Beginner's mind is the bridge under the tightrope

Japanese Zen master Suzuki Roshi said that “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few".

Beginner’s mind is a non-judgmental mind. It has openness to the present experience. Once we think we know, we project our mental model to the experience e.g. this must be my friend’s car since I was expecting her to arrive at this time or this moment of meditation must be like this which I experienced in my meditation yesterday. Once there is a mental model involved, the mind gets involved in comparisons. The mind compares the present experience to the mental model it is projecting and is not non-judgmental. The Judgmental mind carries suffering. Suffering here is a form of inner tightness which resists the present experience. The tightness can come in many ways.?

• From being busy in computing the mental model appropriate for this moment,?
• From anticipating which future moment will match the mental model,?
• From the effort involved in distorting the experience to match the mental model??
• From the disappointment that mental model was not accurate
• From the effort involved in computing a new mental model which would match

If there is no mental model i.e. there is beginners mind, none of these scenarios appear. At the same time, mental models are necessary and beneficial for us to live, transact, interact and just go about our lives. And the suffering and tightness involved in this process is necessary for the same reasons. In fact, suffering gives us motivation to act. Anil Seth presents a convincing case in “Being You” that the traditional model of us taking in sensory data to figure out what is happening in front of us is wrong. We project our mental models on to the world and then correct those models based on sensory data. For example, we may think that the car belongs to our friend only to realize that the color or shape or make is different and our friend has not yet arrived.?We can't survive without mental models.

If mental models are essential and are beneficial for us to live then why have a beginner's mind? It is to experience how it would feel when there is no suffering or when suffering has reduced significantly. In other words, it enables us to know the potential to be truly happy and content.?That noticing inner experience also gives us a handle of what's really happening inside or just what's really happening.

Mindfulness takes practice and can be hard to get used to initially precisely because mental models are so useful and they enable two primary survival mechanisms of wanting and pushing away. When a certain unpleasant experience appears e.g. an itch or pain or pressure, we would like to avoid it. Even when a neutral experience like a thought or thought storm appears, if our mental models say that meditation is about stopping all thoughts then we would hate our process of thinking and try to push it away. In the same way, if we like an experience, we add tightness to hold on to it.?In reality, we can't push or hold on to the present moment because there is no present moment.

Attention to breath is one of the most prescribed ways to increase awareness. After all, that is what Buddha mentioned first in the famous text related to meditation called the Satipatthana Sutta. Keep in mind that right after that he talked about ten other meditation objects including feelings, sensations, mental objects but somehow breath gained special status especially in the west. Part of the argument is that it is a rare bodily phenomenon which happens by itself but can also be controlled for a certain amount of time.?

To each his own and my experience is that pleasant sensations of loving-kindness are a much easier base of meditation. Regardless, it is not awareness of bodily phenomenon that matters, the deeper insights come from awareness of awareness itself. That’s when you know that you are not who you think you were. The best way to know something new is to be open and not project. That can happen by noticing the process of projection, in fact noticing whatever is in the way e.g. wanting, resisting, thinking, worrying etc.

The practice of coming back to beginner's mind by noticing what's in the way serves as a bridge under the tightrope. You know that you are not going to fall in the body of water infested with alligators. And the tightrope is just a few inches above the safe surface.