The Illusion Of Knowing

“We should know whether or not we are fooling ourselves.”

- Shunryu Suzuki

• The Illusion of Knowing

• Half-day Retreat, August 2nd

• A Favorite Quote

• What I’m Watching

There is a particular kind of suffering, a way of staying within our zones of comfort, that comes from the conviction that we already know. This is the message from several traditions: Economist Daniel Kahneman, and Zen teachers Shunryu Suzuki and Seung Sahn.

We know what our colleague meant by that comment. We know why the meeting went wrong. We know what our partner is feeling, what our teenager is thinking, what the future holds for our career or for our country. We can at times easily move through our days inside a dense web of certainties — most of them unexamined, many of them limiting or wrong.

This is not a personal failing. It is, as Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman spent a career demonstrating, how the human mind works.

The Mind That Thinks It Knows

Kahneman’s research reveals that we are not the careful, rational thinkers we believe ourselves to be. We are, instead, pattern-matching machines. We fill the many gaps of awareness with assumptions, we mistake familiarity for truth, and produce a seamless, convincing story about reality that may bear only a passing resemblance to what is actually happening.

Kahneman called this What You See Is All There Is — the mind’s tendency to build confident conclusions from whatever information happens to be available, without noticing what’s missing. Often, we don’t know what we don’t know. We experience the world not as it is, but as our mind has already decided it must be.

Don’t Know Mind

Across the world and across centuries, Zen teachers arrived at a strikingly similar diagnosis — and a more radical prescription — for living with greater freedom and flexibility.

Seung Sahn, the Korean Zen master who brought Korean Zen to the West in the 1970s, made “don’t know mind” the cornerstone of his teaching. He returned to it constantly, in lectures, in letters, in face-to-face encounters with students. He signed his correspondence: Only don’t know.

For Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, the beginner’s mind is not ignorance. It is the willingness to encounter what is actually here, rather than what we have already decided is here. It is a deliberate interruption of the mind’s certainty — the pause before the conclusion, the question before the assumptions and the knowing.

What We Miss When We Already Know

I have watched this play out countless times in organizational life. (And, of course, in my own life…)

The leader who already knows why the last initiative failed — and so designs the next one around the wrong lesson. The team that already knows what the customer wants — and so stops listening to what the customer is actually saying. The executive who already knows which of their people have potential — and so stops creating conditions for the others to surprise her.

Certainty feels like solid ground. But it is often a floor built over a much larger, rather spacious room.

The Practice: Confidence and Humility

The good news is that “not knowing” can be freeing. We can be more curious and more confident about what we know. And we can at the same time be more humble, in what we don’t know and in the uncertainty of the future.

Before your next significant conversation, notice what you already believe about how it will go. Hold that belief lightly — not to abandon it, but to make room beside it for something unexpected.

Ask one genuine question you don’t already know the answer to. Then listen — not for confirmation, but for information.

Notice what arrives, what there is to learn, and how you feel when you stop already knowing. Might there be a bit more wonder, and less anxiety?

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Tassajara, Zen Mountain Center, from a distance…)

Half-day Retreat, In-person (Mill Valley) and Online, Sunday August 2nd, 9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

In our world of busyness, of more/faster/better, this half-day retreat offers time to stop, reflect, and renew. Together we’ll follow a gentle schedule of sitting and walking meditation, a talk, and some discussion. Anyone looking to begin or deepen a meditation and mindfulness practice is invited to attend….If you continue this practice, eventually you will experience the true existence which comes from emptiness.

A Favorite Quote

“We say that water is H2O, but under some conditions water may be ice or mist, or it may be vapor or a human body. It is only water under some circumstances. For convenience, we may tentatively say that water is water, but we should appreciate water in its true sense. Water is more than just water….

We should know whether or not we are fooling ourselves.”

- Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So

What I’m Watching

Alice and Steve - Streaming, six episodes. Funny, surprising, uncomfortable and moving.

Warmest regards,

Marc