"A voice comes to your soul, saying:
Lift your foot, cross over;
move into the emptiness
of question and answer and question."
- Rumi

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"Keep asking those deep questions, sleep on -
when you wake even you'll be gone!"
- Ikkyu

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YOU MUST CONTINUE TO ASK QUESTIONS, pursuing each question as it arises with great earnestness.

Any question which may arise here is answered immediately, and they all have the same answer.

And that is?

That that question, that thought, like all thoughts, is empty. When there is the misconception, the idea that there is a separate entity here out of whose individual mind the thought or question arises, then questions are taken as important. When all is seen as it is, all thoughts, feelings, and actions are seen to arise as the infinite expression of Consciousness. Whatever arises can only be the perfect unfolding in Consciousness, however it appears to the apparent individual. These body/mind things are only instruments, objects in Consciousness and therefore cannot possibly know the basis, the purpose, the reason by which Consciousness works. When any question is asked in this context, the question dissolves. All simply is as it is.

Well, there you are. So, that’s good. (pause.) How long has it been since you awakened to this?

Here we go again. You should know better. Since who awakened?

What you call this body/mind thing, the apparent individual.

You miss my point. There is no one here. The body/mind is an object only; the individual is only apparent, a character in the dream. It cannot be the character in a dream who awakens.

So, it is the dreamer who awakens.

The idea of ‘awakening’ is only an analogy; be careful not to begin taking it literally. Any analogy breaks down eventually, and this one does here. The Dreamer is Consciousness, which is All That Is: it has never been asleep, has no need to awaken.

So, who awakens?

The analogy of awakening, like any analogy, can have a certain limited usefulness. It is one of the straws grasped at in an attempt to describe the indescribable, to communicate what cannot be communicated. It also has its drawbacks. In particular, it can be used to make a demarcation, a distinction. A false separation between those perceived individuals who have awakened and those perceived individuals who have not. This is artificial, a construct of the mind. There is only Consciousness, streaming through and expressing as all these body/mind things. What happens in one body/mind thing as distinct from another is insignificant unless you believe they exist as individual persons and you identify as one of them. As the Third Zen Patriarch wrote, “Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant… What benefit can be derived from attachment to distinctions and separations?”

Surely there is a difference between one who is awakened and one who is not.

Not at all. As Huang Po said, “There is just a mysterious, tacit understanding, and no more.”

The difference then is that some of us have this understanding while most do not.

You are taking it personally, setting up “us and them,” which makes nonsense of it. These are the distinctions that the Zen Patriarch was talking about. Please understand, what you are referring to as ‘us’ or as ‘them’ are personal reference points which are seen here to be illusory, purely mythical in spite of being taken quite seriously by you and just about everyone else. There is Understanding. There is no one here to have understanding, or to have anything for that matter.

But you yourself use words like ‘you’ and ‘everyone.’

If you went to a foreign country, you’d find it hard to communicate unless you learned and used the language that the locals used. Our language is structured in a way that makes it all but impossible to speak without using personal pronouns and other words which seem to refer to individuals. This makes things difficult, but language must still be used. Trying to avoid these words altogether just results in stilted and awkward speech which calls attention to itself and fails to communicate. So one must continue to use the conventions of language which include personal pronouns to refer to an experience and an understanding which is completely impersonal.

It’s a little like continuing to talk about ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ even when you know quite well that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, and so it doesn’t rise or set but only appears to because of the earth’s own rotation. When I use the terms ‘I’ or ‘me’ they refer to nothing personal at all, since it’s completely obvious from this perspective that there is no person here. There is only All That Is, streaming through all these apparent forms. On the other hand, when you say something like, “some of us have the understanding but most do not,” it’s evident that you are taking the distinction between yourself as an individual and others as individuals quite seriously, and are busy comparing and judging between them.

To return to your earlier comment, earnestly asking questions should not be seen as an end in itself. Asking questions does not actually lead anywhere. In the tradition of jnana yoga, asking questions operates a bit like the Zen koan, gradually backing the mind into a corner or exhausting it to the point that it realizes that while questions can go on forever, Truth will never be found there. The Third Zen Patriarch again: “To seek Mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of mistakes.”

The problem, you see, is that all questions arise out of their answers. You can’t ask a question about Self, or Truth, or the Understanding, that you don’t already, on some level, know the answer to: if you didn’t know the answer, the question never could have occurred to you.

That’s why the great Zen and Advaita masters rarely answered a question; they redirected it. The point of asking a question is not to get the answer, which you already have; despite what you may believe, there’s really no benefit in getting answers. All the answers in the world will not lead to Understanding. All answers are within the dream, as are all questions. What you want is no-answer, which can only be arrived at by no-question. For each body/mind, there is only one no-question, what I sometimes call the dangerous question, the asking of which contains the end to all questions, the asking of which stops you, annihilates ‘you.’

If a question arises, then by all means ask it. Sometimes it is all that can happen. But there is nothing sacred about asking questions. It is when the questions cease and the mind is empty that there is an opening.