It’s Not About The Questions

It’s about honesty.

I was speaking with one of my elders the other day about my problems with my questions. I am very fortunate to have such elders. I had told him that I wanted to talk. He is a very good adviser and I needed some good advice.

We are all preparing for our pilgrimage to Merita that will begin on November 15th. I really want to be as mentally prepared as possible.

We were standing together in the foyer of the Chicago Earth Center. We both had our shoes on and were preparing to leave. I had the impression that he needed to head out to meet his woman, but he graciously took a few moments out for me.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for the right question.” I said.

He smiled and commented, “That’s a very wise answer.”

I’m not sure how wise an answer it was, but I proceeded to explain my dilemma. He finally said to me that perhaps my problem was not so much with the questions that I have been asking but with the honesty that I have in asking them. He told me that it is not really honest to ask a question when you already have a desire for what the answer will be.

I gave him my most pensive look and told him I had to think about this. I realized that I had not been very honest at all with the questions that I have been asking because I do have a desire for what I want the answers to be. I have had an expectation of these questions from the very beginning. It seemed that I was not asking questions at all, I was just pining around begging my Master for validation on what I hoped and expected my reality to be.

I’m pretty ashamed of myself, really.

So now I have been wondering about my own honesty. One of my other elders told me that Maakheru said that we don’t really know what honesty is. I guess if there is any wish that I would ask of my Ancestors now, it would be for them to help me to become an honest person. I would ask them to help me to be honest with myself and within myself. Without this kind of honesty, I don’t think that I can even begin to approach the knowledge that I seek. I cannot even understand the first step that I will take on the path.

All of the uncertainty and illusion that I have been suffering with is not, I hope, a permanent condition, but I will never overcome it without true honesty within myself.

Everything that I have been thinking and doing in my life would seem to have come from an expectation and desire, a longing for something that I feel is missing. I have been filling the space of that longing with my own ideas and dreams of what I want the world to be. How can I have the answers to my questions if there is no place to put them in my heart and my mind?

It is strange. I do not feel happy or sad about this. Maybe I’m a bit puzzled. I don’t want to hope and I don’t even feel like I need to. I don’t know what is happening to me now and I don’t… care?

I just want to empty myself of the obstacles. I want to wash myself clean with a kind of emotional and mental ablution until I am purified of all of the wants and hopes and dreams except one. The one hope and the one dream is my desire to approach the Divine.

The more I empty myself, all that is left is a feeling that I do not understand. It is so strange but it is only my longing for the Divine that matters. I don’t know what this is. It isn’t a sadness. I don’t feel bereft at all, I just feel like I’m walking slowly through a door and there is a kind of joy in this. I don’t completely trust myself enough to hold on to it. I should not value emotion and I recognize that the only thing that I can know for certain is that I am ignorant.

I must empty myself of everything that I know. I must become pure. As I write those words “I must become pure” I feel the emotion well up inside me again. A kind of joy.

I must become pure