Great Questions



Great Questions: Writings of Judith Snow

"I have lived on the margins & fought hard to become a participating citizen.


I am a thinker & a dreamer.
I have a reputation as a visionary.
Let’s look at what fosters community capable of including people in all the diversity of their gifts & dreams."
http://www.inclusion.com/booksJudithSnow.html

Beautiful Questions

John O’Donnohue used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind and that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. The ability to ask beautiful questions, often, in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking, and before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before. (David Whyte)


Rilke - Living the Questions


In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke writes:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

In another letter from November of the following year, Rilke revisits the subject:

Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers — perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life. 

https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/living-the-questions/  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Future Beyond Capitalism? Socialism Explained.

Image
  A Future Beyond Capitalism? Socialism Explained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hactcmhVS1w 620,357 views Dec 11, 2020 54K 4.1K SHARE SAVE "Socialism is like the American Dream, only real." Socialism is the only way that "WE THE PEOPLE" can be "WE THE PEOPLE" because in capitalism, the first thing that happens is that the value of human beings is diminished to and measured by their profit value. In other words, the system deletes the value of people, just like feudalism did. Follow the money, follow the power, if you want to find what is valuable to any society. There is no conscience or compassion in the free market. By law, corporations must generate a profit for the shareholders (those that are already rich and powerful). The deeply embedded problem of capitalism is that it depends on the free market, which in turn depends on consumers to consume and generate more demand. There are 4 inherent, irrefutable, and inalienable issues with the continuing s
Read more

The Resurrection

Image
  If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One? Bart D. Ehrman Terry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview format radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the United States by National Public Radio (NPR). She interviews Bart on April 7th, 2014 and prepares the discussion to reflect on Bart's book "How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee." The discussion addresses topics such as the major difference between the first three gospels — Matthew, Mark and Luke — and the last gospel, John. On how Roman emperors were called "God." On the emergence of the Trinity. On the difference between history and the past and on the empty tomb and the resurrection, just to name a few. The Case Against the Resurrection (Bart D. Ehrman) Video ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How Jesus Became God On the dates January 29-31, 2016, Bart D. Ehrman gave three separate lectures to atten
Read more

Proprioception of Thought

Image
  THERE IS NO ACTIVISM THERE IS ONLY PROPRIOCEPTION OF THOUGHT By Matthew Capowski NOTE: In physiology the term proprioception refers to the capacity of the body to have self-awareness of its own movements.  David Bohm introduced the term “proprioception of thought” to refer to the possibility for thought to become aware of its own movements as well through direct perception. We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive. – David Bohm (Source: On Dialogue, 1996) And we think the crisis is outside of us; it is in us.  The crisis is in our consciousness. – Jiddu Krishnamurti (Source: Conversation between Jiddu Krishnamurti and Jonas Salk in Ojai, California, March 1983) Things can be different than how they are.  Conflict can be ended.  But not through the application of thought.  Every form of activism, and every theory, plan, group, or organization I delved into assumed that we could organize thought in such a w
Read more