A very fundamental question that can be asked through deep observation into oneself—simple, direct, and open observation—is: what is your role toward yourself? Or you can also ask: what is your role in your living presence, in your life?
For most of us, the role is to control, to navigate, to choose. But by presenting that question to yourself, you are allowing a healthy doubt about whether that role arises naturally from the depth of your existence, or whether it is just the way you were brought up—by your education, by societal and cultural expectations or norms—altogether reflecting some dictation by inner and external forces.
You may say, "If not to be the driver of my life, the one that makes the choices, that navigates, that controls the inner movement, the choices, and so on—the outer manifestation of activity, and so on—what else can my role be in my life?"
First of all, you have to ask. Because anything that you will hear, or even be hinted at by someone else, is yet another potential imposition, which is not truly, naturally signaling you something true and deep and honest from within. So if you are asking, as I ask, you meet the fact that the question was given birth by not knowing, not by pre-registry in the mind. For if the answer invites the question—let's say it like that—then the question is just a false movement.
A genuine movement of such deep and fundamental inquiry is given birth by the ground of not knowing. So you question from that ground. And the tendency is to find an answer. But whose tendency is that? Isn't it the tendency of the very controller, driver, knower, which is being questioned?
So can this question be put, be presented, without an expectation for an answer—only as a field of observation? What is my true role in my life? What is the most natural, real movement of myself in my life? And the question that was given birth by the ground of not knowing is now presented. There is no answer on the horizon. There is no map that someone gives with coordinates, with destination, with potential arrival.
And then you can ground the question even further and add the word "now." As you are meeting that profound question from that ground, the question becomes: what is my role in my life now? Is it to choose how to proceed from this state of open, alert observation, awareness? Or is it to immerse in it so unconditionally, so unknowingly, that the question reveals the quality of freedom—inner freedom, which is the real quality of life?
Without end, without conclusion, without achievement that you can take with you—just a direct encounter with the profound nature of a foundational question that is truly, deeply, unconditionally asked.
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