The Joy of an Open Question

    Ever since Gilbert's sharing on this past Sunday, I no longer feel that Chan is something that is profoundly separate from the present and what's happening in the now. And one thing I am finding especially is that the sharing of Chan is not necessarily articulating some profound words. Although the study of Chan commentaries and sutras is important, I sense that the real profundity is in the simple and everyday seeing that it promulgates. And this seeing can itself be a kind of mutual learning and discovery.
    What I am saying is: one needn't necessarily explain or describe the concepts to fully experience the concepts and share them. In fact, it seems that the most important aspect is not how one explains the concept, but how one embodies it. This can be as simple as cultivating a simple contentment and acknowledgement of the silent joy that exists between two or more people in conversation. It could also mean following the necessity of the moment, without adding more ambitious thoughts to that situation.
    What is the 'joy of an open question' I therefore describe? I am talking about how sometimes life can be approached as a kind of unresolved question, and this is one way not to try to plaster one's being with these presumed answers which one has read about or half-digested. Everything in life,  no matter how mundane or ordinary, can turn into a question; namely, 'who is experiencing this'? Is 'this' separate from the seeing? And this questioning attitude slowly starts to erode the opposite tendency of trying to impose a map onto what one sees, feels and experiences in daily life. But even the question itself is not something that one can even label as 'shallow' or 'profound', because it just keeps things open, and it isn't about comparing one thing to another. Can one appreciate this notion that life itself is a very open-ended kind of question?
    It's interesting how spirituality sometimes creates what I might refer to as the "hierarchy of depth". Rather than trying to strive toward the heights of achievement, spiritual practitioners tend to set up an opposite but equally pervasive hierarchy where they are always looking for 'depth', after establishing what they think depth happens to mean. The problem with this is that it creates a discrimination between deep and shallow experiences, thus turning meditation into a kind of inner striving for something that is considered profound or mind-shattering. But in my view, practice is not about aiming for anything: it is precisely in seeing through these categories that one creates that a true reality or suchness can be seen.