Learning is the process of connecting that which you don’t know with that which you do know. How do I do that? With questions!
What questions?
I came with answers to these and other questions –
- How do I come to be? (conception – not done that before!)
- How do I stay alive? (not done the process of incubation before, either!)
- How do I grow? (not done that before, either – yet somehow, I knew how to do it)
- How do I emerge from the womb? (novel experience again!)
All these and more I LEARNED as I went along. Or did I?
The Plan
Within me is a plan. One I came with – we call it instinct. Embodied in every cell of my body is DNA accompanied by RNA, that together work as my basic understanding of life – passed on to me from my ancestors. Just like a great library of knowledge, my DNA acts as a repository of knowledge – answers. RNA acts as the librarian.
That means I have within me lots and lots of answers to most of today’s current questions. Seldom am I faced with, “What shall I do now?” Not to worry – my subconscious mind has this!
“Why Don’t You Just Ask?!”
Because I have so many answers, my tendency is toward NOT asking – instead, I tend to just accept that I know and understand. “Ye thought not to ask…” as one teacher in antiquity put it. I think not to ask because I ASSUME so well – at least I’m accustomed to assuming.
Most of the time, my assumptions are correct – often enough that I tend to ask less and assume more. I’m so accustomed to the way things have been and are, that I rarely question my perception of it. Why? Why not question everything?
Perhaps I don’t ask because I’m so unused to doing it. Perhaps I resist asking because I’m afraid I’ll ask the wrong question or get an answer I don’t like. Perhaps I resist asking because I’m basically too lazy to work at formulating a question. I got my reasons!!!
What if I DO, indeed know? Why then would I want to ask a question? Why do I sometimes feel that I don’t know and want to ask? Why would I Google anything I already know?
Ah, but am I AWARE that I know? And can I ACCESS that knowledge base?
So Google it!
Just like when I Google something – Google doesn’t know the answer, either. But it DOES know how to CONNECT me with information I’m looking for – sometimes erroneously, admittedly – yet it still connects questions with most probable answers.
That is the way my mind works – my conscious mind asks a question of my unconscious mind and gets a probable answer. I say probable, because just like when I ask Google, a lot depends on the question I ask and how I ask it.
Ask a useful question – get a useful answer!
THAT is the crucial learning – how to ask a useful question. Useful questions are those that return a useful answer. A “useful” question and answer connects conscious to unconscious mind in such a manner that I then generate a new question at a different level of understanding than where I was when I asked the previous question.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” (A. Einstein)
Perhaps the best questions connect levels of my being in such a way as to awaken me to who I really am. I figure it’s at least worth asking.
What do you think?
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