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Asking Questions - Jim Podolske

The following talk was given by Jim Podolske at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 18, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Asking Questions

Well, good evening everyone. My name is Jim Podolske. I'm filling in for Diana today; she's away this week. For those of you who have been tuning in for the last month or so, over the last three weeks she's given a series of talks about asking questions in practice, and I think she covered the material very well.

So, it did spark me to think more about why I do and don't ask questions. I started formal education, I guess, when I was three years old, going to preschool, and I finished graduate school when I was 29. So I had a lot of years of being in institutional settings where there was teaching going on and there were also opportunities to ask questions. I think during that time, mostly I avoided asking questions unless it was absolutely necessary. I was kind of shy, kind of introverted. I like to figure out things on my own.

And also, I had judgments about myself and also judgments about the other students. You know, there was a saying that I probably heard a number of times: "There's no such thing as a dumb question." I didn't really believe that. I heard a lot of questions that I personally judged as dumb, including my own.

It wasn't until I was in graduate school that I had a professor, George Pimentel—he was a world-class chemist at Berkeley. You know, he invented the chemical laser, he sent an infrared spectrometer to Mars to study the atmosphere, he was very involved in developing teaching methods for teaching in chemistry. So he was quite an accomplished person. I often would get to sit in seminars with him, the physical chemistry seminar and graduate student seminars, and he seemed to have no qualms about asking what I thought were pretty basic questions, you know, pretty simple questions. And I thought, "Well, he can get away with that because he's already got this wonderful reputation. I can't ask a simple question like that as a grad student. I have too much to lose, right?" But he was a wonderful example for me of being able to ask a question if you don't understand something.

I suspect that at least some of the time, some of the questions he asked were maybe ones that he already knew the answer to, but he may have realized that there were people in the audience that didn't understand this and that he was willing to ask the question that no one else was. So, I always carried him around as an exemplar of being willing to let your curiosity lead as opposed to your ego.

Some years later, in the next decade, I was on a campaign to South America. We were in Punta Arenas, Chile, making the first airborne measurements of the Antarctic ozone hole. And so there's a big science meeting room, probably twice as big as this, full of scientists who had been selected to study this brand new phenomenon. The speaker was the person in charge of this whole group, and he kept talking about the Antarctic Vortex and would draw sort of cartoonish pictures of what it looked like. At some point, I realized I don't really get this. There's something missing. So I raised my hand and I asked this very simple question about this Antarctic Vortex which everyone had been talking about, and it really just stopped his talk. He said, "Oh yeah, that's right. You know, we draw these simple pictures, but let me give you more detail." And it looked like everybody sort of woke up in the room when they started getting the answer to this question. So that's encouraged me to keep asking those kinds of questions, to be willing to admit that I don't know it all.

I was also thinking about Diana's talks. She did talk about not just the importance of asking questions—like any old question—but she also talked about how not all questions are created equal. There are some questions that will help you along, kind of help you through the fog or the mud, leading on to a place of greater freedom. And some questions don't. Some questions can just lead you either into diversions or into kind of getting trapped in cycles. When I first learned computer programming in the 1970s, languages allowed you to make a lot of mistakes, and so you could write computer code that would go into an infinite loop. It would just keep going on and on and on, and it would never meet the criterion to get out. Eventually, your allotted time would run out and the thing would stop, having just sat there spinning for a long time. And so I think the same thing can happen in practice as well. You can get caught in these loops. One of the ones that Diana talked about last week was about rebirth. You know, like, "Who was I before I was born? Who am I going to become?"—things like that, that you could spend all sorts of time speculating about but wouldn't really get you any closer to seeing through the things that need to be seen through: seeing through delusion, seeing through greed, seeing through hatred.

Impediments to Asking Questions

So after hearing her talks, I started to do a little bit more examination of, first of all, things that keep me from asking questions—the impediments. Most of them are all internal, of course.

The first one is not being clear about what the question is that I have. You know, sometimes there'll be a teaching and you go, "Well, yeah, I don't... that seems contradictory," or "it seems to contradict something I've heard before," or it's maybe some kind of a paradox, or just defies logic. And so sometimes, either in a session like this tonight or maybe in a day-long class or something, I would know that there was something that I didn't understand, but I didn't know how to articulate it. I didn't know how to put it into words to be able to ask it. And sometimes the question wouldn't gel until I got home at night or the next day or something like that. Now, if I was with a teacher that I saw regularly, like Gil ¹ at that time, I would have another opportunity to ask a question. But sometimes, like in a day-long, if I didn't formulate the question that came up in the morning until the afternoon, the time had kind of come and gone. I missed my chance to ask the question. So that's one of the things that I find has been an issue: being able to have clarity about what it is that I don't understand. Is there some way that I can put that into words in a way that doesn't lead me into even less clarity? And that's part of being human, right? We don't know. I like to watch old Sherlock Holmes movies, and of course, he's always like, he looks around and right away knows exactly what's going on. I'm much more like his companion, Dr. Watson; he's sort of fumbling around.

The second impediment is related to ego, which is not wanting to look bad, not wanting to look unintelligent, uninformed. You know, like I've heard talks about not-self ² for years and years and years, and yet at this point, I'd be a little bit shy about asking a teacher, "You know, I've heard about this for 20-some years, can you try explaining it to me again?" So, I think it's a common human thing. You've got a certain sense of wanting to look good, wanting to appear like you've got it together. That's one of the things that Professor Pimentel helped me with, is that he didn't seem to have that operating. He could just ask a simple question, and there didn't seem to be any kind of egoic impediment to asking a question that you'd think he would have known the answer to.

The third one that came to me, besides looking good, is more of a self-judgment of, "How good of a question is this?" You know, particularly if I'm in a room full of people and there's other people asking questions, should I even be asking this question? Is this time-worthy? And underneath that, there's often doubt operating. You know, doubt about, is this going to be valuable not just to me but to the whole group, or at least part of the group?

The fourth one has to do with wanting praise. When I first started with IMC in the late 90s, back in Redwood City, Gil was the main Monday night teacher. He taught maybe 50 to 70% of the time, and often he would leave time for questions at the end. When I was new, I felt pretty confident about raising my hand and asking a question. And what felt the best at that time was when he would react with, "That's a great question. That's a really good question. You know, that's insightful, that's important." He might even respond by asking me for more input. And that was, well, I'll say it was both a stroke to my ego, but it was also there was some element of feeling validated, that what I had to contribute was appreciated and recognized. And then after a while, I noticed, like, I would ask a question and I might get just a very perfunctory response. He might just nod his head, or he might just say a few words, but I'd never get the, "That's a good question" that I was looking for. And so after I stopped getting those little strokes that I wanted, I got less interested in asking him questions. I wasn't getting the, I'll say, egoic lift that I would in the first part.

And then the fifth impediment that I've been able to identify was that you never know what you're going to get. I'd ask him a question, and in formulating the question, I knew what it was that I was willing to say and what I wasn't willing to say. But then once I asked the question, he might ask me a question back, like, "Why are you asking that? How does that work in your life?" And it's like, "Well, no, I don't want to go there. I just want you to answer my question." He might do like the Buddha; Diana had said earlier that the Buddha sometimes would just respond to a question directly. Sometimes he would reformulate the question a little bit and then answer that reformulated question, like he thought the question that was asked was pretty on the mark but was straying a little bit. Sometimes he'd answer a question with a question, which is what I found Gil starting to do. And sometimes he wouldn't respond at all. He just said, you know, however I respond to that question won't be helpful, so he just wouldn't respond. I've only seen that happen here once. There was one time there was a guy sitting up on the stage, he raised his hand and he asked Gil a question about rebirth. Gil didn't just not respond at all; he just said, "We're not going to go there. We're just not going to talk about that." And the person got really upset and said some unskillful things.

The Value of Asking Questions

So those are the five things that have come to my mind about what have proved to be impediments for myself over the years for asking questions. And I decided, well, I better not stop there. There must be things that encourage you to ask questions. There must be reasons to... I mean, I do want to encourage you all to ask questions.

So the first thing that came to me is it may bring clarity. It might be that a teacher may say something, or a teacher or one of your peers may say something to you that brings clarity. You might need to hear the same thing over and over again a number of times before it clicks. There's cases where hearing it from some teachers just may connect with you better than others. Some may just be able to say things in words and with analogies that click for you that other teachers don't. And it doesn't mean that one is better than the other; it's just that one has some resonance. So, asking questions so that you can get clarity is number one. And sometimes I found that even as I'm asking the question, the question might either become clear or it may transmute somewhat. You might have some insight even as you're asking the question, so that verbalization process can be very helpful in ways that you might not even see if you're just sitting there thinking about it.

Number two, asking the question may take you deeper. Both in the process of asking the question, you may go deeper. The teacher may ask a question of you that can take you deeper in a way that you wouldn't have even thought of before you asked the question.

The third value of asking questions is that the more you ask questions, it's kind of like a muscle. The more you ask, the better you can become at asking questions. You can get better by asking questions, even if it seems kind of awkward and you're not quite sure what's going on. There is some learning that goes on by asking questions.

And then the final two have to do with connection. When I first came to this practice, I really thought that this was sort of a do-it-yourself practice. You know, you came and you heard talks, and then you went home and thought about it or meditated. Over time, I started joining Kalyana Mitta ³ groups, where there were other people that you could ask questions of. So the final two that I was thinking of: number one is by asking a teacher a question, you can start building a bond with them, a connection. So that when times get really tough, you've got an ally that you can go to and say, "Look, things are just breaking down." So, building a connection with the teacher.

And then the last one is building connections with other people. If you were to ask a question, you might find that afterwards someone might come up to you and say, "Well, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I had that same question." We don't have so much time to interact with each other on Monday nights, but they do a lot more of that on Thursday nights and day-longs, Sunday mornings. So asking questions will not only benefit you, but it can benefit many other people in the room that hear the question because they may have the same question and not even know it, or they may have the question and not be willing to say it. The benefits of our practice aren't for us alone; they're for everyone. So asking questions about things that are unclear to you may help others.

So those are the five impediments that I found and the five benefits. I hope you'll contemplate those.

Q&A

Questioner 1: What I really hate is when I ask a question and then they ask me a question in return. It's like they're avoiding answering it, and that to me is very irritating. You follow what I'm saying? I ask a question, he or she responds with a question, and it's like he or she avoids answering the question.

Jim Podolske: I suspect sometimes a teacher may be avoiding answering the question.

Questioner 1: No, I'm not talking about a teacher, I'm talking about just a normal human. I don't think a teacher would do that. A politician, yes. An unfriend, yes.

Jim Podolske: Thank you.

Questioner 2: Very interesting discussion. I was drawn to sort of three things. The first is, I too am a scientist, and whenever I go to a scientific meeting and either give a lecture or I'm in the audience, many of the questions actually fall into a couple of interesting categories. The first is not really there to clarify something about the talk, but actually to add something that is often, to your ego point, "Well, you forgot something that I've done that isn't in your lecture." Right? That's probably 30% of the questions. And then there are questions that have nothing to do with the talk and have something to do with something else that they felt should have been in the talk. And those are sometimes useful. And so often, very few of the actual questions are relevant to the talk, like your point about the vortex: "Actually, please explain something." And partly because they're not in that student mode, they're in the, "Let me show off what others are going to need to know about me," rather than about the topic at hand.

And to your point about the professor, having taught for a long time too, you often want to take the Socratic position, which is to ask a question that is often seemingly simple but opens up what is an important topic that has confused the group or that you want the group to kind of steer towards. Which leads to the second set of questions that I was thinking about, which are those kind of Socratic questions and the Socratic dialogue, which are really a bit of a back and forth and a way to probe a topic by the kind of tennis of back and forth questions that often illuminate in other ways. And then the last is legal questions. If you've ever been deposed or part of a deposition, it's a very structured way of going through and inquiring. But when done right, it's actually quite interesting as a way of probing and getting information out that you wouldn't otherwise be able to get out. So in the law, you're only allowed to ask questions. The lawyers are to ask the questions to get information out.

So anyway, maybe three unrelated things, but to me, that's where my mind went. And so in my own meditation, you know, which of these do I want? Do I want to actually impress myself as I sit there? Because I often do that in meditation. Or do I really want to kind of probe and get at some really difficult thing that I'm grappling with and spend that time focused on it? And what's the best way to do that?

Jim Podolske: Yeah, well thank you.

Questioner 3: I can definitely say I have never thought so deeply, I've been so mindful of the whole process of asking questions as I have been through these recent discussions. And it's been really interesting to think about all the topics that have been raised in connection. I thought it was funny that you raised one of my current questions, which is like the proper balance of self and not-self. And I guess that's probably a question that a lot of us have, which is just ongoing because it's complicated, right? But I just appreciate the conversation because as we've delved in, it's become more and more interesting to me as we've gone along.

Jim Podolske: Yeah, thank you.

Questioner 4: This is kind of a group question. I've noticed I do a lot of visualization. Things from the practice stick with me if I have a visual or some little memory about it. So lately, I used to think of my thoughts kind of like an untrained puppy that I would try to be kind to. I was kind of on that image for a while. And lately, the image that came to mind for a few weeks is that my mind is like the junk drawer in my kitchen. Different stuff pops up and circulates around. Anyway, so my question is, do other people have these kind of visualizations or ideas about the practice? It could be your mind state, it could be anything. But do other people have these ideas, and do they shift through time to different visualizations?

Questioner 5: Yeah, like you, I also do visualizations, and it shifts from time to time for sure. One that really was very powerful for me, and I did this for like a month where every night I would just imagine as if I'm basking in the sun, which is kind of funny because it's at night so there's no sun. But kind of just imagining the warmth pouring over me really helps me calm down and it really mellows all the thoughts, which makes meditation and reflection on the different things, especially the hard things, a bit more approachable, because it mellows it down and kind of softens it. So that's one visualization that I think was very helpful for me.

Questioner 6: I was listening to your five ways of avoiding questions, and of course, I could identify with all five of them, especially number four, because when I had this brilliant question in my mind and I said, "Okay, I'm going to ask it and it will be good and I will look great asking a question," then I don't ask the question. But I would like to offer a sixth one, which I think if you mentioned it, I missed it, and that is a sort of laziness. What I mean is that during my practice, it never happened that I asked the question and in the aftermath, I got an answer and there was a shift that I was always looking for—a shift in clarity, a shift in insight, a shift in knowing myself better. That never happened immediately, but it does happen. But it doesn't happen immediately. It happens, as you said, when others are asking questions, when you read the same text over and over again, and suddenly out of nowhere that shift comes. But it doesn't come from a question. So I don't have the desire to ask a question. I just hang out and wait, and I see it as laziness because, as many people pointed out, asking questions is a good thing not just for yourself but for everybody.

Jim Podolske: Yeah, thank you. Something that occurred to me is years ago when Gil would talk about doing noting practice ⁴ in meditation, where you'd make silent mental notes about what's happening right now. In some ways, that's kind of a question, like, "What's happening?" And that can get fairly complicated; you can come up with very elaborate descriptions of what you're experiencing at the moment. But one of the questions that was helpful for me is just like sitting there, paying attention to your breath and going, "What is this? What's happening right now? What is this?" And it isn't that the answer is important, but it's the continually looking, continually asking, "What's going on right now? What is this?" And that sense of curiosity, I mean, that can help build the sense of curiosity, at least for some people. Maybe for you, it's not the same and it's a different process. Years ago, I used to be involved with a group, and there was a mythopoet, Michael Meade, and he said, "It's not about getting better answers, it's about getting better and better questions." So, finding better and better questions about what's going on. So I'll leave you with that. But thank you for your share.

Questioner 7: I have just a comment. I really enjoyed it, Jim, thank you so much for sharing these five thoughts. I'm just thinking right now, I have always been very shy when it came to asking questions, and basically, I'm avoiding it all my life. I was thinking, the two things that I think are a very cultural thing... the combination of what you called expecting praise and, on the other hand, given my background, that's what it all was about. You ask questions in order to shine and not... and then at the same time, asking questions was considered to be like you basically reveal yourself as an uninformed, unknowing person. So I was listening to you and I felt a little bit of a relief that I'm seeing this clearly. It's not just me, you know, never knowing what to ask or how to do that. There's a lot of deep conditioning and heavy conditioning. And I'm also very inspired by your last idea, by what you said about how it's connecting us. I'm asking not just because I want to know, but because I kind of also want this connection to happen. So thank you so much. I really enjoyed it very much.

Jim Podolske: Thank you.

Closing Remarks

Well, if not, first of all, I want to say I appreciate all of you. I appreciate all of you for coming and for listening, and both for sharing your questions and your comments, and for all of you for sharing your presence, for your sense of being here and listening. I have to say, when Diana sent me this email at the end of last week saying, "I forgot to get a teacher," I was a little apprehensive, but I really like the way it went tonight. So thank you all.