Cultivating Don’t Know Mind

by Carol Russell
An essay adapted from a Dhamma talk given September 9, 2025

This talk is based on the Fifth invitation from the book, The Five Invitations, Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski. I’ve been using each invitation as an inspiration for an exploration about the Dhamma. 

‘Don’t know mind’ is a very Zen expression. Don’t know mind, beginner’s mind. Suzuki Roshi wrote a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He famously said, ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.’

That is a quote I have had hanging in my studio for years. It helps me as an artist to remember not to be too certain, not to think I know how a piece will be when it is finished. Sure, I have a vision and I make use of all my skill, but if I also have a beginner’s mind, then I’m open to where a piece might want to go. There’s magic in that and it shows in how often a painting will end up surprising and delighting me. Alternately, if I cling to some image of how it should be and I end up struggling to achieve that vision, the process is often much less enjoyable. 

I’ll mention what don’t know mind is not. Don’t know mind isn’t ignorance. Like many of you, I value my education, my training, my experience. I value learning through my life experiences and putting my knowledge and learning into practice. 

 Frank Ostaseski writes that ‘ignorance is usually thought of as the absence of information, being unaware. Sadly, it is more that just ‘not knowing.’ It means that we know something, but it is the wrong thing. Ignorance is misperception.’

He goes on to offer this beautiful definition of don’t know mind: 

Don’t know mind is not limited by agendas, roles, and expectations. It is free to discover. When we are filled with knowing, when our minds are made up, it narrows our vision, obscures our ability to see the whole picture, and limits our capacity to act. We only see what our knowing allows us to see. The wise person is both compassionate and humble and knows that she does not know.

Remember last week when Mark played that marvelous film about Thich Nhat Hanh? A guiding light for him through all that he did for peace and for humanity, was not clinging to views. This is fundamental in our practice and he truly lived it. He didn’t take sides in conflicts. He practiced tolerance and compassion and sought genuine understanding rather than rigidly holding onto beliefs. And yet his strength, firmness of heart, and profound caring were palpable. 

The reality is we have never experienced this moment before, or the next one, or ten years from now, like we explored in the guided meditation tonight. This fifth invitation is to see the moment we are in, whatever situation is unfolding, whatever relationship is present, as new, in all its possibilities. We bring all of our knowledge and experience to meet this moment and instead of holding on to a particular view, we’re open to what might be here. 

I have just returned from a fourteen-day river trip through the Grand Canyon. This is a 226-mile journey through a wild, secluded, and remote place. During the day, quietly floating down the river is punctuated by breathtaking white-water rapids. One thing I very much enjoyed was how the experience of the Canyon was constantly changing as I was slowly moving through it– sometimes the Canyon is very narrow, sometimes it widens out. Over millennia, the river carved through geologic ages from 250 million years old to 1.7 billion years old, so I traveled through layers and layer of rocks as the canyon goes deeper into the Earth. And the light plays upon it all. I loved to watch the view unfold ahead as the river wound its way along. I didn’t know what would be around the next bend, and I made a practice of seeing the Canyon with fresh eyes.

Our trip leader would gather us on the beach each morning to tell us what the day had in store. This is how it would go:
We’re going on the river today. We are going to go that way (point downstream). It’s going to be wet. There will be some rocks. We might take a side hike, maybe it’ll be a dry hike, or maybe you can wear your river shoes. We’ll stop for lunch somewhere. Eventually we will find a place to camp. 

The next day it would be pretty much the same talk. It made us laugh. After a few days we realized the guides didn’t know exactly what we we’re going to do either. It depended on many factors, and things worked best if everyone kept an open mind and made the call as the day unfolded. What a wonderful experience of don’t know mind. 

Coming back, I’ve been bringing some of this practice into my everyday life. I’m working with seeing things fresh even when they are fairly familiar and predictable: the long-time relationships, the often-walked trail in the woods, my favorite breakfast. 

Where practicing with don’t know mind really comes into play, I am finding, is when unexpected things arise, interruptions of one kind or another. When I got home from the river trip the garage door wouldn’t open and two automatic drip systems had stopped working. If I have a fixed view of how I am going to spend the day and those plans are thwarted by something that needs my attention, I’m frustrated. But if I’m open to what might be appearing around the next bend in the river, I find I have more patience for what is arising. Maybe surrender is a good word. I can meet the unexpected with equanimity.

Don’t know mind might sound disorienting and frightening. We like to know. It’s very human. There are times in life when things we thought we could count on are shifting or disappearing and we feel ungrounded. Maybe we are losing abilities and memories as we age. We don’t know what we used to know. When we are identified with our rational minds as being entirely who we are, the thought of losing control can be very scary.

Frank Ostaseski addresses this in a chapter called The Story of Forgetfulness. He writes a lot about memory, including this:

The fear of losing memories is a common one. I find it useful and even reassuring to recognize that, actually, we have been losing our memories all along…Forgetfulness is actually built into the system…Memory is not objective, truthful, exact, or by any means permanent. Our memories are malleable constructs. One study demonstrated that every time we remember something our brain networks change in ways that alter our recall of the original event. 

This is a different level of don’t know mind – or is it? 

On the river, probably due to the high level of physical challenge – hard work, the effects of high temperatures and cold water, as well as being completely outside of a familiar environment, I found myself at times feeling physically clumsy and well as mentally ‘slow.’ More often than normal, I couldn’t find words or complete sentences. I chalked it up to ‘feeling my age.’ But what began to dawn on me as the trip unfolded, is that I felt deeply present to my moment-by-moment experience much of the time. Awareness, it seems, is not completely dependent on mental functioning. Regardless of diminished mental capacity, I was often able to rest in this state of bright openness, observing sensory experiences and beauty, often with a feeling of reverence and gratitude. 

Since returning to the land of Up Above, as we called it from the river, my familiar brain has returned.

Yet, there is a residue of this heightened presence and I continue to wonder: Does the conscious mind – awareness - transcend the conditions of the brain? And to what extent?

When Buddhist teacher Noelle Oxenhandler was caring for her mother with dementia, she pondered this question. One thing that presented itself to her was the benefit of mindfulness practice. ‘For what is mindfulness, if not the practice of bringing the mind to those places where it goes missing?’ There is research evidence that regular practice of meditation can ease early signs of dementia. 

Ostaseski tells a story of Harrison Hoblitzelle, a literature professor, therapist, and Buddhist teacher. ‘A man of great kindness and humor, he took immense pleasure in the life of the mind.’ He continued to teach Buddhist practices even after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 
One evening he was giving a dhamma talk when he forgot who he was and why he was sitting in front of the meditation hall.

So, he simply began to mindfully acknowledge out loud his experiences: ‘blank mind…curiosity, nervousness, calming, blank mind, loving feelings, warmer, less trembling, still uncertainty,’ and so on for several minutes. It was all he could do. He stopped, rested quietly, and bowed to the audience. They stood up and applauded in honor of his presence and courage. It was, as several said, ‘among the finest teachings I have ever received.’ For a moment Hob had transformed even Alzheimer’s into freedom.

Some of the deeper questions about the relationship between the mind and awareness are still open for me, but Osteseski concludes that ‘We are not just what we think, what we say, or what we do and certainly not just what we remember. Those experiences don’t define all that we are. Who we are is bigger than that. Awareness, our capacity to witness experience, is not just a cognitive function [as I experienced on the river]. Awareness is beyond thought, beyond feeling, beyond action…Witnessing or awareness is always present.’ 

Another quote I have in my studio is by the great painter Henri Matisse: 
‘You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.’ 

The word naiveté is often used to signify a lack of sophistication or wisdom, but I believe in this quote the meaning is something more along the lines of innocence, ingenuous, lacking pretense, simplicity, qualities of don’t know mind. 

In the last decade of his life, wheelchair-bound, Matisse used paper and a pair of scissors to make Cut-Outs, marvelously bold and playful compositions of shape and color. ‘I am cutting out all these elements and putting them up on the walls temporarily,' he said. 'I don’t know yet what I’ll come up with.’  There is a child-like quality to this work which evokes a playfulness and freedom with the creative process. He didn’t know where this exploration would lead. Art historians now consider this period the height of his creative powers.

As we’ve been exploring, don’t know mind is inherently part of improvising in art and also in life. It is a responsive state that leads to unexpected outcomes. Walking through life with don’t know mind, there’s a directness and intimacy with moment-to-moment experience, which I like to think of as a quieting of a sense of ‘I.’ In deep states of intimacy with life, it’s as though the separation between subject and object dissolve, and there’s just the breath, just the ever-changing canyon, just paper and scissors. 

It's mysterious, isn’t it? What is mysterious cannot be fathomed, but we can open to it. Mystery can evoke a profundity to the experience of don’t know mind, an invitation to see the world in a way that makes meaning for each of us, that brings a kind of sacredness into life.  

As Frank Ostaseski writes: ‘To know the sacred is not to see new things, but to see things in a new way.’  Through the eyes of the Dhamma are ways of seeing that reduce suffering, increase wisdom, open to beauty and peace. Like when I practice metta and afterwards the world appears different. It’s not predictable and certainly not recreate-able; I can only open, surrender, and what comes arrives by grace. 

Of surrender Ostaseski beautifully writes this:

Surrender is infinitely deeper than letting go. Surrender is the effortless, easeful non-doing of our essential nature without interference…Surrender is more like an initiation, in which the dispensable is sacrificed to the essential. While we may resist, our fighting ultimately proves ineffective.

The dissolution of the false will naturally stimulates a sense of fear, and the voices in our heads tell us to pull back. But the sacred is so magnetizing, the surrender so compelling, that fear does not stop us. In time the struggle ceases. Our consciousness recognizes that the power we feel, once so terrifying, is our own deep being. We surrender to the reality of non-separation.

Surrender is the end of two and the opening to the one.