They didn't know what it was, so they called it manna. Manna, "man" from "man," meaning "what." For forty years, the Jews survived in the desert on a food called "what." They lived on a question, went out every day to find answers, but only came back with more questions in their baskets. For forty years, they were forced to take reality as it was, what it was. They partook of the existence they were in without defining it. By not defining it, fixing it with a closed name, the same manna day-after-day was never the same. As the Midrash wrote, it tasted as whatever they wanted, and so by not containing their experience, they could fully enter it according to their states of being. Reality then becomes a reflection of what we put out into it, but only after we have stripped away our preconceptions and accepted it as it is. To contact what is what, what is most real, we must first say, "I don't know what is what." I must live with the question, which first frees reality to present itself, and then frees me to contribute to it in an unprejudiced way. As I was once taught by a Zen master, the point is to develop the "don't-know mind." I don't know what I am, what you are, what the world is. Now, maybe, we can really be ourselves.
Meditation: Sit up straight in your seat and breathe deeply and freely. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in your mind. Feel a sense of who you are. Say your name to yourself. Now ask yourself if you would still be you if you lost a finger. Continue this process: remove an arm. Was the arm "you?" If you are still "you," remove the other arm. How about a leg - was the leg "you?" Go on to the other leg. You are limbless. Are you still you? Cut off your hair, lose your sight, voice, hearing, taste, touch… were they you? One day you will die, and this whole body will be gone. Is it "you?" Where did "you" go? Look at your thoughts; one comes in, another replaces it. Which one was "you?" How do you feel at this moment, and remember how you felt yesterday or last week. Was that really "you?" Contemplate any part of yourself, past or present - where are "you" in all of this? What are you? Do you disappear? Keep breathing. Breathe into the question, removing from yourself any definition you have about yourself. Turn the question outward to see how everything and everyone becomes undefined. Let yourself un-know everything. Come back to yourself and the world as a place of unlimited possibility, of liberating question.