Not Knowing is Most Intimate

I’m taking a trip to Ireland next month to visit old friends and to allow my daughter, who has never been, to explore her roots. I was born and grew up in Ireland, but I haven’t visited very often in recent years, partly because a visit raises some uncomfortable and unanswerable questions: What has happened to the person I was when I lived in Ireland? Where did the time I lived there go? Where is the past anyway? Where is home? I have a habit of referring to Ireland as home, as in, I’m going home next month, but the reality is that my home is here, and I cannot contemplate the idea of living in Ireland again. Still there is a strong attachment.

These questions may be uncomfortable and unanswerable, but they are none the less human for all that: taken together, they may just constitute the essential human question, What’s it all about? or simply, What? Who? Why? Most of us turn away from these questions, and I think that our culture and our society encourage this: it’s not smart or skillful to waste time with questions that cannot be answered in a rational way, that lead to no useful conclusions or insights: let’s get on with my one short life.

The writer William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead: it’s not even past.” On the face of it, this statement seems like an assertion of the power of past experience to subvert the present moment, but maybe there is a bit of Zen wisdom in it after all. Because Zen is where unanswerable questions go, not to die, but to be thoroughly investigated, as though such questions were of supreme importance. There is a refuge in Zen for those of us who are distressed by such questions because Zen practice gives the unanswerable question its due, it assures us that such questions are quintessentially human, and as such not to be excluded from our experience, but rather to be cultivated. Not in a cerebral or philosophical way, of course, not in the artistic way that Faulkner investigated the matter, but in the way of not knowing, which is to say, intimately, in the course of our practice.

We say, not knowing is most intimate, as a way to describe our practice. I used to be a civil engineer, in the past that is nowhere to be found, and engineering is all about using mathematical formulae to predict what will happen within the materials of various functional structures, in order to design these structures in such a way that they don’t fall down on peoples heads. This kind of knowing relies on a mathematical model, or representation, or abstraction: it is not an unmediated, intimate contact with the world as it is. But our society privileges this kind of knowing: the hard facts, the information, the functional data that enables engineers to build things. The privileged place of so-called scientific knowledge makes it difficult to espouse a practice based on throwing away technique and advancing without a map into the unknown.

Because that is what our practice of zazen is like. We may begin with the practice of following the breath indeed we are never done with the awareness of the breath, until the last one but zazen is not about mastering a technique, it is about letting go of strategies, letting go of the illusion of control, letting be, allowing the world as it arises in me to be as it is, which is the only way it can be.

How can we practice without knowing what we are doing? Zazen requires attention, but it is not directed by any concept of zazen: it is the awareness of just this, just that, the awareness of thought, sensation, emotion, or some combination thereof, or all of the above. It is not turning away, no matter what arises. It is being present, even to the impulse to turn away.

It’s the business of the mind to think, to produce thoughts, to generate questions, even questions that cannot be answered: Who am I? What is this? Or where is the life I once lived? The person I was? Where is the past? When such questions arise, my practice is to meet them, not only as words, but also as thought, feeling, and sensation: the urgent and bewildering experience of posing an unanswerable question that is no less urgent and bewildering for being unanswerable. This is to be intimate with the human condition, with the predicament of the sentient being in an infinite and ever-changing universe.

Not knowing is most intimate. A concept may serve to distinguish one of ten thousand things from its neighbors, but then it immediately mediates between me and that thing, it becomes an obstacle to my awareness of that thing. When I walk in the woods, do I see a tree? Or do I see my concept of a tree? To become intimate with a tree, I must lose the concept of a tree and encounter something strange and wonderful that springs in one leap from the ground and spreads itself into a myriad reaching fingers and puts on a canopy of green. This is to be intimate with the dharma that bears the name tree, or as Dogen might put it, to ask a tree about the Dharma. And perhaps to go beyond tree to the realization that all trees are one family, tree and tree are the same, no separation.

I’m going to finish with a favorite kanji poem by Dogen. In the China of Dogen’s time, there was a tradition that the call of a cuckoo was a warning, or even a command to retrace your steps, to go back, to go home as though it were possible to revisit the past, to go home again. Dogen acknowledges this wish and the unanswerable question and brilliantly sets them aside by pointing to the reality of experience: no separation: no past, no present, no future: just-this.

Walking heedlessly in a dream

A cuckoo’s song summons me

I turn my head

Who has told me to return?

You must not ask me where I am going

As I wander this limitless world

Where every step I take is my home.