Situations Equal Questions

   The more that I spend time in the group meditation, the more convinced I am that all phenomena are veiled spiritual questions. They are 'questions' in the sense that there is a problem  lurking beneath all phenomena: a sense of split, of not knowing where it comes from, how it got here,  or even why it is here. I am reminded of a philosophy class in which the question was posed "why is there anything to begin with?" This question seems ludicrous because we always implicitly assume that either 'of course' there is a reason for everything, or 'everything' is simply random material. Again, this too reveals a question of why or where it all came to be and how we know it came to be.
    The habit of turning situations into questions is not so easy to practice. I have found, for example, that when I try to first practice a question or huatou method in meditation, I am almost struggling to generate a state of wonder. It is as though I had already made conclusions and my mind isn't open to seeing new things in situations. I think what allows me to take the question seriously is realizing there is nothing in phenomena to cling to, and everything everywhere is a potential source of pain and suffering. Instead of taking the phenomena as given, I can take all the energy I am investing in sustaining the reality of phenomena and turn it upside down. Then the problem is no longer a biological one, a social one, a 'personal' one, and so on. Rather, all situations become existential questions about what it means to be in this situation, and who is contemplating it.
       Soon, I begin to see that phenomena are not just floating entities; there is something 'behind' them or in them that allows them to be seen, and it isn't separate nor conjoined with the object itself. So I start to question: where are these phenomena truly arising? Does that arising have a specific location? I start to see that phenomena are prompts for me to go further into asking their source, similar to the way animal tracks are often leading us to further clues into who is walking through the forest. When I seriously question the source of phenomena  in mind, I then subvert all these categories that fixate me on one particular way of seeing things, including the self and others.
      This period of constant questioning is necessary, because it tries to redirect one's efforts to finding what the real mind is, before 'subject and object' divisions are being made continually. And when you get to that stage where everything is a question, there is a sudden relaxing where I am no longer identified with these hard boundaries that I create with thoughts. It's as though I am giving myself a bit of a wider pasture in which to move, and that also helps me to not differentiate between the self and situations.. It seems that when I can question the assumptions that phenomena are separate from mind, I become more relaxed, less resistant to what is happening to me, and having fewer thoughts during meditation.