This essay by Eleanor Rosch on beginner’s mind is fantastic. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people in the field of cognitive psychology lament about how Rosch went from doing all this fabulous (and extremely well-known) work on concepts and categories in the 70′s to this “crazy Buddhist stuff.” It’s a terrible, terrible shame that so many scientists are so unwilling to even consider things that don’t fit their existing models of how the mind works, as she says herself in her introduction:

“The beginner’s mind claim, ordinary yet radical, is that we already have … basic wisdom … Thus people do not need to acquire more information, more logic, more ego, and more skills to make them wise. What they need is to unlearn what they have accumulated that veils them from that wisdom. When they do this, it is believed, they find not only what they themselves really are already but what the world actually is, and, from that vantage point, they can live a good life.

The psychological picture that corresponds to beginner’s mind (which I will also call “inner path”) teachings is of different levels of mind (or modes of functioning or ways of knowing). On the surface is the mind of ordinary concepts, emotions, desires, fears, even boredom – the mind with which everyone is familiar. Below that is the mind that is more in contact with basic wisdom and better able to see and act from it. This point may be clarified, hopefully, by a computer analogy. Imagine the ordinary surface mode of knowing as a particular computer program running on a more basic operating system. In daily life (and in psychology and cognitive science — and wisdom studies?) researchers mistake the limited surface program for the whole system. The research community keeps trying to study how the system works, but all it can see is the functioning of the program in which it, as well as the people it is studying, are confined. Every attempt to see beyond or get out of the program, either in science or religion or scholarship, is frustrated because to try to get out, one is only using the operations of the program itself. The situation would be hopeless, except that it is the operating system that supports and defines the program in the first place and the operating system that offers the escape keys that allow one to return to it.

Although this is basically a claim about psychology, two religious traditions are examined as examples because it is within religions, particularly the meditative and contemplative strains in religion, that different modes of knowing and the levels of wisdom such modes might reveal have been most clearly codified and taught. Psychology and cognitive science generally take religions to be no more than cognitive beliefs about personified deities whose purpose it is to provide illusory comfort or to explain things that science can explain better. Such an approach obscures the other aspects of religions. As people pursue an inner path, their vision of religious objects changes radically; perhaps that is why inner path teachings have historically had such uneasy relations with their parent religions. If scientists and educators dismiss everything related to religion out of hand, they may miss the chance to understand aspects of the mind that no other part of society can as readily bring to our attention.”

Last summer I went to a party in Williamsburg, the kind of party where both illegal absinthe cocktails and tater tots were being served and there were random Ouija boards and 1980′s hair/makeup/accessory kits aimed at preteen girls lying around on the floor for entertainment. A guy was walking around in a gorilla suit. You know: Williamsburg. The purported theme of the event, which also included an art exhibition of some sort, had to do with epiphanies. Everyone was asked to write an epiphany on a nametag and stick it on their chest. Being the kind of person who basically lives for an opportunity to write a personal epiphany on a “my name is” sticker, I had one at the ready. It was Hell is standing in heaven with your eyes closed, or some variation on that theme. My boyfriend-at-the-time thought about it for a while and then wrote Epiphanies are hard on his. I thought this was a bit of a cop-out, and maybe it was, but more recently I’ve been thinking that this understanding that epiphanies are hard really is an epiphany in it’s own right.

I’ve been thinking about how to deal with epiphanies or insights (which we all have from time to time, including you) once they arise, and the various pitfalls I’ve experienced.

There are many different facets to the universe, and thus myriad angles on the truth and possible insights to be had. All genuine insights must be interconnected in some way, but different people have different cultural backgrounds, genetics, languages, propensities, karma, etc, that allow them to see certain things more or less clearly, and to uncover different false assumptions about the world. Like many people, I seem to have some particular insights I’ve been “working with” for quite a long time.

I’ve written about this many times, but the insight that has seemed most prominent in my life (which is not to say that it really belongs to me in any way) is that I’ve been able to see, to different degrees, from a fairly young age, that the commonly-held belief that pain and suffering are purely negative states is a mistake. Just that, that simple insight, that there is some value in suffering, that it shouldn’t always be avoided at all costs, has had an enormous impact on my life, with deep and profound implications for everything from my sex life to my religious practices.

I’m incredibly grateful for this and every other insight I’ve been fortunate enough to experience, and I’m sure that it really is true, but I’ve experienced a lot of pitfalls with this. Here are three post-epiphany mistakes I’ve made that I think apply to how epiphanies are hard in general.

1. Overreacting. This is huge, and it’s related to what’s called the zeal of the convert. Suddenly, this idea that used to seem true (e.g., suffering is bad) has been debunked, we have more room to move without the wrong idea/assumption clinging to us, a weight is lifted, we feel better, and it’s great. However, it is very easy to then swing too far in the opposite direction. Yes, it is true that suffering isn’t always bad, however, it is certainly not true that suffering is always GOOD. Running from suffering and pain is often a big mistake, but deliberately seeking out suffering and pain is just as big a mistake. A more complete understanding is that suffering is neither bad nor good. If you overreact, you just wind up just replacing one false belief with another, and soon the freshness of the insight you had is lost.

2. Overconfidence, and overgeneralizing. OMG, I had an epiphany! A real live epiphany! Therefore, I must be super brilliant and insightful and plugged into the way things really are. I probably know everything there is to know about the issues of suffering and pain and aversion and attraction and I should go out and share my vast understanding with everyone I know so that they are not lost in the same delusions I was lost in before I had this epiphany and became enlightened. Um, no. This attitude is a huge mistake. Even if you have seen something, deeply, the vastness of what your epiphany is pointing to is so far beyond anything you can conceive of that adopting a stance of having completely understood anything, even just one tiny aspect of it, is ridiculous. Thinking they already know is exactly what prevents people (including you) from having further and deeper insights. You don’t already know. Everything you think you know could open up further, or close, or shift, at any second. That is the nature of things. Be humble, and be ready for the possibility that something that seems obvious for you today might seem completely opaque again tomorrow. This has happened to me countless times, but I still find myself making the mistake of overconfidence.

3. Ownership. This issue is somewhat more subtle, and I alluded to it before. It has to do with taking on the idea that an epiphany/insight is something that belongs to you, that it’s something you didn’t have in the past, and then you had, and in the future you might lose, which would be a disaster. Because we have egos, this kind of thinking is very difficult to lighten up on. However, meditation practice can help with this. The view that epiphanies belong to us is a mistake, because it turns them into objects, or ideas, rather than something fresh and present that we can work with experientially, right now. Thinking we can attain or “lose” an insight is exactly what leads to the subjective experience of “losing” it. Insights are never attained, they are simply seen. They were always already there.

Last night I attended John Baker’s talk at the Interdependence Project on Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which Baker, a senior student of Trungpa’s, co-edited. The book, which I read during my great spiritual reading binge of 2007, is wonderful, probably right up under Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in my list of essential books on Buddhism, so I was very excited to hear Baker discuss it.

Actually, he wound up spending most of the talk telling wonderful stories about what it was like to be a close student of Trungpa Rinpoche and forthrightly answering questions from the audience about the controversial areas of Trungpa’s life (he was/is just as well-known for sleeping with many of his female students and drinking a lot of alcohol as he is for his teachings). Baker simultaneously touched on a wide range of spiritual matters, and his presence gave me a particular warm, glowy feeling I tend to get when teachers and other people with very strong spiritual practices coupled with clear understanding speak to me about these issues, which is rare and wonderful.

I had not intended to take notes, but somehow wound up doing so. I think I was the only person in the room doing so. I remember experiencing joy when I realized, in an academic context, that I did not need to slavishly record everything in order to absorb a lecture, and that I could just sit there and enjoy the talk without worrying about remembering it for an exam. But, on the other hand, I regretted not having any notes from HH the Dalai Lama’s teachings in NYC on my birthday this year, which I also enjoyed but could barely say anything about when people asked me what it was I liked. So the compromise I make, I suppose, is to take short, somewhat cryptic notes that might not evoke much for anyone but me. The following might not make much sense out of context, but represents some of the lines he spoke that resonated strongly with me. Some of this is quoted or paraphrased from Baker’s memories of Trungpa’s teachings, some from Baker himself. [Some additional later commentary is added in brackets.]

* * *

The first duty of a teacher is to be completely open with his students, to be completely who is he, which challenges to the student to fall in love.

revealing ourselves -> connection -> open society

True compassion arises from open accepting communication, open hearts, being ordinary.

Compassion is acceptance, non-judging, not being sorry for someone or pity.

Meditation practice teaches compassion by teaching us to stop judging ourselves when our minds wander, but simply to accept it and return to the present moment.

Letting be.

The whole world is my body. [Trungpa's response when a student at a public talk, during which he was drinking and smoking, admonished him for defiling his body, which is his temple.]

There is a myth of objectivity in academia. Every question someone poses is a trick, because it assumes only a certain, small set of possible answers.

The only way to gain wisdom on the path is to ask your master for it, clearly.

Crazy wisdom.

The purpose of practice is to gain freedom from our own minds, in society, with people.

Create an explosion.

Aloneness to openness.

On the path, we begin with many rules to keep us from screwing up and hurting others, but we move toward insight, responding to what IS, in each moment, with no rules needed.

Be who you are. Go home to your depressions. [Trungpa to the packed audience at the end of a poetry reading which also included Ginsberg and Bly; Baker interprets this as a warning against setting up others as great heros/artists and comparing ourselves to them, rather than being who we really are.]

Do not be afraid to be a fool.

The definition of a confused sentient being is a person lost in dreams, especially future-oriented dreams, including nightmares. WAKE UP.

Love your life.

The point of practice is to become a completely ordinary human being. Striving to be extraordinary makes us subhuman.

Sometimes pleasure and pain are hard to come by. [Trungpa's response to a question from Baker as to why he would want to fall in love again, with a woman other than his wife, when that would bring so much complication and trouble.]

Compassion is ultimately reflected as the beauty of the world, unimpeded phenomena, forms, colors.

Curiosity is a virtue of the enlightened mind.