Episode 41 A Beginner’s Mind: The Practice of Living in the Unknown

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I want to invite us all to take a moment to settle in, letting go of anything that's on your mind, the cares and concerns of your life, and allowing yourself to just sink into this timeless infinite moment.

Bring your attention to this moment of consciousness, this moment of presence, just being here, conscious and present.

Notice that whatever your mind is doing right now, whether there are thoughts present, or very few thoughts present, or no thoughts present, it really doesn't matter to consciousness.

Who and what you are is so much deeper and wider than the thoughts bubbling up in your mind.

You can make room for the mind to be running its own programs, even as your inner freedom expands and opens and deepens.

Realize that the mind was never you, was never the self, was never who you really are. It has never been an obstacle and never will be an obstacle.

I want to invite you to gently ease out of this opening meditation, allowing this field of unknowing, this spaciousness, to establish itself as the backdrop for our work today.

I felt that a really good place to begin would be with the fundamental practice of “opening to innocence.” Often in conventional terms, we hear the word innocence and we think guilty or innocent. That's probably the way it's most often used. But the innocence that I'm pointing to is a deeper layer that may be behind that more conventional usage. It's really pointing to who we were before we ever knew anything, before we ever began to construct a story about reality or about ourselves. It's this native innocence of consciousness itself, comfortable in the unknown, with no need to impose meaning and no need to get a handle on things so we can control things. This is a deep fundamental trust that allows us to remain open no matter what's occurring. It’s a trust that allows us to stay innocent, meaning to meet every moment with fresh eyes, to not become hardened, jaded, rigid in our interpretations, our stories, or our beliefs—to be ever new and have what the great Suzuki Roshi called, a “beginner's mind.”

We all accumulate knowledge and life experience that informs our ability to navigate life better and better and with more and more intelligence, and all of that is good. We become experts in living. But what would it be like to have all of our expertise in living—all of our know-how about how things work and how to do things, how to be successful and achieve, avoid difficulties and unnecessary problems—all that wisdom, but still come to each moment with a beginner's mind? Not denying or negating our wisdom, our expertise, our knowing, but still meeting each moment as if it were the first moment, each problem as if it were the first problem, without imposing our ideas on it, our beliefs, our assumptions, our preconceptions.

What would it be like to every day meet each person in our life with a beginner's mind? Think about the people you know well, your family members and co-workers. What would it be like to encounter them anew every day? Who or what is this person today? What are they going to say? What are they going to do? Who are they going to be? But again, not negating what we already know about people because it's important. Take for example, someone you work with. It would be important to know how much you can count on them to hit that deadline and be attentive to the details. Maybe they're good at the big picture, so you can count on them to have a great creative idea, but you better double check that they dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. Otherwise, you're going to hand in something that's messy.

If you know that about someone, it's good that you know that and you need to know that. So, again, that kind of wisdom enables us to get better and better at living and navigating life—knowing other people, knowing their strengths, their weaknesses, their tendencies, their potential pitfalls and their genius, so we can sponsor it and fan the flames of it. But still, how do we allow all of that knowing about each other to be there, but still meet each other with innocence, ready to be surprised?

We all aspire to live in an evolutionary culture, an evolutionary world, where everyone is growing, changing, and evolving, and we're supporting each other to grow and change and evolve. If the world needs anything, it needs that, right? We want to see everyone realize their potential. That means everyone's got to grow and change a lot to realize their full potential, and we want that. But to what degree do our assumptions, beliefs, stories, preconceptions about each other create a kind of box or constraint on each other's natural ability to grow?

We see this in childhood education. There have been some studies done where a teacher was told in advance about an incoming class and was told, "You know, Johnny is really smart and has great test scores, and Jimmy is kind of a bad student. He's not so bright." But they've made this up. Then, they tracked those students' progress through the year and found that sure enough, those kids did not perform according to their true abilities, but according to what the teacher had been told their abilities were. What the teacher expected from them is exactly what they delivered. So what we expect from each other matters. Again, we're free adults, we all like to think we have a lot of agency, autonomy, and that we're not constrained by the assumptions and beliefs of others.

Many of us have done a lot of work to break out of the lens our parents saw us through or a negative lens that a former spouse had been seeing us through. We've done a lot of work to clear that and break free from it. But my point is that there's a social fabric of “already knowing,” a set of deep reference points where we hold each other down. Not intentionally; this is just the byproduct of our need for story-making and meaning-making to have reference points.

We've all accumulated a world of reference points for reality, reference points about other people, our mental model of ourselves, who we are, what we're good at and what we're not, what we believe in and what we don't, what our values are, etc. We have this whole mental model of the self-concept. We have a mental model, a reference point, stories about the world and how life works, how people are as a whole, and these models are relatively accurate, meaning some of them are more accurate than others. Some of our stories are truer than others. Some of our interpretations and beliefs are more representative of the real, and some of them are less so, more delusional or distorted.

The goal of the spiritual path is not to have no mind, it's not to have no thought, and it's not to negate all the wisdom and knowledge that we've accumulated that helps us navigate the world. It's to come to a place where we are no longer identified with the mind or no longer attached to knowing, to our certainties and stories. We're no longer invested in what we know, or we don't really need to know. We're discovering a way of living where we don't need to have any certainty to leap forward into each new moment and circumstance, situation, challenge, and opportunity. Where our heart is wide open. We are an enthusiastic “yes!” regardless of how much we already know, or what our level of certainty already is.

We're all on a path of having a clearer and clearer understanding, a more and more accurate knowing, and being less and less ignorant. It's just part of the human journey, all of us trying to be less ignorant. Oh, man, would it be so. Really, in large part, the way we do that is we get good at questioning our assumptions, suspending our beliefs, challenging our own worldviews, taking risks to go beyond what we think or our limiting beliefs. That's part of being a good, mature, growth-oriented, and evolutionary person. That's how we get more access to just practical wisdom. Clear seeing, good judgment, decision making, and problem solving. We're all on that journey. We've all done a lot of work on that journey.

Perhaps there’s nothing that we can do that has as radical an impact as the meditation practice of letting go of the mind, entirely. There's almost nothing we can do that will create a more enlightened relationship to the mind than sitting still for a period of time every day and having no involvement with thought, severing our identification with the mind. Because we don't have to do anything when we're meditating, it gives us a rare opportunity to simply give up any involvement with thought. It's hard to do that during the day. It's not impossible, and we'll experiment with that—what it is like to engage without thought. It's an experiment. It's not a goal. But in meditation, we can give it up, let it go.

It's a very direct path to awakening, because when consciousness is freed from its fixation on the mind, even for a moment, it instantly begins to know something else. It becomes aware of the mystery of its own nature. Consciousness becomes aware of consciousness. You become aware of something infinite. The infinite, miraculous, depth of your own true being beyond the mind.

This month, we're coming back to the very beginning and exploring these practices designed to help us step directly into our primordial innocence, to have a beginner's mind in each moment. When we're practicing ‘not knowing’ or ‘going beyond the mind’ in meditation, there are a number of elements to it. If you look at the main ways that knowing presents itself in meditation, you’ll see that it's trying to label our experience by naming things, “That's what this is. This is what this is.” We’re labeling and naming our feelings, such as, “I'm tense. Oh, I'm really meditating now. I feel so peaceful.” and saying what things are. Then there's interpreting our experience, which means “Oh, I'm feeling very blissful. I must be doing it right. I must be on the brink of enlightenment.” Or, “Oh, I'm feeling drowsy and sluggish, I must be resistant, I must not be wanting to go where the practice is taking me.” That's interpreting. Then, there's evaluating or judging, “I'm a bad meditator.” It's bad or good.

So there's the naming of it. There’s also trying to make meaning about it. What does it mean? Then, there's the evaluating or judging. It's bad or good. “Oh, yeah, this is a good sign. This is a bad sign.” Hear all the story making in there? Problem solving is another one. “You know, I'm going to fix this. What do I need to do about this? Now that I've figured out it's bad, I need to make it go away, I need to get my meditation back on track.” We're trying to solve the problem that we've identified. There are all kinds of other ways we engage with the mind, such as random daydreaming, planning, creating, or imagining.

The key to these practices in the end is, we're not engaging with any of that. All of what I just described might still arise, but we're not playing along. We're not participating. It's happening, but we're not part of it. We're meditating instead. Okay. I think it's time we do some meditation.

To begin, I want to invite you to please settle into your meditation posture, becoming aware of your own presence in this moment, conscious, awake, free.

This practice I'll call, stepping back from the mind. So as you sit here, whenever you notice yourself engaged with the thought, just inwardly take a step back out of engagement with the thought. Let the thought become simply an object out in front of you. Again, I'm using a visual spatial metaphor, but just work with that in whatever way is natural to you. Stepping back. “Oh, I'm embedded in the thought, my attention is on it, I'm engaged. I'm just going to stay back.” There's no wall behind you, so you can step back as many times as you need to, to stay out of embeddedness in thought. That's the goal. You're just staying out of embeddedness by stepping back.

Try to simply not get involved in the mind in the first place. You're not trying to control the mind or stop the mind from thinking, but you're simply renouncing the mind, renouncing any involvement with the mind. You see the mind as a kind of temptation or an invitation to engage, and you're not having any part of it. You're just not getting involved. See if you can just sit here, still and present, and not get involved in the mind.

What if you were to have no interest in thought, no interest in the mind in the first place. Step into a part of yourself that has no interest in thought at all. Allow yourself to practice for the next few minutes, being completely uninterested in whatever your mind produces, just no interest, you’re not interested.

I want to invite you to relax into the part of yourself that doesn't need to know anything. Let go of the need to have any idea about what's going on in your meditation; how it's going, whether it's good or bad, what's happening, what it all means. Just allow yourself to rest in this fundamental trust. You don't need to know. All those theories, and stories, and concepts, and interpretations are interesting, but you don't need them. There's just you in this moment as it is, no need to know anything at all. Experience the freedom of not needing to know.

Finally, I invite you to connect with your own love of the unknown, your own passion for the unknown. Why are you on the spiritual path? Whether you would name it this way or not, there is a part of you that yearns to know the mystery of who you are beyond the mind, that is enthralled by depth, by vastness, by limitlessness. It longs to know the extraordinary, that which is so incomprehensible and unimaginable, that the mind will never touch it, or really know anything about it. Allow yourself, for the next few minutes, to simply rest in your love of the unknown and let it take you far beyond the mind.

Allow yourself to gently let go of the meditation. Allow all of these brief experiments and practice to coalesce. Allow the momentum of your practice to simply take on a life of its own and to flow into your day and into your week, in whatever way it does naturally. Continue to be interested in these different inner movements and lenses on not knowing and experiment with them in your life, and just be very open and innocent to what you might discover. Thank you.