What we learn from these beautiful ancient texts is the power of deep intuition. Making peace with the void is much easier to do right now than after 20 or 30 years of delusional habit-building. The point is not to depress you but to illustrate how many ways we can be led astray. Those who make friends just to feel less alone eventually recognize that such needy relationships are shallow and unfulfilling. Those who rely too much on appearances in their youth are struck by the decay of old age. Those who spend their time chasing various pleasures like sex and drugs often wake up one day in pure terror, recognizing the emptiness from which they’re trying to run away. Similarly, people who spend their entire lives acquiring material wealth and achieving career milestones often neglect their children or other passions, looking back with regret. Everyone does this, from urban liberals to rural populists, atheists to Mormons.

They create an ‘other’ to blame for problems for which we are actually all collectively responsible. Some people rely on a sense of nationality or heritage to compensate for a lack of meaning in the world. In the refusal to empty our individual boats, we fall into various types of weakness across a massive gradient. Instead of using the world as a barrier between you and yourself, you can use yourself as a door from you into a transcendent universal consciousness. It means to approach the self with a completely natural attitude (true self) rather than let the self be reprogrammed by a mad external world (ego). What does it mean for your boat to be empty? For me, it means to be formless, ambitionless, to have no labels for yourself. You can read it hundreds of times over the course of your practice and continue to find something new to consider each time. This parable, possibly my all-time favorite, comes from the Chinese Taoist master Chuang Tzu, whose works had a strong influence on early Zen schools. The spring of clear water is the first to be drained dry.Īs if you had swallowed the sun and the moon:

The straight tree is the first to be cut down, If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,Īnd all because there is somebody in the boat. And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,

The parables of chuang tzu