The importance of asking the right questions and looking at everything with fresh eyes.

The importance of asking the right questions and looking at everything with fresh eyes.
In some of my conferences I tell the participants that a good way to live your life is to have the discipline to save 10 percent of what you earn, give away another 10 to charity and invest 10 percent in education, either buying books, tapes, DVD’s, or attending conferences. Doing this, will keep you in a constant learning mode and will allow you to continue asking questions until your last breath. When you stop learning or when you stop growing, you start to die.
By the way, there are not many instances when I can invite all of you my dear readers to one of my conferences free of charge. I will be at the teatro Inter Metro of Interamericana University on Saturday February 5th from 9.30 to 11.30. You can register at intermetro@exalumnos.edu.
I promise you that you will get a lot out of the conference and it will make a positive change in your life.
Getting back to the subject of asking questions and looking at what is around us with different eyes, we can do a very interesting exercise.
Take a close look at your right hand. Pay close attention to the lines, shapes and patterns in your skin. Notice how your veins are arranged. Look at how your fingernails meet your fingers. Compare each fingerprint in your fingers with each other. When
Ok, when you have examined your hand carefully, figure out what you don’t know about it. Ask yourself five good questions about your hand.
What don’t you know about your hand?
For sure that there are hundreds of details that you don’t know. You can wonder how much your hand weighs, or why is it that you have lines in your palms. Do they really carry esoteric meanings like so many hand readers claim?
You could have taken another approach in analyzing your hand. You could have thought about the mechanics of your hand. How many bones does it contain? You could have looked at the function of your fingernails. How long do they grow in a year? How fast do they grow? When do they stop growing if indeed they do?
Or you could have thought about hand function. Why is it that only 10% of the people favor their left hand over their right one?
Besides the tangible ideas about your hands, you could have leaned toward philosophical questions. If an open hand means “congenial” and a closed fist stands for aggressiveness, what does a hand that is half open or closed mean?
You could have let your imagination consider imaginary notions. What if hands were twice as large as they are now? How would that affect the world we live in, typewriters or even fashion?
Or, could you have thought about the evolution of the hand? Why did humans end up with five fingers? Why not six, seven, or four?
The point I am trying to make here is illustrate how questions can also stimulate a sense of wonder, a sense of curiosity, a sense of prodigy over the universe. When you take a look at the objects around you, you are just one thought away from admiration. You are also closer to being an innovator, inventing things or solving problems.
There is a famous Zen story I read in a book by Roger von Oech years ago about the role of knowing, learning and wonder. A Zen student enters the enlightened master’s home for the first time. The master serves tea, a tradition before discussing ideas. He fills the student’s cup to the brim, and then deliberately keeps pouring. The bewildered student says” “The cup is full. It will hold no more”. The master stops, looks at the student, and says, “Like the cup, you are full of your ideas. How can you learn until you empty your cup?”
In our society, it is common to think of ignorance as a sign of weakness, imbecility or ineptitude and that is very unfortunate. Although it is normal to try to appear knowledgeable, the appearance of being knowledgeable can affect negatively our capacity to learn.
The Zen tradition calls this state of mind, the expert mind. The expert mind is the frame of mind we have when we feel we already know something. We hold on to ideas, ideas that we may have studied for years, ideas for which we earned a post graduate degree, and thus close our mind to learning.
If you are in a management position and you know it all, soon your subordinates will stop giving you ideas or will not want to help you solve problems that need to be solved.
Ah, but on the other hand, with beginners mind, we have an empty mind, a mind which is open to fascination. While the expert mind lives in the past and the future, the beginner’s mind lives in the NOW. Someone with an expert mind might not notice a landscape which she drives past every day while going to school, thinking she knows it very well. But a person with beginner’s mind pays attention to every little detail.
How do musicians give crisp performances after a year on the road? They know very well that each performance is the first for a new audience and should be as fresh for the performer as it is for the audience.
Albert Einstein, in one of his many famous quotes once said, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.