The Strange Freedom of Being No One

0:00 A race car driver Mario Andredi once said, "If you think you're in control, you're not going fast enough." Spiritual philosophers keep saying that control is the illusion of the mind. Trying to freeze frame a reality that's constantly in motion. I've got some news for you. As always, it's one bad one and one good one. The bad news is you're falling through the air. Nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there's no ground. You've been circling this insight your whole life. The thing is, we're all so conditioned to think in terms of here versus there. We exist in a constant dance between one point and

0:45 another. We compare one moment to the next, always with the idea that we're progressing from something to something else. But that's all surface level. How about you stop living in the suburbs of your own self? All this movement, all these places are just projections. The real center, the real here, isn't something you find after climbing the next spiritual mountain or crossing the next psychological river. It's the still point inside you. The awareness that's been there all along. It's easy to think of the center as a point on a compass or a dot in the middle of a circle, but that's limiting. When we think about here as the center, we're not talking

1:30 about a fixed measurable spot in space. The center isn't something you can find by traveling or pinpointing it on a map. So, let's go deeper. In the infinite circle of existence, where do you think the center is? Is it where you are now? Of course, but also it's everywhere. In fact, the center of infinity has no boundaries. It is everywhere at every point, always now. In trauma, for instance, people dissociate. They lose the center. The body is here, but the self is somewhere else. Memory fragments. Identity gets scattered across events. And part of healing is reentering, returning to a here that

2:17 feels real, embodied, and grounded. On the other hand, mystics often report the exact opposite. Not a fragmentation, but a total expansion. The self dissolves and everything becomes here. They say things like, "I was the tree. I was the sky. I was nothing. And yet, I was all of it. What does that mean? It means the localization of self loosened. The sense of being a separate dot on the map and awareness returned to its unbounded field. Both trauma and transcendence break the illusion of a fixed here. One disintegrates it painfully. The other dissolves it

3:04 ecstatically. I am here is the statement of someone who has realized there's nowhere to go. This is it. The point you're trying to reach, whether it's the perfect meditation, the next achievement, the higher state of consciousness is already here and always has been. And what is this here? We all point to this tiny little word that we say when someone asks us where we are. We say, "I am here." But if we examine it closely, it doesn't refer to a street address or GPS coordinates. Here is wherever you are, and you aren't fixed. Your body moves through space, but here follows like a

3:51 shadow. That means here isn't a place at all. It's a function of your being. It's this simultaneous existence that makes being here and there so tricky. You're always both. First, let's start with non-locality. A concept that comes straight from quantum physics, but applies to consciousness, too. Non-locality suggests that objects are not confined to a specific location. This means that you can in a way be everywhere without actually moving. The very fabric of the universe is interconnected at a quantum level and every point is a part of the whole. Buddhist teachers have come up with many ways to describe reality, but it's just

4:38 one reality. Sometimes all the different Buddhist concepts and terms can seem daunting, as if liberation is achieved once you master a long list of complex philosophical teachings. However, all the teachings are essentially pointing at the same thing. Although different teachings emphasize different aspects of reality, it's like trying to describe a sunset. You might measure the light intensity and color changes for the last half hour before the sun sets. You might write a poem about it, paint a picture of it, or photograph it. Any of these portrayals of the sunset will end up emphasizing some

5:23 particular aspect of it. Because by their very nature such expressions can never capture or convey the entire reality of the event. The descriptions of the sunset are different but also overlap in terms of subject matter and intent. In seeing reality clearly, we end up perceiving two aspects of reality, the absolute and relative. very difficult to talk about these two aspects using language and concepts because we immediately become dualistic about it. The absolute transcends dualism. Let me give it a try. It's like a finger and it is independent and free.

6:10 It's a thing unto itself, right? The fact that it is separate from other fingers is part of what defines it, part of what makes it functional. At the same time, the finger is part of the hand. Those things can be true simultaneously and they reflect a different reality of the finger. In the same way, everything we perceive has relative aspects as time, space posation individuality, good and bad. But there's another way to perceive reality. Reality has another aspect in which we recognize that all of these things, good and bad, the boundaries we

6:56 draw between individuals, in a way, these are all just ideas. When we let go of those ideas, we just see everything as one in its essential being. Here's an exercise that you can try for 1 hour. Try seeing reality in two different way. Reality has two natures. The particular versus the whole. The particular. Of course, it's true that reality has individuals and individuals interact. This is the way that we usually experience reality. At the same time, reality is a seamless whole, if you will. It's just as it is. When experienced that way, the particulars can be true, but they don't ruin the wholeness. Everything is included. If you were caught up in a

7:43 drama and you were concerned about your well-being and who was doing what and what was going to happen next, it could be full of angst or excitement. But if you somehow realized that all of this was part of a movie or novel and this novel or this movie as a point as an artistic arc and when you stood back you could see it was just all part of the story. When we're watching a movie for instance we don't think oh no how could that happen to that person. The happening is just all just part of the story. It's a very difficult concept to get across. But in any case, what we usually call the absolute aspect of reality, the essential, the wholeness, the things as it is, how we perceive things directly when we're not

8:30 interpreting them through our mental map or our self-interest. We just see things in this whole way or you are that. It's a simple but profound statement, but let's not romanticize it. This is more than an inspirational quote to slap on a wall. It's an observation of how reality works. When we say you are that, it's not just a reminder of your spiritual essence. It's a key to understanding the world as it truly is. A continuous dance between the observer and the observed. An endless loop where the two are inseparable. You are not simply experiencing the universe. You are the experience itself.

9:16 When the universe bends, it's your perception that bends with it. You don't need to travel to a mystical place to find the center of existence. You already are that center. There's a fascinating account from a woman named Pemma, a well-known Buddhist teacher who recounts the experience of having a mindbending realization about being here and there. She was on a retreat meditating deeply on the nature of her mind when she suddenly felt like she was both here in the room and there in every room, in every place, at every moment. For her, it was as though her sense of self had dissolved into everything around her. Here and there weren't separate

10:05 anymore. They were one. The more you explore this, the more you realize that you're not moving through space and time. You are space and time. Here and there are constructs to help you navigate the illusion of separation. But really, the deeper you go, the more you realize that there is no separation at all. You are not located in space the way a pin is stuck in a map. That's the first lie. We've been taught to imagine ourselves as coordinates, one body in one room, in one city, in one country, floating on one planet, in a vast universe. But what if that model is backward? What if you're not in the universe? What if the universe is in you? This is by no means an abstract

10:53 mysticism. In non-ucuklitian geometry, when space is boundless and curved, there is no absolute edge or fixed center. Every point, yes, every single point can be regarded as the center. That includes where you're sitting right now. So, in terms of cosmic geometry, you are not on the periphery. You are not lost in the outskirts. you are at the [Music] axis. But that's just the warm-up. Because once you grasp that physical space is centerless and thus center full, you have to confront a deeper reality. That you are not just at the center of space, but at the center of awareness, not your awareness. Awareness

11:39 period. You are not in awareness like a fish and water. You are the ocean itself. looking back at itself with borrowed eyes. The more you try to pin down consciousness, the more it slips through your fingers. Like trying to measure the color of wind. In an ancient Zen story, the master said to his students, "The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of being everywhere." Now, at first this sounds nonsensical. How can one hand clap? But the true meaning here is that the act of clapping isn't just confined to the sound that comes from two hands meeting. The sound exists in all places. The one hand clapping represents the singularity of the moment. But when it

12:26 claps, it reverberates across time and space. It's not just here in this moment. It's there across the entire universe. Think about it this way. You know how we've all heard that space is curved by gravity? Well, consciousness according to non-local theories is also curved by experience. This means here and there are simply different bends in the same cosmic fabric. And there's no fixed boundary between them. You're not just here, you're spread out through the entire web of existence. There is a theoretical idea that our entire universe would be a hologram, a

13:12 projection of data encoded on a two-dimensional surface. In simpler terms, our reality is like a 3D projection from a 2D plane. So everything we experience, all the space and time is just an illusion. We perceive the universe as here and there. But in reality, it's all encoded on the cosmic surface like the pixels on a screen. Now, if reality is a hologram, then the boundaries between here and there are just tricks of perception. You're here in your body, but in a very real sense, you're everywhere. The boundary between the center of your experience and the edges of your awareness is a false one. You're

13:58 projecting your sense of being here from a greater, more expansive reality. Think of time and space as substances like clay. When we say we are here, it's as though we're saying we're in a particular moment of this flowing, shifting substance. But the here that you're in is not permanent. It's continuously being shaped. The idea of there is just the next shape that hasn't yet been formed. In other words, here and there are not fixed, but are a part of a larger ongoing cosmic process of [Music] becoming. Suchness is the reality behind your commentary. It's what a moment is before your mind translates it into something useful, dangerous, desirable,

14:46 or boring. Suchness is the texture of this exact moment before you touched it with a label. It's the unedited version of reality, the raw footage before your mind adds commentary. It's the dissess of the thing before the brain jumps in screaming that's a tree or that's awkward. Suchness is the radical act of letting things be as they are. The more you try to escape the moment, the more you decorate your present. It is the felt presence of a moment before interpretation. It's the quiet immediacy of being that asks for nothing and explains even less. Before the machinery

15:33 of thought begins carving the world into objects, roles and outcomes, there is only this, not this thing, but this, as in the totality that resists being broken down. This is terrifying to the ego which survives by naming and comparing. To rest in suchness is to surrender control. It's to stop trying to bend the moment to your preference and let it crash into you exactly as it is. It's intimacy, the deepest kind of it. The reason we don't live in suchness is because we're addicted to stories. We don't want the raw present. We want meaning, narrative, plot. But suchness isn't here to entertain or explain. It's

16:18 here to be. And if you stop resisting it, you might notice it's enough. It is not mystical, yet it is mysterious. We shall not cease from exploration. The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. So it just means that spiritual philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. And so does our thoughts shape us. The thoughts of here and there bring the vision of the dual world. The difference between a system and the mess is just how long you stare

17:04 at it. Dual world might look like the ultimate order to our mind. But truth is the invention of a liar. Suchness is not true or false. It is what remains when all the stories fall silent. [Music]