Spiritual Bravado
When we are young, we live with a great deal of uncertainty. We don’t know exactly how to stand elegantly or even where to hold our hands without feeling awkward. Gradually, we gain physical poise as well as mental confidence in who we are and what we can accomplish. Yet, there will always remains a huge amount of knowledge beyond our present capacity to understand, even about the outer environment we inhabit. There is also an inner environment that we inhabit, which is even more difficult to understand. There is an annoying “something” that we don’t exactly feel comfortable with, need to know, but we don’t want others to know that we still don’t fully know what we are doing. So, we develop a strategy of bravado, (not a good method, but a method), to adapt to uncertain inner and outer circumstances. However, this might not be such a good strategy for the intense preparation for enlightenment as it is for everyday life. The beginners’ mind referred to in Buddhist Zen ...