Your big question is not going to get answered.

You have a giant question writhing around inside you. For each of us it may be a different question, but we all have one. You’ve been wrestling with it, trying to articulate it your whole life, trying to find an answer.

The image comes up for me of the Tarzan TV show from my boyhood. Every episode it seemed like he wrestled some creature in the river – a crocodile, a snake, a bad guy. When you look at nearly all of our childhood cartoons and other shows, and many faery tales, there’s a lot of wrestling with some adversary. This is at the core of the western mind: to be alive is to wrestle with the unknown. For the western mind, the adversary is a tormentor to be vanquished.

For the shamanic mind, that adversary is an ally, a teacher of power, someone to listen to. I’ve learned this as I have gotten older, and as I’ve walked the shamanic path now for 40 years. There is a place in my western mind that wants to tell me I have failed, because I should have answered that giant question by now. This is the mind fueled by dominance, which fantasizes about putting the struggle to rest, putting it behind me, killing it. But the shamanic mind is fueled not by dominance, but by expansion, which focuses on what the mystics call “transcend and include.” We wrestle to learn, expand, transcend this current bit of wrestling, include its learning and power in us, and walk on.

Of course, the giant question in you puts out tendrils like the invasive weed. The giant question becomes scores of other interlocked questions. Western philosophy, and its self-important brother, theology, tell us that constant questioning is a sign of intelligence (and a mark of being smarter than other people). Socrates was famous for advising, “Question everything.” This may be true, but it also may be a recipe for a weed-filled garden of the mind. The Buddha warned people against getting lost in unanswerable questions because they are just another form of distraction – like the 1,000 thoughts of fear and desire that arise as soon as we begin to meditate. Let all that shit go, as the wise ones say.

According to the western philosophy, there is one giant question: “Why is there anything at all?” Or “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Then the thought-Kudzu begins its invasive glee, and the tendrils begin snaking their way out:

Where did I come from?

What is there after “This”?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

How shall I live?

The inner voice demands a cogent, final, unchanging answer. Guess what? That’s not coming.

We can only “answer” these questions through contemplation, then taking on a faith – an inner story. But faith doesn’t provide answers, it provides us a story to stand on so that we can make decisions and walk the earth. Faith allows us to claim who I am in the scheme of the great mystery and generate actions from that place. Faith is not final solid ground, but a current launching pad for our actions. The great mistake made by seemingly all of us is to believe that once we have a faith, it must never change. Nothing in nature never changes, so to quest for an unchanging faith is unnatural. Faith is an activation of the bigger mind – call it wisdom if you will. – bigger than the “yes/no” daily mind. This mind is the one that holds the great paradox of life – not in comfort, but in respect and reverence, wonder and amusement. The poet Rilke says it like this:

This is how [we] grow: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings. (Read the whole wonderful poem)

So, I say again, your big question is never going to get answered. Accepting that makes life so much easier.

Should you stop asking your big question? Not at all. That leads to nihilism – the idea that nothing matters, like when I was one day riding the infamously dicey 21A bus through central Minneapolis. I took a seat in the very back, and saw scrawled with a finger in the dirt on the window: “Grave = Why Bother?” That’s “sinking to the bottom like a fish going to sleep,” as the Sufi poet Rumi says. You can live like that, but it won’t make life easier or more fun – it will just dull everything that comes your way, like self-prescribed lithium.

The magic of being sentient is it gives us a lifetime of asking questions while understanding that they won’t be answered. It can help to enter the asking as “exploration of mystery” rather than a demand to receive and answer.

I’m thinking about the spiritual catch-phrases, “raise your vibration,” “create your own reality,” “ascension,” and “personal transformation.” These are all good things to work on, certainly. But they are also incredibly active. It’s worth remembering that our culture (the “Protestant work ethic”) has embedded in us a largely unquestioned belief that our life’s task is to work, work, work – that our value and identity come from our doing, doing, doing. We easily apply that same unquestioned belief to our spiritual life. We convince ourselves to be optimistic so that we can summon hope so that we get to our frenzy of manifesting. It doesn’t matter if your frenzy is about climbing the corporate ladder, bringing justice NOW, or ascending your spiritual ladder, if you’re living in frenzy, grasping for some purity or completion that is lacking in you, it’s still frenzy, which is something to look at.

Hope is important, and so we want to focus on “ways out of this mess.” But I’m challenged by the Buddhists saying hope is the other side of fear, and the two are always connected, like heads and tails on a coin. The Tibetan Buddhists say we cannot escape fear through hope; we escape fear by abandoning hope. Throw the entire coin of heads-tails/hope-fear into the wishing well.

That’s a difficult idea to work with, because our cowboy mentality equates abandoning hope with “giving up,” which only a loser would do. You’ll never get 1,000 clients, or get rich, or invent that new gizmo, solve that problem by giving up. You’ll never reach spiritual perfection by giving up.

The shamanic approach to all of this echoes the Buddhist in terms of releasing fear and the grasping that comes with it. Toss the entire coin into the well. But the reason I’m a shamanist rather than a Buddhist is the next part of the shamans’ advice: Release fear, and open complete trust in Spirit; rather than fearing, then working and grasping, release all fear, open trust in Spirit, and allow yourself to be guided. Clearly, this is a “next-level” skill, or humanity would be far different than it is.

My teacher says a core shaman’s motto is, “fear is never justified.” He says, when you feel fear, just turn to the fear, and tell it, “You have no power over me. Fear is never justified.” Keep saying it until the current fear dissipates. I wrestle with that, but I try to use it, and it is often transformative for me.

When I go out in the dark morning for my daily prayer, I often get wrapped up in prayers for manifesting, growing, maturing, serving, expanding. Often, what happens is nothing happens. No new idea, new inspiration, new confidence, new answer. But often, a slight breeze raises up during my prayer. The little wind chimes in the garden sing, and a power dances around me reminding me that everything is far bigger than my frenzy of manifesting, and that I might consider trying to be more like the wind chimes. It might be good for me to stop singing prayers for a minute and try to let the hum of the earth sing its way into me and hold me. The earth-hum is a real thing, measured by instruments. One geologist described it “like TV static slowed down 10,000 times.” When that breeze comes up, a phrase flows into my mind: “I am in my unknowing.”

This phrase affirms that 99% of everything is beyond my understanding, and I should not forget to travel into that spaciousness, that void, that womb of all possibility, as often as I work work work on my personal transforming-vibration-ascension-holy wahoo.

So, a truly simple practice of abandoning hope and the frenzy of personal growth is to sit quietly in the dark and allow yourself to be in your unknowing. Here is a helpful set of mysterious phrases you can use:

I am in my knowing (take a moment to describe for yourself three things you absolutely know, and feel that feeling.)

I am in my unknowing (take a moment to describe for yourself three things you absolutely do not know, and feel that feeling.)

I am in my trust.

I am in my trust.

The Tibetans add in this wondrous practice: Hold your cupped hands out. Imagine the earth in your cupped hands. Really see it and feel it in its beauty and suffering. Then hold it up, and release it into the care and supervision of — call it whatever pleases you: infinity, the void, the enlightened ones, the Mystery, the deities, the Holy Ones, the Great Spirit, Source, the Tao. “Here take the world. It’s too big for us to manage. You take it.” Like so much of what I’ve learned, I wrestled mightily with this practice for a long time. But I say now, I love it and find it very helpful. I don’t know exactly why, but I do.

A few years ago, I did a difficult few days of work with Ayahuasca, which is regular part of my training in Peru these last ten years. I entered the week with a searing question: “How do I know if I am ordained?” That word, ordained, is not shamanic, but its an apt word for what many shamanic practitioners worry bout: “Who am I to be doing this kind of work?” This doubt is seen in the ever-present argument on social media over what makes for a true, real, authentic shaman. This is a big question for anyone doing shamanic work, because it’s about claiming spiritual authority and confidence. Doing that takes a long time, with a great deal of self-healing, study, and courage. As D.H. Lawrence says:

..the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.” (Find it here)

The Ayahuasca journey was nightmarish. For two hours I switched off between weeping and vomiting. My head was pounding so hard I felt sure I was going to have a cerebral hemorrhage. I came to the conclusion that I was going to die in this ceremony and had to be okay with that. I crawled up to my teacher for a healing, and for over an hour he worked on me with song and tobacco smoke, with fragrant water and more songs as I continued to weep, vomit, almost pass out, repeat.

Suddenly the ceiling above me opened, revealing the starry cosmos, and the Big Dipper shining. An old man and old woman gazed down at me with some compassion and curiosity. She dipped a ladle into the Big Dipper constellation, and poured drops of what I can only call “pearlescent star-milk” into my head. My weeping and vomiting ceased. The headache faded nearly instantly. I was left with a slight dizzy, dazed and full feeling. The old man smiled at me and said, “Does that answer your question?”

Not really. Yes, sort of.

This is the way it is.