How to understand questions and not slam the door on it.

Questions are the main drive of my life. I learned not to live without them. When I started on my Buddhist path, 33 years ago, I was given a `koan` by my teacher, Roshi Philip Kaplau. This koan put me on a path of self-inquiry with stunning implications. Shattered my ego to pieces.

But let me explain what a koan is. The historical meaning of the Japanese word koan is “the place where the truth is opened.” In Zen, a koan is a paradox or problem insoluble by means of discursive thinking. Most koans are the sayings of the great Zen masters of the past who used them on their students to open their minds to the truth of Zen.

The striking characteristic of almost all koans is the illogical, absurd sense of the words or action. The masters’ answers to their students’ questions are confusing and make us wonder what relation they have to the questions.

If you enjoy to think, like me, the world is all about speculation. Then we all are conducting an inquiry into what it means to be alive. Because yes this is what you are doing. Then we are entering a world with inexhaustible questions which need not be involved with an answer.

Because questions are valuable and complete in their own way. We also understand questions are incomplete and have only partial answers. Another way to say this might be to say `the way to think about our problems may not be available yet`.

Questions can be an invitation to a journey to understanding that involves opening our framework to bigger questions and curiosities. I need to hear the question to follow the thread further. How it can be part of a bigger, more nuanced and complex interaction of linked curiosities. Answers, creative expression, other viewpoints can give energy to the ongoing spiral that never ends.

Let me elaborate. In defends of what a question should mean that the opposite of a question is not an answer; there is logic about it.

While answers give the notion of an end, questions open more possibilities, for exploration, adventure, thinking, etc.

Questions are like living beings that entice us into dancing with All of Life

There’s more than one answer to any question.

The less I seek for some definitive answer, closer I am to fine. Answers are endings and questions are beginnings.

I see question as free-floating formations. They might be `tricksters` in their own way. In need of inquiry. Free it of contradictions. Speak to, like material things, with body parts, history of their own. Make it feel welcome, spoken with and released.

When we give or find an answer it can be like slamming a door shut in a guest’s face. Realize, too late, that certainty wasn’t what the moment needed at all.

It’s painful when it happens because we see it, the door slams shut. Ouch. I suspect this is one reason we need recognize questions as tricksters.

A question is like a river. An answer looks like a stepping stone placed within it. It Shifts the river. Human feet just trying to get across sometimes. A record that humans come this way often. That you’re not alone.

Useful when refined and placed that others pause for a moment, can look around, and maybe taken into the beauty of the place herself.

Or leap from the stone to swim for the fun of it. But an answer wouldn’t have to be a stone. It could be a tree branch, too. Something that fell there more of its own accord. This makes me wonder:

Is an answer more knowable than a question?

Reminds me that a stone, like an answer, is under no obligation to be useful at all. The beauty of its presence is plenty.

To give attention to a question, is a kind of love. This is one of the deepest things we can let life happen that it is okay to just go deep and anything at all may come up.

Any fear, loathing, greed or ennui. In questions we find the worst things about ourselves. We see that this, too, is human. To find that the best things about being human are also not alien to us.

Your path of questioning will be full of generosity and sweetness.

My world of `koan` is everywhere. Our world of a question is everywhere.

It’s not out there, it’s here. It’s no other place in the universe. If I enter my own questions, it is vast. That vastness itself teaches me what it wants of me. It teaches us how to live and how to love.

Thanks for reading. The green heart is my reward. Michel _/|\_