Who, what, where, when, and why are five basic investigative questions. Learn why they are important for spiritual exploration and the development of your spiritual walk. Every spiritual explorer needs become familiar with them, and search for the answers to these are questions to free your mind. Come and join us.
What we’re referring to is what many call truth seeker’s perspective. Some of the answers to these questions change with time, while others are timeless.
The Most Important Questions
No doubt about it. A big part of life is about lessons. Life seems like one great spiritual experiment. We’re all playing the same game, but with different rules. We must conclude we all have unique missions in this experiment. Many of these essential questions come early in life when we are children discovering the world. We ask what am I? What are we? Why are we here? Unfortunately, our parents don’t have the answers.
“Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend time wondering why nature is the way it is . . .” — Carl Sagan
So, people look to organized religion, and there they find the simple answers. Most of these answers are based on mythology, which makes no sense. So, religion teaches us to ignore these kinds of questions.
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” ― Charles Bukowski
Because we each have a unique mission, you can’t copy someone else’s life and expect to find answers that make you happy. Some fundamental answers about life are yours alone. It’s complicated. However, that doesn’t mean we should stop seeking answers, we just need to learn how and where to look.
“Who, what, where, when, and why. These are our most important questions. Through the right Meditation, we discover who we are. What are we? This is the legacy of our life experience and memory. Where and when both depend on the vantage point of our awareness and consciousness. The question, why are we here, propels our journey of exploration.” ― Guru Tua
The mission of our life is something obscure. Some people have do not have very long or happy lives. Others live a long time. So the length of life doesn’t correspond to our mission. Some people have an abundance of resources and good health. Others have no resources and poor health. It leads one to conclude if we had some control over where, when, and how we came into the world, we must all be on different life missions. Either that or life is unfair and arbitrary. We don’t know the answer; they drive our curiosity about life.
Part of living life is getting comfortable with the unknowns. That doesn’t stop us from seeking answers.
“Essentially, what the most important questions we can ever ask ourselves are, Who am I? Who are we all? What do we share, and what is our purpose here? How do we discover meaning? Addressing these questions is the core of Inspirational Psychology.” — Lee L Yampolsky
Inspirational psychology is the same as positive psychology. It’s a practice that focuses on optimistic rather than realistic or pessimistic thinking.
1) Positive experiences that give us joy and happiness.
2) Higher values from the virtues of the spirit love, compassion, and gratitude.
3) It also promotes the use of positive organizations that support positivity.
Questions to Free Your Mind
“We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.” — Alfred North Whitehead
Who am I? It is one of the first big questions we ask ourselves, and it usually coincides with the emergence of our existential fear of death. It’s the common ground we share with everyone when you think about it. These questions spark our spiritual journey, and this mystery is at the heart of our inner quest.
“Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answers.” — Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Many great philosophers agonized over these questions. Still, it remains unanswered. It seems we won’t know the answer, at least in this lifetime. Instead of living in a state of frustration, learn to accept everything as another mystery of life. The most important questions about who and what we are is one of life’s greatest mysteries.
“If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.” — Marcus Aurelius
The best way to come to terms with this question is to learn how to meditate properly. Learn how to connect with the silence of the transcendent. It’s not an answer to an unanswerable question. However, it’s a process to find comfort in the silence of not knowing the answer.
What Are We?
Technically, what makes up 99% of the human body’s mass is just six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Only about 0.85% comes from five elements: potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium.
The physical elements don’t tell us about the consciousness behind the scenes. There’s much more to us than several elements. There is much about our lives that cannot quantify easily. So what are we? We have awareness and consciousness. We possess an Ego that has definable characteristics of personality and instinct. In the end, all these tools fall short of describing what is looking out through our eyes.
We are also products of our DNA. Our line of ancestors is part of what we are. Our lives boil down to a collection of memories. So, what exactly are we doing here? The judgments of our culture distort our values and individual mission.
The culture tells us what we are in terms of our monetary worth; it compares and categorizes us according to an arbitrary and unfair sliding scale. When we awaken to these realizations, we can accept ourselves as we are. It’s welcoming and making peace with all of our flaws. It’s learning to love ourselves because of them.
Where and When Are We?
When and where we are is a matter of perspective, we can measure time and place in a three-dimensional space. However, these measures depend on arbitrary human-made intervals. There’s nothing less absolute than time and nothing more pliable than space. We are back to the awareness that devised the measurements and the consciousness that makes consciousness possible—the questions of where and when having a curious circular relationship.
The willingness to reexamine lifelong beliefs because of conflicting data takes enormous courage, and contrasts sharply with recent examples of public discourse in which our political, cultural, and religious leaders have fit data to preconceived theories.” — Donal O’Shea
Why Are We Here?
Unfortunately, many people turn to religion for easy answers to this question. Religion doesn’t answer the big questions about the meaning of life. They want to make you a lifelong paying customer. So, they provide stories and answers based on mythological superstition. Western theology sidesteps the underlying philosophical questions.
Don’t fall for this ploy. Instead of accepting what religion tells you, start asking more questions. Take responsibility for your spiritual quest. Start asking who, what, where, why and when.
Yes, it comes back to the most important questions. Why am I here, which leads us back to the question of who we are? This kind of circular thinking can be frustrating. We need to find are questions to free your mind, not confuse it.
Osho says that we cannot find truth outside of ourselves. No teacher, holy book can provide it. You must seek the answers within yourself.
“Why are we here? To remember, and re-create, Who You Are. You use life to create your Self as Who You Are, and Who You’ve Always Wanted to Be.” ― Neale Donald Walsch. (1)
Our culture tells us our value is in what we can produce for the economy. So, we become humans doing, instead of human beings, and our value is only in the monetary value we provide. Some people get stuck in the quest for commercialism, always chasing the dollar. Chasing dollars doesn’t make sense in the long run.
One of my teachers, Guru Tua, told me, the answer is in the question, just read it backwards out loud. The answer is, here we are. He would laugh and say, see how easy it is.
So, I asked him, what about the question, what are we? If you say that backwards, you get we are what. Ah, he would say, you just need to keep going, we are what… ever… what comes next? Then, he would start laughing again and say, don’t you get it?
So he went on and said try it with, why are we here. Again, I said, it’s not making any sense. When you read it backwards, you get here we are why. He would just laugh and say you’ve just got to keep going with it. The answer is there, just beyond your analytical thinking. Get your mind out of the way and allow your intuition to provide that gut feeling that you grasp the answer.
In Conclusion — The Big Questions
The most critical questions are about the meaning of life, they are the ones that spark our curiosity to seek the answers. Who cares what happens when you die if you only existed and never lived in the first place?
The Shaman teaches us to see through our hearts. The shamanic journey is just one of the ancient spiritual technologies we use for spiritual exploration. We highly recommend learning as many of these tools as possible. Use them to form your spiritual practice.
More often than not, the best answers lead to deeper questions. Once you reach the eureka moment where you finally grasp something, another door opens, another question arises and we are again searching for answers.
“There are no simple answers in life. There is good and bad in everyone and everything. No decision is made without consequence. No road is taken that doesn’t lead to another. What’s important is that those roads always be kept open, for there’s no telling what wonder they might lead to.” — D. J. MacHale
We hope this provides food for thought, questions to free your mind. If you have feedback or questions, please send us a message via the contact us link.
References
(1) Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversations_with_God