I mean, there's some fundamental, there's some false assumptions about the underlying logic of this process, which I think it's worth addressing. And it was actually, it was a kind of found object in the news that I talk about at one point, I forget where it is in the Waking Up app, but there was a story that I stumbled on on the internet, I think it's about 12 or 13 years old, of a tourist bus in, I think it was Norway, it was somewhere in Northern Europe.

And it had about 30 people on it, and one person was described as an Asian woman, and they went to a rest stop, and everyone got off the bus. And they, you know, shopped and had lunch, and this Asian woman changed her clothing, for whatever reason. And they all got back on the bus.

I think the relevance of it being an Asian woman is that, you know, there were language barriers that explained what later happened. So everyone gets back on the bus, the Asian woman has changed her clothing. And the bus is about to leave, but then someone notices, hey, there was an Asian woman who got off the bus who hasn't come back yet, and they tell the driver this.

And this poses a problem, so now everyone's waiting for this person to return. But in fact, everyone was on the bus, this woman had just changed her clothing and was not recognized by her fellow travelers. So everyone gets concerned as this tourist doesn't, you know, show up, and they start looking for her, right?

And they can't find her. And so a search party is formed. And the Asian woman, because of whatever language barrier, heard that there was a missing tourist, so she joins the search party, which in fact is looking for her, right? And this goes on into the night, and they're readying helicopters for a dawn patrol to find the missing tourist.

Now at some point along the way, I think it was at like 3 in the morning, this tourist realizes that she is the object of this search, right? And obviously the whole thing unravels. She confesses that she changed her clothes, and, you know, the problem is solved. But the problem is not solved by the logic that the seeker is expected, right?

So it's like, it's not true to say that the missing tourist was found in the way that was expected, right? Because the missing tourist was never lost. The missing tourist was part of the search party, right? And so when you think about it from her point of view, like, what happened?

She's part of the search party. She's looking for the missing tourist, not knowing that she in fact is the missing tourist. So what happens at the moment she realizes that everyone's looking for her, right? Like, what is-- the search isn't consummated in the way that is implied by the logic of everyone's use of attention.

And yet the problem evaporates. And there's something deeply analogous about the structure of that and the meditative journey. And precisely in, again, not talking about all the changes and the possible changes in the contents of consciousness that could be good, which, again, they come along for the ride anyway when you do the thing I'm talking about.

It's on this point of looking for the self and not finding it. And there is this sense that, OK, the self is here, and it's a problem. It is the string upon which all of my conscious states, mostly unhappy ones, are strung, right? It's the thing that is at the center of my anxiety.

It's the thing that I don't feel good about. It's the thing that when criticized, I sort of let implode. It's the center of my problem, and now I'm trying to feel better, and meditation has been handed to me as a possible remedy for my situation. And it's billed as a remedy.

In fact, I'm hearing from this guy that this is the thing that is going to cause me to realize that myself isn't where or as I thought it was. So now I'm going to look, right? And so, again, the sense is I start out far away from the goal here.

I start out with a problem. I'm now meditating on the evidence of my unenlightenment, right? I can feel my problem. I feel that I'm distracted and distractible, and I feel this sort of cramp at the center of my life. It's me, and I'm not as happy as I want to be.

I'm not as confident as I want to be. I'm more distractible than I want to be, and now I'm paying attention to the breath, right? This is what the search party feels like. This is what the confused tourist feels like in her own search party. And she's looking for the missing person.

And so the angle of, you know, the inclination of all of this is, and the logic of it, is all wrong, you know, understandably so, given how we all get into this situation. But you know, it's useful to continually try to undercut it and recognize that the thing that's being looked for is actually right on the surface, which is, you know, there is no one looking.

There is no place from which you are, if you're paying attention to the breath, or to sounds, or noticing the next thought arise, the sense that you are over here doing that thing is actually what it's like to be thinking and not knowing that you're thinking. There's a thought, there's an undercurrent of thought that's going uninspected in that moment.

And so there is just a, there's a continually looking for the mind, a looking for the center of experience, a looking for the one who is looking, which again, which is the kind of the orienting practice here. And there's a lot more I say about this, obviously, over at Waking Up, but it's the experiment you have to perform in order to get ready to recognize that this whole, the search party, you know, was formed in error, essentially.

And the problem that you're trying to solve with this practice does evaporate in a similar way, which is like, you don't actually get there in the way that you're hoping for, right? It's like, like you drop out the bottom of this thing in an unexpected way. It's not, there's actually another kind of a similar parable or anecdote that I don't remember if it's Zen or Sufi, or, I mean, I'm sure it's been reappropriated in many different ways, but, or by many different traditions.

But there's this, you know, the case of somebody who's lost in a town and they're asking for directions. You know, you could put this in Manhattan, you could, let's say you're wandering Manhattan and you're a tourist, you don't know where anything is. And you stop and ask someone, you know, "Where is Central Park?" And the person thinks for a second, they says, "Oh yeah, unfortunately you can't get to Central Park from here." Right?

So that is a very strange, I mean, you think about that for a second, you realize, okay, that's a, that's an absurd claim. There is no place that you can't get to from the place you're starting, you know, on earth, right? It's a failure to describe the physical relationships between anything in the world.

Yeah. That's just not the world we live in. Right? So, but it's a funny thing, but on some level that is true of meditation. It's like, you can't get there from here. Like the sense of you, the sense of you as subject isn't brought along to this thing you're looking for.

Right? Like you're like, you're, you know, it's almost like, it's almost like you're, you're making a fist and you're trying to get to an open hand. The fist doesn't get to take that journey as a fist. Right? Like you don't, the fist doesn't go along for the ride. The fist comes apart.

Right? And on some level that our subjectivity is a kind of an intent, an attentional fist. You know, it's, it, it is a contraction of energy. Again, it's, it's so much bound up in thought for, for most of us, most of the time that is. And when, when properly inspected, there's just this, you know, evaporation of the starting point, but there's not this, there's not this fulfillment of, I'm going to get this fist is going to, just going to, if I, you know, if life gets good enough, if I get concentrated enough, focused enough, you know, if I austere enough, if I renounce enough, if I desire less, if I, you know, you know, enough with enough good intentions, this fist is going to move into some sort of sublime condition, right?

That's not the logic of the process.