Last preached on January 20th, 2013
Meditative Reading
But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope? So much is in bud.
How can desire fail? We have only begun to imagine justice and mercy.
Only begun to envision how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.
Surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot drag, in the silt, all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet—there is much broken that must be mended, too much hurt that we have done to each other that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding hat must complete its gesture, so much is in bud. – Denise Levertov
Sermon “Beginner’s Mind” Rev. David Pyle
Unitarian Universalist Minister
and Soto Zen Priest James Ishmael Ford
tells of the three most common reactions
that people have to beginning a study
of Zen Buddhism and Zazen meditation.
These three reactions come from
being told to let go of conscious thought,
to focus your awareness upon your breath,
upon counting, and upon the experience of the moment.
The most common reaction of a beginner,
as they first sit down on the cushion
after some basic instruction in meditation runs a little like this:
“I’m horrible at this! I can’t focus. What am I doing here?
What made me think that I could sit meditation,
could study this ancient tradition?
Is everyone staring at me?
I think the Zen teacher is getting mad at me.
Oh, and I’m not even counting, am I?
The second most common reaction,
and indeed the one that I had
the first time I sat down on a Zen cushion
and was told to let go of my thoughts, goes a bit like this:
“I am Great at this! Wow, I’m a meditating fool.
I’ve been doing this just a few minutes
and already I’m as good as they are.
I bet my posture is perfect!
Enlightenment, here I come!”
However, James Ford has identified a third reaction,
one it probably took someone who was
both a Unitarian Universalist Minister
and a Zen Priest to recognize was happening.
James calls it “The Unitarian Option”. It goes a little like this:
“But what if it’s a good thought?
I don’t want to let it go if it’s a good thought.
It could be the kind of thought that could save the world!
I only agreed to try this meditation thing
so that I could think really good thoughts.
I know, next time I come to this meditation thing,
I will bring a pad of paper and a pen,
and if I think of a really good thought
I will just write it down before I let it go…
James says he confiscates pens and pads of paper
when they appear in his Zendo…
We Unitarian Universalists tend to be very Knowing people.
We tend to be people who know a lot of things.
I apply this as much to myself as I do anyone else…
I think this aspect of our faith tradition that knows things
is part of what attracted me
to Unitarian Universalism in the first place.
We name that there are some ultimate questions
that no one can ever fully know the answer to…
questions like what happens after we die,
or if there is a God and if so what is that God like?
We leave some of these questions open,
Or at least we claim we leave those questions open in public,
but about everything else we know
that we can always find someone who knows the answer.
A little over a decade ago, PEW research put out a study
of all the major religious traditions,
of what characterized each of them.
Which tradition was the largest,
which tradition was the wealthiest,
which tradition was the most rural.
It ranked American religious traditions
based upon a variety of demographic categories
on a percentage basis.
Unitarian Universalism ranked first in only one category.
No, we were not the wealthiest, and we were not the poorest.
We were neither the most urban nor the most rural.
Though we were majority Caucasian,
we were not even the most racially segregated
among the religious denominations of today.
What we were, according to this Pew Research Study,
was the most highly educated religious denomination in America.
We were the denomination with the most college graduates,
and with the most post-graduate degrees.
I remember looking at the membership list
of the first Unitarian Universalist Church
I served as a minster one day,
and after counting the number
of PHD’s and MD’s in the congregation,
I remember having a moment of crisis that I,
having just begun my study for my Master’s of Divinity,
was expected to get up and speak
to this highly educated congregation week after week.
I got over my reticence…
Admit it, we’re kinda proud of what that study found, right?
We’re kinda proud that the religious tradition we choose
is one that is chosen often by those with advanced educations.
We’re kinda proud that most Unitarian Universalist congregations
are located near to centers of academia or the study of science.
There is an old joke among UU Ministers,
that if you are lost looking for the church
you are going to guest preach at on a Sunday morning,
just drive to the closest University or Laboratory and look around.
You’re bound to find the Unitarian Universalist Church
in no time at all.
I remember a moment of pride like that for me.
I was a hospice chaplain,
and I was visiting with a Jewish family
whose patriarch had just passed away.
Our Jewish chaplain was away on vacation,
and it was my turn to cover.
After spending a few hours with the family,
the Jewish doctor that had been with the patient and I
were sitting in the dining room drinking coffee
while the family sat Shiva upstairs.
After some small talk, the Jewish doctor asked me
“So, you’re not too bad for a Christian.
You were great with the family. What denomination are you?”
I told him I was studying to become a Unitarian minister,
and he smiled real big. He took my hand and said,
“I knew it had to be something like that.
Unitarianism is the only other religion I would ever be.
A thinking man’s religion!”
Our society celebrates the expert.
It almost does not matter what you are the expert at,
so long as you are the expert at something.
So long as there is something that you know,
or can do, or can show that is better than anyone else.
I remember that at the University I attended,
there were many experts in our liberal arts college,
but there was one that stood out for me.
He was the world expert in the history of the Army Mule.
He annually produced a calendar with photos of him
posing with the 12 best mules he had selected
from around the world.
Our society celebrates expertise.
This is not a negative thing! Our world needs expertise.
We need the people who are the best Chemists,
who are experts at studying the thought of Emmanuel Kant,
or who know more about the development
of Zen in America than anyone else.
We need such experts, because no human being can study
and understand and explore everything in complete fullness.
In essence, we need to divide up the labor of “knowing”.
And yet, within such expertise lies a trap.
Within our status as a highly educated denomination lies a trap.
Within our image of ourselves, sometimes stated
and sometimes not, as “The Church of the Academy”
lies a trap. Within “knowing” lies a trap.
There is a concept that lies at the very heart
of Zen Buddhism that is hard to express.
It is sometimes called “not-knowing”.
Dogen-zenji, the founder of Zen in Japan
called it either “pure mind” or “original mind”.
Shunryu Suzuki, one of the first Zen teachers
to transfer Zen from Japan to the United States
framed it as “Beginner’s Mind”.
To show a little of my own expertise,
I believe this concept of Beginner’s Mind
finds an analogue in Western thought to the idea
proposed by John Rawls in his book “A Theory of Justice”
as “The imitrex no prescription needed Veil of Ignorance”…
and I think it captures some of the meaning
that Jesus of Nazareth was trying to express,
when he told his disciples that unless they were like children,
they would not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Beginner’s mind is the stance
of encountering something for the first time,
without any prior experience, knowledge, or forethought
to shade or change the authentic experience of the moment.
It is the moment that happens naturally
only rarely past our early childhood,
when we encounter something in our lives
for which nothing has prepared us,
for which we have no knowledge,
and which we can then encounter
with a completely open awareness and unformed perceptions.
One teacher framed Beginner’s Mind for me
as giving up on knowing Zen, and just allowing myself to be Zen.
In my experience,
Zen teachers often say annoying things like that.
Shunyru Suzuki claimed that this concept of Beginner’s Mind
was the core of Zen practice…
that all else arose from being able to encounter each experience,
each moment without pre-conception, prejudice, and knowledge.
Resting in this idea is that all of our knowledge
often gets in the way of encountering the world
and each moment in the fullness of what they truly are.
Now, I am not a Zen Buddhist, and I think it was my reaction
to this privileging of Beginner’s Mind
that began me moving away from focusing on Zen
as my primary spiritual path.
You see, I’m not ready to give up on knowing,
to let go of all of the pre-conceptions and knowledge
that we gain through our lives, through our studies,
and through our expertise.
To me, letting go of expert mind completely
is just as much a trap as not embodying beginner’s mind.
There is a story I have heard floating
around Zen communities for several years.
For all I know it could be completely made up,
but it captures my reticence to fully embrace
the concept of the primacy of Beginner’s Mind.
There once was a Zen school who wanted to do some outreach,
some evangelism into the community.
So, they contacted a local television news outlet
and invited them to come and interview
some of the students about the Zen Center
and about Zen practice.
When the story was aired, however,
it contained one of the students, a beginning student of Zen,
saying that “at the Zen Center, we learn how not to think,
and how not to know anything”.
The trap I see in focusing primarily on trying to capture
authentic experience through a practice of Beginner’s Mind
is that it leaves so much of what makes humanity
what we have become out of the equation.
Human civilization, science, literature and learning
are built upon what has come before,
and without each individual having perfect knowledge
and perfect recall of all things,
we could never hope to encounter
all that there is anew at all times.
If we are always beginning,
we are limited not only by the experience of the moment
but also by the loss of the past
and by the absence of our visions of the future.
Yet the trap that Shunyru Suzuki outlines
for the expert is just as valid.
“In the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities,
in the mind of the expert there are few.”
Much of human creativity finds its link
to the mind of the beginner…
to that authentic experience of each moment.
The more we “know”, the more we limit our possibilities.
The more we know, the less we are able to learn.
There is an old adage, probably as old as academia itself.
The first step to learning is admitting you do not already know.
Now, I’m the minister… right?
I’m supposed to be the subject matter expert
when it comes to such existential questions as this.
I’m the one who went to school and studied
in order to be able to at least guide people
to finding their own answers…
and I’m supposed to have a few of those answers myself.
I doubt even a UU congregation would let me
keep a pulpit very long if all I ever did was step into the pulpit
and tell you what I did not know.
Just as I doubt a UU congregation would let me
keep a pulpit very long if I always stepped into the pulpit
and always seemed to know everything… right?
Earlier in this sermon, I made an off-hand reference
to an idea by an American political philosopher
named John Rawls, which he called “The Veil of Ignorance”.
It was a thought-experiment that Rawls used
to try and determine the morality of an issue,
in the case of the experiment in his book “A Theory of Justice”
it was used to determine the morality of slavery in America.
The theory of “the Veil of Ignorance” was controversial
when he wrote the book, and it remains so today.
At its core, the veil of ignorance means
to try and remove yourself, the thinker,
from all of your own prejudices,
all of your own foreknowledge and pre-conceptions,
all of your own social standing and place in human society…
and then consider the issue as dispassionately as possible
to determine its morality.
So, a white southerner,
in order to get behind the veil of ignorance,
had to let go of the knowledge and pre-conceptions
of being a white southerner,
and then consider the morality of slavery.
The same would be true of a Black Northerner.
Only behind the veil of ignorance
could the morality of an issue be truly encountered,
according to Rawls.
Now, you can guess what the most common critique
of Rawls’ theory was, can’t you?
That removing all of the influences
that have created one’s “self”… our place in society,
our experiences in life, our prejudices and pre-conceptions…
removing all of those is flat out impossible…
and that pretending we can is a delusion.
The critique is that the veil of ignorance could never work,
because you can never get behind the veil in the first place.
While there are other critiques of Rawls’ theory,
the most common one is that it is flat out impossible.
But just because something is impossible to do perfectly,
does that mean we should never try?
I see a connection between Rawls’ theory
of the Veil of Ignorance,
and the Zen Buddhist concept of Beginner’s Mind.
What I see in each of them,
and perhaps also in Jesus’ admonition to his disciples
to be more like the children that were gathered around his feet,
is the importance of trying to encounter moments
with the attitude of a beginner… while not losing all of the
knowledge and expertise that make up who we are,
who we have been, and who we are becoming.
There is an idea I keep coming back to in my own life
and religious practice, and that is the idea
of having many different lenses to see through
and encounter life through…
and I wonder if both Beginner’s mind and Expert’s mind
are just two of these lenses.
If in order to encounter the fullness in each moment,
I need to be able to experience that moment, or that person
in more than one way at the same time.
Tomorrow our nation remembers Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,
and we once again have the chance to look at ourselves,
and the racial and cultural prejudices
that exist within our society…
we once again have the chance to look
at our own relationship to all the things
we think we “know” about other people.
That’s really what pre-conceptions and prejudice is…
it is things we think we know. It is a form of expertise.
The power of seeking to experience the world
through both the Beginner’s Mind Lens
and the Expert Mind Lens is that one allows you
to challenge the other.
Expert Mind allows me to bring all
of our past experience to each moment.
Beginner’s Mind allows us to allow the moment itself to teach us.
Beginner’s mind allows us to challenge our prejudices,
no matter what they are for we all have some,
and to allow us to be regularly open to transformation.
And that, I believe, is the beginning of the answer,
on both a personal and a societal level,
to the crisis of the human soul that Dr. King gave his life for.
I don’t know… and I think I know.
So may it be, blessed be, and amen.