If our attention is to abide or rest in the heart, we must first be willing to see the limits of the ordinary mind and give up the illusion of being in complete control of our life. There’s a great deal that the mind does not know. The purpose of the ordinary, strategic mind is to try to know in order to assume control, and—to a certain degree—it works. For example, the more we can know about an environment, process, or a person, the more reliably we can direct outcomes. The scientific method is based upon formulating clear hypotheses, making careful observations, performing rigorous testing, and repeatedly verifying results. Our rapid technological progress relies on this. However, by itself, this approach to life does not bring individual or collective happiness, as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate disruption, and growing income disparity will attest. Rational thinking is useful, but insufficient. In order to apply our relative knowledge wisely, we must turn to another source for guidance.

The ordinary mind is a good servant but a poor master. When it doesn’t know its limits, it easily becomes a misguided, arrogant tyrant. Traditional European monarchies appointed regents or stewards whenever an heir to the throne was too young to assume the responsibilities of being the king or queen. When the heir came of age, regents were expected to end their stewardships and hand over their authority. In a few cases, however, regents refused to surrender their power, having become enamored with it, and crises ensued. This is a telling metaphor for what happens when the ordinary mind assumes more authority than it is designed to wield. It’s not enough to be clear and rational. We also need to be wise and loving.

When we step back and reflect a little, we can easily see that our ordinary, strategic mind knows relatively little. We don’t know what will happen in the next moment or even what our next thought will be, and most of our lives are wildly different from what we imagined them to be. At the moment, I am writing in my French sister-in-law’s home an hour north of Paris—I could never have predicted such a thing until quite recently. We don’t know the time of our death, what successes or failures await us in the days ahead, or what friends and partners we will gain and lose. The truth is that the course of our life is unknown. We may have occasional intuitions of possibility, but little more, and there isn’t much we can do about it. More importantly, there isn’t anything we need to do about it!

Who we really are is not something we can define or confine with thought.

It is enough that we listen and follow moment to moment. It is enough that we are open, are available, and take the next obvious step and see what happens. It is enough when the ordinary mind bows down to the wisdom of the heart and trusts the movement of a wiser current. When we surrender to it, a natural authority in the core of our being guides our life quite beautifully.

One of the first Korean Zen masters to come to the United States was Seung Sahn. He repaired washing machines for a few years before becoming established in the West—an unexpected twist in his life, I’m sure. I used to attend his dharma talks in Berkeley in the mid-1980s when he was traveling through the Bay Area. One of his main teachings was “Only don’t know.” During his dialogues with students, he would often interrupt them when he felt they were becoming too heady, playfully make a growling sound, and then threaten them in his simple English: “I hit you with stick! Only don’t know mind, go straight ahead!” The questioner and other audience members would laugh. Seung Sahn’s point was that we overly rely on our thinking minds to try to understand what is essential.

Not knowing refers not only to our inability to know what will happen; it also means that we cannot know our true nature solely by thinking about it. Who we really are is not something we can define or confine with thought. Who we really are is quite literally inconceivable and unimaginable. Our true nature is not an object—it exists prior to the mind. We can say what our true nature is not, at least initially, but we cannot definitively state what it is. Yet we can know it directly by consciously being it. When the mind clearly recognizes that it is not going to understand what is prior to it, a spontaneous letting go occurs, and attention quite naturally rests in the heart.

Excerpted from The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence, by John J. Prendergast, PhD. Sounds True, December 2019. Reprinted with permission.