The Sphinx and the Unanswered Question

Some questions are not for solving. The sphinx never tells the practitioner the answer. A patient case for learning to carry the question instead.

The Greek sphinx asked Oedipus a riddle and ate the travelers who could not answer. The Egyptian sphinx is older and stranger. The Egyptian sphinx does not ask a riddle. It sits at the edge of the desert, in the silence, watching the night sky. It is the largest carved figure in the ancient world. It does not speak. It has been not-speaking for approximately forty-five hundred years.

The working tradition pays more attention to the Egyptian version. The Egyptian sphinx is the figure for the practitioner's hardest questions: the ones that do not have answers, that the practitioner is being asked to carry rather than solve.

Three kinds of questions

Most questions can be answered. What time is it. Is the soup ready. Should I take the highway or the surface streets. These are not sphinx questions.

Some questions can be solved through research or thought. Should I take this job. Is this person a good partner. What do I want to be doing in five years. These take work. The work has an end. The end is an answer.

And some questions are not for solving. They are for carrying. Why did my mother do what she did. What does it mean that I survived something my brother did not. Is there meaning. Will I be remembered. What am I for. These are sphinx questions. The practitioner who tries to solve them with the same energy that solves the first two kinds of questions exhausts themselves and the question. The question deserves a different posture.

The small practice

The practitioner who has been carrying a sphinx question for a while can put it on a small piece of paper, fold it, and place it in a small box dedicated to this purpose. The box does not contain answers. The box contains the questions the practitioner is currently carrying without resolution.

Once a year — on the practitioner's birthday is traditional, but any consistent date works — open the box. Read each question. Notice which questions still feel pressing and which have, somehow, dissolved. The dissolved questions can be removed from the box and burned. The pressing questions stay. New questions can be added.

Over five years, the practitioner has a small physical record of the questions they have been carrying. Many of these will have dissolved without the practitioner having solved them. This is how sphinx questions actually work. They do not get answered. They get outgrown. The practitioner becomes a different person while carrying the question, and the new version of the practitioner no longer needs the question to be answered because the practitioner is now a person who can live with the not-knowing.

This is the entire teaching. The sphinx has been demonstrating it for forty-five hundred years. The patient practitioner can borrow it for the duration of a lifetime, plainly, in a small box.