staying with questions

     I often wonder, when one is meditating, where does the decision to remain with the method really come from? For beginning meditators especially (and I am a beginner each time), images can be so powerful, particularly coming from the unconscious. Even when one is not trying to do so, images often come in to fill gaps. If one is not guarding against it, one can get into a very dreamy state after a while. In dreams, one just goes from one image to another and randomly connects them until they make some kind of 'cogent sense'. Like a very young child's writing or drawing, sometimes that sense only 'makes sense' to me. But when I awaken, the sense is gone altogether.
    During meditation practice today, I just stayed on a question (called huatou) without trying to generate answers to the question itself. It's not easy to do this, because the mind has a way of bringing up answers in the form of images, which ends up dulling the experience. It's as though I am constantly coming up with solutions to what appear to be problems, even if the 'solutions' make less sense than the problems do. But one way to circumvent this approach is not to fixate on any answer to the question. It is to be more curious about the question itself, the act of questioning, or the act of having something unresolved. It is not easy to do this at times, because it seems that I am conditioned to treat a question as a segue into an answer. How many times have I asked a question half-heartedly, thinking that deep down inside I already 'know' the answer to it? Funnily, when I am most convinced that I know the answer to a question, the answerer will end up surprising me.  So, I think that I need to get around this idea that having a question entails that I urgently need an answer right away. Rather than privileging the answer, it is often better to privilege the question.
   Another way to look at this is to keep prolonging the process of questioning, until I am convinced that the questioning is worthwhile and that my "answers" have exhausted themselves. That process takes me to a deeper state of fascination with the question itself: an ability to turn the question over and over, looking at it from different sides, and not letting the stream of consciousness kick in and block the process of questioning.
    Many spiritual traditions have emphasized the value of beholding mystery. Pat Schneider, who writes from a Christian perspective, remarks, "What is required to be open to an experience of mystery? Perhaps nothing is required. No formula, no specific words to be said or acts to be performed. No baptism, no creed, no doctrine, no priest, no confession of faith, no adherence to tradition." (p.34) Schneider beautifully captures the attitude of letting go, to see what is left over when one is not relying on any concept or rule while being open to  the unknown. At the same time, I don't think the process itself need be mysterious. It might take the form of being more aware of mystery and allowing it to be present, particularly when one is unsure as to which path to take or what solution to follow. Being with the not knowing can be an exhilarating process where I learn not to feel devastated when I don't  have the answers.

Schneider, Pat (2013), How the Light Gets In, Oxford: Oxford University Press