Review of The Power of an Open Question

My first take on this book (click here) was that the intended audience was beginning dharma students. It might be also be good, I thought, as a holiday gift for friends and relatives to help explain practice in a straightforward, contemporary, and friendly (non-weird) manner. 

But as I’ve read along, I came to appreciate that Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel has constructed a very intelligent book with several beginning practice themes served up first (i.e., the middle way, oneness, and no words) and a movement to issues for more advanced students in the middle and end of the book (i.e., objectification, non-creating, and the teacher-student relationship).

The sections that I found most compelling are on “blindism and doubtism” (the extremes of believing everything or doubting everything) and “the hook and ring” referring to the teacher and the student respectively. 

My one quibble is the author’s use of the word “koan” to refer to a practice theme or topic of inquiry rather than as an expression of the harmony of the fundamental and relative as it’s used more specifically in Zen.  

Look below for an excerpt.

Blindism has a whole lot of “shoulds”: “The tradition says I should, the teacher says I should, a practitioner should, my practice should, I should…” Where do all these shoulds come from? Blindism comes with a big assumption – mainly that we can’t trust our own discernment, even though we have already chosen blindly to trust all those shoulds that seem to keep coming our way. Blindism makes us forget that we entered the spiritual path in the first place through relying upon our own discernment. We saw an opportunity and moved toward it. Now, having found the teachings, do we just lay our discriminating wisdom aside and passively await liberation? Do we just let shoulds navigate our ship? Or do we actively particpate?

It’s amazing what human beings can put up with, but we can only go along blindly for so long. Eventually, we fall into doubism: “How does this practice relate to my life? Why isn’t it working? Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Do thoughts ever settle down? Maybe I’m just a bad student. Could it be that the teachigns just don’t apply to my life? And as for my teahcer, he seems ordinary to me. Enlightenment is obviously a myth…” Doubtism has its own assumptioins. It assumes that it has already figured out, at least to some extent, how things are, so self-reflection and curiousity come to a standstill. Meanwhile doubt revels in its own cleverness. But it’s not nearly as clever as it thinks, because it gives us nowhere to go, which means it prevents us from learning anything new.