The Phrase Beginner’s mind is a phrase coined by Shunryu Suzuki or as most call him Suzuki-Roshi, a Zen master who ran a Zen temple in San Francisco in the 1960′s among other things. But what exactly is beginner’s mind? I wrote about this in my first post on this blog but I want to explore it a bit more. Beginner’s mind is a mind free of judgments, free of preconceptions. The mind of a child so to speak, open to anything. With a beginner’s mind we can see what truly is, not only what we expect.
This is key in just about anything we do. Only by letting go of our preconceptions can we see what is out there.
Preconceptions are everywhere. We expect things to happen a certain way and eventually we get stuck in this. Not stuck in the way I wrote about in my last post, but really stuck. Th kind of stuck you have when you’re dragging along, waiting for relief (the end of a shift perhaps). I know it’s hard to be surprised when you grab your mouse and the cursor moves on the screen. But what would a child do? Look with amazement at the cursor and perhaps try and grab it. That’s beginner’s mind at work right there. We “non-beginners” only act amazed if the mouse is not working. We have the preconception that the cursor should move, but it doesn’t. Amazement (and perhaps irritation) step in as something new unfolds before our very eyes.
We take a lot of things for granted in our daily lives and because of this we get bored or depressed. Drop the judgement and the preconceptions and look again. Life is fantastic! If only you let it and truly see what is in front of you. I promise you: you’ll never be bored again.
I would like to close with these two quotes from Susuki-Roshi, give them some thought.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
“As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.”
Written by Christiaan
Topics: Zen your Mind