Don’t Know Mind

In this whole world, everyone searches for happiness outside, but nobody understands their true self inside. Everybody says, “I, I want this, I am like that” . . . But nobody understands this I.

Before you were born, where did your I come from? When you die, where will your I go? If you sincerely ask, “What am I?”, sooner or later you will run into a wall where all thinking is cut off.

We call this “Don’t know”.

Zen is keeping this Don’t Know Mind always and everywhere.

Seungsahn Haengwon, 1927 – 2004, Korean Seon (Zen) master and founder of the international Kwan Um School of Zen.

Opening the eye of the mind

Repeatedly turn the mind toward what is known:

All things are of the nature to change.

Our only inheritance is impermanence and the truth that conditions rise and fall.

Jessica Angima, Kenyan American artist and meditation teacher

Holding things lightly

Life is not as serious as my mind makes it out to be.

Eckhart Tolle

What’s known and unknown

Look at love – how it tangles
with the one fallen in love

look at spirit – how it fuses with earth
giving it new life.

Why are you so busy with this or that, or good or bad –
pay attention to how things blend.

Why talk about all the known and the unknown –
see how the unknown merges into the known

Rumi, Look at Love [extract]

Very true

The mind starts to become quiet

when it really sees how untrue its narrative is.


Adyashanti

Don’t waste it

Since there is nothing but just this moment

The time-being

is all the time there is.

Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist priest and writer, founder of the Soto school of Zen, Shōbōgenzō