What if even your strongest emotions aren't personal? Is anything personal? What if this experience we are having as a body and mind is more like a radio that receives things rather than creates or generates them? You need a radio to play the songs that are passing through this room now, right? All this experience is floating around, and this radio called "you" is playing these songs called desire, fear, love, envy. Even resistance is just one more song called "I want to turn off the radio." What if your internal experiences are not personal but more like something a musician recorded years ago and being played now?

Even the love songs aren't personal. Even the very dramatic, very sad, very happy, or very romantic ones aren't personal. There is nothing wrong with them; they just aren't yours. You can still pay attention to them, but there is no reason to get invested in trying to change them or get them to stay around. Every song on the radio eventually ends—even "Bye-Bye Miss American Pie," which was 17 minutes long. It would go on and on, but eventually there would be another commercial. A radio is a great metaphor because a radio isn't like a CD player, which you can program to play what you want it to play. What plays on the radio is not up to you. Sometimes, it is a happy song, sometimes it is a sad one, sometimes it is an inspiring one. The Mystery is so wise that it knows exactly what song to put on in this moment. It decides what song gets played, and once it has been played, you can't hang on to it. Just being present while it is being played is the best you can do. That is all you can do. Paradoxically, this recognition that everything that arises on this radio called "you" is impersonal makes it easier to pay attention to what is arising because, if it's not personal, there is no reason to hold back from it.

Another huge mystery is: What is aware of what's playing on this radio? Then, you can ask an even stranger question: Is there a boundary between what is aware of what's playing on the radio and what's playing on the radio? Is what is hearing the radio and experiencing all of the experiences actually separate from the experiences themselves? It turns out that the listener who is hearing these tunes is not separate from this Mystery. Rather, the songs are streaming forth out of the Mystery, and the listening is streaming forth out of the same Mystery. There is a huge ground, or Presence, in which everything happens. The surprise is that this ground is not a place of knowing but rather a place of open-eyed discovery. There is no knowing ahead of time what will be played; you just discover in the moment the next song comes on.