Spend It On the World

Grace, part 3

We Unitarian Universalists are called to the work of justice. We strive to temper our own greed, and to care for the poor, the oppressed, the disadvantaged. Our faith calls us to sacrifice consumption for the sake of sustaining the planet. We seek to cultivate our intellectual, spiritual, and emotional capacities: to be mindful of beauty, caring with people, curious, grateful and generous, correct self-centeredness, and see through our own self-deceptions. That’s the good work.

So why doesn’t grace produce complacency? If the greatest boons that life could offer – the full magnificence of riches of air and sunshine, friends and laughter, tastes and sounds, groundhogs and earthworms – is all given free of charge, isn’t that a bit of a work disincentive?

The answer is: we don’t have to pay FOR grace, but we are obligated to pay WITH grace. We are called to take the inheritance of grace that is our birthright and spend it on the world. Let the gift of grace make us gracious, and shine our graciousness upon every person we meet, and into every corner of every situation we enter.

It is as though you won the lottery when you didn’t even buy a ticket. You have millions of dollars of unearned, undeserved money. Great. Now what are you going to do with it? If you just sat on it, or spent it self-indulgently, that would cheapen your inheritance. Grace is free, but it isn’t cheap.

If you’re not using it, you’re forgetting that you have it. It’s unrealized. Grace asks to be invested in promoting everywhere its own fuller and richer realization. Grace is free, yet it makes an infinite demand upon us: to see it more clearly than we have, to love it more dearly than we have, to follow it more nearly than we have.

The abundance of free gifts calls us to be more reverent, and allow room in life for awe. The unmerited favor we receive calls us to the merits of honesty, truthfulness, and humility. The generosity of what the universe gives us calls us to be more generous, and more grateful.

It's like the rich Uncle who writes you an amazingly large check and hands it to you and stands there smiling at you – beaming at you. He says nothing about what he wants in return, nothing about paying it back, or even about paying it forward. Just: "Here." He doesn’t need to say anything because he knows the calling will arise within you, the calling to rise to the opportunities and the challenges the great gift brings you.

A parable from the Lotus Sutra tells of a wealthy man who has a profligate and irresponsible son. On his death bed, the father says to the son, “I have a present for you.” He gives him a jacket. The father says, “All that I have is about to become yours, without condition. You will do with it as you like. Just promise me one thing. Keep the jacket. Never sell it, or give it away, or risk it in a gamble.” The son promises. After the father dies, the son gradually wastes away the family fortune. He spends it irresponsibly, throws expensive parties, gambles it away. After a few years he is homeless and destitute. But he has kept his promise to keep the jacket. It is almost the only possession he has left. One night, preparing to sleep on the streets, he rolls up his jacket to use as a pillow, and feels a lump in the jacket he had not noticed before. He discovers that his father had sewn into the lining, a magnificent jewel beyond price.

You and I are given this jewel beyond price. We have it -- but perhaps sometimes we don't know we have it. Having it requires only that we know we do. All it takes to realize it (make it real) is to realize it (become aware of it).

When you drop the needless anxieties and worries, your spirit will, on its own, rise. It will want to be more open, cultivate an inner hospitality which lets difference in. When you drop the delusions of scarcity, it will stand on the side of love, extending solidarity to those who are suffering, or excluded, or oppressed. When you drop the insecurities and insufficiency, it will grow more strongly self-possessed, able to enter relationships without fear of subordination or domination.

When you drop the overweening drive to earn, to prove yourself – and need only to just be you, you can shine in surprising ways.

It can be scary to trust in grace instead of trusting in your own work and control. It can be scary to see the vast extent of the riches bestowed upon you and feel the call to respond whole-heartedly to the amazing largess. I know it can be scary. But just remember: It’s OK to not know. The other kids don’t either. You are as prepared as you need to be. And: it’s Pierre.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Grace"
See also
Part 1: Can't Earn It
Part 2: Pay Nothing But Attention

Pay Nothing But Attention

Grace, part 2

You don’t have to earn the best things in life. They're free. You can’t buy them. Nothing you can say, do, be, or become can make you deserve them any more or any less.

I'm guessing you know that. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. We know it, but we don’t think about it much. We live in forgetfulness of what we know.

It’s like the capital of South Dakota – knowledge we don’t use as often as we would if we lived there. Only, in this case, we do live there. We live in the state of grace, and its capital is this moment. All your anxieties are of no avail, and your hard work is not necessary. That can be a sobering and humbling realization. It can also be exhilarating and liberating.

Beyond reminding us that the best things in life are free, the lesson of grace is also to pay attention to all that is freely given – even if it doesn’t seem to be all that great. To be attuned to grace is to be attuned to the beauty and goodness in the ordinary, quotidian conditions of existence: the feel of breath in your nostrils, the myriad sounds surrounding you.

I’m not saying economic security doesn’t matter. Or that you shouldn’t work hard to earn status, respect, achievements, and income. But maybe you’ve been doing enough of that. Too much, maybe. Perhaps you’ve been neglecting the everyday wonders of life for which you need pay nothing except attention.

Amid the hubbub and jangle of all that is, there is joy. There are pains and terrors, and joy persists. Joy is present in our relationships, in the pleasure that we have in beauty, in the marvel of natural world, and also in the marvel of the social world – all the seamless systems of earth, soil, evolution, and of civilization – the intricate organism that is a blue jay, that is a squirrel, that is a swamp or a forest, that is a city.

In the dark night of the soul, joy and grace may seem far away – inaccessible. Even in the normal, more-or-less satisfactory day-to-day run of life, grace may be hidden behind routine, behind the habit of boredom. Grace may be buried beneath our ambitions and goals. We can be so focused on where we want to get to, that we forget where we are – so focused on earning that we forget the unearned. We can fail to realize.

The double meaning of “realize” is helpful here. To realize is to become aware of. And to realize is also to make real. Noticing that grace is always already there is at the same time making it real. To realize grace and joy – to become aware of it and to make it real -- cultivate habits of reverence and awe.

It’s not hard. Slow down. Mono-task, paying deep attention to what you’re doing. Sink into your senses. Stay in the moment, neither cogitating about the past nor planning the future.

Something else that you know, that I know, but we live in forgetfulness of: none of this world is necessary. Nothing has to be the way it is – or has to be at all. And yet, here it is. Be amazed, be very amazed.

We live in grace. We live by grace. Grace plays hide-and-seek through all that is. It plays peek-a-boo – by turns hidden and revealed. So these questions arise: Am I living in a way appropriate to the promise of life? Am I being dull to life: unmindful of beauty? Careless with people? Closed-minded? Ungrateful and ungenerous? Self-centered, even greedy? Am I unknowingly oppressive, or even indifferent to that possibility? Am I weaving a web of rationalizations and excuses to disguise unhappiness of a shallow and narrow life? Am I realizing grace?

There’s a paradox here – an edge of cognitive dissonance that you might be feeling. On the one hand: the beauty and wonder of life and love and hugs and trees and wild geese honking, and you don’t have to earn it, you can’t earn it – all freely given. Nothing you have to do, nothing you even have to be. Everything that matters is already accomplished, already sufficient – in fact, abundant.

On the other hand, I’m telling you to do things. Slow down, stay in the moment, be amazed, amazed at the accident of it all – wrestle with these questions about whether you life is all it could be or your actions as beneficial as you like to assume.

So which is it? Is there work to be done, or is there no work needed?

Yes!

Grace, you see, is free, but it isn’t cheap.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Grace"
See also
Part 1: Can't Earn It
Part 3: Spend It On the World

Can't Earn It

Grace, part 1

We live by grace. We live in grace. There is a joy in life. Even amid the grief and tragedy – in part because of the grief and tragedy, growing out of the sadness – there is a joy.

Many years ago, one summer when my daughter was six and my son was four, we moved: from Georgia to Virginia. New town, new state, new schools. When August came, and the first day of school approached, my daughter was nervous about beginning second grade. She was anxious, which was perfectly understandable.

I asked her what she was afraid of, and she said, “I’m afraid they will ask me what the capital of South Dakota is.” It was a tender and funny moment – my little girl, growing and struggling to cope with a large, strange, and challenging world. So I told her the capital of South Dakota.

Yeah, I blew it.

There’s a place for knowledge, but that’s not the lead of the story she needed in that moment. The poignancy of her need kept me thinking about it. She was teaching me how to be her Dad, and this was my homework. Eventually I did come around to saying what I wished I’d said right off:

“Number one, it’s OK to not know. It’s always OK to just say, I don’t know. Number two, the other kids don’t know either. They don’t know all the states and capitals. I know they don’t because states-and-capitals aren’t taught until 5th-grade. I know some of the kids will seem like they know everything, but inside they’re as scared as you are right now that something about them is wrong. Number three, what you do know really is just right for second grade. You know what 13 plus 12 is. You know what a vertebrate is. You can read. And write. There’s an exciting adventure of second grade before you, and you are prepared. And, finally, number four: it’s Pierre.”

My daughter’s vulnerability in that moment was a gift – as it always is when someone shows us their vulnerability. It was a gift that I didn’t expect, and had not earned, and it was a gift of love. In Christian theology, grace is “the freely given, unmerited favor and love of God.”

For John Calvin, the 16th-century Protestant theologian, grace played a very different role then it does for us. Calvin is worth knowing about for two reasons. First, his thought was hugely influential on our culture. The Puritans and Pilgrims that laid the foundation for what would become the United States were Calvinist. And second because Unitarianism and Universalism have been defined as a sustained reaction to Calvinism. Calvin set the agenda. Unitarians went through and said no to every item on the agenda.

"Total depravity," said Calvin. "Human beings are utterly and totally depraved, corrupt to the core, consumed by sin."
"Nope. Inherent worth and dignity of every person," we said. "It’s a blessing you were born."

"Salvation by faith alone," said Calvin. "Not by your good deeds can you get into heaven."
"Nope. Salvation by works and by character," we said. "It matters what you do."

"Predestination," said Calvin. "It was determined before any of us were born who was going to heaven and who was going to hell, and there’s nothing you can do to change it."
"Nope. Freedom is real, and, with it, character can be nurtured and developed," we said.

"Limited atonement," said Calvin. "Christ’s sacrifice on the cross atoned for the sins of only a few of us."
"Nope. We are all saved," we said.

Straight down the line, whatever Calvin said, we said the opposite.

Grace had an important role in Calvin’s thought. The grace of God is bestowed upon the elect – those whom God has determined to save. Though these elect are as depraved as anybody, God overcomes their resistance to obeying the call of the gospel. The point of emphasizing how depraved we are was to make clear that we can’t save ourselves, and, hence, how dependent we are on God’s gratuitous grace.

I think our forebears were right to dispute Calvin, and I’m glad they did, for in doing so they created this religious tradition which today we inherit. After almost 500 years, though, perhaps we can set aside some of our reactivity and acknowledge a good point. In very important ways, we aren’t in control. That’s the nugget of truth buried in Calvin’s stilted theology. We don’t make and cannot earn the goodness of the world.

The best things in life are free: air to breathe, friendship, love, hugs, smiles, laughter, sleep, the company of trees. You don’t have to earn them, you can’t buy them, and nothing you can say, do, be, or become can make you deserve them any more or any less.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Grace"
See also
Part 2: Pay Nothing But Attention
Part 3: Spend It On the World

The Terrible, Violent, Beautiful, Gracious Jungle

Spirituality of Evolution, part 3

That the mix of competition and cooperation happened to produce humans is, I mentioned, a cosmic accident. That’s a lesson in humility. That we could readily be replaced is another lesson in humility.

“Some zoologists suspect that chimps and bonobos have long been ‘held back’ by the presence of humans – kept from moving out of the jungle onto grasslands and, more generally, from filling the human niche” (Wright, Nonzero, 292)

So if all humans suddenly vanished today, the chimps would Nash-ramble out into the savanna, start spending more of their time walking upright, which would conduce to the voice box dropping down in the throat, which would allow production of more subtle vocal sounds, which, in combination with the positive feedback loop they already have for increased political savvy, would cause the use of those subtle distinctions in vocal sound in a more complex symbolic language. If some virus wipes out all the humans but not the chimps, probably in about a couple million years or so, we’ll be back – that is, a species very like humans: five or six feet tall, with armpits, bad jokes, spectator sports, musical instruments, and so on.

How’s that for a story to give us a sense of our place in the scheme of things? Of course, the chimps are already so much like us. What if all the apes, or even all the primates, or, heck, let’s say all the mammals suddenly disappeared from earth? High levels of intelligence – that is, behavioral flexibility made possible by larger brain-to-body-size ratios – would probably emerge again.

“Toward the end of the age of dinosaurs – just before they ran into their epoch ending piece of bad luck [when a comet or asteroid struck earth and caused massive climate change that wiped them out] – a number of advanced species had appeared, with brain-to-body ratios as high as those of some modern mammals. It now looks as if some of the smarter dinosaurs could stand up and use grasping forepaws. And some may have been warm-blooded and nurtured their young. Who knows? Give them another 100 million years and their offspring might be riding on jumbo jets” (Wright, Nonzero, 293)

-- and arguing over whether to teach evolution in their schools.

Or maybe they wouldn’t. How any given species will go is a highly contingent matter. Yet a level of intelligence – that is, behavioral flexibility – comparable to what humans have is no fluke. “Given long enough, it was very, very likely to evolve.” (Wright 276)

We -- we homo sapiens -- aren’t necessary. Try holding that awareness in your consciousness throughout your day. Remembering this puts the ego's preoccupations in a wider context, and invites us into that wider perspective. Cultivating continual remembrance of non-necessity is a spiritual practice – grounded in what we learn from science.

The evolution story evokes simultaneously a pride and a humility: we are the universe playing itself out – the grand product of the grandest possible creator. At the same time, if we humans weren’t around, the complexity and flexibility of our intellect would simply appear elsewhere. It is a story of nature red in tooth and claw – ruthless, heartless competition forming the conditions for gradually increasing cooperation to form more complex, more beautiful, coalitions of cells, and then coalitions of individuals, to produce wonders that never would have appeared had life been easy.

The moral of the story is the ultimate moral of many spiritual stories: there is irreconcilable tragedy within a basic goodness of reality. The fundamental beauty of the whole somehow emerges from billions of incidents of vicious ugliness. It’s a story of interconnection – for there is ultimately nothing that separates us from the other animals, other life, or from the earth itself. A little more of this, a little less of that – no barriers.

It’s a story that evokes depths of gratitude; wonder and awe. It’s a story of faith, because it tells us there are forces out there that we can trust – that we don’t have to carry all the world’s burdens ourselves. There are much more powerful forces at work out there, and they are slowly, slowly, pushing for ever-greater levels of cooperation and harmony. We are borne aloft by that grace.

Yes, it’s a jungle out there. For that we can be grateful. We -- whether "we" means homo sapiens or "we" means some species with the behavioral flexibility necessary for highly abstract symbolic language and elaborate structures and mechanisms of social organization -- wouldn’t be here if it weren’t a terrible, violent, beautiful and gracious jungle.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Spirituality of Evolution"
See also
Part 1: Our Best Myth
Part 2: Competition and Cooperation

Competition and Cooperation

Spirituality of Evolution, part 2

Evolution doesn't always tend toward greater complexity. When it does, complexity emerges from two powerful forces: competition and cooperation.

Number one: competition. Various “arms races” appear in nature. Consider the beetle – and remember we have a common ancestor with them, too. When beetles first came along, there weren’t any animals specifically adapted to eat them. After a while, “various animals did acquire, by natural selection, the means to kill and eat” beetles. This spurred a response. The bombardier beetle is able to squirt out a scalding chemical mix upon would-be diners. This prompts beetle predators to adapt accordingly. Skunks and one species of mice “have evolved specialized innate behavior patterns that cause the spray to be discharged harmlessly, and they can then eat the beetles.”

This sort of arms race among species drives them toward complexity. “In North America, the ‘relative brain size’ of carnivorous mammals – brain size corrected for body size – showed a strong tendency to grow over time. And so did the relative brain size of the herbivorous mammals that were their prey.” (Wright, Nonzero, 270) As the predators got smarter, the prey had to get smarter too to find ways of eluding capture, and as the prey got smarter, the predators had to get smarter still to keep on outsmarting them. It was an arms race of brain power that drove toward the greater complexity represented by those relatively bigger brains.

Besides arms races between species, there are arms races within a given species.

“The male chimps, it turns out, spend lots of time scheming to top each other. They form coalitions that, on attaining political dominance, get special sexual access to ovulating females – at the great Darwinian expense of less successful coalitions. So males with genes conducive to political savviness should on average get the most genes into the next generation, raising the average level of savviness. And the savvier the average chimp, the savvier chimps have to be to excel in the next round. And so on: an arms race in savviness – that is, an arms race in behavioral flexibility. There’s little doubt that this dynamic has helped make chimps as smart as they are, and there’s no clear reason why the process should stop where it is now.” (271)

Meanwhile, the female chimps have their own selective pressure to develop political savviness. Female savviness increases the prospects for their young to survive. Competition pushes species toward more behavioral flexibility – more complexity.

Number two: cooperation. Cooperation can benefit both parties, but if you’re premature in offering your cooperation, it’s disastrous. You get taken advantage of: left with nothing, or eaten. For a cell, or something even simpler, such as an autocatalytic protein, payoff is measured only in terms of how many replications of yourself will persist through how long a time. Entering a cooperative relationship is risky. But under the right conditions, it improves your chances of replicating.

Mathematician John Nash (portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 2001 movie, “A Beautiful Mind”), established the mathematics of cooperative strategies. In their blind, stumbling way genes come to pursue strategies without thinking about the goal. Over time, natural selection preserves the strategies that lead to the most payoff – the most replications over the longest period of time – and those are just the strategies that Nash’s mathematics tells us would necessarily produce the most payoff.

Sooner or later, given enough encounters, the mitochondria’s precursor and the nucleus’ precursor are going to figure out how to cooperate to create the nucleated cell. Then these more complex nucleated cells are going to work out schemes of cooperation to form multi-celled organisms. Then those multi-celled organisms are going to come to take in more and more different cells, each taking on more and more highly specialized functions – all as strategies for giving themselves more payoff, more replication.

It takes an awful long time for dumb cells to stumble blindly onto the cooperative strategies that John Nash proved do, in fact, most improve their odds. It takes billions of years. The vastness of the time scale alone induces awe and wonder. And there’s something beautiful about that slow, slow, slow, incredibly patient unfolding of life. Frankly, a story of creation in six days feels spiritually short-changing.

Creation ambles and rambles, moving in no straight line, going down a lot of dead ends, gradually working out ways to overcome the barriers to cooperation. There is indeed an inexorable logic of cooperation pulling alongside the push of competition. The social species – whether humans or ants -- have hit upon ways to utilize Nash's equations. We are, you could say, the Nash ramblers.

The same logic that leads cells to cooperate to create a larger organism eventually leads individuals (in some species) to cooperate to form a larger organism called "society." The need for one group to compete with another puts a premium on cooperation among the members of the group -- and better cooperation within groups intensifies the competition between groups. Cooperation works, we might say, “in harmony” with competition, like chimps forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Spirituality of Evolution"
See also
Part 1: Our Best Myth
Part 3: The Terrible, Violent, Beautiful, Gracious Jungle

Our Best Myth

Spirituality of Evolution, part 1

Creation stories of the origin and beginning of the world have the spiritual function of situating us: giving us a sense of place and belonging in this world. Creation stories -- such as Genesis 1 or the thousands of other creation stories among human cultures -- awaken our spirits, arouse us to awe and gratitude, show us that we are each more than merely our ego defenses. What’s your creation story, your origin myth?

For most of us, our creation myth is the one we gather from science. "The epic of evolution," wrote biologist E.O. Wilson, "is probably the best myth we will ever have."

Figures such as Lao-Tzu and Buddha and Jesus and St. Francis show us that you don’t have to have modern science’s stories in order to perceive the intrinsic beauty, goodness, and interconnection of things – at least, they didn’t. Buddha and Jesus didn’t need the scientific knowledge that every breath of air they took contained molecules present at the origin of the universe, that our planet and our bodies are composed of the dust of stars, that sea turtles and humans share a common ancestor, that 98.4 percent of our DNA is the same as a chimpanzee’s, or that about 50 percent of our DNA is the same as a banana’s. But if knowing that helps us awaken to awe -- and thus to beauty -- and thus to gratitude -- and thus to compassion -- then let’s squeeze those scientific findings for all the spiritual juice we can. Particularly for us Unitarian Universalists -- we embrace the project of using scientific findings within a spiritually satisfying story.

So today I want to share some of the wonder, and the grace, and the mystery of our story. The crux of our story is: Complexity builds up from simplicity. Life is an emergent property: it emerges from billions of lifeless mechanical processes all going on together. Mind is an emergent property: it emerges from billions of mindless reactions all going on together.

Species evolution is not a linear picture, a straight line of development. Instead, we see a tree of life, starting at a single point and branching off into the various species. There are billions of branches on that tree. The vast majority of them terminate before reaching the present. And there we are, we homo sapiens, at the tip-end of one twig. Once you see how the process works, then you see that process isn’t aimed at any of the billions of species it has produced. It’s just algorithms cranking away.

This nonlinear picture of a tree of life spreading, spreading, spreading, means that evolution has no direction toward any one particular species – or even any one particular genus or order or class. Rather, evolution is heading in billions of directions all at once.

The common ancestor of humans and chimps lived about 7 million years; the common ancestor of humans, chimps, and gorillas, about 10 million years ago; and the common ancestor of humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, about 14 million years ago. This means that we are more closely related to chimps than we are to gorillas – and it also means that chimps are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas – they are, in fact, exactly as far removed from gorillas as we are.

If the tree is a good-sized oak tree, then our twig goes back only about an inch before reaching the point where the twig leading back out to the chimps branches off. That’s our place in the grand scheme of things: on the chimpanzee twig.

Our origin myth comes from science, yet is spiritually relevant, for it is a story of interconnection. It’s a story that shows us to be the product of grand, noble and creative forces beyond our control -- and also shows us to be the recipient of grace – that is, of gifts that we have done nothing to deserve.

This tree of life did not emerge for the purpose of producing a twig of humans or human-like creatures. If you went back in time 2 billion years and started life on Earth from scratch all over again, the chances that you would ever get a primate, let alone a human, are vanishingly small.

Humanity is a cosmic accident. It’s a mystery, a wonder, and a grace that we are here at all. The general tendency that some of the twigs on that tree will get more and more complex over the eons, however, is no accident.

It’s true: Not all the branches head toward complexity. Some branches stay put. “Bacteria showed up billions of years ago, and there’s a lot of them still around, evincing no aspiration to climb higher on the tree of life” (Wright, Nonzero, 267). The most plentiful life form on the planet, both numerically and in sheer pounds, is just as simple now as it was two billion years ago.

Meanwhile, other species have gotten less complex through evolution – because the costs of maintaining a complex feature became greater than the advantages. For example, species that have moved into environments of total darkness have gradually lost complexity in their eyes and optic nerves, sometimes without any increased complexity in other ways.

Evolution doesn’t drive toward complexity unless it has to, and it often doesn’t have to.

NEXT: The Conditions that Compel Complexity

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Spirituality of Evolution"
See also
Part 2: Competition and Cooperation
Part 3: The Terrible, Violent, Beautiful, Gracious Jungle

Most Intimate

Mystery, part 3

If the use of koans in Zen training seems rather silly, well, yeah, it is. There are many paths to learn authenticity, to learn acceptance, and compassion, and none of them work all that well. None of them offer any guarantees. The koan path happened to call to me – that’s the mystery that had my number.

There are many ways to learn to dwell in mystery. You don’t have to subject yourself repeatedly to being rung out of the room every time you try to explain, but that is one way to begin to grasp in your bones the limits of explanation. When I mentioned some of these koans, you may have found your mind thinking about them, trying to figure them out. That’s natural. That’s what I did, too. Even after doing several hundred, when I would first encounter the next one, my brain would start into “figure it out” mode.

You know what that’s like. You’re presented with a challenge. The brain starts looking through its memory files for concepts that would apply to this sort of situation. Crying baby. Is it hungry? Needs diaper change? Colic? Ascertain the concept that fits, and take the appropriate action. Complaining client. Apologize? Offer suggestions? Just listen? Stuck in traffic. Is there an alternate route?

The mind wants to KNOW what to do. My figure-it-out mind never stopped jumping on every new koan, but eventually it did start to jump more lightly. Instead of pouncing and clinging, it would jump on the koan, bounce a couple times, and rest there lightly, stepping off sometimes.

The mind’s job is to figure things out, and it is very dedicated to its job. But life is not for figuring out. There are times when it is good to know stuff, and apply the knowledge to figure things out and generate more knowledge. But that’s only one activity of living. Life as a whole is not for figuring out.

If you approach everything as if it were merely to be figured out, then you are bringing some idea of what a solution would look like, and you are focused only on the details relevant to that solution. “Don’t know mind” is the mind that can just let things be what they are, without need of figuring them out, categorizing them. “Don’t know mind” can also be called “beginner’s mind.” “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Shunryu Suzuki. “But in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Imagine an expert botanist strolling through the woods on one of our local trails. She knows every plant, its species and genus, the conditions it requires to thrive, what variations are normal and which are rare. She can rattle off several pages worth of information on every item of flora she encounters. She has expert’s mind. She can very quickly sift through the many possibilities and zero in on the one right one. I’m not suggesting she get rid of her expert mind, but along with her expert mind, she could also cultivate a beginner’s mind. She can open herself to the unknown.

In every sprout, every blossom, every twig, and every leaf, there is something about it that isn’t captured by all the categories of knowledge, all the concepts honed by thousands of botanists studying in classrooms and in the field and reading each other’s journal articles. There is something that the bark is, the blade of grass, the soil, that is not reached by those concepts. Whatever we learn about a thing, that thing also has it irreducible mystery. What is here? What is it?

After you say plant, and leaf, and oak, and white oak, and hydrated and photosynthesis and cellular respiration and everything else you know or think you know, there is still this fact in front of you – and the mystery of it is not diminished, not diminished even the tiniest amount – by all your knowledge.

Maybe our expert botanist takes a moment to set aside her knowledge. Or maybe she plunges into her knowledge and runs through every single thing she can think of about a leaf in her hand and comes at last to the end of it. Either way, she can arrive at don’t know mind – the mind that dwells with the mystery of that faded, once-flexible-now-brittle leaf. The mind of wonder opens up, the beginner’s mind in which there are many possibilities.

Creativity comes from mystery. When we know, we’re just applying familiar concepts. When we reach down to the mystery we do not know, new and creative responses to the thing, to the situation have the space to – flourish, to use a botanical concept. In the mystery, you can flourish. Only don’t know.

I’m not praising ignorance for ignorance’s sake. Reading, and studying, and learning are great goods. Learning is growth and growth is life. But when you have arrived at knowledge, that little twig of learning is at its end.

Only don’t know, so you can open yourself to the next thing to learn. But not only that. Only don’t know – not just for the sake of learning – but for the sake of being present. “Only don’t know” is the gateway to dwelling in the mystery that is all around you.

Here’s one more koan, specifically about that. I have mentioned this one before.

Fayan had studied and practiced Zen with his teacher Dizang for more than 10 years.
Fayan made ready to depart, sensing his time with Dizang had run its course.
Dizang asked Fayan, "Where are you going, senior monk?"
Fayan said, "I am on pilgrimage, following the wind."
Dizang said, "What are you on pilgrimage for?"
Fayan said, "I don't know."
Dizang said, "Not knowing is most intimate."
Fayan suddenly attained great enlightenment.

Not knowing is most intimate. Knowing, useful at it is, is like a screen of concepts between ourselves and the thing itself.

Not knowing is most intimate. Every moment offers us the chance to ask, “What is ineffable here?” This is an unanswerable question – because any answer would be effing it, and then it wouldn’t be ineffable. So ask the question, not for the sake of an answer, but for the sake of orienting yourself to the unspeakable. What is ineffable here? What is the mystery of this moment, this sight, this sound, this feel, this taste, this smell?

It is possible to go through life doing no more than responding to every situation with the knowledge we have, as best we can – bringing our concepts and purposes to bear on everything we encounter. This is a grave mistake. There is something else present. Call it the silence inside the sound, the darkness inside the light, the stillness inside the motion. Or call it the sound inside the silence, the light inside the darkness, the motion inside perfect stillness.

Call it the mystery. It surrounds us and holds us always.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Mystery"
See also
Part 1: Road to Not Knowing
Part 2: On the Koan Path