November Project: Question #28
This question comes from Brooks through email
Is there a question you’ve been surprised no one has asked?
Well…not really.
What surprises me is people rarely ask themselves the questions they pose to me. And I have always found that baffling. Sure, there is really no way for me to know if they have asked themselves the same questions, but after spending five years listening and speaking, I think I have a good sense for the amount of inquiry many might allow for themselves.
It is never deep enough, it seems.
It reminds me of a story about the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When he read the first line of the Kafka story The Metamorphosis, it almost knocked him out of his bed. [The first line reads, 'As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.' ~ TM]
Garcia Marquez said of the line,
“When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know that anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.“
What he says is so telling: ‘I didn’t know that anyone was allowed to write things like that.’
This kind of thinking follows people into their inquiry. It is almost as if they need a certain ‘permission’ in order to proceed, and I could never understand that. If someone is serious, then surely, they’ll explore themselves thoroughly. It might not come to them all at once, and I can understand why. But you don’t stop, if you are serious.
And I absolutely understand one might be limited to the questions and restrictions of their conditioning. So it very well may be out of their experience entirely to ask a different kind of question. But if they want to see a different ‘answer’, they’ll need to ask a different question. And nothing is stopping them from doing so, at any time.
Empty Your Bowl
Recently on Twitter (it was actually about an hour ago) I had a little conversation over something I tweeted more than a year ago. The tweet itself reads,
#liesyoushouldntfallfor I am the right guru, and I can bring you true freedom.
The conversation on Twitter was just to clarify what I meant. I was asked,
Q1: How best 2 know it’s a lie?; 2: what lies r ok?
And I answered with,
Is there a ‘right’ guru? Can anyone bring you true freedom? Does true freedom actually exist? No one seems to ask these questions.
It isn’t that people have not asked me those questions. It IS rare, but they have asked. But they never seem to ask themselves the same questions. And those are good questions, damn it! Don’t waste them on me! Explore them within yourselves! 
A few years ago on a Skype call someone asked me a similar question to, Can someone else set me free? (Or Can freedom be given to me? Something like that.) My answer was, Have you asked yourself? I’ll never forget his reply:
But I want you to tell me.
My reply was something like, No. I can’t tell you. You have the question, and you seem to be curious about all of this. That is all you need to begin.
If there is any final message on this subject it is this: Any question you receive from Takuin is in no way better than any question you might receive from yourself. In fact, yours is better. You gave it a life and a mission of its own. Takuin didn’t.
Thanks for the question, Brooks.
{ 7 comments }
“But if they want to see a different ‘answer’, they’ll need to ask a different question. And nothing is stopping them from doing so, at any time.”
Nothing is stopping them but then nothing is making them either.
Who would be doing the asking? Where would the question come from? Can the story that is ‘me’ come up with a question? A question may well arise and an answer too but this story of ‘me’ did not come up with it; the question and the answer would just be another bit of the story of ‘me’. Surely there is no thing I can do that is outside of this story of ‘me’. If the seekers story is to seek then seek she shall and if that story ends with an ‘awakening’ then it will not have been from questions asked or incense burned or prayers prayed. It will just be the story unfolding effortlessly just like these words being typed out; wu wei, the nature of all actions.
BTW… I want to say I find much enjoyment in your photographs that accompany your posts. Thanks.
Thanks, Cedric.
As far as ‘who’ asks or where the questions come from, I really don’t think that is important anymore. Even the realization of ‘no separate self’ is superficial. Not that it is worthless, but it is a seductive trap. People stop there when they should keep walking.
If there is nothing we can do outside the story of the self, then we’d best accept that and get on with life. Even if we do not accept it, life rolls forward. If one wants to explore that further, then they will, I suppose. It is all there, laid bare, and easy to see, after all.
It’s a curious thing. We’re born inspired and questioning everything. But along comes conditioning and doubt. Between the “noise” of unresolved emotions and doubt, we lose confidence in our inner life and begin to seek answers “out there”. It’s a sad thing when the pain of the world is more reliable than our own peace.
In a sense, uncertainty is a good thing. It causes us to ask, to seek, and to not accept the world at face value. But we have to be willing to ask the questions if we want to uncover the truth under all the mud. We have to be willing to face who we seem to be to discover who we are.
Loved the story. I was told I wasn’t allowed. Still undoing some of those ‘shoulds’ around writing…
It’s surprising that you find it ‘baffling’.
Do you find 99 per cent of humanity baffling?
I thought you’d just be sympathetic.
Thanks, A.
I do.
I appreciate the story about Marquez, it’s as if we’ve been taught that we cannot get answers within us and to find out that’s the only place to find the questions and answers is a huge shock.
I like the empty bowl picture as well…it makes me smile. You must empty your own bowl
Was just reading the following from U.G.:
“The real problem is the solution. Your problems continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there, the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent, your problems and solutions go together. Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all. That is obvious. They can only exhort you to try harder, practise more meditation, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the same. That is all they can do. If you brushed aside your hope, fear, naivete, and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts.
Actually there are no problems, there are only solutions. But we don’t even have the guts to say that they don’t work. Even if you have discovered that they don’t work, sentimentality comes into the picture. The feeling, ‘That man in whom I have placed my confidence and belief cannot con himself and con everyone else’ comes in the way of throwing the whole thing out of the window, down the drain. The solutions are still a problem. Actually there is no problem there. The only problem is to find out the inadequacy or uselessness of all the solutions that have been offered to us. The questions naturally are born out of the assumptions and answers that we haven taken for granted as real answers. But we really don’t want any answers to the questions, because an answer to the questions is the end of the answers. If one answer ends, all the other answers also go.”
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