What does being alive feel like? To me it feels like a reference point in space, a center around which experience happens. From the moment I open my eyes in the morning and all through the day this reference point is there, like a window onto the world, made up of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, thoughts and sensations.

This POV may be inside a room, but I walk a few steps, and it’s outside that room. No matter where it is, I always experience it from here, at the center of experience. I can’t throw my POV over there to the other side of the room although I can imagine that perspective. My POV always feels localized in the vicinity of this body/mind and appears to travel around with it.

In addition to this feeling of being a mobile POV receiving constant sensory information from “outside” my POV, a mental commentary is appearing, both about the present sensory information and past information which I contrast and compare with the present. I’m also receiving mental commentary about subjects entirely unrelated to this sensory input, thoughts which pop up out of nowhere, some of it conscious and some unconscious. 

Sensation arises, feeling comfortable or uncomfortable, some of it related to my environment, some not. I may not have the thought, “it is cold,” but the feeling of cold makes me want to put on a sweater. Unconsciously spurred by the memory of the warmth of sweaters? I don’t know, it seems to be more of an automatic response.

These sights and smells and thoughts and feelings traveling around in a localized POV gives rise to the belief that this soup of experience is something more than it is. It’s as if this experience is contained by an independent some-thing that is separate from all of its ingredients and the environment it inhabits.

There is no question that the soup is being experienced. That much is clear. But experienced by what I have no way of knowing. I assume it’s me, but where is this me? I’ve looked, I’ve really, really looked, and it’s unfindable. But here’s the odd thing—even though it’s unfindable, another assumption rises up that this sense of me came before experience and also owns it. The soup is now my soup, my thoughts, my feelings. I am the one who sees, who hears, who tastes, who smells, who touches, who thinks. Experience is no longer just happening, it is happening to a me.

At this point, Buddha says, “Slow down there, buddy, those are two pretty major assumptions that you might want to take a look at. If you’re saying that you can’t find a Me in there somewhere, what are the consequences of that? Think it through.”

One consequence is that if there is no me, it calls into question the whole idea of volition and choice. Decisions and choices are happening, but if there is no me doing it, then these seeming options to move in this or that direction are… what? Movements in an impossibly vast living fabric that is beyond my comprehension? Does an ant decide to go left or right, or does it just go, prompted by an endless chain of previous causes? If so, then these choiceless choices make outcomes inconsequential and entirely without value, neutering any reason for attachment to pleasure or pain. Pleasure and pain do not go away, but being happy or unhappy are no longer fused to either outcome. 

If someone I interact with wants something their way, this is also a choiceless choice seeming to come from a non-existent them, so instead of angrily fighting for my way, I can sit back and observe the dance playing out. Winning or losing are of equal value for there is no me that benefits or loses. Instead of being ruled by my desire for pleasure, fame, gain, and praise while wanting to avoid pain, obscurity, loss and blame, I am free to experience peace while fully appreciating the richness of the endless unfolding. It truly is like watching a movie, where I can enjoy and even become absorbed in the drama of conflict while knowing it is only the play of the Universal Mind.

Choicelessness puts a fascinating twist on doing practice, for practice implies that there is a me who seeks to benefit from meditation or other religious rituals and therefore chooses to practice. Spiritual evolution in fact does appear to occur as a result of practice, but they occur—or not—to no one, making practice something that unfolds in its own time, and not something that can be forced. 

My root teacher’s approach with me was never to say that I should do this or that practice. Instead, he simply acted as a beacon, broadcasting an intangible signal of unconditional love, wisdom and peace that I was irresistibly drawn to. His teaching took the form of cooking or playing games together, taking walks, chatting about the wildlife near his house or even watching Kung Fu movies together, all the while basking in some kind of crazy magnetic field that surrounded him, abiding in the reality of the emptiness of him, me, others, and all phenomena. Then, somehow, some way, it rubs off on you and you don’t have any input on the speed at which it happens. One day it just happens.

I was cooking with him one time, and I took a pot of leftover rice out of the fridge to add to a meal. It had hardened into a cold, solid clump so I began to go at it with a knife to break it up. He stopped me and said to just add a bit of water, cover it and put it over a low flame and the rice grains will relax and separate on their own without any effort on my part. Then he said, when the causes are there, the effect will always happen, and even if you say, “please don’t happen,” you won’t be able to stop it.