Skip to content

What Do You Do With the Big Questions?

Three questions get bundled into one and they come apart cleanly: what you think is actually there, whether you do anything about it alone or with other people, and where you think the answer comes from. Somebody can hold that the world is only the physical one and still want a room full of people marking a day; somebody can believe in far more than that and want nobody else involved.

Thirty-six statements, about six minutes, and a point inside a cube. This asks how you relate to these questions, not whether you have the right answer to them — and it counts what you do about them even when what you do is nothing much.

36 questions

Answered 0 of 36

  1. 1 Something that has lasted a long time knows things I do not.
  2. 2 The most important things about being alive are not physical facts.
  3. 3 There are things people go through that the physical account leaves out.
  4. 4 A crowd is a distraction from the thing itself.
  5. 5 Doing this alongside somebody is what keeps me doing it at all.
  6. 6 Something done with other people counts for more than the same thing done alone.
  7. 7 What I have worked out for myself is worth more than what I was taught.
  8. 8 I would rather mark an important day quietly than in company.
  9. 9 The habit of gathering is worth keeping even when nothing much happens.
  10. 10 Nobody else's account settles this for me.
  11. 11 I have been through something I cannot fit into a physical account of the world.
  12. 12 There is more in what was handed to me than I will get to the bottom of.
  13. 13 The times something has meant most to me, I was on my own.
  14. 14 The words and practices people have kept for centuries were kept for reasons.
  15. 15 There is more going on than the physical world accounts for.
  16. 16 When what I think and what I was taught disagree, I take it as a sign to look again.
  17. 17 The universe has no intentions toward anybody.
  18. 18 Whatever I do about any of this, I do by myself.
  19. 19 An answer I did not arrive at myself is not really mine.
  20. 20 I put together what I think about this from more than one place.
  21. 21 Being handed an answer by people who came before is not a lesser way to have one.
  22. 22 The order in the world looks to me like it was meant.
  23. 23 I would rather stand inside something older than me than build my own.
  24. 24 The world is made of the things you could bump into, and nothing else.
  25. 25 When something feels like more than a coincidence, it is still a coincidence.
  26. 26 Some part of a person carries on after the body stops.
  27. 27 The version of this that is mine is the one I put together by myself.
  28. 28 An unexplained thing is a thing not yet explained.
  29. 29 A group has made room for me and I have not taken it up.
  30. 30 Being part of a group that meets regularly is something I want.
  31. 31 What I have been through myself is the evidence I trust most here.
  32. 32 Being aware is something a brain does, the way digesting is something a stomach does.
  33. 33 I hold a position here that the people who raised me do not hold.
  34. 34 Grief and celebration both go better with other people in the room.
  35. 35 Talk of another level of reality is a way of describing how people feel.
  36. 36 I want the people around me to be doing the same thing at the same time.