How Spider-Man Shows Us the Beautiful Power of Beginner's Mind. If you’re like most people, when a shocking thing happens you instantly go into anger, fight, or some other emotional reaction. Just like Doctor Strange did in the 2016 Marvel movie.
Doctor Strange was a world-class surgeon who, because of his own hubris, had a terrible car crash that crushed his hands. After every known cure in the Modern world failed, in his desperation he found a mystical sanctuary in Nepal led by a woman called The Ancient One. Even though he had come begging for help, he was closed-minded and argumentative toward her metaphysical claims, demanding that, "there's no such thing as spirit." So she shoved his spirit out of his body. He paniced and accused her of drugging him. She assured him she hadn't, then shot him through the vast unknown while he screamed and said, "This isn't real, this isn't real." His ability to accept (much less embrace) his circumstances was slow and incredibly painful at every turn.
Which made it wildly impressive when we saw Spider-Man's response to his spirit being shoved out of his body in the 2021 movie Spider-Man: No Way Home. Initially, he was confused, but even though he wasn't inhabiting his body, it was still able to move to support his goals without him intentionally doing so- implying his incredible intuition (this is where the term spidey-sense comes from). Then he reflected on his spirit experience and said, "This feels amazing," which modeled a stunningly open-minded reception of what was happening to him. Unlike any person we know of before or since, he was then able to re-inhabit his body. In perhaps my favorite display of healthy boundaries I've ever seen, he then said, "That may be one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me, but don't ever do that again."
This scene is a perfect example of the beautiful power of beginner's mind, and in my opinion the most under-appreciated moment in all of Marvel's movies and shows. Spider-Man's natural embrace of the unknown, his fascinated approach to a shockingly unexpected experience, gave him instant access to a vast amount of choices and abilities.
Some years ago I did LSD for the first time (in a safe environment with a close trusted friend.) My relationship with psychedelics is mind-expansion. I take them very rarely, and when I do, I take what’s sometimes called a “god dose” because it’s the dose at which you have the opportunity to encounter things that can only be explained with the ineffable concept of god. So, the first time I did LSD I took a triple dose. The experience showed me that what we call “reality” is an arbitrary tiny sliver of actuality- and it taught me that this sliver was chosen because it’s where we can meet each other.
The ability to reliably encounter each other is worth more than the rest of actuality.
A few hours after the LSD wore off, I discovered a problematic side-effect of the eye-opening experience: my ability to discern what was and was not part of our reality had become way too soft and untrustworthy. Is that really a car bumper? Do I really need to press on the brake pedal? I knew that ability to function in this reality requires proper discernment of what reality is, and that I needed help with that.
So I messaged a friend who was on a Buddhist monk path, told him I’d lost my ability to reliably discern reality, asked if he had any recommendations, and went to sleep. When I woke up, he’d sent me this dharma talk, this Shinzen Young video, and Alan Watts "Veil that Conceals Reality." I started listening. As far as I recall, in each talk there was a moment where the teacher said, “It’s ok if you don’t understand this next part,” and each time the next part was an ah-ha moment for me. After listening to those I felt totally back to normal. Plus extreme gratitude for being back to normal.
I didn’t realize till later that I’d had a massive upgrade in my operating system. My new default setting was beginner's mind.
A few weeks later, I boarded a plane to fly to a connecting flight to my hometown for Thanksgiving. After a long wait, the pilot announced that the pre-flight checks had discovered a problem, the flight was canceled, and we’d all need to de-plane. Unlike ever before in my life, my automatic response to the news was the thought, “Oh! Now I’m on an adventure! I have no idea what’s going to happen next!” It was joyous. Enlivening. And then I realized everyone else on the plane was groaning, cussing, and making phone calls, and that it was surprising that I wasn’t doing the same.
I walked off the plane like a kid in line to meet Santa Claus. I followed the crowd to get in line for the service desk to get re-assigned to a new flight. I was the only person who wasn’t talking on a phone. An airline representative came over to all of us and said “If you call this number, you’ll be helped much faster than at the service desk.” I was the only person who heard him. I called the number, a kind person picked up instantly, found a direct flight to my destination that was 3 gates away and had just started boarding, and booked my spot on the flight. Leaving the line, I turned back and said loudly, “Hey everyone, call this number, it really works great!” But nobody noticed me. They were still complaining on their phones. I was in the air before most of them got to the front of the line, and I got to my hometown 6 hours earlier than I would have on my original flight.
Opportunities arrive all the time. Many of them look like problems or setbacks. But if we encounter them with beginner’s mind, like Spider-Man, we can see them for the openings they are and naturally take avenues toward beauty.
