Staying with the Questions

What is this temptation we have to quickly put an experience into a box and label it?

And why do we resist the experience being de-boxed, de-labeled?

Part of the answer is simple: labels create safety.

They reduce uncertainty.

They give the mind a place to stand.

Certainty is a powerful response to existential distress, trauma, and life itself.

If you could predict your deep emotional field around experience, you’d have won, wouldn’t you?

Certainty offers the promise of emotional immunity.

If I already know what this is, where it goes, and what it means, then nothing truly new can touch me.

The future becomes manageable.

The past becomes explainable.

The present becomes survivable.

This is not pathological.

It is an intelligent strategy running quietly in the background—especially in nervous systems shaped by unpredictability, rupture, or pain.

The problem begins when this strategy hardens into rigidity.

When labels stop being provisional and start being defended.

When meaning arrives too quickly—not because it’s true, but because uncertainty feels intolerable.

And it becomes more of an issue when those labels inevitably fail.

Threatened by another person.

By contradiction.

By grief.

By the blunt facts of life that refuse to cooperate.

Here is the difficult truth: life does not stay inside the boxes we build for it.

When we accept only parts of experience, life itself becomes fragmented.

And what happens to the parts that don’t fit—the grief, the confusion, the contradiction, the experiences that resist explanation?

They don’t disappear.

They wait.

They knock at the door—often through symptoms, conflict, disillusionment, or sudden breakdowns in the stories we’ve been living inside.

At this point, it’s easy to offer familiar advice:

Just accept everything as it is.

Feed your demons.

Confront your shadow.

But when someone is unconsciously wrapped in layers of interpretation and meaning just to maintain safety and coherence, “facing reality” isn’t an option.

This is where much spiritual language quietly fails.

It assumes access.

It assumes capacity.

It assumes that seeing is a choice.

For many people, interpretation is the life raft.

Meaning is the regulation.

Certainty is the thing keeping the system from flooding.

So the question becomes:

How do we relate to certainty without replacing one form of dogma with another?

How do we loosen illusion without tearing away the very structures that once made survival possible?

We must resist the urge to rip illusions apart.

Illusions are not enemies.

They are adaptations.

They arise where reality once overwhelmed capacity.

To strip them away too quickly is not liberation—it is careless.

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain,” wrote Carl Jung.

And often this is precisely why people avoid “truth,” whatever that word even means.

Not because they are ignorant or dishonest—

but because the nervous system cannot yet metabolise what seeing would demand.

Can you really blame someone for obscuring reality to avoid pain?

Life can be agonising.

People turn away in order to live.

What matters, then, is not the removal of certainty,

but the relationship we have with it.

“Truth is not curative by itself,” warned Wilfred Bion.

It is the way truth is approached, held, and integrated that determines whether it heals or harms.

 

Why this matters within psychedelic spaces

It matters because psychedelics—when someone is ready—can dissolve illusion faster and more completely than almost anything else we know.

Once something is seen, it cannot be unseen.

And when long-held assumptions begin to fall away, there is often a powerful, mythic fire that wants to burn everything to the ground.

I’ve been there.

Holding that fire hurts.

And it can feel intoxicating.

Psychedelics can reveal the assumptions we’ve been using to survive.

They can also temporarily bypass the very regulatory structures that made those assumptions necessary.

That is why these experiences deserve respect.

If certainty is the thing keeping the system from flooding,

do we really want the dam to come down all at once?

Psychedelics may expose illusion,

but they do not automatically teach us how to relate to what remains.

And without that relational work, dismantled dogma is often replaced by subtler forms:

“Everything is love.”

“The ego is the problem.”

“This is the answer.”

When examined closely, these are often the same certainty strategies wearing spiritual language.

So again, the question returns:

How do we stay with the questions without replacing dogma with a higher form of dogma?

 

What is truth?

Philosophers—with and without altered states—have been circling this question for thousands of years.

And my fellow psychedelic-informed friends:

do we really believe that after a few powerful experiences, we’ve finally arrived?

Truth is not a fixed set of assumptions to be reached and defended.

It is an organic unfurling—a process, a movement, a dance between what is revealed and what can be met.

The question, then, is not what truth is,

but whether we can give it enough space to move.

Whether we can allow it to reveal itself

without clutching at it as if our lives depend on it.

And perhaps this is the real tension.

In a way, our lives do depend on it—

or at least our psychological survival does.

Certainty regulates us.

Meaning stabilises us.

Assumptions keep the ground from falling away.

So how do we meet truth with both rigor and lightness?

With enough scrutiny to avoid self-deception,

and enough gentleness not to collapse the structures that allow us to function at all?

“What if truth were a woman?” Nietzsche asked—half-mocking, half-devastating.

What if it resists being seized, pinned down, or mastered?

What if it responds not to force, but to patience, presence, and restraint?

That is the work.

Not arriving at truth—

but learning how to stay in relationship with it.

 

Enter phenomenology

Edmund Husserl offers a surprisingly gentle move.

Not a revelation.

Not a dismantling of belief.

Just a pause.

He called it bracketing—placing our assumptions in parentheses.

Not denying them.

Not replacing them with something “truer.”

Simply holding them in suspension.

At first, this sounds impossible.

How can certainties be “held in obedience” without collapsing?

But phenomenology is not asking us to live without certainty.

It is asking whether we can relate to certainty without being ruled by it.

Bracketing does not remove meaning.

It delays its authority.

The belief remains.

The interpretation remains.

What changes is our posture.

Instead of:

This is what this experience means,

we say:

This is how this experience is appearing to me.

This distinction matters.

Because when certainty loosens—even slightly—something new becomes possible.

Not “truth.”

But contact.

Contact with what is actually happening,

before we rush to explain it, justify it, or protect ourselves from it.

This is not a heroic act.

It is a modest one.

And it respects capacity.

Phenomenology does not demand that we see through our illusions.

It only asks that we notice them as they operate.

In this way, it offers a middle path:

neither clinging to certainty,

nor violently dismantling it.

Just staying with the questions

long enough

for experience to speak in its own time.

 

Less judgement, more contact

When we suspend assumptions, conversation becomes possible.

When we bracket judgement, we can listen without needing to collapse or convert.

“People talking without speaking,

people hearing without listening,”

sings a song from the 1960s.

It sometimes feels as though we’ve lost the ability to hold opinions lightly—myself included.

Our culture fractures not only around what we believe,

but around how tightly we hold it.

And yet a question remains:

How can change occur if we have little conviction in what we believe?

This sounds true—and in some ways it is.

But Friedrich Nietzsche offered a sharp warning:

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

A conviction already knows what is true.

It has no room to breathe.

This is why conviction itself must be held carefully—

like something rigid and fragile.

What we need instead of more conviction

is more commitment.

Commitment to values.

To honesty.

To staying present.

Change does not happen when we cling to conclusions.

It happens when we remain attentive.

Life does not care about our verdicts, our binaries, or our certainty.

It responds to contact.

And frustratingly, this applies to every position.

You may be a traumatised person hiding behind a political opinion.

Or a spiritual warrior determined to shatter illusions.

Both assume they are correct.

Neither can be the whole truth.

Even the illusion-breaker must question their certainty about what should be broken.

Even the “awakened” do not see clearly.

 

An ending that stays open

What I am calling for is humility.

Not the humility of self-erasure,

but the humility of beginner’s mind.

A posture that says:

I may be wrong.

There is more here than I can see.

Let’s stay with this.

Enough of dogma.

There is no place for it in honest conversation.

And it is only within open conversation—

careful, grounded, and humane—

that anything resembling progress becomes possible.

Truth is not a fixed set of assumptions,

but an organic unfurling process.

A dance.

And staying with the questions 

is how the music continues to play.