The bus driver

Let’s do a little Sunday thought-experiment.

Imagine for a moment that you are an experienced bus driver, taking people to far flung destinations for their holidays. You’re sat behind the wheel of the bus, day in, day out, making sure that this hunk of metal you’re in charge of is going in the right direction, and following all the rules of the road.

Mostly, you’re a considerate driver, attentive to the needs of others, in their own hunks of metal. Very occasionally, because you’re human, you lose your rag, or are in a massive hurry and employ a ‘f*** you, me first!’ approach, but by and large, you’re measured and polite.

🚌

You’ve been driving this bus for years, and you know what’s what. You’ve been to some amazing places, seen some extraordinarily beautiful vistas through the enormous windows in front of you, and given your passengers a great time on their travels.

You are a good bus driver. The best, maybe. You’re incredibly proud of your work, and wouldn’t even really want to retire when it comes to it, such is your love of the job.

Most importantly, you’re in charge. The safety of the people on your bus is your responsibility, and yours alone. You call the shots—ain’t no one else can do it!—and it’s your feet on the pedals and your hands on the steering wheel.

I mean, you’re the driver, right?

The awkward stranger

Then imagine someone comes along and suggests that, unbeknownst to you, the bus is actually autonomous – it drives itself!

🤨

You don’t believe this for a second, obviously. I mean, what a preposterous notion! You’re the bus driver, FFS. Don’t they know what that means? It means you drive the bus.

Anyway, look, you can’t stand around chatting about this nonsense – there are passengers on board and they’re waiting to be taken somewhere. You wish to be left alone, so that you can get on with your driving job. You tell this idiot to please go away.

They don’t. This troublesome, awkward stranger gets on board with you, sits right next to you up front, and keeps talking, much to your dismay.

They ask you to recall times when you’ve been less than attentive when driving, but noticed afterwards that the bus had continued to travel towards its destination, regardless.

I mean, yeah, I suppose… but you were still driving. You were still in control, right?

Right?

Then they remind you of that one time you were so gobsmacked by the scenery that you forgot to drive at all, accidentally taking your hands off the wheel and your feet off the pedals… but strangely, everything continued as normal. (You’d completely forgotten about this – at the time you chalked it up to a freak of nature, and were just relieved that nothing bad had happened.)

Then they go one step further and demonstrate to you, clearly, that the steering wheel is not connected to the actual wheels, the pedals don’t do anything when you press on them and the entire time it’s all been an elaborate hoax, intricately designed to give you the seamless experience of being in charge… when in fact you were not.

You never had been in control. The driving of the bus and the safety of the passengers was never your responsibility 😳

And here's my question to you, dear reader:

The nihilism trap

Now there’s every chance that you might be relieved by this news. After all, driving all the time, keeping the passengers safe and entertained, paying attention to the road, being vigilant, day in, day out, well… it’s enjoyable, but it’s still quite hard work. Quite tiring work, actually.

And if that’s hard, tiring work that you don’t actually have to do (you still can’t get your head round the fact that it’s work you can’t do, and never have done, but you let that slide), well then, this awkward stranger has just demonstrated that it’s not you driving, so you can take some time off, can’t you? Awesome!

So you sit there at the front, arms folded, feet up, with your big windows and their big views and you enjoy the scenery with the rest of the passengers. The bus drives itself, how cool is that?!!

And would you look at that frickin’ sunset!!

🌅😲

But then there’s a small chance—a perfectly understandable one—that you might be just a bit pissed off. Somewhat disenchanted. A little deflated.

After all, for all those years, you were The Bus Driver, man! You were awesome! You had all the qualifications and you worked hard. You were quite proud of what a good bus driver you were – that takes effort and dedication, you know?

You drove people to far-flung destinations, and showed them a good time and had loads of excellent stories and jokes and commentary, and everybody loved you and was really grateful for the excellent service you provided and yet… now you’ve learned that none of it was actually true. It was all just one big hoax; a trick of the mind – like one of those heat-haze mirages you’ve driven through, so many times.

Honestly? You feel like a total fraud.

😞

So you slope off to the back of the bus with a bit of a hang dog expression on your face, take out your phone and sit there sullenly, refusing to engage with anyone, or even to look out the window at the amazing scenery that’s still going past.

Someone nearby catches you muttering to yourself, and reports back that they heard you complain,

“Oh, what’s the point?”

💔

The unemployed ego

Believe it or not, dear heart, this is how an ego sometimes reacts when it learns that it’s not actually in control of your wellbeing.

All those years it thought that it was making choices on your behalf, keeping you safe, arranging circumstances to be just so, sorting out goals and working towards them, giving you really great advice—driving the bus—and then along comes some awkward stranger who shares the Innate Health understanding and demonstrates that no, it’s not ‘you’ doing all that stuff, it’s life energy. Because there’s nothing else there to be doing anything.

All ego ever does, is observe, and commentate.

And when I say ‘how an ego sometimes reacts’ I‘m probably under-selling it, because I think there’s a necessary period of adjustment that we all have to go through, when waking up to the true nature of things.

I see my clients hit this wall (a wall made of nothing more substantial than thought, naturally 😉) fairly regularly, and I can remember myself, having gone through the emotions of bewilderment, amazement, relief, elation and enthusiasm, also then hitting a bit of sticky patch where the mind wallowed in nihilism for a while.

As you can see from this metaphorical bus-driver story, it’s to be expected. No biggie.

It will pass.

Back to the mountains

If you’ve watched my video about ‘Mountain - No Mountain - Mountain’ (and if you haven’t yet, you can do so here) then, similar to the notion of spiritual bypass, this ‘nihilism trap’ would be another example of getting stuck in the ‘No mountain’ phase – where we’ve seen behind the curtain; we’ve had a glimpse of the non-duality of existence… and yet we’ve not had chance to properly process that and to integrate these insights back into the world of form (or back into ‘Mountain 2’, if we’re using that analogy).

So here’s your next question: How long do you think that ‘redundant’ Bus Driver would spend sulking on the back seats, muttering “Oh, what’s the point?” to themselves, when there’s all this phenomenal scenery still whizzing by the windows, eh? (I mean, how long does anyone—you, your kids, your partner—spend sulking, after things go wrong or they get stung by life?)

I’m guessing not that long. Because in reality nothing’s changed, except for the dispelling of the illusion of control.

There are still places to go, holidays to be had on this bus, beautiful scenery to be gawped at, hills to get up (and coast down), stunning vistas, the likes of which you’ve never seen before – even stories, jokes and commentary to be told and heard. Hell, if you really wanted to, you could put your hands on the wheel, your feet on the pedals and pretend you were driving, just like a little kid does. Wouldn’t that be fun?!

😄

It’s all exactly the same, except that now, you don’t have the weight of all that responsibility on your shoulders. You’re not the one guiding this hunk of metal down the road. It’s not ‘you’ keeping the passengers safe; being responsible for their (your) wellbeing. You don’t have to keep working hard on yourself, to ensure you’re the ‘best bus driver there is’.

You don’t have to worry about driving the bus, at all! You have more options. You can enjoy the ride.

And as I say at the end of one of the chapters in my forthcoming book:

“To submit to this flow is to give up nothing more than your struggle against life itself, and this realisation offers the most delicious of proposals: if you're not in control, you can relax and let go of trying to control everything.”

💖

Giles

Related

Oh, what’s the point?!

If there is no chooser, what’s the point of decisions anyway? 😖

The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft