Blessed are those who have a genuine inclination and an unassuming attitude toward spirituality. These are the chosen children of truth itself because they explore the mysterious for the sake of the mystery rather than for bragging rights.
In stark contrast to these pure breeds are those of us who began our existential search merely as an egoistic, intellectual endeavor. We pursued the grand truth because spirituality seemed superior to religion and brushing book spines with co-readers of Osho and J. Krishnamurti felt swank. We eventually learned that the proverbial truth that we’ve been trying to woo had always been closer than our closest thought and earlier than our first perception. Yet even this had only been a learned fact and not a realized truth.
With time, our vanity had been watered down by the wise words of the silence dwellers, and while we really do want to cross the chasm from learning to living, we are now crippled by our habitual questioning. We have grown complacent building clever questions upon clever questions rather than actually seeking out the answers. We are content with exploring the “why” than making an effort for the “how”.
So how do we break away from our impossible questioning loop? How do we deliver ourselves to the doors of the grand truth? It begins with recognizing the pointlessness of our questions.
“To ask the ‘right’ question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem.”
J. Krishnamurti
Firstly, to ask the right question is to inquire from a pure place of unsullied ignorance where questions can arise free of any trace of presumptions. But our mind can only frame questions with definite boundaries, pretreated conditions, and rational assumptions, all influenced by peripheral answers for previous peripheral questions.
The human mind is incapable of asking a question from point zero. Our questions that are shaped by handed-down references and borrowed wisdom of others from their experiences cannot address a question that arose within us about ourselves.
“The difficulty is to try not to have anybody else’s experience, try not to duplicate what anybody says. The difficulty of a human being is to stay completely, ruthlessly in their own experience.”
Adyashanti
Secondly, an intellectual question can never beget an existential answer. An intellectual question tainted by all kinds of priors will only give rise to an intellectual answer, or at best more intellectual questions, but never an existential answer. The square peg of existentialism cannot fit within the round hole of the intellectual.
So what is going to get us the existential answer?
“The first thing to understand is: drop questioning why. Continue questioning, and you remain in the head. Drop questioning. Suddenly the energy moves in a new direction: the dimension of the heart. The heart has no questions, and in that the answer hides.”
Osho
What is going to make us drop the questioning? What is the last thing that the mind can finally latch on to in order to cease all questioning, the one thing in which all other “why” questions come to roost?
That would be the quintessential question of nonduality – Who Am I?
But even this question doesn’t have an answer. Because language, and any question posed through language, has an inherent subject-object duality about it. An ‘answer‘ will only imply that there is an object that receives this answer, something that decides to either accept or reject it, which in turn defies the whole nonduality premise.
But ‘Who am I’ challenges this duality by bringing the questioner as far as the threshold of an answerless ‘answer’. It still doesn’t deliver an ‘answer’ because there is no separate answer. It’s simply the last question standing – ‘Who am I’ – where when delved deeper, the question itself becomes the answer.
“The ‘I’ thought is not the real Self, but nevertheless it still has a component of reality that can be used to track it back to its source. The ‘I’ thought is not who you really are, but by absolutely focusing intently on that thing within you which has all these thoughts, you pick up the scent of its origin, and you then follow it back to its source. If you keep your metaphorical nose to this ‘I’ thought and follow it back to its place of origin, it goes back to the Self – it goes back to the Heart and vanishes.”
David Godman
Cont.
