Socrates or Buddha?As I understand it, mindfulness can be construed as a way
of keeping questions of life open. By paying close attention to
something simple, though symbolic – like the in- and out-fl ow
of breath – you nurture a curiosity that does not try to explain,
but rather to comprehend. It’s not esoteric experience that
counts, but the astonishing quality of the everyday. Stephen
Batchelor, in his book The Faith To Doubt, puts it characteristi-
cally well: ‘It was not an illumination in which some fi nal, mys-
tical truth became momentarily very clear. For it gave me no
answers. It only revealed the massiveness of the question.’ It’s
a path or means through which to experience what Heidegger
called the ‘throwness’ of being alive: we fi nd ourselves in the
midst of existence. It does not seek to fi gure things out, as if
life were a problem to be solved. Rather, the source of its release
is found in better questioning, which in turn stems from a
growing love for the extraordinariness of the immediate – why
there’s something, not nothing.
I was drawn to the centrality of doubt in this process. That’s
not meant in a passive sense, as if the goal were the cultivation
of an indifferent, detached state of mind. Rather, it’s doubt as
an active engagement and, so, source of energy. The Chinese
adage captures that, when it notes that when there’s no doubt,
there’s no enlightenment; when there’s little doubt, there’s
little enlightenment; and if there’s great doubt, there’s great
enlightenment. It’s the kind of doubt that arises with discov-
ering more. The ancient Greeks sometimes used the analogy
of an expanding circle. The circle represents knowledge,
which as it gets larger also has more extensive contact with
the unknown, represented by what lies beyond the growing
circumference of the circle.
This is a process of knowing that is simultaneously one of
unknowing, revealing how fundamentally ineffable things are.
The goal is interest, not explanations. It proceeds by saying not
this, not that. Negation is, in fact, essential to being open to this
newness. We can only fully say ‘yes’ to what we already know
and grasp: if you don’t entirely know what you’re saying ‘yes’