We don’t realize how many of our limitations are imposed by our thinking, not by anything external. It is really not people or the environment that limits us, but we ourselves.
This is illustrated in what Suzuki Roshi calls the lack of a beginner’s mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.”
The problem is not that we know so much, but that we think we know when we actually do not. The expert becomes locked into a particular perspective and looks at things from only one point of view. The beginner has the advantage of choosing a different perspective, coming at the same thing from a different angle.
The Dunning–Kruger effect tells us that the less we know about a subject, the more likely we are to assume we know more than we actually do. In other words, the less we know, the more we think we know. The opposite is also sometimes true: the more we know, the more we realize how much we do not know. The secret of a beginner’s mind is to meet everything as if for the first time.