No Outside
- Format
- Single
- Genre
- roots reggae · reggae pop · dub · lovers rock
- Date
Lyrics
There's a man wake up every mornin'
Lookin' out the window for the rain
Lookin' down the road for the reason
Lookin' round for somebody to blame
He search the whole wide world over
For the thing gone wrong inside
All them years a-lookin' out yonder
Never once look behind the eye
No outside, no outside
No far-off place, no other ground
No outside, no outside
It's your own self all the way around
No outside
Same old belief a-build him a fortress
Lock up the door against the night
Race with the neighbor, count up the gray
Hold what he have too tight
Fear and competition, agin' and decay
Every one of them grow the same way
From one wrong root the whole thing climb
The world is outside, and it's not mine
No outside, no outside
No far-off place, no other ground
No outside, no outside
It's your own self all the way around
No outside
So put down the searchin' and the scannin'
Come in off the road, come in from the cold
The well you been diggin' way out in the field
The spring was under your doorstep all the while
No horizon ever hold the answer
The root of it never was out there
Turn the eye around now, look on in
There's no in, no out, there's only here
No outside, no outside
No far-off place, no other ground
No outside, no outside
It's your own self all the way around
No outside
No outside
There's only here
The Story
In I Am That, someone asks Nisargadatta Maharaj how a person can live without emotions. He says, “You can have all the emotions you want, but beware of reactions, of induced emotions.” Then he adds, “Be entirely self-determined and ruled from within, not from without.”
Earlier in the same conversation, he says, “You create the world and then worry about it.” I take that literally. My attention is making the world, so nothing in it can induce a feeling in me from somewhere else. A feeling shows me where my attention has been resting.
I could hear “within” and start combing through myself for the cause of every feeling. That’s the habit of hunting for a cause somewhere other than my own attention, first in the world and then deep inside me.
For me his “within” means there’s no line between me and my life. That line was never real, and seeing that is a relief.