This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Practice w/ Don’t Know Mind; Practice Skills (4 of 5) Practice w/ Don’t Know Mind. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Practicing with Don’t Know Mind; Dharmette: Practice Skills (4 of 5) Practicing with Don’t Know Mind - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 25, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Practicing with Don’t Know Mind

Good morning, everyone, and good day. This morning we're exploring some different practice skills. We started the week with learning to align our intentions using this arriving sequence as a way of practicing. Then we expanded to include pausing, with a little emphasis on feeling and sensing our experience. Today we'll expand a little more—you all have already been doing it—but practicing with the "don't know" mind. All of this is something that was very meaningful for me when I first learned it from a wonderful Dharma teacher and practitioner, Phillip Moffitt¹.

Let's begin the meditation. Maybe taking a few long, deep breaths as we begin. This may be a way of pausing—pausing to interrupt the flow of thinking and doing, pausing to allow mindfulness to come to the foreground. Initially, mindfulness may feel like it's flickering in and out. Allow yourself to simply be with that. That's part of arriving.

Arriving here and now. Arriving with the sound. Arriving with the breath. Arriving with a felt sense in the body. Arriving... arriving. Arriving at the temple of this body, mind, and heart with a sense of reverence, maybe a little tenderness, maybe a little sense of gratitude that we can come here and now in the temple of this body, mind, and heart.

Staying with the felt sense of this arriving process. Allow mindfulness to become more continuous. Not perfectly continuous, but slightly more, as we stay with the present experience. Becoming available to what's here: sense contacts, sensations in the body, the felt sense of emotions waving through. Feeling and sensing, being available with the body, through the body.

Let the feeling and sensing come from within the body. You can include the felt sense of the heart space. Being available feels like this. Or maybe a global sense of softening, a global sense of easing up. The heart space may feel more open. However you may feel is just right. A felt sense doesn't need cognition to justify what it is.

Being available can feel tender, and sometimes even a little vulnerable. So it's necessary for us to invite aligning—aligning this being with our deepest intentions, the aspirations that uplift our being and ground our heart and mind. Being available is protected by this alignment. Feeling and sensing, aligning... aligning with the Buddha, Dharma², and the Sangha³. Aligning with kindness. Aligning with something that your heart knows and your body knows.

There is no rush in this process. Let the body and heart guide the way. Sometimes an image may come forth to express the feeling of being aligned. For me, it's like sitting upright with the whole long stream of practitioners. You may feel connected, rooted, grounded, supported by the earth underneath. There may be an inner quiet in your steadiness, or maybe just a hint of it, or a sense of possibility. Being aligned and available feels like this—a wholesome field, the wholesome ground.

From this wholesome field, we open to the felt sense in this fathom-long body⁴. You may feel into the heaviness of this body resting on earth. Sitting like a tall mountain: steady, quiet. Letting go of anticipations. Resting here. Resting in the body.

The movements of the breath can naturally reveal themselves. The dancing sensations, vibrations in the body naturally surface. The feeling and sensing happens naturally when the clouds of thinking, planning, and wanting fade away. Feel and sense the life breath. Soften into the breath. Releasing into the aliveness in this body.

As if we're holding a newborn, feeling the aliveness of the newborn, touching life that's already happening right here. A shift and changes of temperature, tingling sensations, a flow of breath. When we open to our life this way, there may be a kind of tenderness. There may be a kind of joy that's independent of whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant.

You may feel the stillness all around. Stillness that can hold the movements—movements of the body, movements of the emotions, fleeting thoughts. Sometimes the mind wants to comment on what we're experiencing. Know that it's okay to experience without commentaries.

Returning to feel and sense as a body, connecting with the earth underneath. Maybe the body feels different right now, resting on the ground of being alive, mindful and available. What's the felt sense now? Knowing that you always have a choice to return to this ground as you go about the day. You may not feel the same way, and it doesn't need to feel the same way. But our heart, mind, and body can know that we're living this life. We have a choice to align with our deepest intentions.

Dharmette: Practice Skills (4 of 5) Practicing with Don’t Know Mind

I feel so good. I was a little reluctant to speak, but I did bring a topic today, so I will talk. As I spoke a little bit about at the beginning of our meditation, this week I've been channeling a whole set of teachings that came from Phillip Moffitt, who offered a lot of these pithy, short teachings that were very meaningful for me and for many people. Today I brought this particular practice skill called practicing with the "don't know" mind.

This sounds a little counterintuitive because so much of our Dharma cultivation has to do with cultivating a clarity of knowing, or clear knowing. So what does it mean to practice with the "don't know" mind? I wanted to elaborate on this a bit.

The first aspect of practicing with the "don't know" mind is that it has the quality of the beginner's mind. We probably all have heard this phrase. The beginner's mind has different qualities in it. For example, if you're learning a new skill or you have a new interest in playing a new musical instrument, there is a lot to learn and you're very engaged with it. You're eager to practice, open, curious, and very receptive in this kind of beginner's mind. As we engage with it, we get energized, and there is a refreshing momentum that can come forth. So the quality of a beginner's mind has a very wholesome feeling.

We all know how it is when we lose the beginner's mind. We can believe somehow, at some point, we got it. We know it, and we can lose the sense of curiosity and interest. Maybe our engagement becomes very superficial. But in this practice of being present with our lived experience here and now, each moment of our lives that is unfolding has never happened before. It's always new. Yet, we can have a belief that, "Well, this is the same old stuff that we've experienced before, again and again." We can get bored, we can check out, and we can get disconnected from the life that is unfolding here and now. The beginner's mind invites us to renew this sense of curiosity and interest, and maybe let go of the belief that "I knew it, I already know this."

At a recent retreat that Gil⁵ taught—it was an experienced practitioner retreat—he said something that stayed with me. He said that it's not so important to become experienced practitioners; instead, it's more important to learn to be experienced beginners. I love that. There is just that kind of innocence and awe⁶ that gets pointed out, and at the same time, there is also a sense of humility. That's one aspect of practicing with a "don't know" mind: to have this kind of beginner's mind.

The other aspect of practicing with the "don't know" mind is to stay open and unassuming. I was once in a practice discussion with a teacher, and I was sharing an experience. I made a connection, an association, saying that this experience must have something to do with something that happened a while ago. I was very definitive. I thought I knew this: "That was because XYZ, so I was experiencing this." The teacher just looked at me, smiled, and said, "Well, that's one way to understand it."

That was a real teaching moment for me. I realized that I was fixated on the view that A happened because of B. That was just a guess! I actually don't know. With all the myriads of conditions and situations we're living in, we can only speak with some measure or degree of knowing, but I actually don't really know if that association was true. That was very freeing for me. Once I realized there were actually many other possibilities, I didn't have to know this in only one way.

Assumptions and conclusions—particularly the grand conclusions like what I had in that practice discussion—tend to connect with fixed views, fixed ideas, and beliefs. The "don't know" mind invites us to stay open in the face of a situation and make space for it to unfold and evolve. We can allow different possibilities to emerge as we stay open and available to them.

There is a famous Chinese fable some of you may know called Sai Weng Shi Ma⁷. It's about an old man who lives in the countryside and raises horses for a living. One day, he lost one of his horses. After hearing of his misfortune, his neighbors all came and felt sorry for him, wanting to comfort him. But Sai Weng simply asked, "How would we know that this is not a good thing for me?"

After a while, this lost horse came back with a beautiful new horse. The neighbors all came and congratulated Sai Weng, saying, "Wow, what good luck you have!" Sai Weng said, "How could we know that it's not a bad thing for me?"

Time went on, and one day his son went to ride this new horse. While roaming around, he fell off the horse and broke his leg. The neighbors came again and shared their condolences. Sai Weng said, "How do we know that it's not a good thing for me?"

A year later, the Emperor went to war with a neighboring country, and the army came to the village to recruit able-bodied men to fight. Because of the injury, Sai Weng's son could not be drafted to go to war, so he was spared from certain death.

We don't always know. Are we able to, or do we dare to, allow ourselves to open to different possibilities?

I wanted to end by saying that the "don't know" mind is not a blinded mind, or a kind of shutdown or disengagement. Rather, the "don't know" mind empowers us to loosen the grip on fixed views and fixed beliefs. It's not to shut down or simply claim somehow that we don't know and that's better. It empowers us because it creates a space where wisdom and compassion can arise. When we're not so fixed on a certain orientation or direction that we've set in our mind, there is a deeper kind of knowing that I've been speaking about this week. It is a capacity that is within us when we're not dictated by fixations. This kind of knowing is much more direct and intuitive, and it can manifest in many ways that might be surprising to us. It can also reveal itself gradually as things become more and more clear.

Do we allow this kind of possibility by staying open and unassuming? Do we dare to allow this deeper, more intuitive, direct form of wisdom and compassion to arise? That is our inquiry for today.

May our practice and our inquiry and reflections benefit ourselves, and may it benefit all beings everywhere. Thank you, friends. I'll see you tomorrow.