Trusting the Why

 In one of my previous blog entries, I talked about the idea of learning to accept reality as it is without going too much into the "why" questions: why did this happen to me? What am I supposed to learn from it? and so on. It's interesting, because tonight, I am going back to the why questions again! Why is that?
   I think that it's important to ask questions not necessarily to get answers or to elicit pity, but out of a genuine desire to explore what's unknown. "Having the right question" is not as important, perhaps, as knowing the intention behind the question. Questions are 'interlocutionary' meaning that they are a particular form of action that elicits a certain response in and of itself. Take, for example, the question, "why do you keep doing that?" Without knowing what "that" happens to be, I am already guessing the mood and the possible motivations behind the question (i.e. to stop you from doing that thing, or at least to make you more self-conscious about doing it). Questions might also be veiled forms of wanting to manipulate others, as when we ask questions not to seek answers but to persuade others to give us what we want in life. So how can we distinguish genuinely good questions from the latter sorts?
  I believe that good questions truly speak to the deepest and most rooted originations of the things around us. If the question I ask is loaded, I am bound to find myself being narrowed by it. For example, questions like "how could she/he", "why on earth are they like that", "how can I get this (now that I am in this position)" tend to shut people down in the sense that they create walls rather than exploring genuine possibilities. The most interesting questions don't even have subjects or objects, or terms, or conditions: they speak to the existential angst that is behind the existence of every question. But if instead of questioning the existence and who is aware of it, I focus only on surface appearances, I miss out on the gold of really deep and inticing questions. Another way of putting this is that every shallow question has a deeper one, if only one doesn't get caught up in the shallower forms of the questions.
   If one doesn't really know the difference between shallow and deep questioning (yes, I am even getting confused on that one), the best thing is to stay deeply rooted in the questioning mindset whenever one is confused, and to allow that deep confusion to turn into wonderment. This is the hidden value of questions that often get lost when we are too focused on answers. The questioning mindset itself can be a deep spiritual source if, instead of looking for premature judgments or statements, we simply stay as long as we can with the question, and let our soaking in that question allow deeper insights and reflections to emerge than what we would expect from simple 'rules of logic'.