nothing to do

There's a spiritual idea, in Buddhism and elsewhere, that there is "nothing to do": everything is already suffused with "primordial perfection", "deeply okay", "beautiful just as it is". This connects to ideas around letting go and surrendering, which are at the heart of meditative practice.

For me and I imagine lots of others, this framing can register as deeply objectionable, almost offensive. It sounds like it's denying the reality or at least the urgent importance of all the suffering in the world. At this point Buddhists will object that they're obviously not denying suffering (it's the first noble truth!), and that understanding the emptiness of the sense of the doer will ultimately leave you more liberated to take effective action in the world. And that may all be true, but by the time we're having this argument we've lost the thread; the original instruction was clearly ineffective.It'd be natural to ask at this point what a better instruction would be. I don't necessarily have an answer, but in the face of imperfect instructions, trust in the teacher matters a great deal. If you're learning from someone you look up to, who models commitment to effective action in the world, then you'll be inclined to interpret their words charitably so that objections like this lose much of their force.

I think that a better way for a skeptic to understand 'nothing to do' might be as a kind of deconstruction of free will. It can feel like we have urgent, stressful, important choices to make of huge consequence. But of course, at some level of abstraction, 'choice' is an illusion. We will do whatever the physics of our neurons wants us to do. Our psychology will continue to unfold, and the machinery of our mind will operate and actions will be taken. If we identify with the part of the system that is the self-model, things will seem stressful. But if we simply identify with the unfolding content of awareness, then there really is nothing to do. The self-model will still operate and make choices, and hopefully they will be good choices, but it is immediately clear that they were never "free" choices. Trying to hide from the fact that our choices are mechanical unfoldings does not make them less so; it only creates delusion and suffering.

An analogy might be to a computer running a chess engine written in, say, Python. At the level of the chess engine, there are indeed high-stakes decisions to be made. But at the level of the Python interpreter there is simply code running, each step unfolding from the previous step in the only way it possibly could.

Perhaps it feels like by identifying with the Python interpreter in this analogy we would be 'giving up' some agency. The Python interpreter can't do anything to change the chess moves that get made, while the chess program "can" - but of course the chess program is only ever the execution of its Python code! So any feeling of agency we might get by identifying with it is an illusion.

Still, this isn't fully satisfying as an analogy for the mind, because it's clear that shifting the view in our awareness does change how the system operates. If this were not true, no one would ever be able to talk about their subjective experience (and there could never be any worldly benefits to meditation).

What it seems like we're being asked to accept is that reifying the doer (or identifying with the chess program) can make decisions worse but not better. The intuition is that getting wrapped up with the decision-making tends to strangle it, use up resources, deprive it of the space to make better decisions. This is what's still very counter-intuitive to me, and doesn't seem fully explained by the chess program analogy.