Hello!
A short and sweet meditation and post this week.
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve guided a Don’t Know Mind meditation on Home Base. Adapted from Zen teachings, this is still my favourite practice for dealing with uncertainty in work, in relationship, in life. It pairs well with what I think of as the core scientific attitude, the honest skepticism of continually learning from new evidence, of staying with the open question.
A mind that seizes on certainty is, metaphorically, having a seizure. It gets rigid, and has a harder time holding new perspectives. I’ve personally found this to be true even with things like making plans. When I’ve held too tightly to a particular outcome, I haven’t actually been available for more interesting prospects that may be emerging all around.
Whenever my plans seem to be going astray, or I can’t find the answer, my mantra (if I can remember) is, “Don’t know, don’t need to know.” As a meditation practice, it’s even simpler: I repeat it every time a thought bubbles up, or a certainty, or even a perception. It’s the practice of choosing not confusion, but rather, a kind of pleasurable bogglement. It feels like floating, suspended, over the mechanics of prediction. To quote Buddhism‘s famous Diamond Sutra, by cultivating “a mind that dwells nowhere,” we may discover we can actually dwell anywhere.
But how do we know what to do, if we don’t know how it will go?
Certainty has its place, particularly in narrow domains with clear, predictable constraints – like, say, mechanical engineering. But when it comes to the broader questions of human life, it’s harder to find. Nature and culture and other sentient humanoids are complicated. By the time you take two steps towards a hoped-for scenario, that scenario often changes.
The best answer I’ve been able to figure out is the same thing most people figure out: balance setting firmer goals in the long-term with adapting to changing circumstances in the moment. I’ve also noticed that the more neediness I have to know how something will go, the less available I am to my better intuitions.
There’s nothing wrong with knowing. It’s concluding that can get us into trouble, a premature closure that cuts us off from our always-unfinished lives.
As always, I’m curious for your own takes on this. Let me know how this meditation lands for you.
Jeff
PS: Learning to identify and trust the intuitions that emerge from this open not-knowing is a different but related topic. Peter Russell just shared a nice piece on listening to our “inner teacher” here. He opens with Rumi: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” I’ll be sharing a post and meditation soon on the different domains of human intuition, both where and how they enter into experience.
A few quick notes—
The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) is Sunday, May 17 at 8pm EDT. Link here. The DNP is for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. Full scholarships are available, email info@jeffwarren.org.
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Many thanks!
Being Human Takes Practice - New York
August 14-16, 2026
Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY
This retreat explores what meditation teaches us about being human. It teaches us about resistance and fixation. It teaches us about healing stuck emotions and expanding stuck views. It teaches us mercy and forgiveness, majesty and humility. It teaches us about how we relate to other people and to ourselves.
