“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki
I begin the year teaching high-school physics with this quote by Zen monk Suzuki. It is important to me that the students not only learn facts and theories related to the science, but bring attention to the learning process itself. Suzuki’s quote kicks off a great discussion in which the students reflect on their training in music, dance, academic disciplines – In what sense have possibilities been reduced en route to mastery?
It’s a compelling quote partly because it instantly creates tension. A person takes up a practice in order to progress from beginner to expert. Yet possibilities are desirable to artists and scientists. We spend hours working on our craft building technique and gathering expertise, even as our possibilities dwindle. How many lost possibilities justify how much gained expertise anyhow – What’s the conversion rate?
This conversation happens in a physics class so it is quickly pointed out that expert scientists fare better at science than beginners. Yes, much of the scientist’s learning process involves removing possibilities, but those are possibilities of mixing volatile liquids or accidentally blowing up the lab, things like that. When you hire a scientist to solve a problem, you are happy to pay for all the possibilities that have been eliminated. Same with a musician. A total beginner – picture a hyper toddler at the keyboard – may enjoy no limitations, but the expert pianist will be able to entertain the room for a longer period of time, despite the loss of possibilities of certain note combinations. You’d rather your pilot be an expert, your chef, etc.
But even if experts are functionally superior to beginners in these contexts, there are still reasons to wonder about the all-out embrace of acquiring knowledge and technique.
First of all, only a small portion of learners and practitioners become experts. Key ingredients besides the hours of practice are motivation and attention. I have found as a math and science teacher of many years, that when motivation and attention are lacking, the whittling down of possibilities outpaces the accumulation of knowledge, and the student actually loses general problem-solving power as they “progress” through the grade levels.
Here’s an example. A certain mathematical word problem can be handled three ways (at least) – it can be modeled with algebra or calculus, and it can also be cracked by persistent trial and error. I have given this problem to 6th grade students, and high-schoolers enrolled in algebra and calculus. I do not offer suggestions for methods and tell the students they may use any approach to solve the problem. The punch line is that the 6th graders often outperform the college-bound students in HS math electives, because the HS kids have inadvertently eliminated the possibility of using trial and error. The ones who don’t spot the particular algebra or calc technique right away are much more likely to throw in the towel.
Another issue is loss of joy and freedom for the expert. Even if they do maintain the motivation and attention to attain greater powers, they may be relegated – thanks to their expertise – to a very specific nook of music production or performance, or a science lab focused like a laser on one particular topic. There are many pros in many fields who have lamented how early they were pressured to specialize. A high-level research scientist complained that he was discouraged from taking science classes too far (and the examples were not very far) from his area of focus, as an undergrad.
The emphasis on progressing from beginner to expert might be one of those things that benefits society as a whole but not the individuals who form the society. Society needs doctors, pilots, engineers, to be experts – but for the individual practitioner, a life of more play and experimentation, willfully remaining a beginner, may be more satisfying, even if it doesn’t result in the “expert” stamp.
But for many learners, there is little satisfaction in suffering the slings and arrows of conventional schooling. Math classrooms abound with beginners with few possibilities. The textbook case is the 4th grade math student with anxiety. The anxiety dramatically reduces possibilities. It carries with it the thought, “I MUST not be wrong!” and this thought slashes off whole branches of possibilities, often the best ones. Anxiety creates beginners with few possibilities – That is the petrified 4th grade student who has been deemed “bad at math.”
Of course the question arises, in that first-day-of-the-year conversation with the physics students, “Is it possible to be an expert with many possibilities?” Now that’s more like it! The expert who has retained all the possibilities is clearly the big winner.
A world-class jazz musician described his process to me, emphasizing the years of relentless practice, the books filled with riffs to be memorized, the hours upon hours of boring technical exercises. He not only portrayed where he had finally arrived as paradise – the ability to improvise at a high level with other musicians. He described it in terms of total freedom, the ability to generate possibilities ad infinitum. You practice and memorize and study and concentrate and repeat, until you no longer need to think – the music flows out of you.
The expert’s retention of many possibilities isn’t merely about alleviating anxiety (though that’s a crucial part) – It is about generating new possibilities to replace the ones that are whittled away in the process of refinement. For every combo of notes that somehow doesn’t work, the virtuoso finds several new ones that unexpectedly do – for every possibility for how the natural world unfolds that is eliminated by a scientific theory, several new questions appear for the scientist who retains the wide-openness of their beginner’s mind.
“Don’t listen to the person who has the answers. Listen to the person who has the questions.” Albert Einstein
The trajectory most folks will follow in their education – the whittling down of possibilities as they attain expertise – can be partly blamed on societal values and pedagogy. But it is also natural, a product of our evolution as homo sapiens. Our minds notice patterns, seek rules that govern our reality so that we can proceed to adulthood successfully. We get used to the glorious Full Moon because if we were instantly entranced by it, as if seeing it for the first time, we’d be in danger when crossing the street – we’d get constantly distracted from our productive work flow. The toddler can be astonished by everything – the Moon, airplanes, people’s hats, a squirrel skittering up a tree – because someone is holding their hand and looking out for dangers.
So in some sense, as we age and gather experiences, we are meant to be less in awe. We lose the sense of newness, of endless possibilities, because we have to find our routine, take care of our business, move toward our goals.
What if there were a way to safely and temporarily restore Child’s Mind, so that a person could experience wide-open possibility-space once again? A way that did not reduce the expertise they had garnered over the years? This would allow them to become, if temporarily, the expert with many possibilities. In this state, they could tackle problems, take their art in new directions, learn new skills, see what they’d been missing – like the mysterious splendor of the Full Moon.
Intentional psychedelic use can do this. Substances such as psilocybin alter the worlds of perception and cognition, and at most doses do not reduce memory and skill. This allows people to experience a temporary renewal of their child’s mind – the sense of newness and wonder reveals itself, shakes off the accumulated dust of education and training, allows for new discoveries by the aging expert.
A medicine woman who worked primarily with hape and kambo, joked that running mushroom ceremonies was particularly demanding, as the participants became like children, wandering off, poking things, creating little messes here and there. But she also revelled in the joy and creativity of these events. An informal survey of psychedelic microdosers revealed that they perceive a similar “time dilation” that distinguishes the way time “flows” and memory accumulates for kids versus grownups – This is presumably related to the superior learning capacity of the former group. And a gathering body of scientific evidence portrays psychedelics as instruments of restoring “Beginner’s Mind” – whether the evidence comes from studying behavior or brain activity.
Key to unlocking the Expert’s-Mind-rejuvenating powers of psychedelics is guiding the energy, so that it may find creative expression instead of being routed into anxiety. An aspiring Expert-with-Many-Possibilities will do well to perform some gentle yoga-asanas and/or breath practices to support their work with psychedelics.
There are activities that support the practitioner’s transformation to Beginner’s-Mind-Expert. The Surrealists invented techniques for dislodging the rational mind, just as Zen monks came up with koans to prevent students’ attachment to their thought processes. At the moment of creation – or mystical revelation – there is no thought at all, let alone a conscious intention to apply this-or-that familiar problem-solving tool.
So here is the magical recipe! A combination of intentional, (generally) low-dose psychedelic use, skillful work with body and breath, and time-honored (and new!) ideas for shifting the focus away from the expertise. The expertise remains! But it is no longer guarded by the ego, surrounded by rigid walls of habit, frozen in time and space. Instead, it can be tweaked and improved, and even overhauled – in the moment – by the expert, motivated and focused, just like a kid encountering a puzzle for the first time!
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