On the Road to Mecca

"At one time I wanted to take a friend to meet my [teacher]. This friend was a very material man, restless and pessimistic and doubting and skeptical. And everyday I urged him to come with me and meet my [teacher]. 'But,' he asked, 'what can he do for me?' I said, 'You can ask him something.' He said, 'I have twenty thousand questions to ask, when could he answer them?' I said, 'You can ask one or two of the twenty thousand, that is already something.' 'Well,' he said, ' one day I will see. And indeed sometime later he came along, but the moment he reached my [teacher's] presence he forgot every single question and did not know what to ask. He was sitting spellbound and breathing the atmosphere of the master's presence; he had no desire to ask a question. And after the interview, when we were leaving the house of my [teacher], he again began to feel inclined to ask twenty thousand questions, this time of me, and when I asked him why he had forgotten them there, he only answered, 'I cannot understand why.'

Where do questions come from? Very often they come from the restlessness of the mind. And does any answer satisfy them? Never. During my travels I went thrice to San Francisco, and each time I saw a lady who always asked me the same question. Each time I answered her, and each time when I came again she asked me the same question. This meant for fifteen years there was a question and there was an answer; but that answer was never heard. One ear heard it and the other ear let it out again and the question remained there alive. A question is a living being, it does not wish to die; the answer kills it, and therefore those kindly souls that wish to cherish the question, keep the answer away, although the question calls out for an answer. Do not be surprised, therefore if for twenty years a person asks a question of two thousand other people and gets two thousand answers. It does not mean that the answer that he gets does not satisfy him; it only means that he does not wish to have the answer. He only wishes to cherish the question.

~ from "The Vision of the Mystic" by Hazrat Inayat Khan