Returning to Beginner’s Mind

Sunset on our recent trip to Kirra

Through my journey of Awakening there’s been a movement in my own experience over time that I can only really describe as a kind of circling. Not a straight line of understanding, but something more fluid—expansions, collapses, clarity, confusion, depth, simplicity—and then a quiet return.

At times I’ve been deeply absorbed in questions about reality, the self, consciousness, truth. Questions like: what is real? what am I? is anything actually as it seems? These questions open something vast. They have also, at times, seemingly destabilised the usual sense of certainty that most of us rely on to move through life.

There have been moments where that sense of certainty felt very thin. Where even simple things—thoughts, perceptions, interpretations—didn’t feel as fixed, reliable or even true as they once did. It can feel disorienting to be in that space, as though the usual reference points have loosened.

And yet, something else has always been quietly present alongside it all.

Not an answer.

Not a final conclusion.

Not a philosophy.

More like a shift in how experience is met.

Like every arising is met with its own silence.

I’ve noticed that the mind has a strong tendency to turn everything into meaning. It naturally builds narratives, definitions, draws conclusions, and continually tries to locate something stable, reliable and trustworthy to stand on. It wants to know what feelings and sensations are and what they ultimately mean. Even the most profound spiritual or philosophical ideas can become part of that structure—a way of settling and organising the infinite unknown into something more defined and structured. Thought says If I can understand and know, I'll be safe.

But underneath all of that, there’s something simpler that keeps revealing itself....ever deeper.

A kind of eternal, unknowing.

Openness.

Silence before language and meaning making.

Before interpretation and definition.

Not “nothing” as a concept, idea or explanation, but something more like the absence of immediate grasping or a need to reference, understand or know.

An openness where experience doesn't need a conclusion.

Where perception is just… happening, without believing thoughts' definition of it.

It’s very subtle.

Ordinary.

And yet it feels significant in its effortless simplicity.

Here in this effortless silence, there isn’t a need to resolve, reconcile or determine what reality or experiencing, ultimately is, or what the self ultimately is. Not because those questions are definitively answered, but because they don’t require an answer in that moment for experience to be complete and whole. It is realised that they come from the mind that 'thinks' it needs to know. From a mind that believes its completion is in 'knowing'.

Thoughts still arise.

Interpretations still happen.

The mind still moves.

But the movements are not necessarily taken as final, central or even true reflections of 'unknowable' reality.

They can come and go without being believed as defining reality.

This is what I would call something close to a return to beginner’s mind.

Not innocence as something regained, and not ignorance. But a softening of the need to know or understand reality or experiencing.

In beginner’s mind, experience isn't definitively labelled. It isn't being pinned down into fixed conclusions. There is curiosity without ownership of certainty. There is direct engagement with experiencing without immediate interpretation.

What I notice is that this isn’t a special state or something to achieve. It’s more like a natural quality of open or expanded awareness that becomes visible when the urgency to definitively understand or conceptualise experience, relaxes.

It’s always been here, in all of us, underneath the layering of thoughts, beliefs and concepts.

"Right action', 'right thinking' doesn't 'get' you there.

It is already ALL that is here.

And what becomes clear is that the search itself was never really pointing toward a final answer or the true or ultimate Self.

It was returning...

tracing the steps taken...

back...

home...

to this simplicity—the ability to be with THIS direct experience without constantly turning it into something to resolve, understand, perfect, reconcile or know.

Not because questions are meaningless, but because life doesn’t actually require a final conceptual resolution in order to be lived.

It is already whole and complete, in and of itself, in its every expression.

Always and only NOW.

So the movement of thought to define experiencing seems to soften or be seen more ghost like over time.

Less grasping.

Less needing to know, reconcile or organise reality.

More effortless allowing of experience to be EXACTLY as it is, fluid and fleeting, without believing minds need to convert it into something fixed, solid, controllable and reliable.

Life is neither reliable or unreliable...

It just is..

And in that realisation, something very ordinary...free... and very quiet remains.

Just this.....