Beginner’s Mind, and a first proper meeting with Cancer

‘That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.’ (Philip Roth: American Pastoral)

‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ (TS Eliot: Gerontion)

If you pick up a violin for the first time and attempt to play a Bach Partita, no amount of Beginner’s Mind will stop it sounding like cats in a bag. When it comes to performance, give me competence and experience over Beginner’s Mind any day. I am having surgery this week. And no, I do not want my surgeon to operate with ‘Beginner’s Mind’. I don’t want him to be relaxed, playful, intuitive or open-minded. I would like him to be a bit anxious. I want boxes ticked, the whole tight-arse bureaucratic competence shebang.

The term Beginners Mind (another Zen Buddhist idea) refers of course to an odd phenomenon of meditation, which is that it is often most rewarding when you really have no idea what you are doing – i.e. when you’re a beginner. A different function of the mind kicks in from the narrowly focused one that engages for the familiar daily round. It is a mentality that is alert, watchful, but open. It isn’t deciding on what your experience is in advance. It waits for it to be whatever it is. It is more like the natural openness and curiosity of a child, for whom everything is mysterious, fascinating. Jesus (Matthew 18.3) makes the same point: ‘Unless you be converted and become like little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Jesus emphasizes how tricky it is, to arrive at a kind of deep innocence, the hands open and uncalculating, once we know our way around.

Where you might reasonably expect to see a bit of Beginner’s Mind is in Lord Sugar’s apprentices. On the reality TV programme ‘the Apprentice’, they are in a learning environment, and yet their starting point is invariably not learning and listening, but certainty. ‘The word ‘can’t’ is not in my vocabulary’ the contestants say; ‘I’m unique, Lord Sugar; I’m a one off, I’m the full package’; ‘I am so charming; nobody can resist me’. ‘For me the sky’s the limit;’ Yes, we watch these people make a clean break from the reality of planet earth, and then burn up as they try to engage with the ordinary reality of business. We watch with appalled fascination because it is a nightmarish reflection of our sense of our own specialness getting obliterated in the ordinary business of reality.

The aim of Buddhism is to see through our own inner Apprentice contestant. To experience Lord Sugar’s stubby finger pointing at us and to hear that brutally rasped dismissal: ‘You’re fired’. It’s a start, at least. Don’t even think about Beginners Mind till you hear that serious geezer voice and feel that implacable digit break into your world. What I mean is, Beginners Mind cannot be accessed from a position of knowing what you are doing.

As for me, I’m wondering if the long bony finger of death is going to point to me. I was rushed through various tests. An ultrasound established that I had a cancerous tumour that had spread to the lymph nodes. I remember this moment quite vividly. Up to that point I had been telling myself, they’ll whip out the tumour in my face, bit of radiotherapy, all clear by Christmas.

All of a sudden, there was a quite physical feeling of I suppose dread, or maybe despair. A friend of mind said he experienced this in hospital when after a routine operation to remove his gall bladder, he saw the doctors suddenly huddling around his scans. He said he had a feeling then he had never known before. It is a kind of vertigo, where you are suddenly confronted by a reality that your experience of life cannot encompass. Freud says, the unconscious mind does not contain a knowledge of one’s own death. The death of others, yes, that is something we can envisage. But not our own.

I was sent straight upstairs for a chest scan. I knew if it had got into the lungs I was batting in fading light on a sticky wicket. We waited for the results. Well, we rolled up for a meeting with the surgeon, oncologist and CNS nurse. The surgeon said to Claudia, who needed to be at work, that she should stay, and Claudia said to me, ‘This means it must be bad news’.