Quantum
HEALTH
Issue 10 March 2011 “
. . .the ‘almost addiction’ is not to the search for answers as much as it is to the compulsion to keep asking questions.
tend to seek them from others, from outside of ourselves. This search for external answers to who we really are and what makes us happy and why we are here, and a host of other deep questions, can become an “almost addiction.”
Most spiritual traditions tell us that the answers to all of our questions are always already there– inside of us. Yet how many of us really believe that? If there is one area of the media–from books to magazines to websites to conferences and workshops–that has exploded in the last two decades, it has been the self-help trade. That explosion is not because there are more people out there claiming they have answers, although that may in fact be the case. Instead, I think, it is fueled by the millions of people who feel the need to ask so many questions. So really, I guess you could say that the “almost addiction” is not to the search for answers as much as it to the compulsion to keep asking questions. It is from this compulsion that some of the more cynical people in the self-development trade coined the terms “workshop junkie” and “self-help addict.”
We tend to think that as circumstances change, so must our questions. That answers are only provisional and not timeless. However, there truly may be only one core question: “Who am I?” And one timeless answer: “I am.”
That answer–I am–can seem incomplete. We want to fill in the blanks. I am my kids, my job, my mortgage, my disease. . . . The details of daily living can obscure the clarity of “I amness,” replacing it with its polar opposite: “I am not.” I don’t’ have enough time with my kids. I don’t know how I am going to live now that I have been laid off. I’m not smart enough, beautiful
44 Quantum Health
enough, rich enough. . . . We tend to live more in the land of “I am not” than in the realm of “I am.” Yet metaphysics comes to the rescue here as well. There is a Zen practice where you say, “I am not this.” No matter what “this” is. I am not my kids. I am not my job. I am not my mortgage. I am not my disease. Ultimately you are not anything but you. And so you come full circle back to “I am.”
As you see now, the paradox unravels itself when you move beyond duality. The two mantras are like the loops of the infinity symbol: ∞. They are connected, one seamlessly moving into the other. To engage only half of the paradox leaves you spinning, like a hamster on the wheel, moving yet getting nowhere. It helps to remember that what comes from outside of us is information, not answers. Seeking more and more information is fine for the life of the mind, but not for the life of the soul. The soul already knows. And it is up to us to decide to go inward and listen.
That said, if you go deeper into many spiritual philosophies, you might be told to question even the answers you give yourself. Shantideva said that all suffering comes from preoccupation with the self. So how do we deal with this new paradox–the drive to know the self and the awareness of the illusion of the self? After all, until we realise the “oneness” of being, we are subject to the influence of our many selves. Our logical and rational self. Our shadow self. Our inner child. Our inner demon. And on and on. Which one do we listen to? We are told to “drop into beingness,” but that is such amorphous counsel that it often leaves us feeling clueless. And that cluelessness may be precisely the point, for when we give up hunting for clues and searching for answers, there is only thing left–the silence. It is a silence that resounds with every question and every answer. It is from this silence that true wisdom arises. It is this silence from which everything flows. As an Indian mystic said about living in the world while honouring this paradox, “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.”
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