From "What If?" to "What Is"
Obliterate speculation and enter reality
"Take a step from the top of the pole and worlds of the ten directions are your total body.” - Zen koan
Greetings friends and welcome to new subscribers.
Saturday was my birthday, which I got to spend with Aria and the kids. They made me pancakes in the morning, while I watched Arsenal come back to win against Leicester City. Among the great gifts that Aria got for me was Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” …. on vinyl!
(If you have never immersed yourself in “Astral Weeks,” I highly recommend it. It is one of those extended musical pieces that simply re-wires your mind and body in wonderful and mysterious ways.)
Today I want to share a re-worked version of a piece I originally wrote at the beginning of COVID.
It talks about our need to ground ourselves in reliable supports and truths. Reliable truth is also called “wisdom.” Grounding in wisdom keeps us from getting thrown off when circumstances don’t go the way we wish them to or the way we think they will go. Which is pretty much always.
Where and and how broadly we are grounded directly determines our capacity. And when it comes to our growth and adaptation responses, capacity is everything.
From a Zen standpoint, there are four specific things it is essential that we ground in every day:
Our Bodies
The Earth
Our Teams, Communities and Relations
The Unknown
We all have various habits, strategies and practices for grounding in these four things. To the extent your practices and strategies are consistent and integrated, you are probably high-functioning and adaptive.
Unfortunately most of us individually, and most cultures collectively, do not pay nearly as much attention to Fourfold Grounding as we need to. For lack of such grounding, our days are beset by stress and anxiety, our project plans are unrealistic, and our working communications are laced with misunderstanding and misalignment.
And any structures built on unsolid ground do not last.
In this piece, I’ll talk about the fourth of these essential grounds, grounding in the Unknown. It is somewhat counterintuitive, and maybe unique to Zen.
Grounding in the Unknown
You might say that “grounding in the unknown” does not make sense. When we don't know something, our minds usually seek information and answers. We get all "up in the air" with possibilities.
Indeed, when our minds are like this, awash in the “what ifs,” we are very ungrounded. Our anxieties and neuroses run rampant, our stress levels increase, and our overall capacities decrease. This is not grounding in the Unknown; those are strategies for evading the Unknown.
But when we shift from What If to What Is, we ground ourselves in reality. The reality is that no one knows what is going to happen. So grounding in the unknown is grounding in reality, in what is.
Really grounding in the Unknown is to live fully in the present moment. Our daily trance insists that the world and our lives are knowable, but it’s not true. We think we “know” that certain things will happen the “way they always have”, you will feel certain ways at specific times, and if you do X, then Y will result.
Reality is not like this at all. Reality chuckles at the trance, and sometimes smashes it to bits.
Our ground is that which continuously supports us. The law of gravity ensures that the earth supports us no matter what we do. The law of Zen is that the Unknown supports us no matter what we believe. Even if we deny it, the Unknown is the ground upon which our lives rest, upon which all of our thoughts, theories and speculations are built. Those may be infirm but the Unknown is not.
So how do we ground in the Unknown? There are two keys:
Always maintain a curiosity about the things you think you know.
Get familiar with the feelings that arise when you are entering “uncharted territory”.
Curiosity keeps you alive. Often times we waste hours or days trying to solve problems that turn out not to be problems. We think we need to say or do something, when keeping silent or letting things take their course results in a perfect resolution.
Keep questioning what you know and what is the best course of action. There are all sorts of tenacious myths or “mind viruses” out there. My lineage teacher Taizan Maezumi Roshi, whenever someone would present him a theory of what they believed was true or what was going on with the world, even if it were something that most people would consider fringe, and which he himself found unlikely (think UFOs or global conspiracies), would murmur and say, “Could be …. could be…..”. And he meant it! (At least, I believe he meant it. I can’t know for sure.)
Roshi Bernie Glassman took this “Don’t Know Mind” even further and started calling the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism “The Four Noble Opinions.” How about that!
Even after you’ve come to a decision, you can move forward with commitment, and still hold the mind of not knowing how things are going to work out. Because you don’t know.
Getting familiar with your feelings around the unknown typically means being authentic about your fears. We all want to be in control, and to know the best solution or how things are likely to turn out. When we are not grounded in the unknown, our control tendencies take over. It is important to allow ourselves to feel out of control and de-stabilized. The more familiar we are with those feelings, the less they disturb us.
These days we have a profound opportunity to ground in the unknown. At the collective level, we have a growing sense of anxiety around the future. But at a more intimate level in your life and workplace, you can notice how your previous “organizing principles” have fostered various collective dreams that have not been effectively grounded in the Unknown.
Unrealistic deadlines are a common example of this collective dream. A team gets together once a week and looks at a project plan, with all sorts of dependencies and unknowns. A collective vision is projected of how the project will go. Other teams in the organization link their visions with yours. Revenue models and business projections follow suit.
Individual visions are interlaced with the collective vision….. One person will take a vacation after the project phase; others will move on to the next project. Mental maps of the future sprout like a garden.
It might be a very beautiful garden, but it is a dream garden. There is nothing wrong with our dream gardens, but we cannot smell those flowers or eat those vegetables. We cannot ground in them.
When we actually accommodate to the reality of the unknown, a profound freedom opens up in our lives. This freedom is our essential birthright. Now in the midst of massive transition and potential breakdown, we can reclaim this birthright.
In the Zen koan Gateless Gate Case 46 (Stepping Forward from the 100 Foot Pole), Zen Master Mumon says, "Take a step from the top of the pole and worlds of the ten directions are your total body.”
When we really step into the Unknown, our bodies become the earth, and all beings.
Everything is as unknown as it ever has been. With strong practice, the fourfold groundings all come together, and the ground is immense.
Drawing by Mark T. Morse (mtm). http://www.gatelessgatestudio.com/about/