Boats Returning Home

Dr. Will Tuttle

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily: life is but a dream.”

 This well-known light-hearted and whimsical childhood rhyme points to profound understandings that can help liberate us from many of the delusions and deceptions that tend to cause conflict and confusion in our lives. There is a remarkable sense of harmony, joy, freedom, and transcendent awareness hinted at in these two lines. Looking more deeply into the disarmingly simple images in this nineteenth-century American minstrel song, we embark on an odyssey into ancient spiritual wisdom that is more relevant today than ever. The archetypes are universal: the boat is our vehicle—our body, mind, and life—and the stream represents the great mystery that supports us all: the primordial and eternal unfoldment of being that is ever-flowing from the Source, and ever-returning to the cosmic ocean to which all streams—and all of us boats—eventually return. We can each endeavor to harmonize our thoughts and actions with this stream, which symbolizes the inherent, ineffable way of spiritual realization that goes by many names. In ancient Chinese traditions, it is the Tao, and is referred to in Buddhist teachings as Dharmatta, the underlying truth of being, and as the abiding presence of the divine Principle, the Holy Spirit in Christian terms, that revels the hidden, timeless beauty within nature, and that pervades and makes possible the forms, circumstances, and opportunities in the world around us.

We are now, all of us on this Earth, row, row, rowing our boats every moment of our lives on this eternal, life-giving Stream, knowingly or not, and how are we called to do so? First, we are called to do so “gently,” which evokes a sense of tenderness and kindness toward our fellow boaters, all living beings, and also a feeling of mindful awareness and appreciation for the adventure we are on, and for the stream that carries us and propels us along. We are going down the stream and with the current, supported by the benevolent power that is continually helping us and bringing us onward on our journey. Secondly, we are called to do so merrily—four times merrily! —as if there is no end to the joy, happiness, and freedom of this rowing along, savoring every moment, and realizing the deeper truth, that our life is a dream.

What does this actually mean, and what is the significance of this idea that our life is a dream? When we are in the midst of a dream, we are typically convinced of its reality, and we see, hear, feel, and experience this dream reality in as convincing a manner as when we are experiencing our daily waking life. But upon awakening in the morning, we clearly understand that it was “just a dream” and that it took place entirely within our own consciousness, and was also a product of our consciousness. We see that the dream was an ephemeral, and fleeting, and somewhat illusory experience that we mistakenly took to have a reality of its own.

Similarly, when we carefully examine the sense impressions that we receive from the apparently “outer” world—everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and conceive—we realize that it is all the product of neuronal impulses continually arriving over electrical neural pathways from our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and tactile receptors, which our consciousness receives, interprets, and from which it fabricates the ongoing experience that we take to be a self-existing reality that is outside us. Additionally, much of our understanding of the world in this electronic era coms from media inputs that have been produced by outside forces with various agendas, which are additionally filtered through our sense receptors and consciousness. Just as our night dream seems self-existingly real until we awaken, so too does our outer world seem self-existingly real and separate from us, as both a concrete, tactile reality and as an abstract one produced by media images.

This sense of separateness gives rise to the twin drives of fear and aversion on one hand, and craving and attachment on the other. To protect and affirm ourselves in our underlying sense of separateness from the world and our vulnerability, we are continually, like everyone else, seeking to acquire some things and conditions, and to repel others. When all of us are doing this, a world imbued with conflict, competition, and instrumentalization is unavoidable, because we are naturally propelled to use and exploit each other as instruments for our ends. Animals, ecosystems, future generations, children, and the less privileged are especially susceptible to harm, but none of us can escape the suffering that this delusion propagates.

Our cultural indoctrination from birth conditions us to assume that we are an essentially separate self-object that was born and will die, a mere material body existing temporarily in a vast, material universe that exploded into being with a ‘Big Bang,’ and that is essentially meaningless. This pervasive cultural narrative that reduces everything to matter works well to imprison us within an atmosphere of anxiety and vulnerability that makes us easy to manipulate, control, and exploit. The underlying materialism is a direct product of our ten-thousand-year practice of herderism—routinely enslaving animals for food, and reducing these living individual beings into mere material objects that we buy and sell by the pound by the millions every day.

As discussed in our recent book, Food for Freedom, the torrent of physical, sexual, and psychological violence that our core cultural practice—eating—inflicts on cows, pigs, chickens, fishes, and other animals boomerangs relentlessly into all of our affairs, deluding us into the materialism, fearful domination of nature, and sense of separateness that confine our awareness in shallow and self-oriented distractedness. Inflicting an ongoing nightmare on animals, we forget our true nature as manifestations of infinite, eternal, benevolent Consciousness, and inevitably project the same nightmare that we force onto animals into our human world as well. As we sow, we reap. Our suffering is, ultimately, self-inflicted and is also a gift, in that it can help to propel us to question our actions and motives, and to make an effort to free ourselves from the cultural narratives of materialism and domination that wound us all from infancy.

With effort, we begin to discover that our life is an outpicturing of our consciousness (as is a dream), and that with practice, we can learn to quiet our mind and to discover that the material, human self with which we have been conditioned to identify is in many ways a deceptive mask that conceals a vast, beautiful, loving, creative, and witnessing Presence, which is our true nature. Through meditative inquiry we can discover the joy that is an ever-bubbling spring at the core of our being, and which needs no reasons or causes in the outer world. By taking time to practice inner listening, and quieting our mind and becoming more receptive to the eternal spiritual truth streaming into our awareness, we naturally find ourselves becoming more sensitive to our thoughts and actions, and to how our actions affect others. We are drawn to a way of eating and living that liberates animals, nature, and others, as much as possible, from harm and abuse, and we increasingly delight in communing with the forces and beings that are all around us as wildlife and as the beauty of this earthly realm, a manifestation of the eternal Presence that lives in us and as us.

In many ways, this earthly realm can be seen as a school or training gym that we attend in order to learn, grow, and build up our spiritual, mental, and moral muscles. It is a challenging school indeed, and yet we would be disappointed in going to a gym if there were only little five- and ten-pound weights there. We need heavier weights to successfully build our muscles, and our earth school provides plenty of very heavy weights for us to help strengthen our capacities to live authentically, and with kindness and respect for others, and to penetrate the many deceptions all around us, and to discover the joy and freedom that abide as the inherent truth of our being. The pioneering mystic poet Walt Whitman seems to understand well the value of the weights we carry here on earth, which he celebrates in “Song of the Open Road:”

Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them and I will fill them in return.

From a spiritual perspective, the challenges and burdens of this earthly realm are delicious and nourishing, and although much of what appears here seems outside of our ability to control, we always clearly do have the magnificent and essential power to control our responses to the appearances. With regular practice of inner listening and cultivating benevolence and an awareness of our thoughts and their arising, we can connect with our inner guidance system. This is our spiritual intuition that helps us to discern the seeming from the real, and to discover how virtually all of our beliefs and certainties are culturally conditioned and have been implanted into our minds, and how they imprison us in a realm of delusion that causes us to abuse others in various ways, and also to be easily deceived and exploited. We realize the importance of questioning everything—all the cultural narratives about history, food, money, success, health, sexuality, happiness, freedom, life, and death that create the paradigm filters through which we view and live our lives. We come to understand that we have been fooled about the nature of reality and that even the separate self with which we instinctively identify—the one with our name that looks back at us from the mirror—is not the true self, but is in many ways an imposter.

We realize that trying to improve the world is similar to trying to improve our dreams. The only way to improve the world is to improve our consciousness. In dreaming, for instance, there is a somewhat rare phenomenon known as lucid dreaming. Normally, when we dream, events happen to us, as in daily life, and we seem to have no control over them, and can be terrified by dream monsters and exhilarated by experiences of dream flying, for example. When we become lucid in a dream, however, we consciously realize that we are dreaming, and that the monster is an arising in our own consciousness, as is the experience of flying, and suddenly new possibilities of freedom and empowerment dawn within us, as we realize we are creating and projecting everything in our dream, and we are no longer a victim but can actually change the dream reality at will, opening new vistas of learning and discovery to us.

In the same way, we can gradually become lucid in this waking dream, and realize our essential unity with the Stream and with all living beings in the field of our awareness, and from this foundation, anxiety dissipates, and we are no longer a vulnerable victim but a co-creative protagonist. Our life and our advocacy are now rooted in lovingkindness for all apparent others, and in the realization that the world arises within—and mirrors—our consciousness. The more that wisdom and truth are living within our consciousness, the more joy, freedom, and compassion we manifest in our world, and the more our life naturally becomes part of the solution to the problems here. We increasingly realize the underlying paradox that to our conditioned human sense, there is vast suffering that seems excruciatingly real, and that as our consciousness expands into higher vibratory dimensions, we can glimpse suffering’s transient unreality and savor the eternal harmony permeating and underlying transitory appearances.

Most importantly, through this inner work to raise and maintain the vibratory level of our awareness above the low levels of fear, anger, righteous judgment, and squabbling that are continually enforced by established media, education, and government institutions, we disrupt the agenda that keeps us divided and deceived, and that facilitates the exploitation of the many by the few. With practice, we develop the capability to allow the eternal Stream to propel the little rowboat of this short and precious incarnation (just one of many) as we row gently and merrily on our homeward-bound journey. Some of us row vigorously to reach the ocean more quickly, and some dawdle and drift, and some of us even row against the current for a while, but the persistently flowing stream carries us ever homeward. Lifting our weights and bearing our old delicious burdens, we help each other most by allowing the Light to shine through our unique life as creativity and compassion, understanding that one life lives through us all.