Monday, July 07, 2008

Leave No Answers Unquestioned

It has been said that there are three kinds of people in the world--those who are good with numbers and those who aren't.

I've said that there are Four Questions, but I really could just as easily--and just as correctly--said that there are eight, or eighteen, or eighteen hundred and eighty-eight. In fact, it seems to me that there are no end to questions; that life itself is fundamentally a question or, to put it another way, that our living of our lives is fundamentally a process of questioning since the heart of existence is Mystery. (Not a mystery, mind you, but Mystery itself.)

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard reportedly asked seven questions:

"Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, Where is the director? I want to see him."

Perhaps the most well known quotation about questions comes from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:

"...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
May we all.

In Gassho,

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