A beginner’s mind

Kinfonet Discussion
238

As I said in the original post, Krishnamurti did not use this phrase - it is a translation of a Japanese word which means to look at things anew, with the quality of someone who is just beginning to learn something. I don’t think it is a very difficult phrase to understand at the level of intellectual explanation.

However, to actually have the quality of fresh perception is something we often neglect or disvalue. Partly we do this because we think we already know things. It is also because we do not always listen to what other people are saying. Or we do not spend time to look at things outwardly, perceive with our senses afresh.

We have been trying to look at some of these aspects on the thread.

K has also talked about this a lot, so we have shared some extracts and videos of him talking about these things.

239

Again, James, it’s wrong to call a mind a beginner’s mind! Mind is spirit, you don’t know what you’re talking about!

240

Mind is spirit? Is this what you are saying Krishnamurti taught? Maybe I have misunderstood you. K never said mind is spirit.

A beginner’s mind means a mind, an attitude, an approach which is open to learning afresh. K talked about the importance of seeing afresh, learning without accumulating. He distinguished this attitude from the approach of someone who thinks they know, who thinks they are an expert.

To be entangled in conclusions, in opinions, in past experience - all this stops us from having this quality of being a beginner, a learner.

If you are not being prejudiced, then I think you can see the importance of this. To object to words merely because they are unfamiliar to you is a little unnecessary, isn’t it?

241

James, you keep repeating what anyone familiar with Krishnamurti’s writings or videos knows! You don’t have to say it over and over again, it doesn’t make you right. I wanted to say what I did because it’s my responsibility to see that I have signed in, I’m reading the last posts of the thread and the way it all looks is rather upsetting… once again.

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242

I have been responding to your rather prejudicial rejection of the topic on the grounds that you don’t like the phrase “a beginner’s mind” because “mind” for you is “spirit”. Which means that you seem to both reject the topic on the grounds that K didn’t use the phrase, as well as on the grounds that by “mind” you mean something that K never talked about!

It is little wonder you get upset all the time if this is your approach.

243

My approach as you call it is what I said and not your distortion of it. Also I said the last posts that I read all looked very upsetting. Mind is in the realm of spirit, yes, in French they translate mind as spirit. It isn’t something to play around with!

244

Are you saying that when we translate from French this is ok, but when we translate from Japanese it’s not ok?

I do not feel you are being very consistent here.

245

James, I was talking about the mind as something not to play around with, it’s something in the realm of the spirit! I know the French translate mind as spirit, that is all, it isn’t a matter of consistency. If you want, you can tell us, if you know, what is the Japanese translation for mind, why not?

246

As far as I understand, there are many different words for mind in Japanese, each of which conveys different aspects of mind, mentality, thought, intention, emotion, intelligence, etc (just as in other languages).

The English phrase ‘beginner’s mind’ is a translation of the Japanese word shoshin, where sho (Japanese: 初), means “beginner” or “initial”, and shin (Japanese: 心), means “mind”. Shin can also mean “heart”.

247

I appreciate your effort to clarify the whole matter, yet you have adopted a wrong way of proceeding. In all your examinations of our dialogue you isolated single sentences and responded to them skipping the essence, the core of what I have been saying. In this way you keep on misunderstanding those single sentences which have sense only if seen and connected to the whole. In short, you are not seeing things holistically. As long as you continue to proceed this way, all my efforts to dissipate your confusion are useless.
Stay with that confusion, don’t resist it, let it flower, let it tell you the whole story.

248

Hello James and all. As I wrote last night, many thanks for posting this very interesting video.

According to K, what we perhaps are not used to doing is observing anything at all with intensity. The moon and jealousy seem to be good examples. In my experience, an observation of a tree, a cloud or a mountain with my mind silent only lasts for a short time. Is it that we never look inwardly or outwardly with a certain intensity that observations with a silent mind are so brief? There seems to be something very important here. What do the rest of you make of this?

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249

Hello Jess. Personally, I thought “A Beginner’s Mind” was a nice way to convey the idea of a mind looking at things afresh, without knowledge. They are just words so the important thing is surely to enter into the spirit of what is being discussed, if we’re sufficiently interested.

I see that others have used the term “Beginner’s Mind”. For example:

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a book of teachings by Shunryu Suzuki, a compilation of talks given to his satellite Zen center in Los Altos, California.

I haven’t read this book and I’m not saying this makes it right, just that it may be a way of expressing the idea of coming at things with a fresh, innocent approach.

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250

Voyager, by picking out elements of what you have said I have been attempting to understand your point of view. Are you saying that the core of what you have to say is everything you have said? And if I haven’t grasped it then it’s my problem? I feel you are asking me to have superhuman powers of concentration and attention just to be able to grasp one thing you are saying.

It is a fact that you write in a profuse way. This is a gift. You are able to draw a dozen or so strands into a single paragraph, and touch on manifold aspects of a problem. But this same rich profusion also inclines you to make statements that are - for the outside reader - sometimes unclear, confusing.

This is why I asked you - not out of rudeness - what your essential (current) interest or concern is. Not to tell you to “go to hell”. But rather to get a sense of where your heart is, to help me assess which parts of what you have said to give primary attention to.

But you said you had no core concern or interest. And now, it seems, you also lack patience to clear up this misunderstanding between us, putting the onus on me to read all your posts again to see where I am confused (and to stay with that confusion!).

I don’t feel this is fair, kind hearted, or generous. I still don’t understand why - if you don’t have any core interest of your own - you could not have gone along with the proposed first step of looking inwards, exploring this first step as though it was a first step? Would this have been so hard?

It’s a shame, because this looking at the first step is the topic of the thread and I feel you could have contributed greatly to this question. And instead we have become embroiled in arguments concerning secondary issues, which clearly neither of us really wanted to happen.

Anyway, I have done my best to understand you. If this is the only thing you had to write to me, I wish you the best :pray:

251

One of the things he says in his book (which is relevant here) is

“in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

252

Hello, Sean!
Personally, I wouldn’t take a thread called a beginner’s mind, but, as I said before, I also understood that those who took it didn’t mind the words, no problem with being condescending! I am familiar with zen practice, have done my bit, and you must know that there are very different schools there, nothing to deal with here. I’m sure you can see the difference between saying ‘a beginner’s mind’ and ‘an innocent mind’!!!.. And you can’t practise innocence, can you??

253

Hello, James!
Thanks for your information on the meaning of ‘shin’. I can write Japanese calligraphy which I love and am familiar with some Japanese words, so I’m sensitive to the different meanings the same word may have. So, after all, I guess you meant Krishnamurti spoke of ‘shin’ but not of ‘spirit’… He definitely spoke of mind, let us stay with that!!

254

Hi Jess, thanks for the reply. Was I being condescending? That certainly wasn’t my intention. I understand that we have differences in our reactions to words and language but my point was that the important thing is that we can enter into the spirit of what is being discussed, despite the title of a thread. Anyway, hope you have a good day and sorry if I offended you in any way.

255

Thank you, Sean! Have a good day, too!

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256

I think this is probably where the misunderstanding is.

I have been trying to get a sense of where our communication went so unfortunately off the rails, for which I am - for my part - very sorry.

If you recall, you talked about how ego sabotages all investigation. Then I asked you if this is what you wanted to discuss. And then later, in your eventual reply to me, you said that you didn’t have anything in particular that you wanted to discuss - and that essentially you agreed with my starting point “looking at the inner”, that it is the first and potentially last step, but that, nevertheless, this approach didn’t satisfy you.

What do you feel?

257

More or less… in some posts of mine, where I try to explain my point of you, you can notice two different parts of the speech. The first (which maybe not in chronological order) is the enunciation of my point of view, of my general approach to K and to the theme in discussion, and the second is some few example of what I mean. You only focused on the second part, skipping the first. It does not require superhuman powers to see this.

This is the essential part of my explanation. Don’t rush to read what follows, don’t react immediatly to what I said ("yes, but…), just listen to these few sentences. Slow down, make a pause, let that enter into your consciousness.

I’m not saying that my enunciation is right. Of course it can be wrong. But you cannot discover if it’s right or wrong if you don’t consider it. In all your replies to me there are some empty spaces, things you have skipped, things you have not taken into consideration. The core of my point of view lies in those things you have skipped.

Then we have the examples. Those have a secondary importance, they may be or appear wrong to you, I might have chosen something not exactly pertinent, even if they may appear pertinent to me. So in focusing only on them you are bound to conclude that I am wrong. And by the way, I may have introduced too many secondary issues, but the essential part is always the same and consists of very few words. Sometimes so few that you didn’t grasp their meaning. One example of this is “it doesn’t end there”.

Now, there are also side issues, things in your replies which show your lack of global understanding. In your long replies I see too many of those side issues which would need to be addressed. I chose not to do it because the result would be and endless and vain back and forth. Therefore I said that your replies didn’t have sense to me.

Now, let’s try again and consider only one of your replies, It can and will lead us to put the essence in first position and so discover what is that I wanted to say.

One of the “other” factors which I mentioned connected with the outer/inner observation, was love. You replied that you had already considered that aspect before in the thread. (You said more things but I am simplifying). Good that you had considered it before, it’s just what I wanted to say. But don’t you see that in saying that you are confirming my thesis that things don’t end there?

So what is the essence of my point of view about your thread?
Actually I have already explained it several times and you never responded to that but only to side issues.
The essence is that, 1) all you said about observation, the first step, etc, is true and I have agreed with it for 13 times or posts (see my list in my previous post). Nevertheless you were fixed with the idea that I was objecting to it.

  1. That said, that granted, that experimented, in my 14th post I introduced the point of view of someone who has done that first step. Someone who has navigated for a while in that sea. When you are sailing for pleasure, there is no destination, and the first step - starting the journey - is the last step, because the journey itself is the goal, there is no other goal than sailing. So the moment you are sailing you have done the last step to be there. And in sailing - it’s obvious - you discover that things don’t end there, there are many things you encounter and have to tackle, many waypoints where you have to change your course or adjust it. K has spoken for more than 50 years about those viewpoints and all the things involved in the inner exploration. This is one of the points that you seem to ignore, why?

I have also told you that in debating or enunciating those things in this forum, it’s inevitable to see those factor linearly, that is, a sequence of words, concepts, etc. What we are doing is dividing K teachings into fragments and putting those fragments in a line, one after the other. In my view things don’t work that way. It’s fine to start observing but unless we have a “circular” view of all the connected problems our observation will be fragmented as well.

One small example of this fragmented observation is your impass in understanding my description of what I experimented in meditation, the content of thoughts. What you had in mind was the content of consciousness, but you could not see and so understand what the content of thoughts was. Something which is there most of the times. And IMO this is due to your choice of focus only on emotions, or reactions. I.e., you chose what to observe! Got it now? Yours was not a choiceless observation because you had decided, planned that the only important thing was to observe emotions. While if you let the observation free, without choosing the object of observation, or without sticking to one thing only, you will be aware of whatever passes in your mind. Is it clear now?

And now please forgive me but I have to go to lunch.