Questions? Or the Answer…
Einstein apparently said that he wasn’t smarter than anyone else, he just “stayed with the question longer”, which arguably could be what makes a person smarter. Matias de Stefano speaks of questions vs answers in a way that has felt true in me for most of my life - particularly with the approaches I witnessed as a child through religion and school and as an adult in the corporate world.
“An answer is the end of a path. And life is a path so how would you bring an answer? To end life or what? What we have come here to do…bring consciousness, but not to bring answers, it’s to bring questions, because the only thing that opens the mind is the question. Not the answer - the answer stops everything. The universe was made with questions. So you are here to bring consciousness on the questions, not the answer. I allow myself to be the question.” Matias de Stefano, Gaia TV The Journey of Remembering Series, Part 8.
In the corporate world there seemed to be great rewards for having answers and the quicker one was at speaking an answer, the more intelligent they were perceived to be and in many cases doors opened to those with that ability more easily.
What if there is a whole spectrum of possible answers to any given question, but if the first ‘answer’ that comes is accepted as ‘the’ answer, how do you then open your mind again? I often see this as our greatest challenge in society today, this pattern of accepting an answer, answers that are familiar, seem ’logical’; and we see the closed mindedness - where processes are put in place, rules are made to ‘get everyone on the same page’ and voila we are ‘boxed in’. Of course structure is key to go along with intuition - both are necessary and important, it just seems there is often less space given for intuition, for listening to what wants to emerge.
One of my favourite books and teachings during my years of corporate and small claims court conflict mediation was (and is) Theory U and the Presencing process by Otto Scharmer and others at MIT.
Can we take anything in our life - and sense into, perceive what questions might open our mind. Anything, and particular things that you feel really ‘certain’ about? Can we build more capacity to stay with the questions - keep exploring deeper into those questions that lead us into more potential?
How can we attend to opening our mind, our heart and our will to develop a greater capacity to be present to ourselves, others and what is wanting to emerge? “Leadership essentially is not what a person or an individual does, that's the biggest misunderstanding. The essence of leadership is the capacity of the system, in which everyone is participating, to sense and shape the future, and to be in touch with what is wanting to emerge, and then stepping into that.” U-School.org/theory-u