It's funny (I mean, interesting) when you read a book and only one sentence sticks with you. I figure that if I remember it after many years, that sentence must have a significant meaning for me.
A meaningful sentence I recall from one of Huston Smith's books came from a Zen practitioner: "I have a new koan: I could be wrong."
Beautiful!
I'm wrong all the time. So I can totally identify with this sentiment.
Lately I've been enjoying using a similar idea as a sort of mantra when I'm going to sleep at night and find that my mind is overly filled with thoughts of what be coming next in the world of politics, my own life, and other aspects of reality I care about.
Don't know.
It feels really honest and refreshing to silently repeat those words inside my head. Don't know replaces the guesses, predictions, suppositions, hopes, anticipations, and such that otherwise would be rambling around my psyche.
Now, I'm not saying that looking into the future is bad. We human beings have a marvelous ability to create visions of what might be that are far beyond what other animals are capable of.
It's often useful to fashion scenarios of what Time may bring us after the present moment. However, predictions of what will happen beyond a few minutes, or even less, often are widely off the mark.
That's why don't know appeals to me so much.
Those two words remind me to remain open to anything and everything, really. No matter how confident I am that this or that will occur, the universe typically doesn't operate precisely (or even generally) in accord with my view of what will be.
Naturally don't know applies to grand cosmic anticipations as well as small mundane ones.
Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, typically have a clear sense of what will happen after they die. Heaven, God, afterlife, soul travel, reincarnation -- whatever it is, something predictable awaits.
But actually, they don't know. No one knows. Which is to say, as the above-mentioned Zen practitioner said: We all could be wrong. And likely are, when it comes to supernatural suppositions.
A related idea is wu chi, a Taoist term for the emptiness from which fullness flows. In Tai Chi, which I've practiced for about 13 years, wu chi is the poised, balanced ready position that precedes movement. I talked about this in the above-linked post:
I first heard the term, wu chi, used by my martial arts instructor. Warren said that he had told his own Tai Chi teacher that, after several decades of training, he had finally realized that there is only one move in Tai Chi. “Oh, very interesting,” the teacher said. “What is it?” “Whatever flows from wu chi [the empty state of rest in Tai Chi].” “Ah, I think you’re on to something,” said Warren’s teacher.
The idea is that when one is in a state of wu chi, it's easy to move in any direction.
This is a subtlety of Tai Chi that I'm beginning to appreciate more deeply. Even when one move directly follows another, there's a balance point, a pivot point -- the moment when one move is essentially finished and the next move hasn't quite begun.
That point is akin to don't know. In an actual fight, you wouldn't know what your opponent is going to do. So you should be ready to respond flexibly to... whatever.
Hence, the beauty of wu chi.
Everyday life isn't a battle, but it shares the quality of unpredictability. It makes sense to be ready for anything. Or at least, many things that we don't expect will happen, yet certainly could.
Is this a coherent philosophy of life? I'd say so. It's just different from what we usually think of as providing a philosophical foundation for ourselves. Here's how I put it in my wu chi post:
There’s nothing quite like wu chi in Western philosophy or religion. By and large we in the West adore positivity. We want to be filled, not emptied. We want to acquire, not divest. We want to become more, not less. We want to be raised up, not driven down.
Even when we claim to aspire to a state of lowly humility and egolessness, the envisioned end result is to be elevated: saved, enlightened, God-realized. I’m not saying that people of the East are less prone to ego, but at least philosophies such as Taoism and Zen—when unencumbered by religious trappings—present to spiritual aspirants a goal of inner emptiness.
For several years I wrote quite often about wu chi and wu under a blog category, Wu Project. Feel feel to browse through the posts. Or, not to.
Brian
All of creation worships the empty, unknown, ineffable and unknowable experience.
That's what faith is. It is based on the empty space of what I can't know, being a point, and the miracle of what is, being everything. "I" as a point have no dimension, no perspective, no depth. Yet all of these are made up of points, infinitely.
"I don't know" is a step.
"I don't exist in physical space, in a single point of time" is right. There is no assailant nor defendant. There is consciousness and matter in motion.
Readiness presumes a specific point in time. But that's wrong. We are not separated by points in time.
If I don't exist, then no opinion is right. I can't know anything.
That's our real state.
In that state we experience. The experience is real. The concept of it is a crayon drawing, and always wrong.
No experience is false. What you see may be imaginary, may be physical, but you are experiencing it. That is never wrong.
Where that experience came from is subject to opinion and the opinion is usually wrong.
But the experience is what it is. And the more we focus on our experience, and the less we form opinions and conjectures, the less we live in an imagined personna, a self - manufactured identity, the more aware and real we become.
Posted by: Spencer Tepper | July 21, 2017 at 07:59 PM
Hi Spencer, interesting comment.
"We are not separated by points in time."
So we are presently experiencing a moment to moment existence in this life form on this planet but at the same time we are not separate from our lives in the past and the future?
The mind boggles. This is when just emptying out and not thinking and not knowing helps :)
Posted by: Jen | July 22, 2017 at 05:46 PM
Hi Jen
Consider that the brain boils experience down into discrete points and the interpretation, the reconstruction of each point. Actually, because the brain has multiple systems it doesnt always get the sensory data at the same time.
The image you see or hear is constructed from sensory data captured at slightly different points of time, but presented to you as a single point. So you can be seeing things that are built up over several microseconds, presented as a single snapshot.
In Calculus, as Newton taught us, there is no such thing as discrete points of time. They are infinite. We can estimate the volume of a tank of water with a few pieces of information, such as the rate at which the water enters the tank, but it comes down to estimating a continuous function, which is really, an infinite series of points of time. Not really points at all.
Motion cannot exist from discrete points of time. A million single snapshots of movement cannot reflect velocity unless you know how far apart those snapshots are taken. In other words, all movement takes place between those sampled points. That space between what we see and measure is where reality takes place. And that function to infinity is what Newton (and earlier, Liebniz) invented to help us measure what cannot actually be measured in discrete points.
So "now" as a single point of time is just a mental and measurement function. To perceive time directly there is no such thing as past, present and future.
Posted by: Spencer Tepper | July 23, 2017 at 11:46 AM