The chariot

Consider a wave coming in from the sea. A single wave. You can point at it, name it, watch it travel a hundred yards of open water and break on the sand. Plainly it is a thing: it has a front and a back, it rises, it moves, it arrives. Now ask a simple question. What is the wave made of? Water, one would say. But here is a fact about the sea, and it is not a riddle: the water does not travel with the wave. The water mostly stays where it is. It rises and falls in place, while the shape — the disturbance, the form — moves across it. The wave that breaks on the sand carries no single drop that began a hundred yards back. So there is a wave; that much is obvious. And there is, just as obviously, no single object — no lump of water — that is the wave, carried from the start and set down at the shore, the same stuff the whole way in. There is a real pattern moving through water that is itself going nowhere. "The wave" is a true and useful name for that pattern. It is not the name of a thing that travels.

This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.

This is the sixth episode of The Self Across Time. Last week we considered a machine: a booth on Earth scans every atom of a person, destroys the body, and transmits the blueprint to Mars, where an exact copy wakes with the whole of that life loaded. We stood at the door and asked: is that me, or have I stepped into a box that kills me and sends a copy to live my life? Derek Parfit devised the case not to answer the question but to ask what we took to be riding on it. He varied it until there were two copies; he slowed it down until there was no single operation at which one stopped being oneself; and the question "will it really be me?" became, in his word, empty — not hard, but empty. He called that good news. Others read the same result as a loss. And one position did not fall: the view that the deep self was never going to appear inside a thought experiment in the first place, so the machine proved nothing about it. We left that view standing. Tonight there is no machine. Tonight someone takes the self apart by argument alone and reaches exactly the place Parfit reached — and did so long before the machine, not as a metaphysical exercise but as medicine: on the view that a false picture of the self causes a specific kind of suffering, and that taking the picture apart carefully is the cure. This is not Parfit confirmed by an exotic footnote. It is Parfit's equal, who arrived first.

The claim of tonight's episode is that you are more like the wave than like the water: a real pattern, with no single persisting thing underneath it that is you. The person who will argue this is a Buddhist monk, about to be cross-examined by a king — and the king has begun by asking him his name.

The source is old. It is called, in English, the Questions of King Milinda — a long dialogue, set down in the Pali language, between a Buddhist monk named Nāgasena and a king named Milinda. Milinda is a real historical figure: an Indo-Greek king, Menander the First, who ruled in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent in the second century before our era, a descendant of the world Alexander's armies left behind. So the setting is a Greek-descended king, trained in the Greek habit of close argument, who has heard that these Buddhist monks are formidable and has come to test one. He wants a genuine contest, and he gets one.

The king is polite. He asks the monk the most ordinary question one person asks another: what is your name?

And the monk gives an answer that sounds, at first, like a trick or a rudeness. He says: I am known as Nāgasena; my fellow monks call me Nāgasena. But, he adds, "Nāgasena" is only a name, a label, a way of speaking — there is no person, no self, no Nāgasena, to be found here.

The king responds as most of us would. He is offended, and he presses hard. If there is no Nāgasena, he asks, then who wears the robes and eats the food? Who does good and evil, who keeps the precepts, who is sitting here talking to me? If it is true that there is no Nāgasena, then when someone harms a monk there is no one harmed, and when a monk does wrong there is no wrongdoer — your own teaching collapses. Then he puts it bluntly. Is "Nāgasena" your hair? Your nails, your teeth, your skin? Is it your feelings, your perceptions, your thoughts? Is it any one of these? The monk says no to each. Is it all of them together? No. Is it something other than all of them? No again. And the king draws his conclusion: then I can find no Nāgasena at all. Nāgasena is a mere sound. There is no Nāgasena here. You have been lying to me.

The monk, instead of defending himself, puts a question back. How did you come here today, on foot or in a vehicle? In a chariot, says the king. Good, says the monk; then tell me what a chariot is. Is the pole the chariot? No, says the king. Is the axle the chariot? No. Are the wheels the chariot? Is the frame, the body of the cart, the chariot? Is the yoke the chariot? The reins? To each the king answers no. The pole is not the chariot. The wheel is not the chariot. No single part, taken out and held up on its own, is the thing he rode in on.

Then, says the monk, is the chariot all of these parts together? And the king, who can see now where this is leading, says no to that as well — because a collection of parts is not yet a chariot. Pile the wheels and the pole and the axle and the frame in a yard, unassembled, and you have not got a chariot; you have got a pile. And is the chariot something other than all the parts — some extra thing, over and above the wheels and axle and frame? No. There is no further object, somewhere apart, that is the chariot in addition to its parts. So the monk closes the point exactly as the king had closed it on him a moment before: then I can find no chariot at all. "Chariot" is a mere sound. There is no chariot here. You, King, have been lying to me — there is no chariot you came in.

And the king concedes it, with good humour, because he can see he is caught. He says: I am not lying. It is because of the pole, and the axle, and the wheels, and the frame and the yoke — because of all of them assembled and working in the right way — that the word "chariot" comes into use. There is a chariot; I rode in it. But it is not any of the parts, and it is not a separate thing standing above the parts. "Chariot" is a true and useful name for the parts put together and doing their work. That is all a chariot ever was. And it was enough to carry the king to the door.

Just so, says the monk. Just so is "Nāgasena." Because there is hair and skin and bone, because there are feelings and perceptions and thoughts, assembled and working in the right way, the word "Nāgasena" comes into use. There is a Nāgasena — he is sitting here, he eats, he keeps the precepts, he can be harmed and can do wrong, and the king is really speaking to him. But there is no Nāgasena over and above all of that: no extra part, no owner standing behind the hair and the bone and the thoughts and holding them, in the way the king assumed when he asked the monk his name. "Nāgasena" is a true and useful name for an assembly. It is not the name of a further thing.

The point is narrow, and it is calm. The monk has not said he does not exist. He is sitting there. He answers to the name, and will go on answering to it for the rest of the dialogue. What he has denied is something much more precise: that the name reaches past the assembled parts to a single owner underneath them. The king came in assuming — without ever stating it, in the way the assumption is usually held — that a name like "Nāgasena" must finally pick out one thing, a self, the bearer of all the rest. The chariot shows that a name can be true, useful, and in constant use, and still not pick out any such thing. One rides the chariot to the door without there being, anywhere, a further object that is the chariot. And the claim, which is a large one, is that one rides a whole life from one end to the other without there being, anywhere, a further thing that is oneself.

That is the argument. It is ancient, and it needs no machine, no Mars, no scanner — only a king, a monk, and a cart in the courtyard. And it reaches the same conclusion Parfit reached across four hundred pages and a teletransporter. But the monk is not finished, and neither are we, because so far this concerns a chariot. The difficult part comes when he turns the same question on the one assembly you were sure was different: your own.

So the monk turns the analysis from the chariot onto the king, and onto us. Take the chariot apart and one finds pole, axle, wheels, frame, yoke — and no further chariot. Now take a person apart. What are the parts? The Buddhist analysis gives five, and it claims they are exhaustive: that everything a person is, every part of it, falls into one of these five, with nothing left over. The traditional word for them translates as the five heaps, or aggregates — five collections of material that, assembled and running, get called a person. Let me name them in plain English, because what matters is not the vocabulary but the search that follows.

First, the body: the physical part, the form — flesh, bone, the matter of a person, corresponding to the wheels and frame of the cart. Second, feeling — not emotion in the rich sense, but the raw tone of each experience, the way anything that happens arrives as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. Third, perception: the recognising and labelling, the part that takes a patch of colour and sound and registers tree, face, danger, her. Fourth, the mental formations — habits, drives, intentions, the trained inclinations to want this and avoid that, the whole apparatus of disposition. And fifth, consciousness — and here one has to be careful, because this is the part one is tempted to convert into the owner. It is not a standing light behind the others, not a screen on which the rest are shown. It is the bare registering that there is anything at all — and each act of that registering arises with its object and passes with it, one more conditioned event, not a watcher above the stream of events.

Body, feeling, perception, disposition, awareness. Five heaps. And the claim is that this is the complete inventory. Lay out all five and one has laid out everything there is to a person. There is nothing a person is that is not somewhere in those five.

Now run the king's own question — the one he put to the monk — but run it on yourself. Among those five heaps, is any one of them the self? Are you your body? You have a body; you do not say you are a knee. Are you a feeling? Feelings come and go all day, and you are not annihilated when one passes. Are you the recognising, the labelling? Are you a habit, a drive? Are you the bare awareness? Each time the honest answer is the king's answer about the wheel: no — not that one, on its own. Then are you all five together? But all five together is just the collection in the yard; a pile of parts is not yet a person, any more than a pile of cart-parts is a chariot. Then is the self something other than the five — a sixth thing, standing behind them, the one who has the body and feels the feelings and watches in the awareness? Look for that sixth thing. The Buddhist claim, which is exactly the monk's claim about Nāgasena, is that you will not find it. There is no owner over and above the five heaps. There is the body, there are the feelings, the perceptions, the dispositions, the awareness, assembled and running. The word "you" comes into use because of all that, in the way "chariot" comes into use because of the pole and the wheels. But it does not reach past the heaps to a further thing that holds them. There is the holding; there is no separate holder.

That is the term the tradition uses, and I will state it once and then keep to the plain English: anātman — literally "no-self," "no-ātman," where ātman is the deep, permanent, owning self the analysis denies. It does not mean "you do not exist." It means "no owner." A person is living; there is no further person apart from the heaps, living — just as the wave is moving, and there is no object that is the wave apart from the water's rising and falling.

Now, the monk's chariot is a single vivid case. But over the centuries the tradition did what a philosopher will recognise at once: it became systematic. There is a large body of Buddhist analysis — the traditional name for it translates roughly as "the higher teaching" — that takes this and carries it all the way down, past the five heaps, into the smallest events. Its central tool is a distinction between two levels, and one needs it, because without it the position sounds like a contradiction. On one level — call it the everyday, conventional level — it is perfectly true that there is a person here, that Nāgasena keeps the precepts, that one is saving for retirement, that the king rode a chariot to the door. One does not have to stop speaking that way; one could not run a life if one did. But on the other level — the deep, analytical level, reached when one takes the assembly apart and asks what is really, ultimately there — there is no chariot and no person, only parts: at the very bottom, a stream of momentary events, arising and vanishing, each conditioning the next, with nothing that persists through them and no one to whom they belong.

Hold both levels at once, because that is the whole skill. The chariot is conventionally real and ultimately just parts, and both statements are true, each on its own level, with no contradiction, because they answer two different questions. Is there a chariot? On the everyday level, yes, obviously; you rode in it. Is there, in addition to the assembled and working parts, a further thing that is the chariot? On the deep level, no. The self is exactly the same. Is there a you? Conventionally, yes: you are listening, you have a name, you can be wronged and can do wrong. Is there, over and above the running heaps, an owner who is you? Ultimately, no. The mistake — the one the king walked in making, and the one most of us carry about — is to take the convenient, everyday "you" and read it as if it named the deep thing: to hear one's own name and feel, behind it, an owner.

A modern philosopher, Mark Siderits, has spent a career setting this out in terms a Western reader can check, and he gives it a plain, precise name: Buddhist reductionism. The person reduces to the parts and their relations, in the way the chariot reduces to wheel and axle and pole; the whole is real enough to use and unreal as a further thing — what he calls a convenient fiction. Parts real; whole a convenient fiction. Keep those words, because in a moment you are going to hear the same conclusion stated by Parfit, whom we met last week, an age later — and you will have to decide what it means that two traditions with no contact between them analysed the self down to the very same set of parts.

Return to Parfit. Last week he stood at the booth and watched the deep self fail to appear — not in the teletransporter, not in the broken scanner with two copies, not anywhere along the spectrum where no line could be found. His conclusion, reduced to its essentials, was this: there is no deep further fact of personal identity. There is physical and psychological continuity — the body carrying on, the memories and intentions and character running forward, which he called Relation R. That is real, and that is all there is. The single, indivisible I one took to sit behind it and own it was something one had assumed was there all along, and it turned out never to have been there. Parts real; whole a convenient fiction.

You have heard those words already tonight. Siderits used them about the chariot, about Nāgasena, about the five heaps — an age before Parfit was born, on the far side of the world, in a language Parfit could not read. And this is not a loose family resemblance, not a vague observation that many cultures have wisdom about letting go. It is the same structure, point for point. Parfit takes the person apart into continuities and finds no further fact that is the self; the monk takes the person apart into heaps and finds no further thing that owns them. Parfit says identity comes in degrees and there is no sharp line to be found; the systematic analysis says the person is a stream of momentary events with nothing persisting through them. Parfit's "Relation R, not a deep self" and the monk's "the heaps assembled and running, not an ātman" are the same conclusion drawn from the same reasoning. Two traditions, no contact, one result. When that happens in any other field — two laboratories, no contact, the same finding — one takes it seriously, because coincidence stops being the easy explanation and one begins to suspect that both were describing something that is really there.

So one might think tonight's work is straightforward: count a second confirmation. Parfit was right, the Buddhists confirm it, the self is a fiction twice over, and we can stop. Do not draw that conclusion — for two reasons. The first is a matter of ordinary respect for the tradition. The second is the one that keeps the argument honest.

The first reason. It is tempting, for a Western listener who met Parfit last week, to treat the monk as Parfit in robes — to hear "no-self" and translate it into "so they had a rough early version of reductionism; good that they reached it." That flattens the position, and it gets it backwards, because the monk was not doing what Parfit was doing. Parfit was solving a metaphysical problem — what is the truth about personal identity — and the consolation came afterwards, as a result he was glad to find. The monk was not primarily solving a problem of that kind at all. For him the no-self analysis is medicine. The scholar Steven Collins, in his book Selfless Persons, argues that one misses the whole thing if one reads it as a seminar in metaphysics. The Buddhist claim is that a specific and persistent kind of suffering — the grasping, the craving, the constant defence of a self against the world — is caused by a false picture: the picture of a permanent owner-self at the centre that must be protected, fed, and made to last. And the cure for that suffering is to see clearly and in detail that the owner-self was never there. The analysis is for the cessation of suffering; that is its point and its origin. Strip that away and call it "early Parfit" and one has taken a cure and filed it as an interesting metaphysical hypothesis. One has not understood it.

So I am going to hold the two as equals, each keeping its own purpose. Parfit reached this account of the self and found it, to his surprise, consoling. The Buddhist tradition reached the same account because it was looking for the root of a specific suffering, and it called the clear seeing of that account the way out. The same conclusion; different reasons for pursuing it. And — the second reason — that difference cuts the other way too, because it means one cannot simply set Parfit and the Buddha against each other and treat the agreement as proof. There is a real risk, which the most careful scholars state openly, of reading Parfit into the old texts: of deciding in advance that the monk must have meant what the Oxford philosopher meant, and then finding it there because one put it there. The Buddhist stream-of-events is set within a whole framework Parfit does not share — rebirth, karma, the particular liberation the analysis is meant to serve. Pull the no-self argument out of that framework, tidy it up, and present it to a Western reader as "science agrees," and one may have a neat convergence that has discarded half of what the monk was saying. The convergence is real. It is also not free. Two independent traditions reached the same conclusion; that is striking, and it is genuine evidence. But they reached it for different reasons and within different commitments, and a serious person holds both the agreement and the difference together, and does not let the nearer, more familiar voice — Parfit, with his machine and his English prose — speak on behalf of the tradition that arrived first.

Which leaves you, tonight, in a stranger position than "Parfit, confirmed." You have now watched the self taken apart twice, and still no one has shown you the thing you most want shown. So before deciding what two converging analyses add up to, you have to do the one thing neither the monk nor Parfit can do for you: look for the owner yourself, now, in the only place it could possibly be.

So look — and look as an argument, not as an exercise. This is last week's spectrum run on your own present experience, not something to do on a cushion. Put the king's question to the one assembly you were sure had an owner: your own.

Take any moment of your experience and set out what it contains. There is whatever is sensed — sounds, the things in front of you, the felt body. There is whatever is thought — the words arriving, this sentence among them. And there is the bare registering that any of it is going on at all. That is the contents of a mind: the five heaps, listed. Now ask the question. Among those contents, or behind them, where is the owner — the one who has the experience, the self the sounds happen to, the thinker the thoughts belong to? Not any single item on the list; you do not say you are a sound, or are a thought. So it would have to be the further thing, the one who has them, standing behind the whole list and holding it. Name that. Produce it.

And the argument closes as the king's did. The moment you try to produce the owner, what you produce is one more item on the list. Reach for the watcher and you get a thought about a watcher. Reach for the self behind the experience and you get one more experience — an image, a sense of effort, the idea of a self — which is simply another thing thought, arriving like all the rest. The owner never turns up among what is found. There is seeing, and no seer appears except as something seen; there is thinking, and no thinker except as one more thought. Every candidate you can produce for the owner is, on inspection, just another part. Which means the one thing the search was for — the further thing that stands behind the parts and owns them — is the very thing it never returns. You went looking for the sixth thing behind the five heaps, and what you came back with was another heap.

David Hume, in Scotland, in the seventeen-thirties, in his Treatise of Human Nature, and with no Buddhism before him that he knew of, reported the same failure in almost the same words. Whenever he looked, he said, into what he called himself, he always came upon some particular perception — a warmth, a cold, a light, a pain, a pleasure — and he could never catch himself at any time without a perception, and never observed anything but the perception. He looked for the owner and found only the owned. What we are, he concluded, is a bundle — a bundle of perceptions, in perpetual flux. That is a Western philosopher, working alone, reaching the chariot by accident, three hundred years ago, and plainly unsettled by it. So this is not the trick of a single tradition. It is what anyone finds who actually looks. The monk built a method for it; Parfit built a machine for it; Hume simply looked. And now you have looked too. You have done, without help, the thing this series has been circling for weeks: you have searched the one place the self absolutely had to be, and found the searching, and no separate searcher.

That is the assumption beginning to give way — not all of it, there is a piece still to come next week, but giving way here, under your own examination. For five weeks the self you began with has been giving way, one part at a time. Memory failed as a record. The view that you are the story you tell met someone who tells no such story. The view that you are simply the living animal could not settle it either, and Parfit's machine made "will it be me?" go quiet. And now the last position — the felt, present, seemingly undeniable owner behind your eyes — you reached for it and found no one there, only the contents, with no one to whom they belong. Two traditions, worlds apart, brought you to this same place. You have taken yourself apart twice now and found the same absence where the owner was supposed to be.

And there is no celebrating it, because one view has observed all of this — yours, the monk's, Hume's, Parfit's — without being moved by it. It is the view from last week, the one we left standing at the booth: the defender of the simple self, the deep, further fact of being one continuous person, the thing that does not break down into heaps or continuities or anything else. And tonight has cost that view almost nothing, and that is the plain truth of it. Of course you could not catch the owner, it says. Of course the self did not turn up as a sixth item beside the sounds and the thoughts. What did you expect? A further fact, a simple self, is by its very nature not one of the parts. It is not a sight you could see, or a thought you could think, or a part you could lay out, so it was never going to appear in the inventory — and your failure to find it there is not its absence; it is exactly what the view predicted. You looked for the seer among the things seen and did not find it. Naturally. You were looking in the one place it could never be. The monk takes the chariot apart and finds no further chariot among the parts; the defender of the simple self agrees, and adds: just so, and a self is not a part either, so taking the person apart among the parts settles nothing about whether there is a self that is not one. Two analyses, East and West, an ocean and an age apart — and the defender says, calmly, you have run the same search twice and twice looked in the wrong place; you have moved everyone's intuitions and refuted nothing.

You cannot set that aside tonight, any more than you could last week. It is not a cheat. It is the precise and frustrating reply of a view that placed its self where no analysis — Buddhist, Humean, or Parfitian — could ever reach it. So hold the real shape of where you now stand, because it is sharper than "no-self, proved." You have analysed the self down to a bundle from two independent directions, and that agreement is real and it is weighty. And the one who says you were searching the wrong place is still standing, unrefuted, pointing out that two careful searches of the wrong place do not add up to a demonstration that the self is not there. What is gone is not the self. What is gone is your right to assume the owner — the easy, unexamined certainty that of course there is someone behind your eyes, because you can feel them right there. You reached for that someone tonight. You came back with a set of parts.

So you have looked, and come back with a set of parts and no owner. There are three ways one might try to leave an argument like this. All three present themselves as the exit; all three are mistaken. Consider each in turn, because which one you reach for shows what you have not understood.

The first is the cold conclusion: that there is no self, that it is a fiction, that two whole traditions agree, that the owner is not real, and therefore that nothing matters and there is no point to any of it. Stop there, because that reply fails in three separate ways. First, you did not establish "there is no self" tonight. You established that two careful searches could not display one — and the defender of the simple self is standing right there to remind you that these are not the same claim, since a self that was never one of the parts was never going to appear in a search of the parts. Second — and this is the point most often missed — the monk never said you do not exist. He said the opposite, to the king's face: there is a Nāgasena, sitting here, eating, keeping the precepts, able to be wronged. On the everyday level the person is perfectly real, and one cannot run a life without that level. What is denied is only the further owner, not the person. "There is no self, so nothing is real" collapses the two levels the whole analysis was built to keep apart. And third, "nothing matters" is a strange conclusion to draw here of all places. The monk did not take the chariot apart to show that nothing matters. He took it apart as medicine — on the view that a specific suffering, the endless grasping defence of a self that is not there, can be ended by seeing clearly that it is not there. That is the opposite of "nothing matters." It is the claim that the ending of that suffering matters enormously, enough to build a whole path towards it. One cannot use the no-self analysis to argue for nihilism; it was developed by people for whom it meant the reverse.

Which leads directly to the second reply, the consoling one — and I have to be careful here, because I half-stated it myself a few minutes ago. It runs: so this is good news; the grasping self dissolves, the defending stops, here is the lightness Parfit found and the peace the tradition promises, so take it and go. No — not tonight, and not as something now settled and owned. I told you the analysis is medicine, and that is true, and it would be dishonest to hide it. But reporting that a tradition offers a cure is not the same as handing you the cure, complete. Last week, with Parfit, the other reading was on the table: the one in which the same thinning of the self reads not as release but as cold, in which "no one in particular the future is for" drains away the reasons to sacrifice for it. That reading is still live. I am not withdrawing it tonight merely because the second traveller to this place happened to find it kind. And the deeper reason the consoling reply is premature is that we are not finished. What began under your examination tonight is not complete. There is a piece still missing, and until it arrives, taking the consolation home would be taking it before it has been earned. The lightness is real. But it is not something you get to pocket and carry off tonight, any more than you could last week. The soft reading is not the answer, and it is not tonight's to take home.

And the third reply is the one to rule out most firmly, though you already heard the argument against it at the booth last week: the turn to practice — meditate on impermanence, watch the heaps arise and pass, hold the self lightly and you will suffer less. No. The chariot is an argument, not an exercise. You did not meditate your way here a moment ago; you reasoned — you looked for the owner and failed to find it, in the way you failed to find the line on Parfit's spectrum, and that failure is a finding, not a state to cultivate. There is nothing to go home and do that settles this.

So this is what you actually carry out — how much it is, and what it costs. You have now taken the self apart from two directions that never communicated — a monk with a chariot, in the ancient world, and a philosopher with a machine, last week — and both times you reached the same place: a bundle, a stream, the heaps assembled and running, and no owner standing behind them that you could ever catch. That agreement is real, and you cannot un-see it. What you cannot take with you is the move you have been making your whole life without noticing: helping yourself to the owner, hearing your own name and feeling, automatically, someone present behind it. You reached for that someone tonight, in the one place it had to be, and found sounds and thoughts and breath and no one holding them. The owner is not refuted — its last defender said as much before the search began: no search of the parts could ever reach it. But you can no longer assume it. The thing you took to be the ground under everything, you now have to argue for, and you do not yet know whether you can.

This is not the end, and there is a reason for that. Two things are now loose that began fixed, and they have not yet been brought together. Go back to the first night — the dog and your sister, the memory you would swear to that never happened. We found then that memory is not a faithful record; that there is no clean recording of who you have been. And these last two weeks we have found that the one who was supposed to be keeping the record — the owner, the self behind the eyes — is a chariot, a bundle, no one in particular. Next week those two findings finally meet, and we stand in what is left when there is no record and no one who kept it — when both the record and the keeper are gone at once — and we ask the only question then remaining: whether what remains is unbearable, or the lightest you have ever felt. That is next week's whole work, and I will not do it tonight in half measures.

And one point to leave open, because you will want it much later. Tonight the monk took the self apart and stopped there: the heaps are real, the owner is the fiction. But there is a later tradition that went past even that — that turned the same analysis on the analysis itself, and asked whether the heaps are any more solid than the self was, whether even "it is all just parts" is one more thing to let go of. We are not going there tonight; it goes further than tonight can hold. But note it; we will come back to it.

For now, take it where it actually lives — not a courtyard in ancient India, not a booth on Mars, but your own ordinary day. The next time you catch yourself defending it hard — your name, your record, your side of some old argument, the you that has to be right — stop for a second and do what you did tonight. Look for the one you are defending. Try to catch them. And when what you find is a set of parts and no one holding them, do not reach for a verdict, and do not reach for a practice. Simply notice that you have been guarding a place you were never able to find anyone standing in.

Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.