The "what" question.....

In Ezra Bayda's book, the Zen Heart, I have found some very interesting thoughts about the "what" question. He describes three habitual grooves where most of us get caught spinning in the mental world: analyzing, blaming and fixing. "These conditioned patterns are detours from being the present to reality and taking any one of them guarantees that we will perpetuate the story line of "me".
In his discourse on analyzing, he explains "that through analysis, we can uncover why we think the way we do, why others are doing what they are doing, or why something happened the way it did. We think that this mental understanding is necessary for our comfort. But, most of the time, does asking why on this level give us much real clarity or satisfaction? Don't we usually end up just spinning in circles? Granted, when we uncover our believed thoughts.....those repeated thoughts that we have the habit of taking as reality.....we can sometimes see how these thoughts impact our emotional reactions, but most of the time, the reasons we come up with are, at best, only marginally accurate.
From a practice perspective, the real question is not why but what.....what is my life right now? Or even better, "what is it?" This question moves us out of the mental world into the experiential world. "What is it?" serves as the perfect koan because, like a koan, there is no way you can answer it by thinking or analyzing. In doing so it allows us to experience the spaciousness of the nonconceptual. In fact, the only answer to this question is the actual experiencing of the present moment itself. The only answer is "just this". Right now, ask yourself, What is this?" To answer, simply feel the breath going in and out. Feel the air in the room. Feel the tension in your face. Feel the energy going through your body. Experience a felt sense of the overall body posture. Experience "just this"....the simple quality or texture of the moment. Naturally, when difficulties arise in life, we look for answers, because we prefer the comfort of black and white thinking. We continue to hold on to the notion that we can figure life out; yet, the fact is, we'll never figure life out by asking why. Most often, we just don't know."
The second equally fruitless detour is blaming. Ezra's passage explains the this sometimes very subtle way of escaping groundlessness is very compelling and is much like an addiction. He says that if we look closely, we will see that blaming is primarily a defense against feeling the anxious quiver of our experience. "The practice countermeasure to blame is to directly face the pain we are trying to avoid. this is not mental process" it involves feeling the pain, residing in it, as the physical reality of our life. I'm talking about doing something very straight forward, yet very difficult, which is to cut through the story line of blame and instead stay in the present moment of our experience. We simply do not want to do that. To enter the present moment of hurt, ask yourself what that hurt actually feels like physically. Remember, the word "hurt" is just a concept. Again we are back to the question "what is this?"
The final detour from reality in Ezra's book is fixing. "All of us need to become aware of our strategy of escape, our own specific patterns of trying to "fix" our experiences. The quality of perseverance is of key importance, because we have to learn to just stay, even when our experience is not pleasing us in the ordinary sense. Put simply, the solution is never about fixing, but rather about staying....especially staying with the fear of helplessness and the loss of control."

As I am loving the "what" question in my life and am seeing the great potential in this koan, I will be writing more on this subject. I hope that you will enjoy this fresh approach to the present moment.