Wonder

Human beings pretend we know. “I know what’s better for my mother, if she just did blah, blah, blah, she would be so much…I know what’s better for my son, I know what’s better for my co-worker. I know this, I know that.” When we think we know, we immediately invest in it. We identify with it. And so what’s interesting about that is as soon as we do that, we close a bunch of doors. We lose our openness. And deep down inside each of us knows we have no idea what’s going on. We don’t know. We don’t know why we’re occupying this body, we don’t know when we’re born where we came from, we don’t know why we’re on this planet. We don’t know. And nobody knows. So what we do, very interestingly, is we pretend we know. And some people take it quite vigorously. They take on a set of beliefs and they’re ready to fight over them or kill over them or abuse other people over them, and that reinforces it.

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So in fact, by allowing the question, we’re allowing the doors to open. The question isn’t, “I need to figure this out.” The question is actually here: What am I? What is this? What is true nature? And in so doing, we’re opening ourselves up. Zen practice itself is actually a self-actualizing practice. It’s not dependent on anything else. It’s up to each one of us to self-actualize. If deep down inside we don’t know, then really the self-actualization is becoming completely comfortable with not knowing. That’s what human beings are. Human beings need to be comfortable with not knowing.

So, in Zen practice the question is given priority because most of us suffer this disease of pretending we know the answer. So we—[sighs with relief] ahhhhhh—don’t know. It’s actually a quality of wonder. Ahhhhh. And that quality of wonder is very opening.