Empty your boat

 

 

"A man repaints his boat. 

Once it’s done, he’s so pleased with how it looks that he decides to take it out on the lake, even though it’s a foggy day. 

As he steers through the fog, another boat slams into his, damaging the new paint job.

The man is furious. 

Why the hell didn’t the person in the other boat pay attention and watch where he was going? 

The man turns to yell at the person in the other boat, and finds that there is no other person. 

It’s just an empty boat, drifting on the lake."

If you can empty your own boat

Crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you,

No one will seek to harm you.

Chuang Tzu

What does it mean for your boat to be empty? 

For me, it means to be formless, ambitionless, to have no labels for yourself. 

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). 

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.

In the refusal to empty our individual boats, we fall into various types of weakness across a massive gradient. Some people rely on a sense of nationality or heritage to compensate for a lack of meaning in the world. They create an ‘other’ to blame for problems for which we are actually all collectively responsible. 

Everyone does this, from urban liberals to rural populists, atheists to Mormons.

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. 

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. 

Those who rely too much on appearances in their youth are struck by the decay of old age. 

Those who make friends just to feel less alone eventually recognize that such needy relationships are shallow and unfulfilling.

The point is not to depress you but to illustrate how many ways we can be led astray. 

Making peace with the void is much easier to do right now than after 20 or 30 years of delusional habit-building. Give yourself that gift. What we learn from these beautiful ancient texts is the power of deep intuition. We know that we gain strength from humility and obscurity, and yet the atomizing force of modern culture is so strong that we often go against our better interests, chasing wealth, fame, narcosis, distraction and attention. These pursuits cause us troubles we are often too afraid to acknowledge despite their near-total presence.

In a broader context, the pop moralizing and self-victimization tendencies of our age can be viewed as a cheap attempt to be a straight tree, to paraphrase Chuang Tzu. 

In our attempts to be what we’re fundamentally not, we make ourselves into marks. 

We proclaim over social media to our insular circle that we ‘stand with ___’ when a tragedy occurs, or that we support one crooked politician over another identically crooked one. 

We take offence to even the silliest jokes and remarks when we identify too strongly with the various labels they allude to. 

In a word, we take ourselves so seriously because every decade it becomes more difficult to empty one’s boat. The world is moving too fast, the trainwreck of progress forcing itself upon individuals with so much inertia they cannot build up proper defences. 

The river of Chuang Tzu’s time is now a massive canal teeming not only with billions of our little skiffs, but also cruise ships, mega-yachts, and industrial freight boats. The same way a single individual can’t learn in a lifetime how to invent the internet, we can’t adequately prepare ourselves for the compounded spiritual assaults coming at us from the modern world. This is why it’s so remarkably important to practice, and why the preservation of texts like this are such a blessing.

I’ve heard people say, “perfection is unachievable, so stop trying.” 

What if perfection is the point at which we stop trying? 

This doesn’t mean neglecting life or becoming a lazy oaf. 

It means just accepting what is and fading into reality rather than trying to make oneself both a fast and squeaky wheel. 

It means emptying one’s boat. 

If we can continue to learn how to do this, the changes that occur in the river cease to be of any importance. Maybe this is a solitary pursuit, as Chuang Tzu acknowledges (“to all appearances he is a fool”). But imagine how liberating a opportunity this is. 

If you’re reading this and participating in this dialogue, you are aware of the situation and capable of remedying it. Because there’s nothing to remedy; all that’s required is letting go completely. It takes time, but that’s a small price to pay for true freedom.

Charlie Ambler

We sometimes use this story to support clients in exploring emotions like anger, blame, and judgment, especially when others are involved. It can also be an invitation to maintain equanimity when mishaps occur and nobody is at fault.

As it is typically used, the Empty Boat story is about better understanding our own stories to help us manage our own reactions. This is all well and good. Every little bit of perspective helps. But sometimes stories get watered down by retelling and time, and I wondered if that might be happening here. The Empty Boat story as it is commonly used seemed too buttoned-up. Too cute. Too practical.

Taoists usually don’t tell stories to help you find an easier way to cruise through life. They offer you the “red pill” and a glimpse at how deep the rabbit hole goes. (Walt Whitman, an American Taoist if there ever was one, wrote in Song of the Open Road: "I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes.")

Empty my boat?  

I thought this was about just seeing everything around me as empty boats, un-caused, blame-free, whether someone is in them or not. Isn’t my boat fine?

And what does emptying my boat even mean?

Chuang Tzu goes on to say: 

free yourself from the desire for 

achievement and fame. 

In other words, stop controlling. 

Stop steering your own boat. 

Let Life, that which you are inextricable from, 

steer, and see where It wants to go.

It also means you stop reinforcing a separate identity…whether it is your social status, your gender identity, your followers on social media, or your Enneagram type. For that matter, stop even seeing yourself as separate. Keep throwing everything out, until nothing is left, not even you.

Whoa. Scary stuff. Who would want to do that?

Most wouldn’t. If you have a pretty cushy life, you would be crazy to—sorry—rock that boat by trying to shed the images and fronts and capabilities that you have cultivated to help you get where you are.

Better to just use the Empty Boat story to round off the rough edges, reduce some friction and some of the trouble your over-the-top reactions might get you into. Nothing wrong with that. We live on stormy seas and getting through, more or less unscathed, can feel like victory.

The only reason to want to empty yourself is because an urge arises inside you to know the Truth. 

Not because it is going to benefit you, but because you are tired of being a lie, tired of believing you’re a separate self, tired of feeling separate. If you get your head in that tiger’s mouth, as the saying goes, it is not easily extracted.

Once all that jetsam of mind and ego are in the water. 

Once you aren't there. 

Then all that’s left is everything else. 

Just this, as they say in Zen.

So the deeper meaning, 

the Taoist meaning, 

is empty your own boat and 

you won’t have to worry 

about other boats, 

not because boats won't collide, 

but because other won’t exist. 

No you. No other. No problem.

Dennis Adsit