Between Knowing And Not Knowing

Ezra Klein: I sometimes play with the idea — and recognizing that I know nothing in these areas — that a lot of what is being described here is simply unreliableness. And that sounds negative to people, but when I sit with it, a lot of what is being said is that your thoughts, your sense of self, what’s going on around you is just unreliable. And your tendency to really feel fixed about it, to believe you really know what’s going on, that’s giving it a solidity. I always like emptiness as thinking of it as an alternative to thinking of things as solid and their meaning as solid and their nature as solid.

Ruth Ozeki: Yeah, that’s lovely. I like that a lot. That just makes me think of teachings about not knowing. There’s a phrase in Zen Buddhism that comes from a koan, which is, not knowing is most intimate.

And that it’s when we don’t know something and when we can sit in that state of not knowing is when there’s a kind of an intimacy with the world around us. And this is something that Shunryu Suzuki, who is the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center — he talks about beginner’s mind. This is another iteration of beginner’s mind.

And what he says about beginner’s mind is that in the beginner’s mind, possibilities are endless, and in the expert’s mind, they’re few. And so this idea that in this state of not knowing, curiosity and engagement with the world arises, for lack of a better word. And that engagement, that curiosity is intimate and very, very alive.

And this really pertains, I think, to the process of any kind of creation, music, art, certainly literature, is the ability to sit in that state of not knowing and somehow find some way to rest there, somehow find some way to be comfortable there. Because it’s a very uncomfortable feeling as a novelist. When I start writing a novel, I know nothing about it. And what I really want is to know something. I want to know everything about it, about this fictional world.

And so there’s a kind of tension between the state of not knowing and then the state of knowing. And so somehow through meditation, I’m trying to cultivate the ability to sit in a relaxed state in that generative tension between knowing and not knowing until some kind of answers start to arise.