“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart:
Heart Advice for Difficult Times
"It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew,
and in that there is joy.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart:
Heart Advice for Difficult Times
"It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew,
and in that there is joy.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
Bodhidharma by Shokei, 15th Century |
Of course, not having a clue rarely stops me these days. In fact, at age 68, it seems to be the best stance to take in any given moment. It certainly seems the most appropriate. The presumption that we really know what is going on is most often only just that, a presumption. Clung to, it can be patently presumptuous.
And that's being a bit generous. My first boss, Charlie Winchester, foreman of the maintenance department at a small factory in a small town north of Chicago had a decidedly less delicate way of making the point.
I started working at Clayton Mark and Company as a high school sophomore, dutifully eschewing summer days splashing in the local lake to save for the obligatory college education. As good fortune would have it, I ended up in the maintenance department where my tasks ranged from mowing the extensive grounds to learning how to fix things. Charlie was a kind and able mentor.
One particular lesson on the nature of reality began as Charlie came around the corner to find me standing in front of a simple machine gone amuck. Lurching erratically and making tortuous noises after my attempt at repair, it threatened mayhem. The afternoon's production quota now in question, I quickly explained what I had done and why. With the ever present cigar stub in his mouth, Charlie quickly shut the machine down, then took a pen from his shirt pocket pen holder and wrote the word "ASSUME" on a piece of paper.
"You know what happens when you assume?" he asked.
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I don't need to go into the details of his lecture here (he was actually quite gentle and compassionate with me considering the circumstances), but to illustrate the points he was making Charlie added two strategic slashes, leaving me staring at the piece of paper. It read:
ASS/U/ME
Although Charlie's delivery may seem a bit rough around the edges for some of my spiritually minded friends, his was a profound Teaching. Its depth continues to amaze me.
After 45 years of Practice, it has become quite clear to me that our assumptions and preconceptions consistently stand in the way of actually seeing what is right in front of our nose. What makes matters even more interesting is that this usually operates subconsciously. We don't experience them as the presumptions they are. At the deepest levels, clung to and codified into belief systems, they create a perceptual screen that filters the way we experience the world. To make matters even more challenging, the way ego often operates, the screen often filters out data that doesn't verify the "truth" of that what we "believe" to be true. Then, if someone actually appears to directly confront these belief systems, fear and anger often emerge to propel a defensive reaction.
This, of course, has enormous consequences.
After 45 years of Practice, it has become quite clear to me that our assumptions and preconceptions consistently stand in the way of actually seeing what is right in front of our nose. What makes matters even more interesting is that this usually operates subconsciously. We don't experience them as the presumptions they are. At the deepest levels, clung to and codified into belief systems, they create a perceptual screen that filters the way we experience the world. To make matters even more challenging, the way ego often operates, the screen often filters out data that doesn't verify the "truth" of that what we "believe" to be true. Then, if someone actually appears to directly confront these belief systems, fear and anger often emerge to propel a defensive reaction.
This, of course, has enormous consequences.
The first of the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers, an organization of socially engaged Buddhists founded by Roshi Bernie Glassman is:
"I vow to live a life of Not-knowing,
giving up fixed ideas about myself and the universe."
To many folks who are swirled up in the mainstream of contemporary society, an intention to not know may seem quite strange. After all, we've all been raised in a system that rewards status, power and influence to knowledge. No matter where we end up in that pecking order, we still most likely have a great deal of ego invested in 'knowing" what is going on. The software coding of our conditioning, if not the genetic hardware of our species itself, has most of us operating from a system of fixed ideas about who we are, who "they" are, and how things are. Moment to moment, we think and feel that we are seeing and responding to an objective reality "out there" that somehow exists and operates independently from us -- and that we ourselves can objectively assess it's nature.
Guess again.
Through the ages, the avatars, seers, sages and saints of all traditions have made a point to look at the world created by a prevailing system of belief and proclaim "it ain't necessarily so!" Whether it is conceptualized as the Kingdom of Heaven or Nirvana or Sat Chit Ananda or the Tao or Being or Presence, each of them pointed to a dimension of experience that transcended the "conventional" reality presented -- a reality often confirmed by the religious authorities of their day.
I consider myself lucky to have come of age in the late 60's, a time when a lot of us caught the tidal wave of a Collective Kensho to surf our way into the Experience. Many of us sailed through modes of consciousness where the Teachings of Jesus and Buddha made perfect sense. There was spiritual plane of existence. We saw it with our own eyes, felt it with our own hearts.
And yet -- here's where the Practice comes in -- some of us came to understand that "knowing" that we are All One and that Love IS the Answer, didn't really hack it. In fact clinging to that experience could lead to all sorts of side-effects: arrogance, self-righteousness, and closed mindedness perhaps being three of the most obnoxious. (I've managed to manifest each and everyone of them quite well at times.) To actually be a kind and considerate human being with any consistency was going to take some time and effort. It would take Practice.
Although I didn't realize it at the time, the Practice that emerged wasn't about taking a magic carpet ride to ecstatic states. It would ultimately involve diving into the nether realms of my own subconscious. Over time, it entailed exploring and reconfiguring the framework of conditioned thought and feeling that operated beneath the level of conscious awareness, freezing the world I lived in and separating me from aspects of myself and the One Love that exists at the Heart of Being.
This is where meditation comes in.
The development of a regular meditation practice can be extremely helpful in deepening an awareness of the essentially spacious quality of consciousness that always exists within and beyond the constrains of our conditioned patterns. It can also afford us the opportunity to gaze at the essentially fluid nature of all experience. This may be a bit unsettling at first because the thrust of our conditioning is to "nail down" a fixed reality, but once this fear is faced and allowed to dispel, a sense of the vast and essentially Mysterious nature of the Universe unfolds.
Believe it or not, that may be the easy part.
Another, perhaps more daunting, aspect of the Practice is the process of taking a deep look at our own conditioned patterns, even the darker, "unacceptable" aspects of ourselves that are most often reflexively denied or repressed. Both on the meditation cushion and elsewhere, this takes a commitment to look at ourselves in the mirror so honestly and so compassionately that we are able to not only touch the more miraculous aspects of who we are, but to face, and embrace, the ghosties and ghoulies, the gnarlier aspects of our own conditioned personality. This is the Heart of Practice, the process of opening our hearts and cultivating a clear, open and accepting mind.
As the Practice unfolds, more and more, we are able clearly discern the difference between knowing and thinking that we know. As we become more aware of our actual experience, time and time again we will witness directly how often our assumptions stem from conclusions previously drawn (ranging in time from the moment before, to as far back as early childhood), and that these preconceptions then actually obstruct our ability to see and respond appropriately to the situations that present themselves. In time, we develop the ability to catch this as it happens in the here and now. With Practice, more and more, we are able to then drop it and open to what Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn called "Don't Know Mind."
Life gets a lot easier when that happens.
Being somewhat clueless as to how to actually proceed years ago (and, at the beginning of this post), I didn't realize that being clueless was not only the starting point, it was the endless endpoint of the journey as well. In the midst of ordinary events of our lives, Not-knowing opens us to a realm of unimaginable wonder. Life itself gets Iridescent.
Moment to moment, letting go of thinking that we know what is going on, we are able to be Present with an Open Heart and a Clear Mind.
It just takes Practice.
(PS BTW. Tomorrow's Day of Mindfulness will be the fourth consecutive week I've managed to "put first things first" and spend a day in Silence. Stay tuned.)
Guess again.
Through the ages, the avatars, seers, sages and saints of all traditions have made a point to look at the world created by a prevailing system of belief and proclaim "it ain't necessarily so!" Whether it is conceptualized as the Kingdom of Heaven or Nirvana or Sat Chit Ananda or the Tao or Being or Presence, each of them pointed to a dimension of experience that transcended the "conventional" reality presented -- a reality often confirmed by the religious authorities of their day.
I consider myself lucky to have come of age in the late 60's, a time when a lot of us caught the tidal wave of a Collective Kensho to surf our way into the Experience. Many of us sailed through modes of consciousness where the Teachings of Jesus and Buddha made perfect sense. There was spiritual plane of existence. We saw it with our own eyes, felt it with our own hearts.
And yet -- here's where the Practice comes in -- some of us came to understand that "knowing" that we are All One and that Love IS the Answer, didn't really hack it. In fact clinging to that experience could lead to all sorts of side-effects: arrogance, self-righteousness, and closed mindedness perhaps being three of the most obnoxious. (I've managed to manifest each and everyone of them quite well at times.) To actually be a kind and considerate human being with any consistency was going to take some time and effort. It would take Practice.
Although I didn't realize it at the time, the Practice that emerged wasn't about taking a magic carpet ride to ecstatic states. It would ultimately involve diving into the nether realms of my own subconscious. Over time, it entailed exploring and reconfiguring the framework of conditioned thought and feeling that operated beneath the level of conscious awareness, freezing the world I lived in and separating me from aspects of myself and the One Love that exists at the Heart of Being.
This is where meditation comes in.
The development of a regular meditation practice can be extremely helpful in deepening an awareness of the essentially spacious quality of consciousness that always exists within and beyond the constrains of our conditioned patterns. It can also afford us the opportunity to gaze at the essentially fluid nature of all experience. This may be a bit unsettling at first because the thrust of our conditioning is to "nail down" a fixed reality, but once this fear is faced and allowed to dispel, a sense of the vast and essentially Mysterious nature of the Universe unfolds.
Believe it or not, that may be the easy part.
Another, perhaps more daunting, aspect of the Practice is the process of taking a deep look at our own conditioned patterns, even the darker, "unacceptable" aspects of ourselves that are most often reflexively denied or repressed. Both on the meditation cushion and elsewhere, this takes a commitment to look at ourselves in the mirror so honestly and so compassionately that we are able to not only touch the more miraculous aspects of who we are, but to face, and embrace, the ghosties and ghoulies, the gnarlier aspects of our own conditioned personality. This is the Heart of Practice, the process of opening our hearts and cultivating a clear, open and accepting mind.
As the Practice unfolds, more and more, we are able clearly discern the difference between knowing and thinking that we know. As we become more aware of our actual experience, time and time again we will witness directly how often our assumptions stem from conclusions previously drawn (ranging in time from the moment before, to as far back as early childhood), and that these preconceptions then actually obstruct our ability to see and respond appropriately to the situations that present themselves. In time, we develop the ability to catch this as it happens in the here and now. With Practice, more and more, we are able to then drop it and open to what Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn called "Don't Know Mind."
Life gets a lot easier when that happens.
Being somewhat clueless as to how to actually proceed years ago (and, at the beginning of this post), I didn't realize that being clueless was not only the starting point, it was the endless endpoint of the journey as well. In the midst of ordinary events of our lives, Not-knowing opens us to a realm of unimaginable wonder. Life itself gets Iridescent.
Moment to moment, letting go of thinking that we know what is going on, we are able to be Present with an Open Heart and a Clear Mind.
It just takes Practice.
(PS BTW. Tomorrow's Day of Mindfulness will be the fourth consecutive week I've managed to "put first things first" and spend a day in Silence. Stay tuned.)
1 comment:
My journalist-ego is really struggling with "not knowing" right now. Despite direct questions to myself, to others...feels like looking at a picture with all key details crossed out or listening to those 18 minutes of silence with the greatest of aversions. I prefer (attach?) to the childlike scientific curiosity of "don't know mind," and am having trouble maintaining equanimity during this quest. Any suggestions?
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