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Not-knowing, Discovery, Gifts, and Going Forth - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 17, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Not-knowing, Discovery, Gifts, and Going Forth

Hello everyone. It is very nice to be here. Hearing about the potluck next week, I'm looking forward to coming. It is great to bring something, but don't let that keep you away. If you don't have anything, it is fine to come. It is just wonderful to be here.

I thought I would describe a sequence that can be a reference point for how to meet anything—how to be in the middle of whatever is happening. It can be used in meditation, it can be used when meditation is going to help you deal with the challenges of life, and it can be used in stepping forward from meditation into the world to find your way. Sometimes it is nice to have a sequence, a series of practices to do, because it makes it a little bit easier to know what to do in this complicated world.

Not-Knowing

It begins with the practice of not-knowing. In meditation, this means you begin by not coming with "knowing." You don't come knowing who you are, knowing what you are about, or knowing the situation. Instead, you are preparing yourself to know. We need this idea of preparing ourselves, getting ready to know something. This is not only true in meditation. With this last election that we just had, some people say that maybe now is a time for preparation for what is coming. Maybe that begins by not-knowing—not knowing what to do, what is supposed to happen, or what the situation actually is.

There is value in not-knowing because often when we come to meditation or to challenges in our life, the knowing we come with is not so helpful. Sometimes the knowing we come with brings judgments, old memories, and ideas of what is going on. We are projecting a kind of knowing onto the world and onto ourselves.

If you meet someone for the first time, the clothes they are wearing might remind you of a kind of person you think you don't want to hang out with. You are coming with a pre-existing knowing that you project onto that person based on their clothes. Instead, to do this process, you would begin by not knowing. "Who is this person? Let me not carry my old associations with me. Let me find a way to clear my eyesight and clear my hearing to find out who is this? What is this? Let me not begin by knowing; let me begin by not-knowing."

Meditation can involve relaxing. I wouldn't underestimate the tremendous value of relaxation, of calming, of settling. When we are not relaxed, calm, or settled, there is an agitation or a tension that is squeezing or pushing out some of the projections, prejudices, and preconceived ideas that we bring with us. It is like squeezing a toothpaste tube when the cap is off; it is just going to keep coming out. If you are tense, something is going to keep coming out—a compulsion to think certain ways, be certain ways, or feel certain things.

There is something about relaxing, softening, gentling, settling, and calming that stops that pushing of our ideas, prejudices, and projections of what is going on. We can come into a deep, healthy state of not projecting, not assuming, and not associating with past preoccupations. We show up fresh and new, with new eyes. I call that the practice of not-knowing.

We prepare ourselves. If it is in meditation, I don't know how long you have to prepare yourself to meditate for the next steps—that is up to you. Maybe it is a few minutes, maybe it is longer. If you do a daylong retreat, like some of us did yesterday, maybe it is the first two meditation sessions that have this flavor. If it has to do with international world affairs and you are the one who is supposed to solve them, that preparation might be much longer to really clear your mind and heart to be ready to do the next step.

Discovery

The next step is to discover. This is the place where you get to know. Now you are here to discover what is right here. Discover something new, without the lenses of prejudice or pre-judged ideas that we tend to bring. Look carefully: what is here? What is happening? In meditation, how are you right now? What is actually going on here and now?

It is not an easy thing to stop and do because, for some of us, the mind keeps spinning. It is thinking about things, thinking about our issues, thinking about the future, fantasizing—doing something that stands in the way of really checking in with ourselves. In meditation, one of the very profound aspects is the chance to meet yourself—to really meet yourself in a deep, intimate, close way to discover what is here.

You want to find a way to meet yourself that comes out of this not-knowing but is respectful, kind, and caring for this person. We hope it would be that way in meeting someone else: that when we meet someone, we are there to be present, to respect, to be kind, and to get to know them well.

Yesterday, I talked about my experiences in life meeting people with handshakes. I once met a candidate for president many years ago. I think I was behind a little fence or something, and the candidate was walking down and shaking hands. I thought, "Oh good, I get to shake this person's hand." As soon as the person's hand touched mine, the candidate was already looking over to the next person. There was this limp hand. I thought, "Oh, what was that?" There was no contact. There was no seeing, being seen, or being recognized. It was like I was just an instrument to pass by and move on to the next person who was more important.

There can be that kind of meeting. Then there is the meeting where someone really stops and shakes your hand in a nice way, and you feel like they are really there for you. They are stopping, they are curious, and they are interested in you. You are important to them.

The equivalent for this when I was in the Zen monastery was bowing. In the monastery, there is a tremendous amount of bowing going on. Once I counted how many times I bowed from the time I woke up in the morning, which was 4:00 AM, until maybe 10:00 AM. I think I got close to a hundred bows. Every bow carries a little bit of significance. You are supposed to bow to people when they pass. You bow if you pass them in the pathway. You bow to people if they serve you meals (which they often were doing)—you would bow before and after.

So much was communicated by how you bowed. If you didn't like them or were kind of angry with them, maybe you bowed just an inch and your hands wouldn't really come together. Or sometimes you would bow really deeply. Or sometimes, when you saw them coming down the path and you knew you had to bow, you just went the wrong way around. A lot of things got conveyed through these bows. It was part of the richness of the monastery to study and see all these things involved with bowing that highlighted who we are and what was going on in the moment.

How do you meet yourself? How do you bow to yourself? The meeting is really important. First, not-knowing, and then meeting yourself—discovering. Meeting and discovering are the same thing here. Really discover what is here and the layers of what is here.

I was surprised that, after the election, there were layers of emotions for me. I had maybe the first recognition that I felt dismay. That was strong enough, and I was just operating, doing my life, busy doing things, and carrying this feeling that I thought was dismay. But then when I sat to meditate, I saw, "Oh, there are layers here." There is fear. For me, a little different than fear, there is alarm. There is anger. There are all kinds of things.

As I went through them all, I was kind of delighted, as opposed to caught in the grip of them. That is what happens when you start with not-knowing. If you start with knowing, then you fold what you discover into those preconceived ideas, attitudes, and judgments, and it is a lot more difficult. The advantage of not-knowing is that you feel for yourself what is going on. "Oh, look at that. There is fear. Who would have guessed?" And how you meet it is so important. "Oh, there is fear. This needs attention. This needs care. This needs kindness."

So there is a process of discovery. Discovery of what is happening with your thinking, what you are thinking about, and more deeply than that, maybe what you are feeling—what the emotions are. More deeply, there are sometimes deep underground attitudes with which we carry ourselves into the world. As we relax and calm, we start going through the layers and start meeting more and more parts of who we are. On different days we meet different parts of ourselves; there are different things to meet.

Two people meditating at the same time might have radically different experiences of meditation because they are coming from different events in their life or different concerns. They are meeting different things. Because of that, mindfulness serves a different function for them based on their need.

The Gift

So: not-knowing, discovery, and then the third step is the gift. What is the gift here?

That is an odd thing to ask. Part of the gift can be: what is the gift you have to offer? If you are sitting in meditation, what is the generous thing to do here for yourself? Maybe this is a time when you do loving-kindness; that is the gift. Maybe this is the time that you say, "Okay, now is the time to be my own companion. I'm going to companion my anger. I'm going to companion my fear, just like a good friend might." You might take a walk in the park with a friend, and they are mostly just there to accompany you through your grief. It is so good to have someone there accompanying you who is not going to fix you, not going to judge you, and not going to say, "Aren't you over it by now? We've been talking about your grief for five minutes. It's enough already." That doesn't work. You really just accompany your friend. So you accompany yourself. That is a gift that we can do for ourselves. We don't know how long that is needed until we go through it. At some point, you feel, "Oh yes, something releases. Something lets go. Something opens."

Maybe the gift is freedom. This is the calling card of the Dharma¹. What is the gift of freedom here? It might be that you give your fear freedom. You give your anger freedom. You give your love freedom. You give your patience freedom. You give freedom to what is here.

Maybe you even give freedom to your thoughts. Maybe what is needed is not to resist your thinking, not to try to change it, not to judge it and be horrified by it. But maybe also what is not needed is to keep fueling it or participating in it. There is a whole other way of giving freedom to your thinking mind: will you get out of the way? The compulsive activity, the pushing of the toothpaste tube, is stopped. You give freedom to your tube to just be a tube without squeezing the life out of it.

I love the idea that the word "emotion" has the word "motion" in it. The "e" is a Latin prefix that means "out." So, moving out. All emotions are moving out, or all emotions should be in motion. But we get stuck. We resist, we hold on, we get tight, we get somehow afraid or alarmed. A lot of things keep the gears inside from moving. So the idea is: how do we give freedom to our emotional life? Liberate your grief. Liberate your anger. Not to get rid of it, but rather to let it flow freely.

In certain circumstances where you are not participating in the grief or the anger but you are giving it freedom, it has a chance to evolve, flow, and heal. It has a chance to do what it needs to do. It has a chance to give you the message that it wants you to hear. So let it be free.

There are two great places for me for really giving freedom to my emotional life. One is in meditation, where I know I'm not going to punch someone out. It is safe. So I can feel my anger and just let it flow and move through me, and then discover something new about it. It might be that there is a relaxing with the anger or an opening up. Maybe underneath the anger, it turns out there is fear. "Oh, that's interesting." Underneath the fear, there might be love. There might be a capacity for care and kindness. "Oh, that is what is going on at the root." What a great thing to have done. Giving freedom to my anger led me through these layers so that I tapped into something deeper.

The second way I deal with strong emotions is going for hikes. I go alone in the mountains for long hikes, and that also just lets it flow. There is a different way that it flows when I am walking because when I walk, I let my mind think what it wants to think. In meditation, I kind of stop thinking, and it is valuable to let the mind just flow. But because I am walking, I don't get caught in my thoughts. I stay limber and loose, staying unattached to them, and they just flow. That helps this process also because thinking and emotions have a wonderful synergy. There is something important about how they work together to see deeply what is going on.

So, the gift. Just asking yourself that question: "What is the gift here?" I say that with the intentional idea that there are two kinds of gifts. What is the gift you want to give to yourself or the world? And what is the gift of this situation to you? What is it to learn? What is it to be? What is there to be changed or transformed? What is there to be received from yourself or from the world?

Sitting in meditation and saying, "What is the gift here?" What is the gift of fear? Have you ever asked yourself that, or is being afraid just good enough? No. What is the gift of fear? What is the gift of anger? What is the gift of love, of respect, of compassion? What is the gift of mindfulness? What is the gift of presence? What comes out of it for you? What is the message? What is the attitude? What is possible?

One of the ideas of the gift is that you have made yourself ready for it. The not-knowing, the discovery, and really meeting the situation is getting ready so the gift can register, so you can feel it and know it in a deep way.

The gift of setting an emotion free inside is that maybe now you have confidence that you don't have to be caught in the grip of the emotion. You've learned that it is okay. There is a possibility of having strong emotion but not being glued to it, entangled with it, or defined by it. It is almost like, "Wow, there is fresh air. There is breathing room here." By giving it freedom in the context of mindfulness, there is breathing room. That is the gift. Who would have known?

Going Forth

The last step of this process is: what do you want to bring with you now? After going through this process—not-knowing, discovery, and the gift—how do you want to be different now? How do you want to live differently? How do you want to act differently? What have you learned that has shown you something that makes you say, "Yes, I want to be different in some way."

Without a desire to be different, you might stay stuck. Simply the willingness and the openness to be different loosens something. It lubricates the gears so something can move and change. Again, if you don't want to change, good luck. I mean that in two ways. One is that you really won't change some of the ways you are stuck so easily. The other is: yeah, good luck, you will change anyway. We are always changing. But if you are stuck in something, you might change for the worse. If you are stuck in your anger and resentments, churning away in them, not giving them up, continuing to feed them and live in them, it just gets worse. Something gets debilitating or drained out of us.

We are always changing, and we can have some choice over what change we allow for ourselves. How do we want to change? Ask the question: "Having gone through this process, now what? What would I like out of this?"

Maybe that first step was so impactful—relaxing—that you say, "I want to be careful that I don't tense up. I want to bring more of this calming into my daily life. Maybe I'll set a timer on the hour to remind myself to pause for 10 seconds and relax."

Maybe the second step was impactful—it was eye-opening to stop, take a look, see what is going on, and learn. You say, "I think I need to do this more often. I need to get to know someone when I run into them. Take the time to know them before I say something silly or joke with them." I have told the story many times of a friend of mine who showed up, and I was immediately silly and said something, only to find out that I think his best friend had just died. I was so disappointed that I had acted that way, not taking time to know my friend and find out what was going on before I barreled ahead. Maybe the gift of how you want to change is to take time to get to know people and situations before you prejudge them.

Or maybe it is the gift of kindness, or the gift of giving other people freedom, or the gift of caring for people's welfare and living in a good way.

In Buddhist meditation, that is often one of the gifts that is regularly reflected on at the end of any significant Dharma event. It could be your own meditation, it could be some Dharma ceremony. At the end of every retreat at IRC², we do what we call "dedication of benefit" (traditionally called "dedication of merit"³). That is to consider how the benefits of this event can be used to benefit the world. At the end of every meditation, I spend a little bit of time thinking: "Now I've meditated. That's nice. Now is there any way from this that I could benefit others? Can I make this world a better place?"

If you get a big "No" because you are overwhelmed and exhausted, then maybe it is simply, "I am just going to sympathize with other people who are exhausted. I can at least do that—commiserate with them." Maybe that is nice for them to know that they are recognized and understood. But how is it that, coming out of meditation, you can be different?

In the Buddhist tradition, this idea of living for the benefit of others is done for your own benefit partly because not living for the benefit of others actually limits us. It is a kind of being closed down or shut down; the heart isn't really open, something is being clouded over. The idea is to step forward into the world with no limitation. If we are unlimited in our freedom, I think it is a natural thing to delight in people, to love people, to care for people, and to want this world to be a better place.

If we don't do this process and we are caught in fear or anger, then there is a danger that what we spread into the world is more fear and more anger. I am struck—moved—by the profound thought that if a parent lives afraid as they raise a young child, the child learns the world is a frightening place. Is that the best way to raise a child, to have that anxiety?

I hope a parent really takes this idea seriously in order to want to change—to not be spreading more fear into the world, but to do so with sincerity, honesty, and authenticity. Maybe doing this process starts with not-knowing, relaxing, and calming, so there can be a deeper and deeper discovery of what fear is, where it comes from, and how to relate to it. Maybe there is a discovery that the gift would be to give that fear freedom.

As I like to say, a huge task with chronic fear is to help the fear feel safe. That is what it most wants. A young child who is afraid mostly wants to be held. "This is safe now. You are here. It's okay. Now you are safe with me. Let me give you a cookie." They just feel like they are protected a little bit. Our fear is that way also. So the gift would be: help that fear feel safe inside of us. Safe from what? Most likely it is from you, because of how we relate to it.

How do you want to change so the world is a better place? One of the ways to really make the world a better place is to do this process over and over again: to meditate, practice, clarify, open up, discover the gifts of what it is to be a human being, and bring those gifts into the world.

This is true in meditation, and it is true for international events or cosmic events in this cosmos we live in. We can do this process:

1. Not-Knowing: Preparation to be ready to do something.
2. Discovery: Meeting ourselves.
3. The Gift: Asking, "What is the gift to offer? What is the gift to receive?"
4. Going Forth: How to go from here in a different way to benefit the world and yourself. How do you want to change?

You will probably forget about it very quickly, so we do it again and again. In meditation, you can do this four-part process. You could do this talking with a friend: "Let's go through this four-part process. Let's not know here first. Then let's discover—let's just talk together. What is the gift here? And how do we want to change?" We could do it slowly. We can journal about it. We can spend days on each step if it is a really big thing in our life that we don't know about.

If this interests you and seems like a nice four-step process, I think it is a wonderful thing to live by and a wonderful way of orienting yourself in this life. It is kind of a reframing of the basic Buddhist practice of mindfulness, which is a profound process. This is one way of understanding this process: Not-knowing, Discovery, The Gift, and Living Differently (Going Forth).

Q&A

Participant: I appreciate that you talked about the emotions and kind of welcoming them and letting yourself feel them. For me, I've had to feel a lot of emotions that I'm very uncomfortable with, but I feel like that is part of the job right now. It is part of what is in front of me. So thank you.

Gil: Yes. Emotions are a huge part of being a human being. So learning how to be wise about them and familiar with them is part of the task. We are not supposed to reject them. What is the gift in being emotional? It is odd how the word "emotional" has negative connotations—"I think that person is too emotional." But what else are we supposed to do?

Participant: Good morning. Thank you for a very timely talk. This was very important because I went through all the dynamics that you described in terms of emotional reaction to the election that happened. But I wanted to ask... I've been very fearful of what might be happening in Ukraine with the current administration and all the bad things that are happening in the theater of war. I read an article in the New York Times that essentially shed a different light on the situation. What the author said was that this war is costing a lot of life and is really not solving anything. The perpetrator of the war is not just Russia and Ukraine but also the United States; in the process of providing just enough ammunition and support, we are trying to diminish Russia without helping Ukraine win the war. So the very fact that this person [administration] is planning to potentially... this is a part of not-knowing... potentially might be aiming to really bring this war to a conclusion, but not in the terms that we have favored (Ukraine winning and getting their territories back), but in lots of compromise. That will make Ukraine much smaller potentially, but at least stops the bloodshed and all these horrible things going on in the upcoming winter. That gave me a different thought. Maybe I was wrong in really having a prejudice or preconceived notion that there is only one desirable outcome, and maybe there is a different desirable outcome that is completely different from what I thought.

Gil: To tie it into what I said: You had a preconceived idea about this situation. It is one of these international challenges that we live with. And then something inside of you offered a different perspective on it that was a surprise for you. Now you are reoriented around this, wondering if there is a different attitude or different way of responding.

That is a wonderful process to be involved in—questioning, looking, wondering, and looking for new ways. The art of it all, especially in a room like this and meditating, is to offer these words without trying to offer "the truth"—without saying "This is the new truth"—but rather, "This is part of this discovery process that we are all in." You have now contributed a little piece to it. And you also contributed to this wonderful fact that it freed you up. It kind of loosened something for you, which allows you to go through this process in an even better way because now you can relax even more, discover even more what is going on, and see.

Participant: Thank you, Gil. This was really so wonderfully timely. One of the things I've been doing to manage the whole anxiety and stress of what happened in the election—which for me is horrifying—is I've been telling myself, "It's going to get worse before it gets better." I wanted to get your thoughts about that. Reflecting on what you talked about, in a way, it is not-knowing, but it is also kind of saying it is knowing. I'm reconciling that it may get worse before it gets better. I just wondered what you thought about that. Is that really being unknowing, or is it not?

Gil: I don't know. Probably I'm not going to answer the question directly in terms of how you asked it. It just seems to me that for a lot of us who are not in the middle of the political world where there is a lot more information going on, we are partly in this phase of not-knowing and discovery. It is a matter of really discovering.

If you have this idea that things will get worse before they get better, that is a very big generalization. It might be that some things get worse and some things get better. It is important maybe to make that distinction. If we generalize about the state of everything as one single thing, then we come to one conclusion. But if we have the ability to tease apart where there are benefits and where there is harm being done, maybe it is possible to support the benefits—how things are going to get better—and then we are in a better position to contend with how things get worse.

Chances are, no matter who was going to win the election, it would have been that way. Some things will get better, some things will get worse. You want to be very careful that these ideas don't limit our ability to discover. It is reasonable that you have that idea, but my word of caution is: be careful with it as a generalization. Relax, don't know, and then discover what actually is there.

Participant: Yes, it is. What is also occurring to me is that what I've been pondering is this question of fact-checking. There has been so much delusion in the media. That is an action that I'm taking: whenever I see something, I really go deep on not a lot of issues, but particularly one or two, where I really look at the source. For me, that is a little bit of not-knowing—keeping it in mind that I don't know. It is being said that this is the truth, but there is a lot of intention that isn't really about the truth in those messages. So that is one of the "what to do next" things that I am doing, and I'm finding that very helpful.

Gil: Very nice. I love that fact-checking.

There are a few things that I would recommend around the news. When I was in the Zen monastery in the 1980s, we had big pieces of paper with print on them [newspapers]. When I was in the monastery, these newspapers would show up, but usually, they came a few days late because we were deep in the mountains and there wasn't daily traffic back and forth. I discovered how different it was to read the news fresh on the day versus a few days old. There was something that grabbed me when it was the first day—the current paper. I would be more alarmed, more attached, more involved. But if I read the same thing and I knew it was old news, I could do it in a matter-of-fact, kind of more curious way.

It has gotten worse now because we don't use the paper thing anymore. Now it is minute-to-minute; we are keeping up. And so then it is really alarming; we really get caught in it. So there are ways of changing how we do the news.

One is to actually wait and read it on Wikipedia. It is not necessarily accurate, but it doesn't come with the kind of language that is designed with headlines and first sentences to excite you and pull you in. There is not that click-baiting going on, so you can read it in a different kind of way.

The other is that there are some news services that will present both sides of political things. One, I forget the name, has both sides and then who they think is the centrist news, so you can study the same piece of news and how it is being presented in different ways. Another one that is more recent is called Tangle, which is also trying to offer serious news from both sides of the partisan divide. So you get both, and you get it engaged in an intelligent way. Then it is easier, I think, to start being more careful about what you take in and how you respond to it.

Thank you all for being here and being part of this. May you live a life of gifts.