Questioning Your Way to the Truth
Q: If I go sit for meditation and then meet with you at tea time to ask questions, will I get all my questions answered before I leave?
A: Some of your questions can be answered directly and immediately. Some in a roundabout way, for you need to contemplate and enter into them. And some I will completely ignore because you are not yet ready to hear the answer. Just because you form a question doesn’t mean you can understand the answer. Some questions come merely from curiosity, not sincerity.
Q: On my way here I had some questions in mind that I wanted to ask you. But as I thought more about it, I started to have some doubts: maybe I should just try and think through the answers myself.
A: Yes, do that. If your questions are good questions, they will open the mind. When you turn your attention to the mind with the determination to observe it carefully, it responds by becoming softer and more flexible. This is the process that transforms adolescents into mature, caring adults.
But we must be aware of thought interfering in our investigation. We must discriminate between thinking and contemplation, for thought is a futile mode for studying profound spiritual questions. We must go beyond thought. This requires a jump into the unknown. When you are prepared to go it alone, holding on to nothing, you will go far beyond the limitations of thought, which keeps you in mental slavery. This is your spiritual destiny.
Q: I hope I’m not disturbing you. I expect that you must be tired of answering questions from naive visitors.
A: Answering questions about meditation practice is often energizing, so I don’t find answering questions tedious. If the questioner is really sincere, there is a special, even holy, feeling in and around the conversation.
Of course, I am not so enthusiastic about answering stock questions about monks’ undergarments and the shaving of our heads. But even those questions, I have now learned, have the potential to stimulate something deeper in the questioner. If I have the patience required to answer the questioner’s needs rather than the question, then I am doing precisely what I should be doing in that moment. That is Dharma. Often what begins as curiosity develops into something more profound. Some day I hope to meet someone who will ask me, “Who is it that asks my questions?” Or, “What is there to seek?”
My own favorite question is this: “Who would I be if I let go of all the factors that make me think I am me? Would I be better off? Happier? If so, why?” Or, in another version: “Who am I when I don’t think I am who I think I am?”
I came to practice meditation because I wanted to know the answers to a string of questions that I had been pursuing since childhood: Why are we here? What is goodness? Is there any value in goodness that an ordinary person—the sort who can be lured into foolish behavior—can make use of in this world? Why is the world as it is? Is there a God, and if so, can I depend upon him or her? What can I expect from an investment of faith in God, or, for that matter, an investment in cynicism?
Buddhist meditation is in no way daunted by these questions. The meditator contemplates these sorts of questions within the heart, going deeper and deeper into them with relentless determination. My own determination was so intense that I knew if I couldn’t discover satisfactory answers, I would have to continue to search for a teaching that was powerful and wise enough to penetrate into and unravel these questions.
As it turned out, there wasn’t any need to search further. I was amazed to find the answers were within myself, just as all spiritual teachings proclaim. Once I recognized the nature of the inner world, I knew that all I identified as my personal world, which caused so much grief and distress, spun out of the well of infinite consciousness. Everything I want and need to know is within me. I am within everything I need to know. Buddhist meditation has the tools that can access whatever I need to realize. There is a way to freedom.