Esteemed Reader

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

What is our world-view? Is the cosmos the result of pure chance? Do I regard it as being governed by an all-wise and benevolent Being? Do I depend on a kindly Providence? Do I regard it as a penal settlement, or a “Vale of Tears”? Or do I regard the world as a school to which I am sent to acquire a certain understanding, a kind of gymnasium in which I can develop my potentialities? —A.R. Orage

Do you ask, as I do, daily, questions about the nature of the universe? For instance, who gathers, like a crop at harvest-time, people? And who decides which are sufficiently well formed for saving, and which are ground into meal for fertilizing the next planting? Do you ask yourself why it is that your body is here, imbued with life and ever-varying levels of consciousness? Who is the “I” that inhabits it? What is its origin and destiny? Etcetera, etc.?

These and other, probably deeper questions than mine, are the ones that are like splinters, that have become thorns, that are growing into something like sabers, and are digging ever deeper into some of our psyches.
To my mind these are the important questions, the ones to be wrestled with like koans; like the angel Jacob wrestled in the desert; and with the insistence of Natchiketas in his conversation with Death.

I mean, there are some obvious answers that are all too pat and easy, provided prepackaged by the evolutionary biologists as they split the hair of individual versus collective selection. For decades scientists were terrified of positing theories that suggested anything smacking of collective intelligence. They didn’t want to be called communists, after all. But now the idea of a collective selective motive spurring the evolution of life is gaining new prominence. Individual lives, these theories say, are connected to some kind of “global brain,” like a vast psychic Internet that implants into every discreet being an awareness of what will benefit the whole organism of life, and not only a particular genetic strain.

This new-ish idea of a collective intelligence and evolution is, of course inspiring in its way, but it is not, under any circumstances to be accepted as an answer to our burning questions. Accepting an answer—any answer—to those questions kills them dead. Nevertheless, the asking must continue. This is how we will discover something of what is hidden beyond the gossamer veil of phenomena.
The greatest saint of the last century Sri Sri Ramana Maharshi admonished his students to hold fast to one question: “Who am I?” Never be satisfied with an answer, he said. When one arises, ask again.

A Zen student asked Joshu: “Does the dog have Buddha Nature?” Joshu’s answer: mu—nothing. Can you say what “nothing” is? Cummings attempted with his “any—lifted from the no of all nothing.” And poetry might well yield the closest approximation of an answer.

But the real answer (to this and any real question which is, anyway, always, in essence, the same question, or at least the same living disposition of questioning) is immediate. Now. In the flesh and marrow of the experience of living, of being; of being nothing. That is the answer that sometimes gets the Roshi’s approval. Certainly no formulaic one.
Gradually those important questions get boiled down, distilled, concentrated into a singular urge, a tacit asking without moving a muscle, or even shifting any neurons. It is an asking that emanates summarily from every cell; and returns an answer in the same instant. So the question and answer are one, and in their union they conceive new life, which is Being itself.

—Jason Stern