“You don’t know enough to be pessimistic.” – Dr. Wayne Dyer
“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
How many times in your life have you been wrong?
Now hold on for a second as the ego kicks and screams, declaring; Never!
Now take a breath and be truthful; between you me and the wall, how many times have you been wrong? Ever…
Ever had someone cheat on you? You were wrong about their character.
Ever gotten lost in a new city? You were wrong about your geographical location.
Ever lost your keys, glasses or wallet? You were wrong about where you left the item.
The point is that we are all wrong, all the time AND we survived!
We’re trained from childhood to fear being wrong, to avoid it at all costs, to view a wrong answer on a test as a character flaw; of course this is BS. We can’t avoid being wrong and “wrong” is not a life threatening condition.
Wrong is an ego destroying condition.
It is not our lives that are threatened by misplacing our keys but the ego can only tolerate itself by pretending to be infallible.
The pretense of infallibility is a deadly mistake.
Every madman, despot and villain is absolutely certain of the Justness of their cause that the ends justify the means and anyone injured in their blind pursuit of ego deserves what they get. The prisons are full of unrepentant men believing that they are the exception to the rules, that they shouldn’t be punished for injuring others because they’re certain their ends justified the violence they utilized. The corporate boardrooms of the world are packed with the bloated egos of men certain that their profits are more important than the destruction they author to achieve it. The military of every nation is staffed by the blind arrogance that murder in the name of a country is patriotic while the same assault from their adversary is criminal.
This is the dangerous insanity of conviction. The ego-belief that your agenda justifies the harm you do (or participate in) to achieve it; the certainty that when “everyone else” simply falls in line with your beliefs THEN the world will be right. The conviction that the pursuit of bloated profits is warranted while the workers’ belief that they deserve safe working conditions that will eat into your profits is outrageously unreasonable and let’s not even consider an equitable distribution of the profits that the workers created through their efforts…
The insanity of conviction is that you believe you know enough to justify the means at hand, the harm we do, the blatant waste and destruction of the environment, the assault and murder of other beings in pursuit of a belief, agenda or prurient desire.
No advancement comes from conviction.
No progress comes from conviction.
No discoveries or breakthroughs or insights ever come from conviction.
A mind already closed can admit no new knowledge and cannot know wisdom.
All of the ills of the world are caused by men certain of their convictions. All the progress ever made is by someone curious enough to go beyond what they already know.
There are a great many things people are certain of in this world, most of them are falsehoods.
The beginners mind in Zen is the ultimate state of wisdom; to be aware without conviction is the only state of sanity that can exist in a Universe of infinite potential. This is a dangerous state to the authoritarianism, the institutionalism, the militarism and greed run rampant in the world because knowledge without conviction is the ability to evolve beyond what is, into what we might become.
Take a chance today to undo any assumptions you have about life or any situation that you feel blocked or stuck in; the Beginners Mind holds undiscovered treasures.