Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
1. Zen Mind: Beginner’s Mind is a concept and a practice that we find in Zen Buddhism; some argue that it is the essence of Zen itself. We can sum up this concept with this quote from Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” It is the explicit practice of Zen to maintain the beginner’s mind throughout life. The Beginner’s mind is characterized by: openness, an attention to the body and continual renunciation of the ego.
2. Small-Mind: The expert, or professor, has meticulously developed small-mind as a means to stifle imagination. We can think of it like this: small-mind is a self-sufficient and limited world built in order to make sense of radical flux. It is the professor’s job to study this world, to make decisions upon it, to define it. The more certain the professor is of this world, the more hallucinatory it becomes. It is a cruel fate that in the process of deciding upon this world, he makes for himself a zone of exclusion that closes off all possibility; soon he is the professor only of his own ego.
3. Universal Resident: Meanwhile the beginner’s mind is confronted daily with what Zen refers to as vast-mind. The beginner’s mind, cast up on this sea of consciousness, must be willfully naïve, non-dogmatic, ecumenical and open; Beginner’s Mind resides not in any individual world, but lives rather in the universe. Whereas a world is composed entirely of human discourse, the universe cannot be bound by any such material. Though the beginner’s mind may pass through these variously constructed worlds (worlds such as: Capitalism, Christianity, Patriarchy, Anthropology, Human Supremacy) it does not belong to them.
4. Oceanic Feeling: It is the claim here at Spacewhy that Beginner‘s mind indicates a capacity that is possessed by any given human; this a mystical capacity. The philosopher Catherine Malabou has described this capacity as brain plasticity. Psychoanalysis refers to it as Oceanic Feeling (note 1) Oceanic Feeling, or beginner’s mind, is a kind of brain-state that can be accessed by a variety of means. Young children live exclusively in this brain-state. In adulthood beginner’s mind can be activated by meditation itself (traditional Zen and otherwise) or by yoga, running, mountain-climbing, fasting, sleep deprivation and near-death experiences.
5. Planet X: likewise one can achieve the beginner’s mind through the epiphanies of Mycelium Teleology. Indeed, it should be here noted that beginner’s mind is the necessary component in understanding and acceptance of the premises of Mycelium Teleology (note 2). In short, what is necessary is ego dissolution. This dissolution is of two kinds:
Dissolving your own ego. The ego is necessary to survive on Planet X. And yet the ego breakdown caused by the eucharist of Mycelium Teleology is followed immediately thereupon by an ego reconstruction. It is in this moment of radical beginner’s mind when the subject is able to forge a new ego. This is why psychedelics is able to rewrite addiction, depression, and PTSD.
Dissolving the world-ego: the world—or worlds—as we have seen, is a social construction; this world is not the planet. The environmental collapse caused by metabolic rift ensures that this world-ego is terminal. We may describe the social upheaval that we see today as this dissolution of world-ego in action. This is the ongoing collision of what we have referred to elsewhere as Planet X. Planet X forces beginner’s mind upon the world sooner or later; it may do so violently. What new world will come about in that process? We do not know; but it is the power of the human capacity of beginner’s mind that we may yet still have a hand in its making.
note 1:) heretofore psychoanalysis has been resistant to grapple with the full implications of Oceanic Feeling: more on this soon.
note 2:) The expert’s mind, certain as it is of the empirical sciences and the episteme of human supremacy, must necessarily be unable to comprehend Mycelium Teleology. And yet beginner’s mind is always already a capacity that the expert/professor may still access, difficult though that may be.
