by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
published in The Stream, January 2007
<< The Stream Index
First, an excerpt from the letter that triggered my reply below, which, in the process of my making it, triggered further thoughts in line with the Principle of Description…
“Since I´ve started image-streaming, I find that my brain automatically answers when I do the right questions… but these questions seem to be liberated naturally too…it´s almost an instantaneous process of question/answer.”
[My reply:]
You are quite welcome. I guess one question is how to persuade many more people to try Image-Streaming and practice it enough to get to that point of instantaneous flow.
One of the most useful questions to ask is, “What IS the best question to ask in this context, and its best answer?”
Asking (writing) that latter question just now, my thoughts flashed to two points:
- What we’ve been observing recently is that various of us, between us, have a sufficiency of effective methods for generating ingenious answers and solutions; but the real challenge is noticing and recognizing questions to ask and then asking them (so those answer- finding methods can come into play).
- One of those pocket timer-buzzers, which you can set as a reminder for anything. The thought behind that: there are probably most-relevant questions for every situation and/or opportunity to learn something significant. What if, every hour and twenty-two minutes or whatever interval, one were reminded by pocket-buzzer to ask, “In this context right now, what IS the best question for me to be asking, and its best answer or understanding to appreciate?” Or, “What is the best thing I can learn from this situation, right at this moment?”
I have the sense that this will take some resolve and no little energy to pursue, but it might be part of the next significant development for us. It at least begins to address what I had come to consider to be the next critical issue for us….
Isn’t the Principle of Description a hoot?!? So long as I continue to follow some of my own advice, that one continues to help me…..
Do you have one of those pocket timer gizmos around to experiment with? I think I can round up one around here for my own experimentation…..
Many thanks for writing. Replying gave me the opportunity, as that reply process has so often, or perhaps even the excuse, to start generating what may be the next revolution in our program. With great appreciation, …..Win
Hey, people: Most of you have heard me state my conviction that we’ve moved beyond the challenge of methods to ingeniously answer questions and problems, to the challenge of noticing and the discipline of asking questions worth asking.
- Do you have one of those pocket buzzer gizmos around to experiment with?
- Would you experiment with it for a few days, as I suggested to my correspondent above, OR:
- Can you suggest a better experiment or application than that toward the same objective, or toward the same potential next step in our operational evolution?
Further consideration: Unless you’ve done much Toolbuildering, there is always the temptation to regard our present methods as a finished system, needing only effective commercial application to become a fixed package for use wherever. If you’ve done much Toolbuildering or thought about this issue much, however, you can begin to appreciate that all we’ve done thus far in the Project Renaissance context is less than a drop in the bucket of where we need to be heading. We literally have not yet scratched the surface. I know you’ve heard me say this, I’ve heard most of you acknowledge it’s having been said, but I don’t know that it’s really sunk in. We have made but the very barest of bare beginnings on the long and mostly unmapped path of where we have got to go.
What if (we really did have an effective way that) we really did notice, pose and process each of the questions most worth asking as they arose, now that we have all these various ways of finding their answers? If this is our next major step in our evolution, it may well be worth more than all the (tapped and untapped) value of our problem-solving methods and work to date. Do you have, can you get, one of those pocket buzzer timers, or, still better, come up with a better experiment which opens this next-step frontier for us? (Can your image-streaming faculties come up with a better such experiment?)
I will be playing with these effects also, but it would be best if the first published results on this came from someone other than myself.