What Happens When Spiritual Inquiry Moves from Why to How to Who?
I recently listened to a short talk by Swami Sarvapriyananda called What Is the Purpose of Life if I Am “That”? (You can listen to the Youtube talk here»)
The question he was answering is one of those questions that can keep a spiritually inclined person occupied for years:
If I am already Brahman, already the Absolute, already what I’m trying to become, why am I here going through all of this? Why the struggle? Why the suffering? Why spend years trying to wake up to something I supposedly already am?
His answer was essentially: The question itself is the problem.
Well, that’s annoying.
Especially for those of us raised in a culture where asking why is practically synonymous with intelligence.
Something happens and we want to know why: The grass is wet. Why? It rained. The car won’t start. Why? The battery is dead. We find the cause, and we feel that we understand something.
So we naturally bring the same habit into spiritual life: Why am I here? Why is there suffering? Why did this happen to me? What is the purpose of my life? And eventually: Why does any of this exist at all?
Sarvapriyananda’s point is that at a certain level, the “why” question stops working.
When the Question Contains the Problem
In ordinary life, cause and effect are tremendously useful. The trouble begins when we use causality to ask about the source of the whole thing.
In Advaita Vedanta, time, space and causation belong to maya, the world as we experience it. So asking what caused maya is already assuming causation in order to explain causation.
As Sarvapriyananda explains: It’s similar to asking what happened before time. “Before” is already a time word. Or asking what’s outside space. “Outside” already assumes space. The question sneaks its own assumptions into the answer.
Think about this for a minute and you’ll realize how often we do exactly this in spiritual life. We assume that if we keep analyzing carefully enough, eventually we’ll arrive at the truth.
But maybe we won’t. Maybe some questions are useful only within the level of reality where they make sense.
Okay. So How Do I Get There From Here?
I talked about the video afterward with someone who isn’t steeped in Vedanta.
His reaction was immediate: “I get what he’s saying intellectually, but where does that lead me? How do I get better at not asking the question and just being?”
Now that’s an interesting question. Because it’s where philosophy runs headlong into actual life. It’s one thing to understand intellectually that asking why the universe exists may be a category error. It’s another thing entirely to stop experiencing yourself as a separate person standing over here, looking at a universe over there, trying to figure it out. You can understand nonduality perfectly well as an idea and still get furious when somebody cuts you off in traffic.
So perhaps the more useful question becomes: How do I experience differently?
That doesn’t magically take us beyond subject and object. There’s still an “I” asking how. But it turns us away from endlessly explaining reality and toward experiencing it.
That’s a significant shift.
From Why to How to Who
I’ve found that spiritual questioning moves naturally in a certain direction.
We begin with why.
- Why am I here?
- Why is there suffering?
- Why did this happen?
- Why does any of this exist?
Why looks for an explanation. And explanations can be extremely useful until we reach questions that can’t be answered through cause and effect.
Then we move toward how.
- How do I live differently?
- How do I stop getting caught by every thought?
- How do I experience what these teachings are pointing toward?
- How do I get there from here?
That’s already a different kind of question. We’ve stopped trying to explain reality and started asking how to experience it differently.
But eventually another question appears. Who?
- Who wants to get there?
- Who is suffering?
- Who needs to understand?
- Who is asking all these questions?
Now the direction of inquiry changes again. Instead of looking for an explanation of reality or a method for reaching some other state, attention turns back toward the one doing the looking.
And this isn’t a progression where we graduate from Why, earn our diploma in How, and finally get promoted to Who. We can cycle through all three based on circumstances. Something terrible happens and we’re back to why. We hear something that makes sense and ask how we can put it into practice. We get quiet enough and suddenly wonder who is having this experience in the first place.
Then the dog throws up on the carpet and we’re right back in cause and effect.
That’s being human.
But I think something changes as we become aware of which question we’re asking.
Why seeks explanation.
How seeks experience.
Who investigates the one seeking.
And perhaps, eventually, even that final question disappears.
Because if the inquiry into who goes far enough, there is no longer a separate questioner standing outside life demanding that life explain itself.
The Western Mind Loves a Microscope
Much of Western culture trains us to narrow our focus.
Break the problem into pieces. Measure it. Analyze it. Name the parts. Find the mechanism.
There’s tremendous value in that. Science has given us extraordinary knowledge of the physical world.
But the same approach can become an obstacle when we’re trying to experience consciousness itself. You can’t dissect your way into nonduality. At some point, instead of narrowing attention further and further, you have to allow awareness to expand.
I’ve experienced this difference in meditation.
Concentration meditation directs attention toward something: the breath, a mantra, a candle flame, a single point of awareness.
Another kind of meditation moves in the opposite direction. Instead of tightening attention, you stop grabbing onto what appears.
A thought arises. You don’t follow it. An emotion arises. You don’t build a story around it. A sound comes and goes. You let it. Gradually, the usual boundaries can begin to soften.
For a Western mind trained to define itself through body, personality, accomplishments, relationships and history, that can be surprisingly uncomfortable.
If I’m no longer holding tightly to all the things I use to define myself, who am I?
That expansion can feel like losing control. Sometimes it can even feel like a kind of death.
Advaita offers a radically different answer. What remains when you stop clinging to all those definitions? Awareness.
Why We Want Enlightenment in the First Place
There’s another problem hiding in many of our spiritual questions.
A lot of us come to spirituality because we’re in pain. We’re seeking relief from grief, fear, confusion, loneliness or the endless noise in our own heads.
Then we hear about enlightenment.
Excellent.
Apparently there’s a state where all of this is understood and suffering no longer has the same hold over us. I’ll take one of those.
So enlightenment quietly becomes another solution to a problem. If I become enlightened, I’ll stop hurting.
Which means the spiritual search itself can become one more attempt to control experience. There is a difference between wanting to understand what we are and desperately wanting to stop feeling what we’re feeling. The second can masquerade as the first for a very long time.
And once again, the question who? becomes useful.
- Who wants enlightenment?
- Who wants the pain to stop?
- Who believes there is a better state somewhere else that can finally make everything okay?
Those questions don’t have quick intellectual answers. They are questions to sit with.
What Meditation Actually Changes
This is one reason I keep coming back to meditation. Meditation doesn’t require you to solve the universe. It asks you to notice what you’re doing right now.
Thought appears. Normally we climb aboard. Then another thought arrives because of the first one. An emotion follows. That emotion generates another thought. Before long we’re several miles down a road we didn’t consciously choose.
Meditation begins to loosen that automatic chain.
The thought can still appear. The emotion can still appear. You simply don’t have to become either one. And when we stop feeding every thought and emotion with our complete attention, suffering begins to change.
Sadness can still be sadness. Fear can still be fear. Pain can still hurt. But there’s more room around all of it. And in that room, sometimes something else becomes apparent. Awareness itself.
This is where meditation and the question who? begin to meet.
If I’m watching a thought arise, who is aware of the thought? If I’m aware of fear, is the awareness itself afraid? If I can watch my ideas about who I am come and go, are those ideas actually who I am?
We can answer those questions intellectually. Or we can sit quietly enough to find out.
Maybe We Don’t Need Better Answers
Swami Sarvapriyananda tells a story about dreaming that you’re being chased by a lion.
You desperately want to know where the lion came from. The jungle? Its parents? Where did the parents come from? You can keep following the chain backward forever.
But from outside the dream, the answer is obvious: There is no lion. Wake up.
Of course, while you’re dreaming, that’s an extremely unsatisfying answer. The lion looks pretty darn real.
Which may be exactly where most of us are. We’re trying to get better explanations for the lion.
Why did this happen?
Why am I here?
Why do people suffer?
Why is life like this?
Some of those questions matter enormously within human life, and we should ask them.
But the deepest spiritual questions eventually bring us to the edge of what questioning can accomplish. Then something else is required. Experience. Attention. Meditation. Being here long enough without immediately explaining what “here” is.
Sarvapriyananda says that from our side there is the question without the answer. For those who are enlightened, the question itself has dissolved.
I think that’s the piece most of us are missing at first. Rather than awakening finally giving us the answer to every question, our questions change as we change.
First Why?
Then how?
Then who?
Round and round we go. Because this isn’t a straight path and we’re still human. Until perhaps, somewhere along the way, we stop needing life to explain itself.
And there is no longer anyone standing apart from it, demanding an answer.