confusion, mother of wisdom

talk transcript, edited version : June 24, 2025

I would like to explore today ways in which dissonant notions such as confusion and wisdom could relate to one another. At times after a silent retreat, I have had someone come and tell me they found aspects of the experience confusing for them. Somehow, they are sensing the overriding feeling is one of confusion, or a mind that is unclear, entangled and boggled. I have thought and tried to make sense of this, as usually we think maybe the opposite needs to happen. There is this sense that maybe, somehow the person's mind was perhaps more clear when they came to the retreat, when they sat through the days and hours of sitting, or they had some notion that they understood things, or they made sense of things in a way that felt less conflicting, challenging to them. That as a result of the silence and the intensity of Zazen, and just not being able to talk about their experience during the week, at the end, they feel that understanding of things or seeing things, that to some degree made sense to them, had been taken away from them as a result of the practice so that now they feel more confused. To start, maybe it would be a good idea to try and understand what we mean by confusion and what we mean by clarity. Are there some unexplored assumptions at work here that we are not seeing?

When we sit an intensive retreat, through the silence and the stillness that unfolds we begin to turn our attention inwards. In some texts about the practice of zazen including Master Dogen's Fukenzazngi, this process is referred to as "turning the light inward to illumine the self" rather than giving our attention be captivated by stimuli coming from the exterior. So we pay more attention to inner processes. So, how is it then doing that giving this our focus, we are thrown into what we perceive to be a confused state of mind? Now, as I ask that question what you may have heard of as the three pillars or fundamentals of Zen practice come to mind. These are great effort, great doubt, and great death. So you have one of them that is great doubt. Is there a relationship between that great doubt that you have in Zen practice – it actually comes up more in a striking way in Rinzai Zen where you work with koans, and the koans thrust you or precipitate you into that greater doubt – and then as a result of practice, through the great effort and encouragement of those who sit with you and maybe a teacher's guidance, the breakthrough experience that cracks you completley open? As I mentioned, this may be more a Rinzai approach, pushing through the mind until it opens up allowing you to see what the litterature call your true nature, satori in Zen parlance.

Going back to the doubt, what is it about? A lot of things, some of an existential nature: doubt about the sense of who I am, what the purpose of life is when I am faced with death, questions about my drives, my ambitions, how I engage with others, how I present myself to the world. So all these things that before were not really examined, around which necessarily we carry a lot of assumptions, unexplored beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world, all of a sudden, we begin to have deep misgivings or questions about them. We could say what may open before us is some kind of an existential crisis.

I guess if you don't go through some kind of a crisis, you're not going anywhere with this. By existential crisis I mean some deep questioning that exposes you to uncertainty and lack of solid ground. If all the matters were resolved effortlessly, one after another, all the questions kind of opened up and there would be no resistance to face, then what would our practice be actually about? Suzuki Roshi said you cannot go far into your practice if you don't encounter difficulties along the way. Why do we find Zazen challenging? Well, it challenges us because we can't seize or grasp it, it is bottomless. It challenges our assumptions. It challenges the beliefs we are invested in. It challenges the opinions and self-views, and maybe particularly self-imagery, of which most of the times, we are not conscious. We don't even know we have self-imagery because we are so invested in, caught up, and identify with it. It is one of those things you cannot see as it is too cloto you.

So, practice, instead of offering the certainty we crave, in some subtle way digs the ground beneath our feet. And we feel, initially at least, more off-kilter, more unsettled. Perhaps there is a connection between what in the tradition is called the Great Doubt, all of a sudden being thrown into these deep existential questions, and the experience of confusion we are talking of here. Now confusion in itself is not problematic as such, I would say. What is problematic and creates dukkha or suffering, are not the mental fabrications in themselves, of whatever nature they may be. It's our attachment to them that is afflicitve. It's our attachment to our views, our attachment to how we see the world, how we define the world, how we think we are as a person, or should be as a person, the partial images we have of others, how instead we would like them to be, all this is what burdens us.

The mind binds us to these images and they become the prism through which we look at life and perceive reality. Now, this linkage is another way of seeing attachment. So it's not the assumptions and the beliefs and the opinions that create confusion or duhkka per say, it's how we grasp, how we hold on to them. And on the Eightfold Path, which is where the Fourth Noble Truth leads us to, that is Satipaṭṭhāna Marga, the noble truth about the path – the path is the Eightfold Path, the guidelines of living a life conducive to practice that will lead to breaking through saṃsāric conditioning –the first of these fundamental practices is Right View.

It's the first one, probably because it's the most important, probably because from that very first orientation, the others follow naturally. Some commentators or teachers have described Right View as the absence of any particular view. Now, we may think Right View is having a right view of the Buddhist teachings, of the dharma, and the doctrines and how they work and the philosophy, and then maybe get attached to them, and thinking you have incorporated a worldview that makes sense, that is profound. And then without knowing it, we get attached to that. So then we are thrown back again into confusion. So that's why it makes sense, as some say, that the Right View, which is about insight, actually, and wisdom, is no view at all, or rather not getting attached to any particular view. Maybe you can see it as the view that sees right through any view and lets it go and that takes us back again to the practice of zazen.

As I said, the experience of confusion can be seen as an initial encounter with groundlessness. And I

think anyone who has had an experience of groundlessness, the eruption of a dramatic form of anicca, or impermanence manifesting itself, knows of the desperation with which the mind tries to find something to hold on to. When anicca erupts into the seamless movement we try to create of our existence, we experience it as some form of groundlessness. We begin to get a deeper sense that all phenomena are conditioned and lack self nature, and as Buddha said, keep arising and falling. So you can't hold on to that, you can't grasp impermanence.

Resisting the groundlessness is another way of saying that we are resisting this natural movement of

things towards change, the fact that they are in flux , and we can't hold onto them. And yet we hold on to our perception of reality, hence the confusion. So paradoxically, and it makes sense

from a psychological point of view too, what we resist – states of anxieties, states of frustration – the more they persist. And the more we oppose groundlessness, the more confused we become for it would mean insisting on meeting reality on our terms rather than accepting it with its vissicitudes. Can we be open to not always knowing, can we accept that our certainties can no longer offer us the comfort they once did? This would be like surrendering to the current of a river and letting it carry us along on its course. Along into where? We don't know whete the surrendering will take us. If we

knew, it wouldn't be letting go. There is always that not knowing at the end and at the beginning of the letting go. So it doesn't make sense to think we let go from a place of knowing. We always let go

from a place of not knowing, and we release whatever it is we are holding into that space of not knowing or uncertainty.

So, for me, and that's probably then another way of speaking of confusion is that we try to figure things out, force our way into some conclusion, into some clarity, into some understanding, into some form of resolution, which would make for swimming downstream. Then, all of a sudden, you're swimming in the

sea and you find yourself in the middle of a rip. The immediate impulse is to try to swim out of it. But the more you try to resist the rip, the more you become exhausted and risk the possibility of actually drowning.

But if you let go and let the rip carry you, let that movement, sudden movement of the currents or

counter-currents in the ocean do its work, it will carry you through to somewhere where a new situation presents itself. And maybe from there, we could find there are possibilities are presenting themselves for us to find our way back to the shore.

Last time when Carl read that passage from Bertolt Brecht, and someone said, "It sounds like a sutra."

This passage from the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke seems also to have the same kind of quality.

And may have all read these letter before. I think they have a sutra like quality to them, you don't exhaust their depth. "Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue . Do not not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

So, again, the mind that asks these questions and wants an immediate and reassuring answer is the

mind that does not want to sit and settle into the confusion. So to become aware that one is confused is one's entry point into the unknown, into the uncertain, into whatever it is, as Rilke calls it, "unresolved in the heart." So we can say that what we often feel confused about is confusion around confusion itself. And the metaphor, the image that comes to mind is one of the first images that came to mind when I was

studying what meditation is, and I don't know where, I have no recollection, but it stayed with me: the

image of scooping water from a very murky body of water and pouring it into a glass. So the water is

so murky, you cannot see through it. You can't see the other side, or what's on the underside of the

glass. It's very dark, opaque. But as you settle with the confusion, with what is confusing, slowly, what

happens? Well, it's the process of the particles that are floating in the water will sediment. And after

the sedimentation, what you have is crystal clear water from the water that was initially murky and

didn't offer any possibility of something that is transparent or translucent.

So, as mentioned, what's confusing is not even our views, but our attachment to them, to how we see the world, and how we know ourselves. If we give confusion space, like that murky water scooped from a river with a glass, little by little, we will see the inherent clarity of the mind manifesting itself. It is not something that requires any particular external intervention. It's part of the possibility of confusion to manifest clarity and wisdom. And some have argued that without the confusion, what would wisdom and the clarity be about? Or said differently, if we are not deluded beings what are to be enlightened about. Hence, one contemporary Zen teacher, Anzan Hoshin, expresses it this in a way which I find both intriguing and pertinent : "Confusion is the mother of wisdom." But this utterence is itself a distant echo of Mahayana teachings that posit Prajñāpāramitā as being the mother of wisdom . As I said in the beginning, we can speak of confusion as another way of seeing our illusions. It's another way of experiencing dukkha and suffering through the attachments we create with those views, beliefs, and assumptions. Then, if we continue with the practice, if we give it more effort, dedicate more time to it, we may begin to see that clarity is present, that wisdom is present and has always been here for there is no where for wisdom to go.

Then, because of our deep-rooted sense of grasping, we try to seize at that clarity, at that wisdom, because that is the most ingrained function of our ego-conscious mind; grasping. And once we start grasping at that wisdom and thinking that wisdom is something that in some way is about me and relates to my understanding, then we fall back into confusion again. Then we fall back again into self-imagery. again. The root of confusion is attachment. When we are no longer separate from wisdom, we no longer see it as something outside of us that we need to go and acquire or reach out for, and then hold on to and grasp. Which is why Master Dogen says, "Buddhas do not know that they are Buddhas." The wise do not know that they are wise. And that takes us to the very beginning of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu: "He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know." So then we can perhaps see more clearly and realize that whatever dukkha or confusion we are experiencing manifests itself most of the times in some form of some contraction. And we sit with that. When we breathe into it, then we begin perhaps to realize that the tension and the contraction dissolve into space, or disappear. As Master Uchiyama would say, like the bubbles that he talks about that appear, bubbles of our thinking that surface continually on that river of our lives or our consciousness or our awareness, and then burst I think to sum this up, is that we can acquire knowledge. We have methodologies for that. But wisdom is a process that's very different. We cannot fabricate it. But when we surrender and do not resist the confusion, and let go of all these self-images and views that we hold on to, that create this sense of a separate self, then, like the particles that sediment in the bottom of that murky water, you realize that wisdom and clarity have always been here. The parallel with the clouds and the sky is very obvious here. And if we let the clouds just be the clouds, then they pass, and what they reveal is the speckless, infinite spaciousness of the sky, which is a traditional representation of the mind.

Once more, In the Tao Te Ching we read: "Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?"

Thank you for your attention. If you would like to make any comments or questions, feel free to do so.

Thank you for listening.

Group Discussion

Anje:

Thank you, Hamid, for the talk. I have to go. I already heard my mother call me twice. Thank you so much for sitting together.

Hamid:

Thank you, Anje, for being with us. Please attend to your mother.

Anje:

I will.

Hamid:

And don't forget that you could call the theme of this talk "Confusion is the mother of wisdom."

Anje had already left...

Ahmed:

I suppose there's a lot of confusion these days, even in the collective. I know we're speaking more on

the internal confusion, but I suppose it is also internal, what's happening in the world, and the

attachment to the desire for justice or the desire for balance or, you know, just the agony of watching

so much suffering and then to continue to see more hegemony and more pain and almost no

conclusion. And certainly there's an attachment to some desire of wanting things to balance out and

for righteousness and for the suffering to emerge from it. Yet it still continues on, and that attachment to wanting that, and not just letting go for it to be what it is to be, is causing a lot of agony these days, both in the individual and the collective. I guess that's what came up to me now with the urgency of what is going on around. And now supposedly some kind of giving up to these powers, these storms in the sky, you know, the real sky and the sky of the mind sort of coming together in this display of geopolitics and war.

And it's very difficult to let go of that as if that is a cloud that will pass. It seems like it is a constant, constant force of, yes, of injustice, evil, whatever you want to call it. It's just what keeps coming to mind as we speak about this, the depth of the truth and the wisdom that we speak of. That just came to mind, so I thought I'd say it.

Gerry:

Thank you, Hamid. And Ahmed, your comments made me think of a saying that I saw somewhere on

the internet, something like, "This too will pass, but it may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass." So

that's not to belittle, ob

viously, what's happening in your part of the world.But Hamid, the first thing that came up for me is that I've had a sense of feeling sorry for somebody

who went to sesshin for the first time, with all these expectations, I guess, which we have of what we

will obtain out of sitting for a week and what we will achieve. And I think, you know, for somebody who

hasn't had the advantage of sitting together like we do as a group and discussing these things

beforehand, it must be such an eruption of turmoil to go to a sesshin, for example, for the first time and

just be confronted with all of this stuff in the mind. And that is obviously related to the expectations that we all have when we practice or when we begin to practice, when we continue to practice, you know, this grasping onto the expectations of what our practice will do for us, without realizing that the answers that we seek are here close to us all the time. I think that that can take many, many years of practice or a lifetime of practice before we can realize that. SoI think your talk just actually, for me, just summed up the part of practice or everything that you brought in about Right View and no view, you know, about the clearing of the water. I think it was Alan Watts who says, "Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone." But this takes so, so much practice and so much learning, and so much confusion, that water might take a long, long time to clear. So I look forward to reading the transcript of this as it comes up because it just had a breadth and depth of everything that's related to our practice. So thank you. Thank you very much.

Carl:

Thank youfor your talk, Hamid. And it is so clear intellectually, so clear. Especially, I think, for people

like us who are sitting here, because I consider us as thinkers. And that you came in the end to the

topic that it is, in fact, physical. And you said, when we sit in Zazen a long time, that everything is

contracted, and then we go to this physical letting go. I think this is the actual personal experience of it,

not the thought experience, not the imagination. This physical contraction and letting go. Now what seems to be the pith of life. And if we connect it with confusion and wisdom: contracting, confusion, creating material things; wisdom, relaxation, let them go, see that they have no permanence, maybe also see that the value is not there that we have given to them when we created them. This is a physical process. And I think when we can live it consciously as an exercise in breathing exercises, like in Qigong and standing up and sleeping, it's just big relief—cannot say relief, it's serenity. For a long time, I thought it is a sickness that I always have this mood shift from not knowing then clarity, but it seems to be a natural process through this experience what we become in practice, that investigation, unconscious investigation, is a big aid because we can investigate with willpower that we investigate. So we want to have a solution, that we want to find the key, or we can just investigate the experience, just that is my comment to this beautiful, large, expanding talk. And also, I'm very near to what you said about... I'm very near to this turmoil of pain, craziness, paranoia in the world. This is, I have to confess,yesterday I could relax, I could see it and say, "Don't take care." Then when you say it, Hamid, Ahmed, it comes up again, and I want to take care. It is also, oh, this contracting, moving of ours. In Brecht's text, when the thinker was coming to this accident, he got out of his big vehicle. He got out of his big creation. He was a son of a king, he had so much responsibility and uperego, and he got out of this. He got out of the plane, got out of the military construction, the mental constructions. That's what we do, as Zen, we have to do. Thank you.

Gerry:

Just one thing I'd like to add, again from Ahmed's comments, that we may think, go back to Carl, we

may think that we have cracked it and we have, you know, in our sitting practice, in our lives or

whatever, but then, you know, life has this habit of creating yet more conf

usion, and creating more confusion through a situation such as in the Middle East right now, or personal loss or whatever. So it's this continual clearing of the water that we have to practice with. I don't think we will ever have the opportunity to live in that, or swim in that clarity all the time. You know, that mud keeps being flung at us from all directions. So I guess that's our practice.

Hamid:

Thank you, everyone, for your comments, for relating to the conversation. And thank you

for this moment of just sitting and looking at the confusion rather than trying to shrug it off. Thank you. And may you all be well.

⁂Erring Cloud Sangha | June 24, 2025