is interesting: it’s like someone who suddenly awakens from a bad dream, and is so afraid of falling asleep for fear that she or he will fall into the same dream all over again. If we know that it’s literally “just a dream”—something temporary that our mind creates—would we be afraid of the phenomena? We need to literally look into the eye of the storm to gain insight into this dream.

Put it in a different way: if you are in the midst of a conflict that escalates, as long as your mind remains calm and still, you will find that there is a kind of “center” that is never subject to the fluctuations of the conflict. We may use a lot of analogies to describe this quality or state. Among one of my favorites is that of the “movie screen”. As violent and bloody as a horror movie can be, does blood actually stain the movie screen? Does the blood that appears in a movie actually affect the screen itself? If we think back to any number of situations we have been in, we will find that the fundamental and primal awareness is not affected by anything that comes through the six senses.

Life is like a dream: we are living it but transcending it every moment. We are in the dream and we suffer whatever consequences are involved in participating in the dream. However, there is always an observer that is not really touched by the dream. The nature of mind is such that, like the movie screen, it can never be sectioned off as a character in the dream. It lacks the temporal and spatial qualities that makes it appear as an actor or an element in the dream itself. Instead, these images are simply projected onto the screen. Our true nature has no part to play, other than to reflect the phenomena coming and going through the workings of cause and effect.

If, out of fear and despair, we tell ourselves, “I need to get out of this dream right now”, then we have fallen into the trap (the proverbial “ditch”, as noted in the opening vignette) of believing that there is a self that can awaken out of the dream, that is solid, substantial and real. In fact, however, there is no such thing. Everything has an empty nature and is coming together from cause and conditions. What stays unchanging is the principle of impermanence, emptiness, and no-self that forms the center of the movie screen metaphor. Impermanence means that whatever appears on the screen has no lasting temporal existence. It vanishes without a trace in the next frame. The belief that one frame connects to the next is an illusion that is constructed by the mind itself. Emptiness means that everything is compounded from a series of mental and physical heaps or aggregates. The compounded nature of things makes them always dependent on other things for their appearance, and are therefore interdependent. No Self entails the absence of an enduring self that undercuts or underlies all appearances.

The dream, then, lacks a dreamer. And even the movie screen is only a kind of metaphor that is used to describe the nature of mind. It is not designed to tell us what mind is and where mind is located, since there is no actual “screen” that we can point to as “a screen”. Rather, the screen metaphor is used to hint at the impermanent, empty  and non-self aspects of our true nature.