Mr. Smarty Pants

This blog comes from two sources - let’s see if I can bring them together. The first was a trip to Avebury that Philippa and I made a couple of days ago and the second was one of our book groups where the issue of ‘not knowing’ was talked about.

OK. So when we were walking around the stones at Avebury I asked P. if I had ever told her about an entire night I had spent there when I was in my twenties. She (kindly) said no. The story goes that I and a group of friends believed that Avebury was one of the chakras that was positioned along the spine of Albion - the sacred land we now call the UK. On a particularly auspicious night, astrologically determined, the kundalini energy that was resting dormant at her base would awake and unfold, rushing upwards through each of the sacred circles until it reached Albion’s brow at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides (or was it Brodgar in the Orkneys?). Each of us was to be present within our own ring when this happened sometime in the very early hours of the morning, and having been there, write about our experience and collate these into a small booklet.

Now here comes the punch line of the story. I wrote a very self-consciously ‘Zen’ piece about how nothing happened at all. I lifted my experience of being tired and damp in my sleeping bag as I huddled uncomfortably against a stone and presented it as something very cool and quietly knowing. You see, I knew that the others would write a lot of very far out stuff, letting their imaginations take full reign, and I did not want to be like them. I wanted to be special in my not knowing. And of course what I didn’t realise was that by doing so I was simply demonstrating my own narcissism.

Now we jump forward to the present. I don’t think all those years back I had heard of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s concept of ‘beginner’s mind’ - the mind that is still fresh and open and is not clouded with the knowing of an expert. However, when I did hear it, I was really struck by it - perhaps because being a person who uses knowing as a defence, it spoke a truth I needed to hear. And it still resonates with me - I chose to call our small group the Beginner’s Mind Sangha.

So where is this going? Recently I realised just how sneaky our (my) minds can be. In the same way I took my miserable experience at Avebury and faked the simplicity and the ordinariness of authentic Zen, so it is possible to take the innocence of having a ‘beginner’s mind’ and covertly subvert it into exactly its opposite. While presenting myself as one who does not know, and furthermore, one who knows all about why ‘not knowing’ is of value, what is actually going on in the background, behind the facade, is just more of the same old making oneself special - and impenetrable - by more covert, hidden knowing. Knowing about not knowing.

So where to next? Fortunately one of our group owned up to being an irrepressible ‘fiddler’ with her state of mind. This caught my attention. When I sit, supposedly resting in a ‘doing nothing’ meditation, I am constantly fiddling with it so that I am doing nothing better! Furthermore, over all the years I have been doing this, what I have realised is that the ‘fiddling’ just gets subtler and subtler - I think I’m not doing it but actually I am. This experience of consistent failure is an authentic experience of not knowing. I say this because the felt-sense of this feels open, oddly it is actually spacious quite in contrast to the contracted felt-sense I have when I am identifying myself as a ‘not knower’. It’s like it takes an authentic failure to actually puncture a hole in my narcissistic self to get to something real…

However there is one last twist that just comes to me. Elizabeth Bennet’s father in Pride and Prejudice, when he discovers he has been secretly rescued from social disgrace by Mr. Darcy, says that he is thoroughly ashamed of himself, he then adds with a great degree of personal honestly, that he is also sure that it will only last a day or so. Similarly, my discovery of how not knowing is quickly colonised by the self-cherishing ego will itself be colonised by yet another layer of defensive knowing in the flick of an eye.

NW. With thanks to all those who manifest as my guru.