Choosing The Only Option
There’s this quote that I first heard on Mythbusters, which was framed as an ‘ancient Buddhist saying.’
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
It’s not. It’s not necessarily a new phrase, per se, but the quote as I was able to source it is from the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind from the author Shunryu Suzuki. I don’t know if Suzuki was a good dude or a bad dude, but he was very much writing about zen, a particular perspective, and not Buddhism in general. What’s more interesting to me is that in the section he presents this quote, he goes on to talk about how it is the aim of zen meditation to not lose the beginner’s mind. That is, this quote that is sometimes treated as a message in favour of the skill of the master. In the Mythbusters segment, it was invoked to suggest that the beginner, who would try everything to escape a sinking car, might try a lot of things that wouldn’t work, while a master who understood how to get out, would conserve their energy and make the best choices at the right time.
That means that this Mythbusters Segment invoked an ancient quote that wasn’t to speak well of the thing the quote was dismissing. That is, when you become a master, you see the world in less complicated ways. When you are a master, you imagine you know everything that could be, and do not look at what is.
That’s not what I came here to talk to you about, of course.
Came to you to talk about games.
Continue Reading →