living in the question

[AUDIO AND TEXT]

A personal confession. Back in olden times, that is in the late 1980s, this person that you’re looking at took a sojourn into the world of Lifespring, a self-discovery group that ultimately got branded as a cult and a dangerous, mind-breaking fraud. (There was probably a bit of the pyramid scheme involved, but that’s another story.)

Perhaps surprisingly, this person didn’t experience it as a cult. The stuff that happened during the months of that association was most revealing of what was going on inside and around this person, as well as all who participated. Much of what had been hidden inside came to the fore. A big wow!

A major thing that came out of those few months and made its mark was this phrase: “Living in the question.” What did it mean to live in the question? And what exactly was the question, anyway?

In our tradition, the fundamental inquiry or question is, “Who am I?” Well, I found some variations on that question on the internet (which seems to have all the answers these days – or so it is said). So, here are four questions of life that have been proposed by an author named James N. Judd. As usual, I don’t have much information about this guy (I read that he has a bent toward Vedanta and Christianity, but little more). In any case, the life questions attributed to him may bear consideration.

• Who am I?
• Where do I come from?
• What is my purpose?
• Where am I going?

I figure that most of us here this evening carry these questions in the foreground of our consciousness. But I also suspect that most humans who go merrily (or sometimes not so merrily) about their daily lives carry them as well, somewhere in the background of their own minds. They may not even realize that these questions are working within them, but it’s a good bet that they are. If people go to church, if they have an affinity for religion or philosophy or psychology or language or any of the other sciences of the mind, if they ever stop to think about how time and the world began, these questions are swirling about within their consciousness, whether they are conscious of them or not.

Unbeknownst to these folks, it’s these questions that have led them to the various practices they have embraced. They wonder why they were born. They ask what their purpose is in life, why they do the things they do, and to what end they are doing them. They want to know what happens after they die. They want to know what their place is in the big, bad world in which they find themselves.

Maybe some folks decide there is no overarching answer to any of these questions. They want to believe that everything and everyone are just random happenings, with no meaning at all. They are content to live unburdened by the question of “Why?” Others, however, find what they accept as pat answers to these questions – in religion (or the rejection thereof), in philosophy, in psychology, or whatever. Still others don’t even bother to ask; they don’t admit the existence of questions like these at all. They go for the WYSIWYG approach (what-you-see-is-what-you-get). And if that approach works for them, who are we to say they’re wrong?

But for us, who venture to spend long periods of time sitting in silence – alone or with a group – these questions are at the heart of the matter.

• Who am I?
• Where do I come from?
• What is my purpose?
• Where am I going?

We are explorers, seekers, questioners, wonderers, wanderers, however we want to characterize ourselves. We are not content to lie asleep – deaf, dumb, and blind – to the wonder of existence. And even if physically we may be deaf, dumb, and blind (let us bless the remarkable Helen Keller and others like her), we still seek to discover the thread that holds between our own being and that which lives around, within, and beyond us.

Around, within, and beyond. Therein lies the inescapable sense that drives us on in our determination to connect – with whatever is in there / out there. That’s what our intuition has gifted to us: the sense that the within, the beyond, and even the around, are indeed something to discover. And here we find that we have been granted the courage to do what’s needed to let our intuition propel us on the quest. Answers? Part of us still wants to find the answers to these life questions. But the bigger, wiser part of us knows that somehow, these questions are unanswerable. Rather, our answer is to live in the questions. And relish them. How wondrous and how alive that engagement is!