The 5 Year Flip: Knowing We Don't Know Shit
You are full of shit. I am full of shit. Everyone we know is full of shit.
And do you want to know who knows this with absolutely certainty?
Our future selves… ohh we may not realize it now, but just give it 5 years.
See our current selves — chuckle at our past selves.
Yet our future selves — will chuckle at our current selves!
Damn, no self is safe — from our self! We look out into this big bad world of people and things and think yea, we got this shit figured out.
Until we don’t. Until we keep laughing at our naive former selves. Our overconfidence follows our psyches like a shadow. This cycle of ignorance, overconfidence and laughter — is what I call The 5 Year Flip.
For our current selves always think we are soo right. Clutching our self-righteous ideas, we weave our narratives and world views.
Yet time humble us. Grows us. Or in my case — bitch slaps me.
Just think of yourself 5-10-15 years ago? I cringe at 25 year old me, he was such a selfish asshole. Current me? A work in progress.
Yet most of us think change happens more when we are younger in our teens and 20s, and then finally we mellow out (or wisen up). But this isn’t so. Research shows the rate of change (psychologically and emotionally) is the same from 20-25 as from 40-45 as from 65-70*. But for some odd reason we think we simply plateau around 30 something — becoming whoever the hell we are. But this is bullshit and the 5 Year Flip is our fossilized ignorance to prove it.
When will we finally learn?
We know our past selves, those poor damn fools, kept falling for the 5 Year Flip. So how can our current selves live in a way to avoid the laughs from our future selves?
Ironically, “I don’t know” is what we need to know. And this leads us to a famous Zen teaching on the nature of mind.
DO YOU HAVE SMALL MIND?
After 35 years of experiences where I marginally act less and less like a jackass, I have come to this realization:
The more I learn, the less I know. Call it humility. Call it wisdom. Call it honesty.
Yet we live in times where we are expected to have an opinion on everything. Where we don’t have conversations, but debates. Where we shame, blame and condemn. We swim in winning, not empathy and understanding.
The knowing mind — that analytical, conceptual, OCD categorical label maker of our thinking mind — has become a narcissistic crack addict. In the age of the individual, it’s hooked on its own ideas. Whether social justice warriors or ‘pragmatic’ climate deniers, we love the high of being “right”.
But what is being right anyway? Just a bundle of flickering ideas? Opinions of how IT should be — about how THEY should be? A neurological .15 sec fart of a thought paired with juicy interoceptive feeling that gives my ego a hard-on?
Well yea. But hard on’s aside (not really) — here’s the rub. We don’t just cherish our beliefs, we chisel them into the marble facade of our egos. Our bundles of beliefs — become “us”. We idolize and identify with them as “ME” and “I”. Our ideologies often behave like ego porn, a perpetual ego stroking that makes us self-absorbed and over confident. A weird narcissistic snuff film where we worship and masturbate to both our ideas and sense-of-self. Hell that's probably half the reason for all these ZenRants :).
The small mind builds our identities out of our ideas. Living in concept and ideas of right and wrong, it creates and protects “I”. Or what some psychologists call the ‘narrative self’ TK. But hell, it makes some pretty dope moats!
Our knowing mind, or small mind in Zen, is this rational landscape of concepts and categories. Good vs bad. Cat vs dog. Right vs wrong. Us vs them. Here, brick by brick, concept by concept, the small mind constructs “us”. It builds our stone castles, shrines to the self, made from our concepts, narratives and world views.
These world views and belief systems help us predict and explain the world — which is awesome (thanks evolution) — but they also become prisons of identity.
We think our castles are solid. Permanent. Indestructible. A cozy and ideological secure bunker from the world. This is the reassuring trick the knowing mind plays on us. Like a soothing blankie for a toddler, the knowing mind makes us feel confident, safe and secure. This is why our current selves believe we are always so damn right. We mortar our bull shit castles with an amalgamation of psychological biases: that is well just the human condition (* e.g. confirmation bias, control bias, self-bias, over-confidence bias etc).
But as the 5 Year Flip painfully shows, our ideas and selves are not marble, but fairy dust. Our precious beliefs are not solid and ME, but a nebulous morphing cloud dancing through time.
We are not a moat and castle, but with more time and experiences, we grow and change like a tree.
We are not fixed. We grow up and out. We twist and turn. We fight for sun and water. We flow with the ebbs and tides of seasons. This dynamic change permeates all our ideas. It is inherent in any “I” or self.
When I was even more of a wise ass know it all, my grandpa used to say “I may not be right… but I am NEVER wrong”.
And so it is with our ideas. Not only are they squishy and dynamic in time- they are never really 100% right — nor 100% wrong. Just think of the mad genius Newton, he was kinda right and kinda wrong. But for some reason we sure as hell think and live like our lives like we are always 100% right.
So whether you are 25 or 65, the 5 Year Flip keeps holding true. We don’t live in a stone castle of 100% righteousness in any now. Instead it’s the best guest prediction from a social monkey sitting on a rock hurling through space at 67,000 miles/per hour.
Ok ok, so what is there besides this small-mind?
I don’t know — mind.
WISDOM: KNOWING ‘DON’T KNOW’ MIND
When you hear a bird — what do you actually experience? Do you know? Can you describe it in detail?
When you meditate more you start to notice magic tricks of the mind. You see behind the curtain. For example, most of our bandwidth of attention is thinking about the bird sound, not experiencing the chirping song. It’s super subtle mind magic, but look and you can see the slight of hand. Don’t believe me? See the ZenRants Challenge at the end for a meditation game.
Once you see the small mind in action, you can begin to glimpse what Zen calls “Don’t Know Mind”.
With I “Don’t Know Mind” you peel back the veneer of concepts, labels and ideas (thoughts). In its’ place we sit with bare sensations of reality — the raw qualia of what we see, hear, taste, smell and feel.
We don’t identify with each thought fart (I don’t think the Buddha used that term) — but instead the space and dance of it all. We rest in non-conceptual knowing.
See our perceptions (good/bad, hot/cold) are not only dynamic over time (e.g. kids learning to like broccoli) — but they are fabricated by our minds in time.
Our subconscious brain filters, processes, formats and labels the incoming information of our experience before it is ever consciously aware to “us”*. We kinda know it’s a bird, before we realized we ever consciously heard the bird. It’s weird.
Realizing this is penetrating what they call in Zen - “don’t know mind”. By soaking in the direct consciousness of sensate data - we peel back the layers of the mind’s databases automatically labeling everything.
*Nerd Note: actually most of the time the predictive engine of the brain predicts and simulates reality in a controlled hallucination — then our brain compares the internal brain simulation to incoming sensation data of the outside world as a spot check -adjusting “ our experience” if data is different. Have you ever stepped for a step that wasn’t there? This is blowing up a controlled hallucination - aka our perception - this gaming is all nature’s clever way to save computational energy in our brains.*Nerd Note.
The Buddha famously taught this non-conceptual knowing to a mad man named Bahiya of the Bark-Cloth (yes he wore bark loin cloth and wandered as a beggar):
“In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress.””
This is how tapping more and more into I don’t know mind - or the bare reality of things — can minimize the trap of the 5 year Flip.
So instead of living in ideas and concepts ABOUT THE WORLD, we can rest in the dynamic craziness that is the world NOW. This is clarity of the “Power of Now, ”that cliche but true platitude that is a pearl of present moments.
With time and a larger data set of experience our operating system that perceives, judges, conceptualizes the world can evolve. We still may be overconfident pricks, but we don’t easily get pulled into it’s riptide of our knowing mind’s bullshit.
So fucking what you might ask?
Sure we grow up and change — who cares if in 5 years we laugh at our selves — that’s life. Fair — but what if we also swim in a river of 5 minutes Flips?
This is what ‘don’t know mind’ has beautifully and horrifyingly reflected on my judgmental mind. Here’s a story of me and a machine gunning asshole.
Hell right now I am writing in a cafe in Malaysia. There is the jolting echoes of machine guns everywhere. But don’t worry, it’s not real. It’s just a video game. Some foreign tourist (whoops , judgment mind - I’m a foreign tourist too) is gaming out on volume 97, obviously without headphones — who needs those.
What the hell is this guy’s problem? The whole place has to listen to his murderous rampage non stop? Where is the humanity?!
Shit— the right and wrong hook caught me again. The judgmental reaction can be so automatic. I’m not even reacting to the actual sounds, but most of my attentional bandwidth is now absorbed in the feelings of irritation and anger — spinning in judgmental thoughts of he’s wrong — on how he’s such an inconsiderate ass (by default making me marginally not an ass and “Right”).
Yet Mindfully dropping the anger — listening to the sounds directly — it’s surprisingly and bizarrely has a mildly pleasant flow to it. The same sounds, the same judgmental asshole, but two perceptions make for two worlds.
This is simple example of how often we don’t live in direct reality of what we see, hear, and feel. Instead we are stuck in our heads. Stuck in being right and wrong. Stuck in concepts and judgments and confined to our mind’s label maker called perception (or at least this self-righteous writer - but we can’t have anarchy, I did drop to my heart and then ask him nicely if he minded turning it down a bit. He wasn’t an ass, but an oblivious, enthusiastic gamer — one who muted his war games).
In these turbulent times where the world is literally burning, we don’t don’t have to (and can’t afford to) be passive, mindful pushover hippies. We we can fight for change. Fight for whats right.
But the 5 year flip reminds me to be more humble. To (try to) take myself less seriously. And it also empowers me to listen to others with more understanding and compassion — and less judgment and check-mating debate moves.
In the end, either they are full of shit and will learn in time. Or, wait for it, I am likely full of shit and not as right as I think. And in reality we both aren’t 100% right and are trying to figure shit out.
As Ken Wilbur says, ‘Everyone is right (partially, from their developmental growth stage)… For no one is smart enough to be 100% wrong, 100% of the time.’
So now instead of calling out every terd of bullshit, I make it a game. I try to find their seed of truth. Who cares if it’s some woo woo new age fluff bullshit — how is this guy using it as a tool to find meaning in life? This makes it fun and interesting plus a great mindfulness practice. And hell, I can’t learn by talking, but I can by listening — even to semi-bullshit.
So instead of a self-righteous chest pats, with present and open hearts we can listen. We can enact change. We can know we don’t ever truly “know” shit. That to truly know, is to rest in I “don’t know mind”. That when we feel so god damn “right” — we can pause to contemplate - What will my future self — think of my current self?
Hell if I know. But I know this — in 5 years we likely will laugh at our current selves. In 5 years, I will likely laugh at the ridiculousness of this post — so don’t take me seriously — just keep in mind the 5 Year Flip and how we both are full of shit.
~ Alf ~
ZenRants Meditation Challenge: BIRDS or MUSIC?
With this insight of seeing just the seen, in hearing just the heard - we can see how often we are not in that platitude called the present moment.
Here is a meditation game to show you. The next time you hear a bird, pay attention to your mental awareness.
Most of our bandwidth of attention is thinking about the bird sound, not experiencing the chirping song. Don’t believe me? Meditate and see the mind’s magic trick yourself.
Listen to a bird (or some consistent sporadic sound). Most of us think we hear a bird. But with enough meditation experience you notice this: the brain is so fast it labels the sound vibrations “bird” automatically. It’s a bird before we consciously realized - hey bird. We might hear an inner auditory word “bird” and/or see an inner image of a bird flash. It’s so rapid it’s barely perceivable, like a whisper we heard while in another conversation.
Also where is the bird? “Over there”?”. Yet another perceptual overlay maps it in 3D space as “over there”. This isn’t raw data of the real world, but processed and manipulated information from our perception based on our prior conditioning and experiences.
Instead of hearing sounds over there, try resting your mind in the sounds, in the space of the bird song itself. Let yourself fall away — not thinking about birds but becoming the music. Enjoy the jam!