Actions Without An Actor. How Life Happens By Itself

The Buddha said that there is doing but no doer. This is a profound and radically liberating understanding. It helps us act in daily life from a place of freedom, lightness, and interconnection with the world. In this talk, we will explore what it feels like to engage with life with less sense of pressure, control, and a self that is doing it all. At the same time, there is still a great responsibility, in the sense of the ability to respond.

Transcript

So let me start with a kind of basic human situation that hard for us to imagine an action without it being driven by a need or an intention or a will and sourced in a thought.

I need to get something,

I have to go to the shop,

Something needs to be fixed,

Something has to be changed.

And with that is a very natural sense that we measure if it happens,

If it doesn't happen,

If it's pleasant,

Unpleasant,

How much it happens.

And you know,

Very simple daily life action and even the simplest action of,

Here's a cup and grasping.

All of that is in one movement or it's in going to the shops or it is in writing a book.

And there will always be some feelings of Vedana,

Meaning basic pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Relating to the outcomes.

So,

You know,

If I want my drink and I go like that,

It's just the drink just won't be there and they'll say,

Oh,

It didn't work.

This is all very well,

We can't be otherwise,

But we can begin to see how much the issue of agency,

Meaning I am the one in the middle,

Assessing outcomes,

Can begin to take over the whole action,

Whether it's reaching for a cup or whether it's writing a book or whether it's going to the shop or whether it's going to a doctor or whatever we do.

And this has become,

In a way,

And here is my view,

Far too dominant and toxic in our modern life.

Money has become the measure,

Success and failure dominates totally.

I remember I used to work for an Arab NGO in the north,

In the Galilee,

That was doing work on ecology and so on.

And we made an application to the European Union for funding.

The application involved something like six boxes of papers,

Of which a huge amount was assessment,

How if it's working,

Not working,

How much we measure,

What the results will be.

There was such a lot of emphasis on assessment,

How we measure.

And it's just a small example.

Just a small example.

Our sense of success and failure has become huge,

Huge and dominant,

Especially in the modern world.

It always is there,

It always will be there.

It can't be not there,

Basically,

If we reach for the cup and we don't catch it.

But it really has become a kind of religion of the modern world.

Advertising,

For example,

Is an obvious example.

And action tends to be built on a sense of something needs to be changed,

Something missing,

Something I have to get,

Something needs to improve.

And issues coming out of that get more subtle when we look at it carefully.

For example,

If I don't,

I'm not motivated by making change and something is missing or painful,

Will I be passive,

Too passive if I don't see this,

I don't have this sense of being driven to make change and the self needs to see that there's something missing here in order to make change.

So here's an issue which is coming on what I said just now,

Which can definitely seem like a problem.

How much do I need a self in there in order to really make sure that something happens,

Such as dealing with something that's very painful,

Dealing with suffering.

And in that case,

It's often I get loads of kind of criticism.

You Buddhists are too quiet.

You sit quietly and you think that's going to change the world.

People don't forget that the sense of,

You know,

The basis of Dharma is action as well.

And the Buddha was a super activist going all over the kingdoms,

Going to the courts and the kings and the leaders trying to change things and stop wars.

So there is a sense there,

There's an issue there that's coming out of that.

If we have less self,

Less motivation,

We're less driven,

We're less by measuring and measuring,

Are we going to feel too passive?

Another question is,

How can I trust?

If I don't want to fix things,

Then trust,

Which I need,

Instead of opposition,

Instead of anxiety,

Instead of,

Will it just disempower me?

I trust things,

How will I make change if I trust?

Surely I have to see things and then going out to make change.

So I need this sense of something missing,

Something wrong,

Something to be fixed.

How much?

Another issue coming up for us is very simple.

So if I'm not driven by needs,

Intentions,

Something wrong,

Something to be fixed,

Should I go to the doctor?

And it's a big story now,

Should I get a vaccination?

Would the Buddha be vaccinated?

Should I get a vaccination?

Isn't that trying to fix something,

Trying to,

You know,

Etc.

And another question,

Which is,

If we don't measure outcomes,

How will I know if it works?

How can I make decisions?

So isn't measuring absolutely vital?

So here are questions that really do come up when we are faced with a bigger view of how much action needs to be driven by me and what I need and want and what I want to fix.

So the first thing I want to do is rephrase the issue of self and non-self,

Anatta and emptiness.

Because one of the problems that is kind of dominating the dharma community is that anatta or self and non-self tends to become a kind of overarching concept called emptiness.

And then that's the measure.

Whereas I don't think it's wise,

And certainly in the Buddhist teaching,

Having emptiness as a kind of a goal or a kind of overarching belief or a concept doesn't really help.

And I think we can rephrase,

Which is very helpful to us in understanding action,

We can rephrase anatta,

Less selfing,

As lightness,

As a sense of lightness of being,

As a sense of interconnection of things.

It's not an absence.

Emptiness can lead us to a place which is a kind of absence,

Emptiness of.

So anatta is being empty.

But it's not exactly the essence.

It's a dynamic.

Anatta is a dynamic.

And it's not an absence.

And it's an understanding that,

Like in our meditation,

Things happen because of a vast network of conditions,

Which cannot really be collapsed down into a very small cause and effect.

They are chains of interrelations.

I mean,

We see it really clearly with the virus,

Just in this news this morning.

The virus appears in South Africa,

And it's appearing in Israel and London and or England and all over the world.

It can't be stopped.

It's not something that,

That it can,

Because it's multiple causes.

It's,

It's,

There's interrelation of things.

This is a small example.

Don't want to get obsessed with it,

But the breath that we breathe is an interrelation.

So if we see things like that as a bigger picture,

Then it does affect our actions.

For example,

Very,

Very simply,

We have an intention to have a cup of tea.

We just had one just now.

There was an intention,

An encouragement.

There was a timetable that said 20 minutes,

All the conditions allowing us to have a cup of tea.

What happened when we had a cup of tea?

90% of all of that was not in control at all.

Our digestive system worked to digest the tea,

The kettle boiled because we put the,

Put the fire on.

There's so much happened that wasn't in our hands.

The intention was there,

But if we put it in a big perspective,

The intention to have a cup of tea is a very small slice of a huge network of conditions that made in the end a cup of tea,

Including our digestive system.

We're not in charge of it.

We don't say,

Stomach,

Stomach,

Press the button.

It's not under our hands.

So we need to look again at how much the self is defined as a driver of action.

And we can begin to understand that life works through us,

Creating conditions,

And our action becomes another condition,

Which creates other conditions.

So if we get that,

Keep that bigger picture,

There are conditions creating other conditions.

Life is working through us and our actions are also conditions and our intention is also conditions.

And indeed,

The sense of things happening by themselves is a deep and freeing insight,

Which can be with us in our life in the small and in the big.

And in the big.

For example,

Yesterday I went running in our village.

And for me,

Running is not running for the sake of how long I run,

How many kilometers,

It's running as a non-action action.

So I run and I see the world going past and my feet are moving and the breath is coming in and out and the thorns trees,

Olive trees passing by.

And the whole thing in a way is happening by itself.

The minute I start saying,

How much should I run?

Did I run more than yesterday?

Then I actually will say,

Why should I do it?

I kind of give up.

I don't need to do run if I'm just doing how much I run.

I know that some of you probably do sport and maybe do competitive sport maybe.

And that's not a problem.

But I'm talking about what is the volume of the end gaining that we want out of this action?

How much of the consciousness is occupied with measuring success or failure and how much I get to?

It's not that we should cancel it.

But the question we need to ask is how much of the consciousness is busy with it and how much is not busy with it is in the present moment of getting a sense of things happening by themselves.

We go shopping.

The shopping list is there.

We remember it.

We forget it.

We pull it out of our pocket.

Okay.

The hands are responding.

We pick up the milk.

We see the milk.

We take it because that's on our shopping list.

How much of that needs the pressure of a me in there saying I'm in charge of the whole thing called shopping?

It's a question.

So the way to work with it,

One way to work with it is a little bit like I was trying to do with this meditation,

Guided meditation on reflection of something happening to us during the day.

We watch the arising of a controller who's in charge of this event,

Responding to a difficulty.

For example,

Someone says something insulting us or putting us down or putting us up.

Doesn't matter really or whatever.

And how much the self feels in charge of this and having to respond and sometimes to defend.

But can we watch that arising?

The defender,

The one reacting,

The one that needs to fix something,

The one that wants to change everything,

The one that needs.

And without blame,

Because it's so human,

We can just watch the arising of these voices in us,

The self needs to protect itself.

The self that feels something's lacking,

The self that says reacting to dukkha,

To pain,

Painful experience.

How much it's happening?

Are we building up a victim mind,

For example?

Are we building expectations?

It rises automatically.

Let's have a look.

And again,

Not to censor ourselves,

We mustn't do that.

It's much more a sense of freedom if we know when it's happening,

We know when it arises.

We can see the triggers.

Someone says something,

Oh Stephen,

Why do you do this?

I get it sometimes from my daughters or whatever.

Oh,

You put a dirty spoon in the you didn't do the washing up properly.

Never mind,

I say,

Yeah,

But I'm the one doing washing up all the time.

But so what?

Then what happens?

Trigger,

Response,

Like I did just now,

Maybe defensiveness.

But maybe from there,

We also see there is power to act differently,

With less automatic reactivity,

Less pressure.

So one way to work with all of this is really to look at the sense that the way the controller keeps arising,

The agent,

The agency,

I am doing this act and watch that as a creation of self and the world at the same moment.

If it's a very classic picture is the victim.

And I did tell a story a couple of days ago,

Those of you who were in the event the evening I gave in Totnes Consciousness Cafe,

But I'll just tell it briefly again,

Because it's a very strong image.

Some time back,

I did a workshop,

Five day retreat with 15 people coming from Israel and 15 Germans in Berlin.

And it was really focusing on the Holocaust and working with it as a kind of very powerful narrative and how we can together work with it wisely.

And I noticed that the Israelis coming there really expressed the sense of the victim mind.

And they were talking a lot about being a victim.

And it's understandable,

Of course,

There's a second generation,

Maybe third generation after the Holocaust.

And the German participants in this retreat were really,

Really quiet.

And they didn't say anything.

And at a certain point,

I felt the retreat wasn't working very well because of that.

Like,

They were withdrawing.

The German participants were kind of withdrawing.

So I invited them to be seen.

Maybe their sense of pain was expressed in another way.

Their sense of difficulty was expressed in another way,

Not being obvious victim.

And as soon as this invitation came out to see their look behind the eyes and see where they are suffering,

What's happened in their homes and their past and what they're carrying quietly,

You know,

Without talking about it.

And it was very clear,

Then the sense that the way a victim view can take over the mind kind of and by reflection,

It can be undone,

It can be opened,

It can be it can be we can work with it.

Another way that we can work with the sense of the pressure of being an actor in charge.

And wanting results and wanting change.

Is to look above,

To look at the big picture.

These days,

If we look at the small picture,

We're in trouble.

Things look difficult.

But what about the what about what the what is the big mind say?

Looking at Gaia,

Looking at the whole planet as a living being,

Looking at our interrelations of things,

Looking at the interrelation of yourself with somebody else just now in that little image during the meditation,

Looking as if above kind of the relationships that we have.

And looking a little bit of karma,

Because karma,

Although it's kind of a kind of slogan,

It actually means the big picture,

In which there are multiple influences.

And we cannot say cause and effect in a simple way.

It's the mind that wants cause and effect,

Because the mind wants to be comfortable and say,

I know what's going to happen tomorrow.

It's uncomfortable to be uncertain.

But having a view of karma begins to show us that this mind that we have,

That wants to control is illusory.

It's a bit of an illusion,

It's a magic trick.

Because so much is happening at the same moment.

Every action you do,

Just like I said,

Drinking a cup of tea,

Creating huge amounts of change,

The digestive system,

The blood,

The water,

The preparing the,

You know,

All kinds of happen just for one cup of tea.

Everything makes waves.

These words I am saying are like waves,

Your thoughts that you're thinking,

The listening that you're doing are making waves.

We don't,

We can't say where they go.

But I think the meaningful message about karma for me personally is that nothing is lost,

That everything is meaningful.

Karma is like the interrelation of things,

The butterfly effect,

If you like.

So waves go out.

And that helps us to have less expectations,

Because we see the picture is so big.

And it also helps us to be driven by a bigger view of things.

And that brings compassion and connectedness.

And it really helps us then,

We will do an action from compassion,

Go out to,

I was very impressed reading stories.

My sister in Oxford,

I was going to come and just now and be there and come to London Insight live,

But it didn't work out.

But she was telling me how extraordinary it was in her street,

How the beginning of Corona,

Everybody was helping everybody else with a compassionate heart,

Never mind who they were.

There were all kinds of nations and all kinds of languages.

And everybody was helping,

Checking each other,

Checking each other,

Who couldn't go out to the shops,

Who needed help,

Etc.

So the heart,

The compassionate heart and the connectedness comes from a bigger place than for me.

Kindness comes actually from a bigger place.

And then kindness and calm are powers.

And sometimes the pressure for us to make a change undoes things.

There is the issue of trust I mentioned before,

Sadha in Nepali.

And trust is again,

Coming from the big picture.

The trust would say,

There is no reason to be against the world or the world to be against us.

The world is as it is.

And from that place,

Can we go out and make a difference?

I know that it feels counterintuitive,

Because if we trust everything,

We think,

Well,

Then I don't do anything,

Because it seems all right.

We can say,

No,

It's not all right.

There is pain what's happening right now.

But I'm not going to go out in the world from a place of resistance,

Irritation,

Anxiety.

I can get up in the morning with trust.

The world is,

That's a good basis for me to act.

I allow the world to be as it is.

Now I'm going out to act.

I allow my body to do what it is.

My body may not be healthy or maybe healthy.

I have to allow it to be what it is,

Because otherwise,

In a way,

It's really hard to cure it by resistance and friction and opposition.

An example of this is the middle way organization that I started out here in Israel many,

Many years ago,

Called Middle Way.

We did a lot of work around trust,

For a couple of quiet peace walks with Jews and Arabs,

Walking through towns and cities in the countryside,

Walking in Israel and Palestine,

And showing that Jews and Arabs can live together perfectly well and act together and walk together and be together and all ages as a demonstration based on trust.

Trust is possible.

So trust is a power,

One of the five powers,

Actually,

In my book,

Five powers,

It's the first one.

And it does come from that sense that life is doing it.

Life is doing it.

We can help,

We can give a hand,

But we trust life.

There's a nice image of the alms bowl of the Buddha.

This is a bell,

But the Buddha had a alms bowl,

Meaning a food bowl,

Like the monks do today in Theravada world.

And the key about this Buddha's alms bowl is that whatever comes in is all right.

The Buddha and his monks didn't walk around in the village saying,

What's in here?

Actually,

I need a bit of extra.

It looks a bit off,

I think.

Can you put something else?

It's not enough.

Or it's vegetarian.

I wanted meat.

Oh,

It's meat.

And I wanted vegetarian.

The Buddha wasn't a vegetarian.

The more powerful image of the alms bowl is whatever comes in is in a way what life brings us.

And our mind is a bit like an alms bowl.

Whatever comes in the mind,

That's what we get.

That's what comes in.

The Buddha said,

I don't dispute with the world.

I don't challenge or dispute,

Argue with the world.

The world can sometimes argue with me,

But I don't argue with the world.

So the image of the Bodhisattva is really an image deeply of action without an actor.

If you look at the way the Bodhisattva is described,

He or she isn't in charge.

There's some beautiful text about this.

If the Bodhisattva,

Whose mission in a way is to bring all beings into enlightenment,

And if he does it or she does it,

And you ask he or she,

Who did this?

They would say,

I don't know.

And if you ask,

How was it done?

They would say,

I don't know.

That's the way it just happened.

And I think it's quite important for us to have some of that view that not being in charge is a really freeing sense.

We give ourselves,

But we don't take on ownership of this act of giving.

We don't need to take it on.

Dana is a very good example of this.

Dana is the first or first parami.

And the Bodhisattva is representing,

Embodying the 10 paramis,

10 in the Aravata world and 6 in the Mahayana world.

And Dana is the first one and a very important one.

But the key to Dana is impersonal,

Because we give without wanting anything back.

We don't make calculations.

Dana is beyond the calculations.

It's where the trees are giving us oxygen and we give carbon dioxide.

The earth is giving us our life and we give to the earth.

I have chickens and I have a vegetable garden and it's beautiful to be part of that cycle.

I grow the vegetables.

I give them life.

They give me life.

I look after my chickens.

They give me eggs.

I look after them.

I give them life.

They come,

You know,

Look after the eggs and they get born into chicks,

If I'm lucky.

Sometimes,

Mostly not,

But sometimes yes.

And I look after them and I have plenty of old chickens there that my chicken shed is also an old age home for retired chickens.

I give them life.

They give me life.

Who's in charge?

Who's in charge of these cycles?

And it's so much joyful not to be in charge.

How many vegetables am I getting today?

Oh,

I expected more.

Or how many eggs?

Oh,

You want to give two?

Okay,

You didn't give any today.

Fair enough.

So,

Dana is that,

Is the giving and receiving.

It's a cycle and it's beyond someone being in charge.

Dana is a beautiful example of actions without an actor,

Of nobody really in charge of this.

And in a way,

In a very,

Again,

Big picture,

We have no choice Dana happens by itself.

We are given a body.

We didn't demand from life to be born.

We were born as Dana and we give ourselves our whole life to the world.

Whether it's we say,

Okay,

I have to go to work nine o'clock in the morning,

Etc.

Etc.

We have thoughts about this,

But actually what we're doing right now is speech,

Is listening,

Is interaction.

I'm giving myself right now and you're giving yourself to this dialogue and it's fine.

It's not an issue because we can't do anything else actually in this life because there isn't a kind of a box called a person that is totally kind of locked up and having to then give from that place.

We're in interaction flowing with everything.

And so here is an example,

Dana,

But Aparamita are good examples,

Meta,

Steadiness,

Authenticity.

These are good sources of action in life and they are instead of the sense of controller and controlling and they really help the world.

They help our neighbors,

Our kindness,

Our compassion,

Helps the person next door.

If we measure how much we're getting back,

We will lose the joy of it.

So an answer to some of the questions that I'm sure you're going to ask and you can ask them anyway,

Is so if I do,

If I have trust or too much trust,

I see the world as it is,

Then surely there's no motivation to change.

And I think the answer is the bodhisattva image is a very good answer to that,

That we manifest our qualities in the world because there really isn't anything else to do.

And the measuring of outcomes is in small doses,

I would say.

We need to measure an outcome so we know that we're getting to the shops or we're grasping this cup of tea.

Yes,

Fair enough,

But that's it.

So I want to finish this talk with a quote.

I have to say that I've pretty well finished a book which is actually a dharma novel.

And it's been a huge struggle.

Not easy at all,

Because I've written 15,

16 nonfiction books.

And this is the first time in fiction and I've been,

I think this is the fifth time I'm rewriting the book,

Something like that.

But it's a dharma novel based exactly on what I'm talking about in this talk.

The novel is a character loosely based on myself that develops wisdom and insight and awakening through building a house stone by stone.

And it's what I've been doing actually,

Maybe 30 years ago here in this place.

I built my own house stone by stone.

And I went back over that and sort of rephrased it as a journey of awakening.

So the whole book is about awakening,

Not through sitting quietly for months and months in a cave,

Which I'm not against.

I think it's really important to have that experience as well of stopping.

But I mean,

Not to forget that the experience of awakening is in doing as well.

It's not just in the mindfulness and samadhi aspect of the Eightfold Path,

It's in all the rest of them.

So I want to quote a little piece from my book,

Which is unpublished.

I'm still kind of working on the final edition of it.

But this piece is very reflective and about about making a wall out of stones and how that can be a totally awakening experience.

So I'm going to read it to you.

And it's,

You know,

Maybe one day you'll see the book,

I hope.

I don't know if it'll be published in the book.

But anyway,

This piece is to me,

Says the whole talk.

And then it occurred to me that the only thing that made a wall out of a random pile of untamed stones,

That makes a thought out of awareness,

Or makes,

Or for that matter,

A world out of primal emptiness,

Is an intention.

My needs and thoughts were foundation stones of every construction,

And the rest happened accordingly.

Reality is a cloud of indeterminacy,

Pure potential.

Human intention collapses it and forces it to be born as something,

Such as a wall,

Or as quantum physics says,

A subatomic particle.

What we want and what we define makes worlds.

We sing the world into existence.

What if there was no intention?

Would it all stop?

Could the building process proceed without it?

If the human observer went home for lunch,

Does the subatomic particle return to the womb from which it was born?

Could the wall be unmade if all interventions and definitions of it stopped?

I tried it.

I surrendered out of experience into a timeless,

Trackless,

Undefined moment.

The touch of stone became just bubbling energy without a location.

Stone,

Hand,

Touch,

And the person running the show all disappeared as definable things.

The wall didn't collapse in a pile of dust,

But with this awareness it ceased to be a knowable object.

It became a glorious uncertainty.

The word wall didn't make sense anymore.

So was it possible to build this way?

From a regular conventional point of view,

No.

But from this awakened point of view,

The question turned around.

Was it possible to build any other way?

Building without the constant sense of something to be done was radically different.

Zooming into the carrying,

The plinth,

And the movements of the body and mind showed that they were all just happening by themselves.

And if I zoomed out to take in the big picture,

Stones,

Trees,

The mass of creatures and people living their life,

It brought me to the same place.

No one in charge.

The builder was a person-sized point of view,

One of many.

Yet if the building could be seen as happening by itself,

Then how can the builder say that he is the builder?

How could the wall itself say that it is being built?

If I'm not really the builder,

Then am I also not really a person,

Or a self,

Or a human being,

Or anything definable beyond conventions and points of view?

The words appearing on this white page,

The thoughts,

Perhaps just as of light behind them,

Behind them,

This person writing these words,

You,

The reader,

Are no more than convenient fictions.

I felt launched into free fall,

And it was scary.

Despite the apparent mass of the rock in my hands,

Where could any real ground be found?