What You Ask Is Who You Are

Is the humble question the divine spark that transubstantiates brain into mind and spirit? To recover your birthright to the adventure of becoming an individual, throw the net of your inquiring mind as wide as possible.

I seem to be a traveler on a journey to an unknown destination. Some longing, some missing X, keeps me searching for a holy grail that is hidden just beyond the mist.

That we are mindful or spiritual animals means that we are animated by a quest for something more than bread and shelter. Our reach always exceeds our grasp. The great mono-myth of the hero with a thousand faces converts the process by which we become self-transcending into a dramatic narrative of quest and conquest in the external world. But the greatest travelers may never stray more than a few miles from home. Indeed, they may be confined to a wheelchair, as is Stephen Hawking, The road is not clay nor is the path through oaks or elms. The grail is no cup that once held wine or hemlock.

We need to translate the metaphors of quest, journey, and path into more exact language. The heroes and heroines are the men and women who ask new questions and open our minds and spirits to new possibilities.

In the beginning is the brain. And the brain is a biological phenomenon. It is organized to handle practical matters. It sees to it that we breathe when we are asleep, seek food when we are hungry, and avoid such obvious dangers as high places, loud noises, and large wild animals. But beyond programming us with basic instincts for survival and preparing us to learn primitive skills of hunting and gathering, most of the brain is unemployed. It remains asleep, awaiting the kiss of the imagination to bring it to life. It is an acorn, an oak-in-waiting, a raw potential that may be actualized in as many ways as there are unique persons. Its dance card is mostly empty. What it is to become is written neither in our genes nor our stars.

To change the metaphor, think of the brain as a vast forest that contains only a few organized enclaves with elaborate systems of connecting roadways along its outer edges (the reptilian brain and mid-brain). Imagine what we might see in an aerial photograph of medieval Germany: a few walled cities surrounded by uninhabited wilderness connected only by footpaths and primitive roads. The brain is an underdeveloped country that becomes mind when intricate neural pathways take shape, new roads are built into the interior, towns and cities emerge, and a communication system joins the newly inhabited realms of the cerebral cortex to the other kingdoms of the brain. The mind is a self-created network of crisscrossing roads leading to destinations more numerous than the stars.

What is the origin of the impulse that travels across the synapses linking neuron to neuron to form pathways where there were none? How does the kingdom of mind emerge from the uninhabited potentialities of the brain? By what magic did we escape from the prison of impulse and instinct and become freely pondering and deliberating animals? What causes fated biological entities to metamorphose into self-creating human minds? Michelangelo pictured the moment on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when God touched Adam and gave him life, but how are we to understand this in less literal and less mythological ways?

We are unfinished animals, biologically endowed at birth with a brain but destined to become self-conscious and self-creating. The informing principle of all of life, the cosmic DNA -- call it God, Nature, or the indwelling creative principle -- does a strange trick with humans. It implants an impulse that will carry us beyond its own programming. We are created to be self-transcending. What is unique about human beings is that at the heart of our DNA lies the necessity of freedom, the potential to become something that is not yet defined. We are driven to transcend old boundaries and limits, to surpass the biologically given conditions of our lives. Of necessity, we transcend "nature" -- the imposed reign of instinct and automatic responses -- and become creatures of mind or spirit. As missionary Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen says to Humphrey Bogart, "Nature is what we are put here to rise above."

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking. The question is the helmsman of consciousness. Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. The complex networks of neurons that make up a mind are as individual as our fingerprints. What makes me Sam Keen rather than Alan Greenspan are the questions that give shape to my life. I do not wake up, spend each day and end each day thinking about interest rates, the consumer price index, or the ratio between the dollar and the yen. The questions we ask determine whether we will be superficial or profound, accepters of the status quo or searchers. The difference between Einstein and Hitler depended on the questions they asked. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for.

Imagine the different type and quality of life you would have if the questions you asked when you got up each morning were the following: Where can I get my next fix of heroin? How do I serve God? What will the neighbors think? What happened during the big bang when the world was created? Who will love me? How do I get power? How can we destroy our enemy? How can we end violence? Where will I spend eternity? How can I make enough money? Who are my friends? How can I be comfortable? Is my cancer curable? How can I become famous? How do we heal the Earth? Where can I get food for my children?

Becoming a Questioner

To become a questioner is to enter the philosophical life and to make a commitment to search for wisdom rather than certainty. Philosophy is a wrestling match with angels in which we are always wounded, a struggle with questions that can never be answered with any finality.

The first stage in the process of becoming a lover of questions is to discover the unconscious answers -- myths, ideologies, values -- that have informed our lives thus far and, therefore, what questions we have been taught to ask and to ignore.

In the beginning are the answers. From the moment of birth onward, an infant is subjected to an elaborate system of cultural indoctrination. An encompassing symbolic world of rituals, celebrations, games, modes of worship, folktales, and myths teaches the unconscious child the implicit catechism, the socially sanctified answers to questions about the meaning of life. We are taught the accepted prejudices long before we learn the skills of discernment. As the song tells us, "We have to be taught, before we are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people our relatives hate."

The majority of people in any stable culture are more or less true believers in the consensus. They reach adulthood and ask: How will I make a living? Will I marry? Have a family? What is my duty? How can I be a good citizen of my community? Most adults find answers to their questions about the meaning of life and their ultimate destiny in the shared beliefs of the people around them. They live and die within the horizons of the myth, accept the answers, the institutions, the authorities, the ideology, the heroes and villains, the values, the worldview and politics of their parents and peers.

In the unexamined life that is the lot of the majority, the questions to which the cultural consensus are answers remain unconscious. The cultural catechism is implicit within the accepted mythic horizon of symbols, rituals, heroes, and villains. Compare, for instance, the catechism that is presented in a medieval cathedral and an NFL football game. Both are mythic systems that offer implicit answers to the questions: What is the chief end of man? What gives happiness? What are the heroic virtues? One celebrates Jesus as the model of masculinity and Mary as the essence of femininity, the other the winning quarterback for the San Francisco '49ers and a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader as the archetypes of man and woman. A stained-glass window with a portrait of a saint and the Trump Tower are both advertisements for the ideal life.

The difficulty with living submerged within the cultural myth is that it tends to limit the development of the mind and spirit.

When the mind wraps itself in a security blanket of answers, the brain closes down its quest, moves away from adventure and ceases to expand its system of pathways. Thought becomes received and recycled opinion and travels round and round the familiar highways -- repetition compulsion. Living within the closed circuitry of The Answer, within cultural orthodoxy, stunts the brain, sends the electric spark through the same old neural pathways. The result is a mind captive to tape loops, fixed ideas and complexes, Oedipal or otherwise. Unconscious beliefs bind us to a life of opinion, secondhand experience, and habitual ways of responding to problems and crises.

Fortunately, the human spirit is a cultural outlaw that is always smashing boundaries, violating the rules, breaking taboos, and stealing fire from the authorities. Something in us does not rest easy with easy answers. Something drives certain individuals beyond the inherited and imposed limits of their biology and culture. This restlessness has myriad names: the Logos, the image of God, the divine spark, "the exigence to transcend" (Marcel).

Whoever is touched by this divine daemon is destined to wrestle with an angel, in order to win a mind, a name, a spirit. To recover your birthright to the adventure of becoming an individual, throw the net of your inquiring mind as wide as possible. Here, for instance, are some of the great philosophical questions we must consider in order to situate our lives within the widest horizon.

Who am I? How do I become the unique self that is my destiny? How do I win my freedom from biological necessity and from the myth my culture has imposed my body, mind, and spirit? Where did I come from? What is the origin of life? My life? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is a cow?

What is the end -- the finis, the telos, the fulfillment -- toward which nature (and history) is moving? What is the goal of my life?

For what may I hope? Is there a postmortem existence? Of the soul? The body? What is my vocation? What are my gifts? How do I contribute to life?

Who are my people? With whom do I belong? Who is the we of I? Who are my enemies? How close should I be to mother, father, sister, brother, wife, friend, enemy? Who is in charge? Whom should I obey? Who are the authorities? What are the rules? What ought I to do? Why?

Why is there evil? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Is there ultimate justice? Punishment, reward? What should I do to reduce the quantity of evil?

What is the map of life? What are the stages along the way? How should I conduct myself as a child, a youth, an adult, an elder?

What is wrong with me? With human beings? Why this disease? Why are we self-defeating? What would we be like if we were whole? What can we do to be healed?

Are we alone in the universe? Does God play dice with the universe? Is there a supra-human caring intelligence?

Obviously, there are no authoritative answers to these enduring questions. So, why ask them? Why not stick to questions about matters of fact -- "shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings," profit and loss, and who will win the Super Bowl? We do not cultivate a questioning mind in order to receive answers but to save ourselves from a life of premature closure and cultural captivity. To love the great philosophical questions is to be reminded that the life we are given is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be explored, suffered, and enjoyed.

Sam Keen, whose Psychology Today conversations brought Joseph Campbell, Norman 0. Brown, and other seminal thinkers to national attention, holds two M.A.s in theology from Harvard and a Princeton Ph.D. in philosophy. His books include the best-seller Fire in the Belly, Hymns to an Unknown God, and his most recent, Learning to Fly: Trapeze -- Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go.

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