Looking deeply

The importance of asking good questions & knowing when to stop

“Whatever came to be, practice looking deeply into its nature.” Gautama Buddha

Once, during writing practice, after listening to several people read, our teacher Natalie Goldberg urged us to reframe our questions as statements. So many of us, it turned out, asked many things of our doubtful, doubting selves that our processing of whatever was coming up was getting stopped short.

The advice felt like a breakthrough moment at the time – this could well be the unplugging of the stem that was blocking my own flow, an unleashing of the insight that would finally be yielded after pages and pages of confused wandering.

This could be the end of what Alan Watts’ described as the samsaric cycle of getting caught up in a practice of “all retch and no vomit” – the perpetual state of dissatisfaction that comes from repeatedly doing things that betray our true desires.

In the case of writing practice, this pertains to writing around the thing we wish to write about, meandering around the point but never getting there – using questions to avoid the answers.

I remember thinking at the time, ‘aha, yes, what a clever and simple technique of flipping the inner critic’, of skilfully tending to the doubt by acknowledging that something is uncertain and yet framing it as though we are moving towards a deeper understanding of the emotional truths yielded in hindsight.

Naturally, in the many months since that particular class, questions have continued to emerge in my raw drafts. I have found my flow momentarily stuttering as my mind thinks it should but then resists complying with Natalie’s advice – because we, I, don’t always have an answer and it feels a deception to fake it until it’s ready to reveal itself.

Portals of potentiality

I’m a firm believer in the value of a good question, in curiosity. It’s what sets us going, the wondering and wandering. It’s what keeps us going, in matters of caring to understand by diving a bit deeper.

The converse is also true as is all the grey in between – continually asking why, why, why, what, where, when, how, etc, can quickly get frustrating, tedious and lead nowhere dispiritingly fast.

So on occasion, I will indeed reframe my queries as statements. And that has often spurred me on whereas I might otherwise have ended up going around in circles or abandoning my own pursuit out of aforesaid tedium, or stopping because of that other stumbling block, denial and dread.

Hence lately I’ve been wondering, if we always jump into answer our own questions, rather than ramble them out in our works-in-progress, are we hastening towards a resolution that isn’t real, are we stopping ourselves short in our explorations, are we lying to ourselves?

Right now, questions are emerging as portals to greater potentiality, rather than as stumbling blocks. Sometimes we might ask a question and leave it hanging. Sometimes the inquiry percolates and an answer emerges later on, or if not an answer, then another tangential route that leads towards insight.

Other times, as I observe from looking back through my notebooks, there’s a plethora of questions floating about without resolution.

Maybe they just weren’t the right questions, or asked at the right time of the appropriate people.

The place of doubt on the path

As with all instructions, none can really be absolutes, definitive and universally applicable all the time. For a while, and no doubt at another point soon, the reframing of a question into a statement will serve my process when it comes to standing my ground and moving me forward.

All of which is to say, this is all my own experiential interpretation of Natalie’s advice, which is the point – we have to figure things out for ourselves, especially when it comes to teachings of any kind.

In fact, the best teachers, including Natalie, especially in the Buddhist tradition, as per the Buddha himself, will tell you to find out for yourself: don’t simply accept what you’re told, that is no way to know your own mind; instead, go forth and inquire – ask if what you seek, find, hear or learn is truly applicable to you as you see, taste, touch, find and experience life.

This is the meaning of Ehipassiko, the path of critical inquiry and investigation that the Buddha encouraged, whereby it is direct, personal experience that will tell us what we truly need to know.

Indeed, this is the very nature of writing practice as a means of reflective inquiry – to see where our mind leads us, to see what we can find in our own depths, to listen inwardly and hear what we think and feel, to discern what this means in the process.

And so I’ve been shunning Natalie’s advice and allowing myself to be uncertain, to vocalise (on the page) my wondering without a definitive end point. More instances of curled punctuation than the affirmative action of a full stop.

Knowing isn’t always the answer

Reading Samra Habib’s memoir, ‘We Have Always Been Here’, I was moved by the author’s repetition of questions, sometimes a whole page of questions. Because that is the reality of recall, of memoir, of working with memories of which we can’t be certain, in relation to events long gone that only our own recollection can recreate.

So how can we truly know everything? We might know ourselves relatively well, or at least sufficiently enough, but as to the motivations of others’ behaviour, without them to answer, we cannot know.

At one point, Habib wonders about their mother, whether she dared to imagine another future for herself than the one of wifely servitude she acquiesced to.

As I work on my own memoir, I regularly wonder along similar lines about the people in my family, several of whom I cannot ask direct questions because they are either no longer here, or it would be an emotionally disruptive and harmful intrusion to ask them to dive into parts of their lives that they may quite rightly have decided to leave behind.

In other instances still, to ask certain questions of elders would be considered disrespectful, although that bothers me less and is something I’m willing to forsake for the more relevant blockage which is the potential consequences for people other than myself, people whose own stories and lives I want to serve rather than inflict suffering upon.

In other words, how much does it help versus how much does it harm to ask certain questions of others, especially when there’s a very real risk that the answers will be less than satisfactory (i.e. lacking in the accountability I ideally seek) and may well just fuel more misunderstanding and upset.

With certain unanswerable questions, I’ve resolved with a sense of ease (after much gut wrangling) that it truly is a matter of compassion, even in the face of anger – my anger at the injustices I’ve seen several beloveds endure without recourse to remuneration, without apology from the perpetrators. It maddens me, in fact it has shook me viscerally to the point of being ready to go gunning for answers.

And then I’ve softened as I remember the most pressing and humane, and therefore potentially more revealing question that we need to ask of each other, even if only in our minds, especially of people who cause the harms that hurt us and the ones we love:

“What happened to you? What happened to make you behave the way you do/did? What hurts did you endure? What experiences shaped your outlook and behaviour?”

I’m not yet sure if I’ll ask these questions of certain people or whether they are better left in the realms of wandering. Sometimes we can only guess. Sometimes it’s better not to know. Sometimes the truth hurts more than it helps.

All of this may well be something that gets reframed as a statement that hints at the possibilities and the curiosity, rather than questions that might never be answered. Only time, and practice, and drafting and redrafting, will eventually tell.

There are many truths in the end

Either way, at some point we must end our searching, take our practice off the page, or take the page to publication, in other words, we have to come to some sort of conclusion in order to move on.

After all, the spiritual path, and writing in many ways, is ultimately about moving towards understanding, not endless inquiry and debate. We have to stop in the end, sit still, counterbalance the motion. It will happen whether we make it or not. We cannot go on forever in any vein.

And even where we won’t know the answers, the mind can open to another possibility in the very asking that takes us beyond the confines of our invariably biased views, to see a little more clearly.

In that sense, perhaps all of our lives are, all retch, because every generation invariably asks the same questions albeit in different terms and through different lenses – because ultimately, we just yearn to understand and be understood, which takes time and experience.

As the oft-quoted verse from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets intones:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”