Can we be alone with a question?

We look to someone else, or an induced experience, to answer it for us, frightened by the emptiness and confusion when we are alone. Whatever we pick up from teachers, and in all the books, courses, and ceremonies, does not actually land in life. It remains an idea, without the understanding of oneself in action, which would end the question itself and create the new. 

We generate a misalignment instead, between what we think we know, and what we actually feel and experience. This does not want to be exposed, as it is really rather painful and frustrating. But seeking answers, we can never actually be with the question itself.

It is a totally different thing to go into a question for oneself, outside any influence and authority. To sit and move very quietly and intimately with it, allowing it to come and go. Appropriate questions naturally return at the right moments, if given space, until they dissolve completely from understanding. Unnecessary questions disappear by themselves. 

They mustn’t be answered by thought, as it is an attempt of the brain to reference to past. If we are serious enough to keep our attention on the question itself, we then naturally live into the answer, without any effort. Everything, and nothing, changes in that moment of true understanding. 

It is in the emptiness of being alone that creation takes place, which is unrecognisable by thought.

Reader-response

Can one be alone with a question? That is, can one avoid looking for answers that satisfy the sense of security that human beings seek? Can I fully live my question in any given moment of my life instead of seeking answers that would inevitably belong to the past?

By asking questions, not seeking answers, the dialogue remains alive. It has no end but is the constant evolution of life.

If I were looking for answers, I would attach to ideas that might make sense in a precise space and time, but just a moment later it would completely lose that sense because life has already moved on, as it is ever-evolving. If I were to look for an immediate answer, the moment I find it and attach myself to it, it would already belong to the past and would have nothing to do with the truth of the present moment. Yes, it might give me a sense of relief or security, but I wonder if that can be the truth?

– Angelica Carletti