The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers. - Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation
As the 2024 calendar year winds down, many of us will be thinking about our lives, often about changing some things with how we act, think, and feel. It’s a very old tradition for people to reflect on what’s happening as the year ends, and to consider what could be different moving forward.
This makes a lot of sense and is helpful in a practical way. Taking a pause to reflect on what feels satisfactory about our lives, as well as what doesn’t feel right, can be a necessary step in the process of shaking things up. And we all need some serious shaking up, because no one is immune from the incredible power of habits and conditioning. It’s not an exaggeration to say that our habits and conditioning, both the seen ones and unseen ones, are the main driving forces in our unfolding future, individually and collectively.
Many New Year’s resolutions will take a concrete form. Quitting smoking, exercising more, eating healthfully, spending more time with people we care about – these are great directions to move in. And there are so many good directions, all depending on the specifics of our life situation and our personality. Single people focused on work make resolutions that may be very different than those made by couples with young children, immersed in family life. The young and the old, the healthy and the infirm, the wealthy and the impoverished - all wish for different kinds of change to come into their lives, depending on what their life looks like right now, and what they feel is possible.
Most of that wishing for change unfolds as part of the worldly perspective of our lives, worldly in the sense of the practical, ordinary supports we all want and need - housing, food, employment, health, social connections. These things conventionally help us to feel secure, safe, and satisfied in a constantly changing environment. These needs are so important and yet maybe we should consider extending our understanding of "needs" even further. We might include spiritual wants and needs - the ones that are not about material things and not about the content and stories of our experience, but are about the nature of experience itself - what it is, what it means, and how to work with it. These kinds of needs cannot be nourished by food or strengthened with exercise.
I'm not referring to religious needs, which are different from spiritual ones. Religions are organized institutions, and so they provide well-packaged programs which try to respond to spiritual needs, but it is the spiritual needs that come first. They precede all religious activity because they are as old as our humanity itself. Our religious needs are important in their own right, but unfortunately they often land us in a messiness of imposed beliefs, commandments, dogmas, or even ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking. But spiritual needs come from the core of our beingness, and so they transcend all religious doctrines, no matter the tradition.
Spiritual practice starts not with belief in a transcendent reality but through embracing the anguish experienced in an uncertain world.- Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs
Spiritually, we seek to resolve our deeply personal and existential questions. Questions like: What am I? What is this life? Why do we suffer? What is right living? What is death and what will I do when it arrives? Various religions and philosophies offer all kinds of responses and "answers" to such questions, some helpful and some useless. But the questions themselves do not belong to any theology, they are simply human questions.
As the new year arrives, can we make space to explore these other, unworldly questions? Is there time alongside exercising more and eating better, to give effort to such reflection? Asking oneself 'What am I?' is not going to pay for groceries, and contemplating our mortality won't get the kids to school on time. But there is mystery here, mystery that calls for our attention, and the conventional supports of everyday life don't address the mysterious.
These kinds of questions can sometimes disturb us. There is a fundamental Buddhist teaching which in Sanskrit is called dukkha. Dukkha is considered to be one of the universal marks of existence, meaning that where there is sentient life, there is always dukkha. It is often translated into English as "suffering" but often has a broader meaning, which is maybe better captured by "unsatisfactoriness." Some say the etymology of the Sanskrit word has the meaning of a wheel on a cart that is slightly off its axle, not fitting and moving smoothly. Words like anxiety or angst come to mind to me, a feeling of something being not quite right, even when in the midst of what seems okay on the surface.
Dukkha
If we do notice we're feeling such angst deep down, then what is there that might help? What might resolve an angst that doesn’t go away by watching television, eating junk food, listening to music, playing on our phones, or by drinking and partying? Those actions help us temporarily forget about whatever it is that feels troubling and unresolved to us. But what will help us deal with the sense of unsatisfactoriness that often lies underneath even the best of worldly situations?
I don’t know.
That’s one place to start, to just acknowledge that one isn’t certain concerning what to do about existential angst or unresolved suffering, and that the uncertainty itself can be frightening. Another step might be to accept that most other people are not certain either. Many people claim to be certain about how to live and how to answer deep questions, but anybody can make that claim. Many make it purposefully falsely for their own gain, and many make it because they are arrogant or fooling themselves. All the self-help books and programs, all the supposed religious teachers and spiritual gurus – they can say anything they want and can promise all sorts of results, but how much of it is truly valuable or reliable?
False teachings say: Do this and I promise you’ll get that. Buy this, and I guarantee you will be happy. It’s a scam, the biggest scam of all, this idea that anyone can guarantee anything, especially in the realm of spirituality. Only you can ask your existential questions and only you can answer them; you and life together do the asking, and you and life together do the answering. The future is unknowable and so guarantees are a fantasy. So, when we admit that there is anguish, and we’re not sure what to do, that it’s frightening, and that other people are not sure either, then what?
I still don’t know.
How could I know what you should do to find equanimity, to find relief from anguish? I’m not you! But I've got this human body and 58 years of experience living in human communities, so there is probably a lot we have in common, and that makes it possible that some things that work for me might also work for you. Maybe.
That’s mostly what authentic spiritual teachings can offer – some suggested actions and approaches to try that have worked for others, and which maybe will work for you. What works or not depends on where you are, how you try, and the support that’s available. Teachings can point the way, but only each of us can do the work ourselves.
Wonder
Maybe this is not sounding very uplifting!! But there is hopeful news too. There are some teachings that appear and reappear across our very long human history, and which arise within many and varied spiritual traditions, from all over the world. Of those few common teachings, perhaps the simplest of them all is to focus on the asking itself.
If there’s anything that approaches a universal quality of authentic spiritual practice, it’s wondering and questioning. If we don’t wonder and don’t question deeply, if instead we spend all our time going faster and faster living in only our worldly affairs, it’s hard to imagine how a spiritual practice can even emerge at all. We’re just too busy - busy with the worldly. When we are so busy, spiritual questions might emerge only when some crisis hits us, a situation in which we must face loss, grief, sickness, aging, or death, for ourselves or our loved ones. But if we wait for a crisis before we begin wondering and asking about such things, will it be too late to find what we’re finally seeing that we need? Maybe.
Can you imagine the relief there could be for a deep-rooted angst to be lessened, or to feel less tightly bound by anxieties? It's worth considering this New Year whether we should pause our worldly activities more, to slow down, take a breath, and to look inward to see what’s happening. Not happening out there, happening in here. We are not likely to resolve our deepest concerns by turning away from ourselves. It takes a courageous turning towards ourselves that puts us on a path to resolving the unsatisfactoriness we may feel in our being. Turning towards ourselves means pausing, looking, asking: What is this experience? What is this sense of being? Who is it that sees and hears and feels? What's happening right here, right now?
The question is a great religious act; it helps you live great religious truth. - Rabbi Shmuel Sperber, quoted in the Gates of Repentance prayer book
This pausing is the exact opposite of what the world at large generally keeps telling us to do. Mostly, the world keeps saying watch this video, read this article, play this game, buy this stuff. In other words, the world's general message is to do anything other than to sit quietly, in stillness, and reflect on our human spiritual questions. Why? Because there's no money in it. Powerful organizations are competing for your attention, and there's no money in it for them if you're just sitting quietly, wondering and reflecting. But in a very real sense, your life is on the line, and for you, the value of such searching may be priceless.
Here are my own unworldly New Year’s resolutions, which I hope you might find some value in, or a way to integrate them into your own unworldly resolutions if you wish. Maybe!
I resolve to spend more time wondering at what I am and what it means to live a meaningful life that is of benefit to me, to other people, to all life, and to the environment that supports us.
I resolve to put more effort into attention on the present moment, and to keep returning my attention back to the here and now when it’s lost into distracting thoughts and experiences.
I resolve to show myself compassion when I fall short in my resolve, and to find appreciation when my resolve is going strong.
I wish you all a good new year.
Allen
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. - Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet