On a merchant ship somewhere between the west coast of Africa and Spain, we found a stowaway. He was African. He had hidden himself in the cargo and we discovered him three days out.
The captain’s instructions were plain. The crew followed them. I followed them too. Not because I believed in what we were doing, but because the captain was the captain and the ship was the ship, and I had learned by then how authority worked and what it cost to refuse it.
We were not violent. We were something in some ways worse: indifferent by order. A door kept locked and a man kept inside it and all of us walking past as though the situation were administrative rather than human.
All of us except one.
The door
He was not an officer. He had no rank that entitled him to dissent and no ideology I ever heard him articulate. He simply could not do what the rest of us were doing.
Every day he stood outside that locked cabin with food. And he sang. I do not know what the songs were, or whether the man inside could hear them clearly. What I know is that he kept coming back. Every day. With the food and the songs. As though the locked door were not the point and the man behind it could hear him and that was enough.
He stood there in rain. He stood there when the weather sent everyone else below. The storm did not change anything for him, because there was no calculation to change. There was only the door, and the man behind it, and what he was required to do.
What I saw and didn’t do
I was twenty-one or twenty-two. I had been on ships for a few years. I had accumulated, by then, enough understanding of spiritual traditions and enough time on a cushion to explain, in fairly precise language, the unity of all human beings and the nature of compassion. I could have given you a decent summary of the Upanishadic position on the Self being present equally in all beings. I knew the theory.
And a man with no ideology and no Sanskrit and no cushion was standing outside a locked door with food and songs because he simply could not do otherwise.
He was not performing virtue. He had no audience. The captain was not watching and would not have approved. He was doing it because the doing of it was who he was. There was no gap in him between the understanding and the life.
I recognized it. And I kept walking.
The gap
That gap, between knowing something and living it, is what my forty years of practice have been about. I didn’t understand this at the time. I filed the moment away and moved on, the way you file away anything that reveals something about yourself you’re not ready to look at.
But it didn’t file me away. In the years that followed, whenever I found myself at a door I was supposed to walk past, I thought of him. Not as a model to imitate, because that would make it a performance. As a reminder that the conviction and the action are either the same thing or they are nothing. That you do not stand in the rain because it is noble. You stand in the rain because you cannot walk away and still be who you are.
I’ve spent decades since then in two contemplative traditions, Advaita Vedānta and Nyingma Dzogchen. Both have given me more than I can say. But neither tradition handed me what that man had. He didn’t get his from a tradition. He got it from somewhere I still don’t fully understand, and the gap between his version and mine is the most honest thing I can tell you about where I am after four decades of sitting.
The inquiry hasn’t closed the gap. It has made the gap visible. And visibility, it turns out, is the beginning of everything the traditions are pointing at. You cannot close what you cannot see. My practice has been, in large part, learning to see it more clearly, in smaller and smaller increments, in ordinary moments: the argument at dinner, the impatience with a stranger, the reflex to perform understanding instead of standing in it.
The man outside the door didn’t need a practice for that. Some people apparently arrive with the gap already closed, or so narrow it doesn’t matter. The rest of us sit every morning and try to notice what we are when the performing stops.
There is a longer version of this story, and others from the ships, in Nothing in the Way. Not because the ships are the point. Because they’re where the question started, before I had any language for it. Before I knew there was a question.
The full story is in Nothing in the Way, a memoir of four decades across Advaita Vedānta and Nyingma Dzogchen.
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