THE ACT OF QUESTIONING
We have, all of us, something in common – together with the fact that we just exist now: it is that to everyone present here, whether he recognizes it or not, the most important thing, the thing that really matters to him is himself. I am not referring now to some specific ego features such as selfishness, self-love or self-importance, but to something very simple, factual, quite unavoidable. Am I not extremely important since everything that exists, exists because I am? And if I think the opposite, is it not again I who thinks it. Everything passes through me. I am the only one who can experience or live my life. It is not a secondhand life, although unfortunately most of the time we seem to forget that.
This fact brings us immediately to the most difficult question. What is myself? …Do I have anything of my own?
My life? I may say, in a way it was given to me, I have done nothing for that. It is now given to me as an existential fact. I can become aware of it. It operates through my body.
This body given to me works by itself according to definite laws...and most of the time I am unconscious of it… The body goes and comes, eats, sleeps, evacuates, has sex affairs and sometimes calls on me to be recognized, to be taken care of; but it usually works as well without me…
I may sometimes realize that everything I have, all my thoughts, my words, my feelings, my body’s learned ways of behavior – all the contents as well as most of the dynamics of what is called my psychological life – have been inputted into me.
My only originality seems to lie in the way it is put together… [Yet], however deeply I realize that what I am is altogether ‘imported,’ conditioned, and divided, I still believe in a mysterious and compelling vocation: that of being myself…[which] awakens in me a strange and immediate sense of responsibility.
This brings me much nearer to what I can recognize as my own. Especially if I recall that to be responsible means properly to respond, to answer. All I can possibly do, as a matter of fact all that I am doing is responding, responding to my existence. What really defines and shows us a man is his response. If there is for me the slightest possible choice in the midst of operating laws, whether from hazard or necessity, is it not in the way I respond – that is, in the quality of my participation in all that is given to me through the immediate experience of my life?
Let us be clear that my genuine responsiveness is not to be found in any of the formal responses that my programmed computer never fails to produce. It has to be sought beyond that. It is an intentional act of knowing, which has a singular capacity for freedom since it can exist beyond my “formal” conditioning. This primary, free response is my attention. My attention is my own and fundamental answer to my existence. It is both my response and what I can be responsible for. An opening as well as an engagement, it is my becoming present to what is, it is hic et nunc my participation in the reality of being. Arising as a basic act of knowing through actual being, my attention is simultaneously awakening to myself and to the world. All the rest, I mean all the other responses which are formal, all my acting out, all my outward manifestations proceed, so to say, by themselves, depending in their quality on the quality of my attention.
…Paradoxically this basic act of knowing, which is attention, is only actualized when we don’t know – that is, when there is a question. Its level and, so to say, its degree of “totalization”
are proportional to our questioning. You have surely noticed that when a question is vital – when it takes us in the guts, as you say – it suspends all unnecessary movements, emotional and physical as well as mental. It clears the way for real awareness and sensitivity, which are components of my total power of attention. It is only between my not knowing and my urge to know that I find myself present, mobilized, open, new – that is to say, attentive.
Attention in its active form is therefore inseparable from interrogation; it is essentially, in its purity, an act of questioning. This act is the privilege of our human existence. An animal contents itself with being. The responsibility of man is to question himself on the meaning of his being.
In our society, mainly concerned with production and efficiency, the drama is that our capacity for questioning, still so vivid in early childhood, is very quickly eradicated or pushed aside for the benefit of our capacity for answering. When a child has a real question, most of the time he is immediately given a stupid answer… unconsciously closing the question. But under its dominating necessity - [this need to answer] - is it possible to keep alive in ourselves our most authentic and precious capacity, which is questioning?
…While playing our part, while being engaged without cheating in the situation that calls us, can we at the same time neither affirm nor deny, neither resist nor follow, assume that we neither know nor don’t know, that we are able or unable? Can we be acutely present to what is, without judgment or indifference, without any solution or escape? It would mean being aware on all fronts, renouncing the known for the unknown, withstanding the inevitable principle of repetition, staying still within our movement.
Total questioning in our lives is the key to being, but…most of us are so busy with successful answering and so identified with our own image that we need severe shocks such as death, suffering, illness, deep frustration, or ‘super-gratification’ to awaken our question.
…I would say, to simplify, that each of our functional apparatuses (thought, sensation and feeling) carries a specific energy and a specific attention or sensitivity. When mobilized together by virtue of questioning, they potentialize each other and contribute to the rare experience of being really present, aware of oneself. Everyone has tasted more or less strongly such a state of awareness in certain occasions or events of his life.
When more aware of ourselves, we are able to contain our energy and at the same time remain, so to say, open, permeable, seeing and yet not interfering in whatever has to take place in ourselves.
…Questioning is an act, it is not something of the mind. It is an act by which you become completely available.
(Michel de Salzmann; excerpted from “Man’s Ever New and Eternal Challenge” originally appearing in full in
On the Way to Self Knowledge (Needleman) and Two Essays (de Salzmann))
We have, all of us, something in common – together with the fact that we just exist now: it is that to everyone present here, whether he recognizes it or not, the most important thing, the thing that really matters to him is himself. I am not referring now to some specific ego features such as selfishness, self-love or self-importance, but to something very simple, factual, quite unavoidable. Am I not extremely important since everything that exists, exists because I am? And if I think the opposite, is it not again I who thinks it. Everything passes through me. I am the only one who can experience or live my life. It is not a secondhand life, although unfortunately most of the time we seem to forget that.
This fact brings us immediately to the most difficult question. What is myself? …Do I have anything of my own?
My life? I may say, in a way it was given to me, I have done nothing for that. It is now given to me as an existential fact. I can become aware of it. It operates through my body.
This body given to me works by itself according to definite laws...and most of the time I am unconscious of it… The body goes and comes, eats, sleeps, evacuates, has sex affairs and sometimes calls on me to be recognized, to be taken care of; but it usually works as well without me…
I may sometimes realize that everything I have, all my thoughts, my words, my feelings, my body’s learned ways of behavior – all the contents as well as most of the dynamics of what is called my psychological life – have been inputted into me.
My only originality seems to lie in the way it is put together… [Yet], however deeply I realize that what I am is altogether ‘imported,’ conditioned, and divided, I still believe in a mysterious and compelling vocation: that of being myself…[which] awakens in me a strange and immediate sense of responsibility.
This brings me much nearer to what I can recognize as my own. Especially if I recall that to be responsible means properly to respond, to answer. All I can possibly do, as a matter of fact all that I am doing is responding, responding to my existence. What really defines and shows us a man is his response. If there is for me the slightest possible choice in the midst of operating laws, whether from hazard or necessity, is it not in the way I respond – that is, in the quality of my participation in all that is given to me through the immediate experience of my life?
Let us be clear that my genuine responsiveness is not to be found in any of the formal responses that my programmed computer never fails to produce. It has to be sought beyond that. It is an intentional act of knowing, which has a singular capacity for freedom since it can exist beyond my “formal” conditioning. This primary, free response is my attention. My attention is my own and fundamental answer to my existence. It is both my response and what I can be responsible for. An opening as well as an engagement, it is my becoming present to what is, it is hic et nunc my participation in the reality of being. Arising as a basic act of knowing through actual being, my attention is simultaneously awakening to myself and to the world. All the rest, I mean all the other responses which are formal, all my acting out, all my outward manifestations proceed, so to say, by themselves, depending in their quality on the quality of my attention.
…Paradoxically this basic act of knowing, which is attention, is only actualized when we don’t know – that is, when there is a question. Its level and, so to say, its degree of “totalization”
are proportional to our questioning. You have surely noticed that when a question is vital – when it takes us in the guts, as you say – it suspends all unnecessary movements, emotional and physical as well as mental. It clears the way for real awareness and sensitivity, which are components of my total power of attention. It is only between my not knowing and my urge to know that I find myself present, mobilized, open, new – that is to say, attentive.
Attention in its active form is therefore inseparable from interrogation; it is essentially, in its purity, an act of questioning. This act is the privilege of our human existence. An animal contents itself with being. The responsibility of man is to question himself on the meaning of his being.
In our society, mainly concerned with production and efficiency, the drama is that our capacity for questioning, still so vivid in early childhood, is very quickly eradicated or pushed aside for the benefit of our capacity for answering. When a child has a real question, most of the time he is immediately given a stupid answer… unconsciously closing the question. But under its dominating necessity - [this need to answer] - is it possible to keep alive in ourselves our most authentic and precious capacity, which is questioning?
…While playing our part, while being engaged without cheating in the situation that calls us, can we at the same time neither affirm nor deny, neither resist nor follow, assume that we neither know nor don’t know, that we are able or unable? Can we be acutely present to what is, without judgment or indifference, without any solution or escape? It would mean being aware on all fronts, renouncing the known for the unknown, withstanding the inevitable principle of repetition, staying still within our movement.
Total questioning in our lives is the key to being, but…most of us are so busy with successful answering and so identified with our own image that we need severe shocks such as death, suffering, illness, deep frustration, or ‘super-gratification’ to awaken our question.
…I would say, to simplify, that each of our functional apparatuses (thought, sensation and feeling) carries a specific energy and a specific attention or sensitivity. When mobilized together by virtue of questioning, they potentialize each other and contribute to the rare experience of being really present, aware of oneself. Everyone has tasted more or less strongly such a state of awareness in certain occasions or events of his life.
When more aware of ourselves, we are able to contain our energy and at the same time remain, so to say, open, permeable, seeing and yet not interfering in whatever has to take place in ourselves.
…Questioning is an act, it is not something of the mind. It is an act by which you become completely available.
(Michel de Salzmann; excerpted from “Man’s Ever New and Eternal Challenge” originally appearing in full in
On the Way to Self Knowledge (Needleman) and Two Essays (de Salzmann))