Since the condition that has caused our dis-ease is a fixed, partial view of our experience, we cannot promote healing just by adopting a different view. It might be a better view, it might be a wonderful view, it might be the greatest view of reality in the world, but it will not be healing if it’s just another set of beliefs and attitudes. Instead of building bigger or fancier boxes, we need to develop the antidote to all our partial views of reality: being present with our experience as it is. We could call it beginner’s mind. This is unconditional presence. As Suzuki Roshi says “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few” We have all become experts at being ourselves, and in so doing we have lost our ability to be present with our experience in a fresh, open-minded way.
John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening
All of us, without exception, have been thoroughly conditioned to react immediately to what is happening in and around us by thinking about it — talking to ourselves and to others in judgmental ways, often repeating these thoughts over and over again. Thoughts evoke emotions, tensions, excitement and stress, and can bring on exhaustion and sickness. Awareness reveals this simply to be so. Awareness is freedom from wanting to improve oneself or to put oneself down. It … opens one up to whatever else is happening this instant: breathing, a bird singing, a motor humming, the wind blowing, thoughts moving, the body tensing and relaxing…
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
Can we look at all the aspects of our lives with this mind, just open to see what there is to see? I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time doing that. I have a lot of habits of mind – I think most of us do. Children begin to lose that innocent quality after a while, and soon they want to be “the one who knows.” We all want to be the one who knows. But if we decide we “know” something, we are not open to other possibilities anymore. And that’s a shame. We lose something very vital in our life when it’s more important to us to be “one who knows” than it is to be awake to what’s happening. We get disappointed because we expect one thing, and it doesn’t happen quite like that. The very nature of beginner’s mind is not knowing in a certain way, not being an expert. As Suzuki Roshi said in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the experts there are few.” As an expert, you’ve already got it figured out, so you don’t need to pay attention to what’s happening. Pity.
