Letter #36: Your Answers Questioned
Yangtone Farmstay, Chiang Dao, Chiang Mai... a piece of heaven
Dear Friend
As mentioned in our last Letter, I want to talk about questions this week. To anybody who desires change, to better themselves, to build a better world, to improve their own health and the relationships they have with other people, asking questions is perhaps the great skill to practise.
How much practice in this skill did you personally get during your school days?
Beware wolves in sheep’s clothing…
‘What are these wolves in disguise?’, you may ask, and, ‘I can’t see any such wolves, where are they?’
Firstly these wolves are in your mind, specifically in your ‘long-term memory bank’ where you store everything you’ve ever known, heard about and experienced.
Secondly I am using these dangerous animals metaphorically to describe beliefs we hold about various aspects of life, but which we subconsciously hold as truths or facts about life. Such beliefs, or erroneous truths, are probably behind all the separation, division, hatred, conflict and all violence and coercion that is destroying our human family.
You see why we can call them wolves - they can be very dangerous if not deadly.
(A digression, but connected to our discussion…. When we realise through doing inner work that we are interconnected, not separate from each other, as is etched into our psyche, any motivation to hate others, be in conflict with them, harm them has now disappeared, because one realises if they harm others they are holding the energy of harm within their own body mind and spirit.
In short, if I hate you or belittle you, my interconnection with you means I am producing and holding the energy of hate or belittling, and am therefore belittling and hating myself; if I harm you I harm myself. So why harm you? Peace! No more conflict, hatred, insanity. The bit I put in bold reveals in my view one of the key secrets and understandings to living your life aligned with the web of life, and in harmony in one’s relationships.)
A belief we hold about something or somebody in life that we know is a belief is not dangerous because we can see it for what it is - the wolf is showing himself as a wolf and not pretending to be a sheep. We can see the wolf and make sure it won’t cause a problem.
But the thing about most, if not all, beliefs is that they are held and understood by their owner as truths and facts.
And remember, that is the cause of conflict and division and hatred. ‘Trust the science’ was a common refrain during the mad events from 2020 onwards, but of course this just betrayed people for holding a belief that we don’t have to think about it because science is always correct and always tells the truth!
So if we adjust our beliefs, or even better get rid of them, then this is a direct way of removing violence, coercion and separation from one’s life.
An obvious example in today’s times is that ‘Donald Trump is a Hitler’ and ‘Donald Trump is our saviour’. Both holders of such a belief hold them as cast iron facts about Donald Trump. And they’ve never met the man! They are, of course, opinions, or personal understandings.
In fact, nearly everything to do with politics is all about beliefs masquerading in one’s mind as truths and facts.
Another example is that ‘Australia is the best country in the world’. But we will also hear ‘America is the greatest country in the world’, or ‘Thailand is the greatest country in the world’. They can’t all be factually correct! In fact, none of them are. Yet all hold these beliefs of theirs as self-evident truths. It’s their truth, but not the truth.
It’s not the belief that causes any potential problem, but the insistence by its owner that this or that is true for all, when often it’s not true for anybody.
Thirdly, and this is key, you won’t see the deceitful and dangerous wolves unless you actively and consciously choose to look for them. Once you do start looking, though, well blimey, they’re all over the shop! It can be quite a revelation, it certainly was to me. It will take you well over a year to uncover so many beliefs pretending to be truths, the work never ends!
So, what beliefs masquerading as existential truths and facts do you have in your mind and long-term memory bank?! This is the basis for today’s Letter.
Ask questions and question answers
If you want to learn, if you want to understand our world, if you want to understand yourself and to evolve during your journey of life, then the only way to do this is to ask questions about everything.
But bear in mind most people are not very comfortable with questions, and there’s a good reason for that: our so-called ‘learning’ experience during our years of schooling frowned upon or simply blocked you from asking questions.
They had knowledge for you to learn, and you were to passively accept it and learn it by rote to pass the tests and exams they used to compel you to ‘learn’.
Understanding it was not on the agenda. Knowing whether it was true or not was not on the agenda. Questioning it you were not to!
But unless you understand your world, you will be dependent on others when anything deviates from your usual routines or patterns. And we live in turbulent times of non-stop change. Yet our schooling disempowered us in a really rather nasty way because they never allowed us to develop the very skills we need to navigate and embrace change. Instead we resist it, fear it. So when big change comes we are not skilled to handle it, and many suffer. In this way tyranny can set in, if people are unwilling or unable to change their way of life. However, the forces of change will then visit them from elsewhere, often the Government, with no choice.
We empower ourselves by developing the skills of learning and communicating. That means asking lots of questions.
I argue, always, that learning is the Mother of all Skills, yet nobody ever taught us it. Our schools do not teach learning. You will have read in my Letters before that real learning has four separately indentifiable stages to it: input >> intake >> output >> reflection. The schools only focus on input and your education stops there.
But learning takes place and understanding deepens as we work through the intake, output and reflection stages.
The Mother’s very first and most important sibling is the communication skill. The communication skill is having the ability to listen and speak (or write and read). Not hear and mumble some kind of cliche or third-hand ‘knowledge’, but to really listen and to really express ourselves.
Listen attentively with respect, and listen interactively. When we listen like this we will want to ask questions.
Express yourself and your views with integrity, ready to be wrong, always ready to learn more and understand better. Invite questions from others, question yourself. But if you never speak or express yourself, you can’t even hear yourself to ask any questions.
Asking questions comes from the curious mind. School systems crush our innate curiosity. We have to relearn and reactivate this natural human trait of ours.
I think there’s a good argument to say that curiosity is the finest trait we can hold within ourselves if we want to live a good life. It leads to learning and loving learning, and making the activity of learning a regular feature of your life leads to wisdom and self-leadership and true sovereignty of self.
Learning is the Mother of all Skills, and learning comes to the curious mind and open heart.
Asking questions is foundational to true learning - learning about yourself, your mind, how your body works, how the web of life works, and what our connection is to this whole web of life.
How am I feeling right now? Why am I feeling like this?
That person disagrees with me - are they wrong, or am I wrong? Are we both right, but coming to the discussion from a different perspective?
Who am I? What am I?
What is my purpose? What is the meaning of my life? Why am I here?
What does freedom mean? Spirituality? Love? Soul? Cognitive dissonance?
What is my view on X? Where did I get that view from? Is it actually my own view that I formed from my own understanding?
Why is the government saying that? Are they telling the truth? Do they always lie, or just most of the time?
And when you ask questions, but don’t have answers, then what?
Research. Action research. The latter is researching your own life and the experiences that you have, talking anecdotally with others; while research is reading or listening to others in books or media.
The first question in the above list is a great question to regularly ask yourself whenever you remember to do so. It also means you will be listening to yourself as you find out what your answers are. And soon you may wonder how it is you can observe your own feelings…
We subconsciously and automatically flee from painful feelings, numb them, pretend they don’t exist and so on, and this is why such feelings keep on returning. When we start to ask ourselves where our feelings come from, what triggers them, then we really do begin learning more about ourselves and increasing our self-awareness.
Asking questions of ourselves and the world around us—in media or our own place of living—helps us see how our karmic energy is playing out, and when to fix something, and how to do it.
Your answers questioned
Then once we start getting used to easily asking questions, we can then challenge our own answers. This is an integral part of the uncovering of beliefs we have been holding as truths and facts.
What I found is that once you start questioning yourself, you automatically start questioning what others say is true, especially those who claim power over you.
For many the world turns on its head! It turns 180 degrees, like Orwell’s party line that declared ‘War is Peace’.
Task
The first question above was this: How am I feeling right now? Why am I feeling like this?
Take some time out to ask yourself this now, and write down or type your answer. Then read what you wrote down and question it, see if you want to change it in any way.
One of my favourite books is called Your Answers Questioned by Osho. Here is what the inside sleeve says:
“Are you sure you know all the answers to life’s important questions? The book you hold in your hands will ask you to take a good look (and maybe a new look) at the way you see the world. It will introduce you to ideas we might not think about every day (but maybe we should). What happens when the majority is wrong? Where do your ideals and convictions come from—are they yours alone or did someone give them to you? What purpose does anger serve? Is there a difference between loneliness and aloneness? Where do love and lust meet? Can you love someone and love yourself too? What is jealousy? How can one truly forgive?”
In randomly opening up a page, I find his answer to the question asking what the difference between loneliness and aloneness is:
Loneliness is where you are missing the other.
Aloneness is when you are finding yourself.
I find myself agreeing (because I asked myself if I did!)... I spent thousands of hours of doing hammock time, something I’ve mentioned to you before, back in the 1990s in my first decade living in Thailand, and this was what I call ‘doing alone-time’. That was indeed me finding myself, and learning tonnes about me, my mind, your mind, the human mind, and the whole human world and human condition. The basis for all that reflection time was, of course, mulling over so many questions in my own mind.
Not least was, ‘How come human beings can be so beautiful yet so brutal too? How is this so?
Get asking, get questioning, get reflecting, get contemplating, get mulling upon, get learning!
I’ll leave you with three of the most important questions to ask yourself.
Who am I?
What is my passion?
What is my purpose?
Then, when you have begun answering them, your next step is to ask yourself some new questions that will help you be who you are, help you act upon your passion, and refine your purpose.
I would love to hear your answers to these three questions - email me!
All the best
Philip
