On Answers
An Answer Called an Answer is Not an Answer
My travel story
About ten years ago, I got this idea in my head to drive around the country visiting different spiritual communities and writing about them. I was twenty-seven, single, had no debts (though, admittedly, also no savings), and didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with my life. I felt I needed some answers.
So after five years of living in New Orleans, I sold everything I owned except what fit in the backseat and trunk of my parents’ old Toyota Highlander and started driving. I named my trip “Spiritual Fringe” and in those halcyon days before Substack took over the blogging world, when Patreon was just getting its wings, I sold subscriptions to a blog I wrote through the latter platform to finance my travels. I crisscrossed the country, going from New Orleans to a Jewish intentional community in Southern Florida to a Bruderhoff Christian center in the Florida Panhandle to an ecovillage in the mountains of North Carolina to a hippie commune known for its midwives in Tennessee to a Sufi community in Kentucky to the global capital of Transcendental Meditation in the middle of Iowa to an architecturally green off grid village in Arizona to a farming ranch in California where people commit to living together by the golden rule. I spent long hours on the open roads of the country, listening to music and podcasts and my own thoughts. I slept at campgrounds and crumbling motels off the highways. I sat writing for hours in small-town coffee shops between stops.
And indeed, I ended up on the scent of spiritual and esoteric innovation. I talked with rabbis, pastors, priests, priestesses, sheikhs, neuroscientists, and yogis. I interviewed them, along with anyone else I met who would spare a few minutes. I asked them if they had religious backgrounds, how they’d arrived where they had in their lives, if and how they conceived of “God” and divinity, how they understood good and evil, how they made sense of evil in the world (if they believed in it at all).
Did I find the answers I sought? After six months, I thought I had. In his book, “The Perennial Philosophy,” Aldous Huxley identifies a shared concept at the core of nearly all ancient religious, philosophical, mystical traditions—a divine oneness that transcends and encompasses all the material world. We are all cells in a single body, molecules in a vast ocean, shards of light in a great flame; we merely perceive our separation from each other in material form, but in truth we are not separated at all. In Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Platonism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam (particularly Sufism), there lives some version of this idea in the heart of its wisdom. Even Einstein’s discovery of e=mc2—positing that mass and energy are essentially the same substance just moving at different speeds—can be understood as pointing to a fundamental unity in the universe.
The wise folks I met in my travels nearly all shared some version of this belief. Some added a wrinkle: yes, they said, the truth is oneness, but to access that felt sense of Oneness, one needs to be able to see and love others as simultaneously distinct and individual, and also containing the oneness. Love of another, the Sufi sheikh of Louisville, Kabir Helminski, told me, is the surest path to experiencing Oneness. I started to call this idea, “The Oneness and the Twoness.”
I came to a synthesis that felt like exactly the answer I was looking for: all is one but every person is distinct and should therefore be treated as the sacred oneness they are (the golden rule of treating others how you want to be treated also shows up across myriad ancient cultures and traditions), and the key to experiencing it all was love. Huzzah!
I felt elated. Not only because this answer felt clear, but because, I realized, I was in love with someone, an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years, and who, as it happened, I was about to see at an engagement party in New York City. It was all so simple. I would tell this friend of my love for them, and so would begin the path toward my future free of turmoil and angst.
LOL. To put it mildly.
Answers vs. Insights
There’s a teaching in Buddhism that three “poisons” that lead to suffering are:
Greed, the feeling of unquenchable want;
Hatred, the feeling of intense aversion toward something; and
Delusion.
It’s said that greed feels like a hole in the heart; hatred, like a fire in the heart. And delusion, here’s the kicker, feels like the truth. Oof.
Suffice to say my feelings were not reciprocated. I was devastated. I thought I’d found the answer, and I mean the answer—the Perennial Philosophy and the golden rule and love!—but of course I hadn’t. Because answers are delusions. The first two lines of the Tao are “Tao called tao is not tao/ Names can name no lasting name.” A famous Zen koan teaches, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught that in the search for answers, finding them is the surest sign of having gone astray.
But then, if answers aren’t real, are we then just doomed to wander the earth in ignorant delusion unless we meditate ourselves into dissolution in the oneness for all our waking hours? Is my thirty minutes of mindful meditation practice each morning (let’s be real, it’s most mornings, and ideally it’s thirty minutes but sometimes it’s twenty five…and sometimes twenty…and sometimes fifteen) just a foolish attempt to soothe my addled ego when the only true balm is ego annihilation?
Well, could be I guess. I can’t say for certain it’s not.
I think there may be value, however, in drawing a distinction between answers and insights. Answers are ends, strong periods with a hard edge that, by definition, require adherence to their strict implications. After an answer is a wall, and that wall becomes the first barrier of the confinement zone in which is determined precisely how one is to live and act. Insights, on the other hand, move far more flexibly around the shape of reality, serving as everything from a comma, which can give us a moment of rest, to an em dash—propelling us into the next iteration of the unknown with just enough confidence to feel some wonder and delight at whatever awaits.
Where does that leave us?
I recently went on a silent meditation retreat with the organization Or HaLev, led by James Jacobson Maisels. It came at a moment of particular intensity in my life, with two big events having occurred in rapid succession—in August, I learned that my wife is pregnant, and in October, my mom died suddenly. Mired in grief, I was struggling immensely to keep calm about the pregnancy. Over and over, I imagined the worst and didn't let myself say it, certain I would fall to pieces. Every minor issue sent me spinning into a catastrophic rabbit hole of Google diagnosing (“is discomfort in week 16 a possible sign of genetic illness in a baby” is one example of my inane searches; to synthesize the answer I found to that particular questions, if you’re wondering, it’s “well huh, maybe, but also maybe not.”).
On retreat, during my meditating practice, I found my mind returning again and again to the same knot: having learned so acutely the truth of uncertainty from my mom’s passing, how would it ever be possible to let go of my need for certainty when it came to my wife’s pregnancy and, I imagined, our future child? After two days of being stuck, I posed this question to James. His response was quick and incisive. “Instead of striving to let go of your need for certainty,” he said, “let it in, be gentle with it, say ‘come on in, darling.’ Consider,” he continued, “that the goal isn’t to not have a need for certainty, but to begin to develop a relationship with the need.”
Well huh.
Something about Jame’s quick reframe untangled the knot, or at least loosened it. It started to hit me that my aversion to a need for certainty (so wily, these poison paths to suffering), which I had judged to be delusion or greed, had led to my stuckness. Now, whenever I notice that sense of aversion creeping in, before just being in it, I interrogate it, ask it questions. In that way, I’ve found something I didn’t even realize I was missing: space to notice when my mind starts to spin and catastrophize. Rather than ignoring that desire for certainty or trying to shunt it away, I welcome it in and thank it for trying to protect me. This practice has led me to be able to then continue moving on with my life without so much paralyzing anxiety. Has this “cured” my anxiety? Of course not, but it’s helped.
Many of us feel a need for answers, for certainty, and that’s okay. If we can remember to achieve at least a hint of space from it, we might remember that the desire for certainty can be quite useful, making us vigilant when vigilance is called for, prepared when preparation is necessary. The rub is not to be overcome by the need and thereby enticed into that closed spiritual container of having discovered “the answer.”
Here the words of Rabbi Tarfon in the Mishnah feel particularly prescient: “The work (of trying to improve yourself and the world) is not yours to complete,” he says, “but that’s no reason not to do it.”1
Last thought: on “Orthodoxy”
The word “orthodoxy” comes from the Greek roots of “ortho” meaning “correct” and “dox” meaning “opinion,” and so I’ve begun to think that the concept of “orthodoxy” exists far more broadly than just among those who identify with Orthodox sects of religions. Indeed, even those who identify as “Orthodox” aren’t always “orthodox.” I know Orthodox Jews who don’t fit the bill of believing they hold “correct opinion,” but rather believe the Orthodox Jewish way of life holds great insight for them. I also know plenty of people who recoil at the label of Orthodoxy while holding rather orthodox convictions that what they believe, how they live and act is undoubtedly correct. All of which is to say, in the attempt to determine who might be offering insights and who might be trying to impose on us answers, labels are often not helpful.
Cited or referenced:
This translation is my own, and, as my teacher Dr. Susie Tanchel, taught me long ago: Translation is interpretation.