This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Questioning as an Expression of Freedom ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Questioning as an Expression of Freedom - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 11, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Questioning as an Expression of Freedom

Welcome, everybody.

Tonight, I'd like to continue on the topic of questioning that I introduced last week. This idea of questioning as a part of practice. I want to expand on that a little bit and talk about how questioning is actually, in some ways, an expression of freedom. To ask is a sign that we're not locked in or stuck, or somehow not even realizing that there could be an alternative.

Maybe we are in a situation where we're just not allowed to ask questions. Whatever kind of situation that might be, people in power sometimes don't like this. "Nope, don't ask any questions. This is the way it is." Maybe our parents say something like, "Because I said so." That's the rationale. You don't get to really ask, "But why?" "Because I said so, and that's enough."

So, this whole notion of being able to ask questions about anything or everything is an assertion of a certain amount of freedom. We don't think about that often. We think that we're asking questions just because we want to know the answer. But what if we start to think about it as an expression of freedom? This path, of course, is leading to greater and greater freedom, greater and greater peace, and ease, and well-being. It's not like there's no freedom, no freedom, no freedom, then—bam!—there's freedom. All along the path, there's more and more well-being, there's more and more peace, there's more and more freedom as we walk on this path or practice in this way. So naturally, there are more and more questions too.

We can ask big questions. Sometimes even the fact that there are big questions is a sign of freedom, instead of just the minor ones like, "Do the knives go into this drawer or the other drawer?" That's just a minor one. But what if we ask questions like, "What is it that opens the heart and mind? What opens my heart? What opens my mind?" Recognizing that greater freedom comes from letting go. This opening is a letting out of whatever's in there, no longer holding on. Part of this path is for each of us to find for ourselves our own flavor, our own take. It's not exactly the same for every person. That's part of what freedom means. Each of us will show up wherever we are in our lives, bringing whatever we have with us.

So we can ask, "What is it that opens the heart and mind?" This is a worthwhile question for each of us. Maybe it's obvious, maybe it's not. We could ask the opposite: "What closes the heart? What closes the mind?" What is it that creates the conditions in which we close our hearts? Maybe we feel hurt, threatened, or unsafe in some way. Or maybe we have a feeling of wanting to make ourselves feel better, so we put somebody else down, creating a sense of superiority. That's a way that closes our hearts and minds.

Another question we might ask is, "Can we live from love and wisdom?" Can we have love and wisdom be foundations, a support for our life? However we understand love and wisdom, for each of us it will be a little bit different. And I'm sure if I were to ask you a few decades ago what love means, what wisdom means, you probably would have a different answer than you have today. This is something that shifts as we mature, as we have more life experiences, and as we practice more. But the question is, can we live from love and wisdom? Can we have that animate our life? Can we have love and wisdom be like a North Star that helps orient us in the way we respond to what life brings?

So often, we see around us the roots of fear, confusion, greed, or hostility. We see all that, and we also see the suffering that it brings for ourselves and for others. It's everywhere. You just open up a newspaper or look at your phone, and it's filled with that kind of stuff. That's what the media companies want you to get anxious about so that you'll do more clicking.

But what about the roots of love? How deep are they? How do we understand that? Can we tap into them? Can we trust them? How do we know if we can trust the roots of love? Whatever they are, each of us will have a slightly different idea. Maybe it's not so clear. Again, maybe we can find it by thinking about the opposite. What are the roots of hatred, the opposite of love? We can think about how hatred often comes from fear, from feeling threatened. So the roots of love might be a sense of settledness, a sense of softness.

You could even ask for yourself, "What does freedom mean?" What does it mean for you? I'll just say, earlier in my life, freedom certainly meant the capacity to do as I damn well pleased. That was what freedom was, just do whatever I want, whenever I want. And I organized my life around that. But now, I would say freedom means something very different. Now, freedom is more this sense of not being pushed around by what life brings me. Not feeling like I have to avoid that person because I don't want to tell them something, or I don't want to look at that thing because it'll make me upset. Instead, freedom is having the capacity to say, "Okay, if it hurts my feelings, it hurts my feelings. It's not the end of the world." If what I hear is sad, it's sad. It doesn't have to be a huge problem.

Freedom is being able to stand up for what we believe in, for what we think is helpful for ourselves and for others, taking everyone into account. And being willing to do that without having to always be guarding ourselves or protecting ourselves from what may come as a response. I'm not going to say that I'm completely immune from what other people say and do. I'm not. But I am much more than I used to be. There is a much greater sense of steadiness, of being able to feel grounded and connected, and standing upright. Like, "Okay, yeah, I'm here, and I'm not going to get pushed around as much." And I like this capacity to open my heart to so many things that before would have made me feel uncomfortable, where I felt like I had to avoid situations I've never been in before. "Oh, that person's really different from me." No. Instead, now it's like, "Okay, let's see what it's like. I can hold this. And if it's painful, I can hold that too."

Sometimes in this practice, we have these questions. It's definitely in there, and I have had Dharma teachers give me this kind of instruction, pointing me in a particular direction at a certain place in practice. There can be this question of, "Who am I?" And when you first ask that, there's all the obvious stuff that comes up. But then you just ask again and again and again and again. And then it starts to be a little bit slippery. "Who am I?" Or something like, "What is this?"

As I talked about last week, the purpose of questioning is not so much that we absolutely find the answers. It isn't like a quiz or an exam. It's more for us to just adopt a stance, an attitude of openness and listening. As opposed to when you feel like you have all the answers, it doesn't matter what anybody else says. You're not going to listen. But this idea of questioning, "What is this?" can be a part of practice. It can be dropped in, usually after the mind has settled some. Some people do it as part of their daily life, just dropping in this question, "What is this?" and feeling their way into the answer, leading with the heart. Having the heart answer instead of the mind, if that makes sense. It's a different way than if you were taking an exam. Nobody's going to be grading you. It's just an exploration.

So when we find ourselves lost in a story that we're telling about somebody else or about ourselves—"I'm a great person because XYZ," "I'm a terrible person because of ABC"—if we remember, we could ask, "Who is it that's telling these stories?" And there's a way you can kind of look behind and ask, "Who's telling these stories?" and see if you can find the storyteller.

These questions can be a way in our practice, an inquiry into whether there is a core self, this essence that's at the center of everything making it happen, telling the stories, asking the questions. You can just investigate. It can be a really fruitful practice.

As I mentioned last week, this idea of investigation is the second of the Seven Factors of Awakening¹, so it's definitely part of this path. It's not just something you do on the side. It's a part of this movement towards greater awakening. It's also an antidote to doubt. If you find yourself hesitating or vacillating, thinking, "I'm not sure. I don't know about this practice, I don't know about this teacher, I don't know about these teachings. Who is this Buddha person?" Investigate. Ask questions. Read Dharma books, listen to Dharma talks, ask teachers, ask other people who have a practice, or ask people who don't.

The activity of asking is an integral part of practice, even if we don't say it explicitly. This practice is asking us to adopt an attitude of listening, a stance of openness and receptivity. And that's a big part of what questioning is about: just being open to hearing something new, being open to being surprised, open to learning something, open to realizing, "Oh, I thought it was that way, but maybe it's not."

"I thought I was always sad. I've been feeling sad for months now. I'm trying to meditate so that I'll feel better." That's a perfectly legitimate reason to meditate. But you might discover with meditation that maybe there are lots of moments that are perfectly neutral. There's no sadness, it's just neutral. Or maybe you even find that there are little moments of happiness or joy or senses of well-being or contentment. And then you start to realize, "Oh yeah, I'm sad a lot, but there's also these moments of happiness or clarity or ease." And then we slowly start to rewrite our narratives. Instead of, "I'm always sad," it can be, "Oh yeah, sadness arises a lot." That's very different from saying, "I'm always sad." It's such a different feeling. Instead of identifying and saying sadness is something that's always present for me, we can say, "Yep, sadness is present sometimes. Sometimes it's perfectly neutral, and maybe even boring."

When we sit to meditate, it isn't so much that we're trying to make something happen. We're not trying to have some particular experience. We can't make those happen. I certainly tried. I didn't quite understand meditation in the beginning, and I thought something fantastic was supposed to happen. I was just huffing and puffing and straining, and I just made myself really tight and tense and didn't like meditating anymore. So it's not so much that we're trying to make anything happen. Instead, we're trying to listen to what's happening here in this body and mind. "What's this experience?" Being open to it, being receptive to it, noticing it, in the same way as asking a question.

When we're meditating, we have this receptivity, as opposed to this idea that we're just trying to confirm something that we already know. There can be a way when we meditate that we feel like we just have to check the box: "Okay, I meditated today." And there can be a subtle way in which we are like, "Okay, I know it's like this at the beginning of the sit, and then maybe after 10 minutes the mind settles down, it's like this. Okay, done." But instead, maybe this attitude of "Well, what is this? What is going on?" is a way forward with a meditation practice.

All these practices and teachings are offered with an invitation to see if this matches your own experience, as opposed to saying, "Okay, this is how it is, and you have to believe it." Instead, there's a real invitation: "Is this true for you? Does this make sense for you?" Some of you may be familiar with this expression, ehipassiko², which translates as "come and see." So it's not "go and believe," it's more like "come and see." Is it this for you?

A number of years ago, I had to log into a shared account for something to do with IMC. When they gave me the password, the password was "ehipassiko." And I thought, "Oh, yes, this is such a great way." Not only this "come and see," but it also showed how important this was for the person who set up this account. This basic tenet of an invitation to welcome what's arising and maybe bring some curiosity to it, rather than the idea that we know it already.

In this way, we might even understand that to see for ourselves—that is, to "come and see"—is the Dharma. We kind of think, "Okay, the Dharma is out there in these teachings written down in the Pali Canon." But the Dharma only exists when human beings are interacting with it or expressing it. It's not some abstract thing that exists independently. It's something that is present when we are walking the path. This gets pointed to in the suttas. In fact, the Dharma is described as "visible here and now, immediate, inviting to be seen for oneself, onward leading, and to be personally realized by the wise." That's a definition of the Dharma that we find. "Visible here and now, immediate"—something that we can experience, tangible. And "inviting to be seen for oneself," and "onward leading." I love this. It invites all of us to have a slightly different, or maybe really different, expression or experience of it, something that we each discover as we move along this path towards greater and greater freedom.

So then we might ask, "Okay, Diana, if this questioning is an expression of freedom, you might say, 'But I don't feel very free,' or you might say, 'I don't ask questions.'" So we could ask, what blocks questions? What gets in the way of questioning?

One is this inner critic that can arise. When the inner critic is active and being believed, it's asking questions, but they're not helpful questions. Instead, there's this question like, "Am I getting this right?" There's this real concern, this feeling like whatever I'm doing is wrong. Underneath that is the sense of, "If I'm doing it, it must be wrong." So this question, "Am I doing this right?" Or the inner critic might be saying something like, "Well, who am I to question? Surely, everybody knows better than I do. I don't know enough, or I haven't practiced enough." Implicit in that is the sense of comparing ourselves to others and feeling like maybe somebody else has the right to question, but I don't. And that's just the inner critic, this aspect of our experience that shows up on occasion and likes to squash us or make us feel inadequate. We don't have to believe it. We give it authority, but we don't have to believe it. That is a whole practice in itself, how to work with the inner critic, but it does block our questioning.

Another thing that can block questioning is that, in some ways, our culture or society doesn't really support it. In America, we like to think that we're fiercely independent and all about freedom. We have this pioneering spirit. That's all true. And there's also a way in which we clearly get the message: don't question. The media often wants to tell you how it is. I don't want to demonize the media, but some of it has that sense of, "We're just going to tell you what you need to know. If you have questions, you don't need to know the answers. Just listen to us." Or there are leaders of institutions who don't want us to question. So there's this way in which our society promotes a sense of passivity, a sense of "let's just consume information and not question it." Which isn't healthy. All of us need to bring our own sense of what's appropriate and what is right and wrong. I'm not saying that we can't believe anything, of course not. Some things we have to take on faith if people that we trust say them. But there are some things that we should question.

Another reason we might not question is that we like to have answers. It feels comforting. "Okay, I know the answer. I understand this. I don't have to worry about it. I got it." There's a certain amount of comfort in that, and it's 100% appropriate to do that with some things. For other things, it is better to question. That's part of the art of practice, and I would say that's the art of having a rich life: knowing which things to question and which things not to question. The truth is, we don't know the future. We know the likelihood that certain things will happen, but we don't know exactly what's going to happen.

There's this story in the suttas about a person named Mālunkyāputta³. He goes up to the Buddha and he says, "I'm going to disrobe unless you answer my metaphysical questions, including what happens after a person dies." And the Buddha said, "I never promised that I was going to answer all your questions. Why are you threatening me that you're going to disrobe?" The Buddha says, "Disrobe if you want. I'm not going to answer all your questions." Specifically, he didn't answer some of Mālunkyāputta's metaphysical questions, including what happens after a person dies. The Buddha said that he didn't want to answer them because it wouldn't be beneficial. It wouldn't lead to peace or insight or awakening just to know what happens after a person dies. The person would just be passively accepting information, and there's no way to know whether what the Buddha said would be true or not. It wouldn't put an end to questioning.

Then the Buddha gave a simile to Mālunkyāputta. A person is injured by an arrow. Other people see this and call a doctor. The doctor comes to remove the arrow, and the person, who I imagine is in tremendous pain, says, "No, no, no, wait. Before you remove the arrow, I'd like to know who shot the arrow. Where do they live? What is their name? And about the arrow, what type of arrowhead does it have? What kind of feather is on it?" It goes on and on, all these ridiculous questions. Meanwhile, he has an arrow sticking in him, and he's bleeding and in terrible pain.

The Buddha is pointing out that if we are busy asking these types of questions, there's no end to some of these metaphysical things. And instead, we're still suffering. So can we put our questions to a use that's going to lead to more freedom? To ask a question is freedom, but can the type of questions we ask lead to even greater and greater freedom?

So, what are some questions that we can ask? If we're experiencing discomfort, dissatisfaction, suffering, dukkha⁴—whether it's really mild or really terrible—we can ask, "What is it that's being clung to? What am I clinging to? What's being held on to?" This requires a distinction. There's the pain of what life brings you, the arrow for example. But then there's often what the mind adds on top of it: "Oh, I have to figure all these things out about the arrow," or "Just wait until I'm healed again, I've got to go and get revenge on this person," or whatever it might be. All the story-making that we do perpetuates and amplifies the discomfort. Those stories revolve around a certain amount of clinging: clinging to ideas, clinging to views, clinging to how we should be treated. I'm not saying that these things are not important, they are. But is there a way that we can notice how we're clinging to some things that just bring more suffering?

That's a question we can ask ourselves. "What is it that's being clung to?" And then we could ask, "Where does this clinging come from? Is there a belief that's underneath it?" This belief that in order to be safe, I have to cling on to an idea of myself. Or in order to feel more comfortable, I have to dogmatically hold on to certain beliefs and not be open to learning something new.

The questions we can ask ourselves are, "What are the conditions that support the arising of more freedom? When do I feel more or less ease and peace and freedom? What are the conditions in which I feel the most well-being and peace and ease, and what are the conditions in which I feel the least?" Can I organize my life, can I create conditions in my life so that I feel more and more peace and ease? This idea that conditions are so important. We know that it only rains when there are rain clouds. Suffering only arises when there are the conditions for it. So questions to ask ourselves are, "What are the conditions that support the arising of more freedom?" Just to be sensitive to where there is more suffering, less suffering; more freedom, less freedom.

Some of you might recognize that part of this is the Four Noble Truths. This recognition that what's being clung to is what leads to suffering, the opposite of freedom. So this idea of questioning as an expression of freedom, and questioning as a way to lead to more freedom, is an integral part of our path. Both as a stance, an attitude of being receptive and open, and also as a way to highlight when we're really tight and constricted and not being receptive. Questioning as an alternative to just believing, but instead for all of us to find for ourselves, discover for ourselves, where there's more suffering and where there's more freedom.

I'll end there and open it up to see if there are any questions.

Q&A

Questioner 1: Diana, when you were towards the beginning of your talk, I was thinking about a phrase that I've heard people use from time to time: "don't go there." And I realize that that's in some ways could be very skillful or very unskillful.

Diana Clark: Yes, this idea of "don't go there" is like, "don't ask questions, don't go there." Is that what you mean?

Questioner 1: Yeah. And in what ways would that be really skillful to say, "don't go there"?

Diana Clark: Well, all of the questions that you're talking about, there are some things that are just not going to get away from suffering, or it's just going to wind you around the axle.

Questioner 1: I like that expression.

Diana Clark: Thank you, Jim. So like the questions of, "Well, what kind of bird did the feather on this arrow come from?" Like, don't go there. Don't waste your time with those types of things. Yeah, thank you. One of the things I was thinking, I just got a text from one of my college friends yesterday, and I was thinking about when he and I were roommates. One of the big arguments was like, "Who is the best rock band?" [Laughter] Or, "Who's better, Superman or Batman?" You know, these types of things. Yeah, great, thank you.

Questioner 2: Jim, thanks Diana. I've been listening a lot repeatedly to a talk on courage. You talked about how safety can lead to investigation or fear can prevent investigation, and those always seem external to me. Like I have to wait for fear to go away or safety to come. So I really like focusing on courage. It's empowering, and it's like I can investigate even in the presence of fear or without feeling safety.

Diana Clark: Yeah, very nice. We could even investigate, "Well, what is courage? What does courage feel like? What does fear feel like?" And that's a way of turning towards what we often don't want to turn towards, which is fear. Yeah, thank you for making that connection.

Okay, so thank you all, and I wish you a wonderful rest of the evening.