Saturday, January 31, 2009

Questions and Answers

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

Last night around 1:30 AM I woke with this sentence running through my mind, an apparent snippet of conversation, "Yesterday's choices are today's questions." I sense that this means each choice we make unfolds new questions and, from a spiritual point of view, its rarely the answers that matter; what really matters are the questions. Why?

Questions open us, answers close us. Questions inspire us, answers satisfy us. Questions ask us to look under something, answers assume there is no need to look further.

As in life itself, in Zen practice there are no answers, only questions. How we face these questions becomes critical and determines our character. To answer a question with "don't know" mind, is to not really answer a question, but to open our mind to see what is really there as opposed to what we assume is there.

Let your life be an open question.

(I suspect the degree to which we feel comfortable with this is the degree to which we have attained don't know mind.)

Be well.

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