Zen and the Art of Falling
In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.
Chogyam Trungpa
My wife is a Physical Therapist. She has explained to me that walking upright, which is a means of locomotion most fully expressed by human beings, is actually quite remarkable. The process is one of taking a stable system and intentionally driving it into a state of instability — falling — and then regaining stability, over and over again.
First we stand. Next we hurl ourselves forward into a fall. We then catch our fall and regain our stance. If you watch a human infant learning to walk, you will see this instinctual process unfolding quite clearly.
The process of knowing (of creating knowledge) is very similar to this. We construct a stable explanation of the world and stand on it. As the world changes beneath our minds, we fall. As we fall, we struggle to reconcile our explanation of the world in order to reassert a stable stance.
In ideology and dogma, we try to cling to a stable stance — a truth — from which we will no longer fall and from which we need no longer move forward. But the world does not comply with our attempts to avoid our fear of falling. The world changes beneath our clinging minds and, sooner or later, we must fall despite our best efforts.
Since the world is always changing beneath our minds, the length of the fall we will take in knowing will be greater the longer we try to avoid falling. The danger of relying on ideology and dogma increases over time. History is filled with tales of fatal falls.
There is another option though. We can chose to master the art of knowing in much the same way we master the art of walking.
Like walking, the process of knowing — this falling forward —- goes unexamined in our everyday experience. To change this — to depart the habit and master the art —- we must be letting go in much the same way as the infant learns to walk by falling. To move forward, we must step off the brink of our belief, stepping into the fall, and trust that we will survive. In this way our knowing becomes more powerfully useful given our aims and intentions. Our journeying minds can then take us where we chose to go!
I call this process surfing the wave of knowledge creation.
























