Beginner's Mind

According to Evelyn Rosch in her essay Beginner’s Mind: Paths to the Wisdom that is not Learned, there are levels in our mind. “On the surface is the mind of ordinary concepts, emotions, desires, fears, even boredom -- the mind with which everyone is familiar. Below that is the mind that is more in contact with basic wisdom and better able to see and act from it. It is beginner’s mind.”

“The beginner’s mind claim, ordinary yet radical, is that we already have such basic wisdom -- the “innate primordial wisdom in the world as it is,” the “self revealing truth” that “God has put into everything that exists.”

“Thus people do not need to acquire more information, more logic, more ego, and more skills to make them wise. What they need is to unlearn what they have accumulated that veils them from that wisdom. When they do this, it is believed, they find not only what they themselves really are already but also what the world actually is, and, from that vantage point, they can live a good life.”

I find her words comforting and amusing as I have spent the last nine months trying to accumulate more information, more logic and more skills to guide me on my ministerial path.

I have always believed that we know what we need to know, and that we just need to remember it.