A professor in Harvard in his lectures on positive psychology once said that every quest starts with a question and we should be very careful of what we ask because questions create reality.
If you want to go to the cinema, you will ask what time does the film start, if you want to go to a restaurant you will ask what kind of food they serve, if you want to travel abroad you will ask which is the best hotel to stay at. That sounds pretty obvious but in other issues, more personal, such as marriage for instance, we tend to ask different questions congruent to what we are looking for. “Why do I want to get married?” “What do I feel for him” “How can I be happy?’ “How can I make him/ her happy? “Do I believe in healthy relationships?” “Is commitment and sexual monogamy feasible?” “Am I in love?” “What does being in love mean to me?” All the answers vary according to the motivation that lies underneath the question. I know it is demanding to live a life of constant self-examination, but I see no other way to change our life and grow.
Mature mental health often demands to balance conflicting needs, duties and desires and that is why questions are helpful. They make us aware of what we are looking for, the reason we do something and in a deeper level, the purpose which brings meaning to every action. Are we in search of our own personal benefit or of serving someone else? Which is the main purpose under our action? Purpose is the reason for which something is done or exists, while reason is a cause, an explanation for an action.
Asking the right questions makes us think about the way we lead our lives and is crucial for our well being. Asking the right questions is a motivation that resembles a bit the direction we decide to take when we wake up in the morning, when we travel : where are we heading to? North, South, West, East?
Questions create focus and focus creates reality.
Each question directs us to a certain part of reality. It makes us focus on something and we need to know the consequences of the ability to focus. Carl Rogers explains that we live in a huge world that is changing continually and in which we are the centre. This is called the phenomenal field and it includes everything that is experienced by the organism whether these experiences are perceived consciously or not. That is actually his first proposition in his Theory of Personality and Behavior. (we will refer gradually to the remaining 18).
A large portion of this world of experience is available to consciousness, for example, the smell in the kitchen from mum’s food, because it is associated with my hunger but another big portion is not perceived or experienced because my focus is not on it, for example, my breathing. If I meditate on my breath I will choose to bring from this vast phenomenal field the experience of breathing to my perception by the simple act of focusing on it. That is what we mean by focus creates reality and the way we perceive this reality forms our reality. It is my choice to focus on whatever experience I want to bring to consciousness, what I need to symbolize, what I need to see or what I choose to slip back into the ground or prevent from perceiving.
WHERE DO I PLACE MY ATTENTION?
I believe you are reading these articles because you want to feel better, happier. “Do you believe in change?” is a yes or no answer but “How is change possible?” is a more difficult one. The first answer will be “yes”, the second is “through practice”, the next question will probably be “who says so?” and the answer is “neuroscience because our brain changes its shape when we practice a lot ” and the dialogue goes on about what do we need to change, which are the healthy and unhealthy channels, “ is the world to my mind a heaven or hell?.” Do we usually place our attention on fear, anger, threat, jealousy, shame or wellbeing, growth, self – esteem, confidence?” “ Is it on our virtues or our drawbacks?” “Is it on what works or on what doesn’t work?” and last but not least “Why do I do that?”.
WANT MORE ON WHAT WORKS.
When you ask yourselves “why are there so many divorces nowadays” you begin a quest on what is wrong, on what doesn’t work. When you ask how some couples remain happy and loving during 30 years of marriage, your focus changes and sheds light on what is working in successful marriages. When your motivation is to find out what needs to be done to stay together in a relationship you focus on something different than if you ask who is the best attorney in town. You need to find for yourself what are your motivations, what are you looking for. I’ve always wanted more on what works, not because I deny or avoid pain but because I believe we should study health AS WELL, not only neurosis. We should understand the origin of health and wellbeing, we should focus more on the positive rather than the negative. But in order to do so, we need to ask the right healthy questions. “Why is studying the best in life, better than studying the average?” Because if you focus on average, you get average.
Let’s stop studying why we fail or feel unhappy, let’s study why some people succeed despite their hardships in life. Bad, painful emotions are experienced every day in the world but some people recover more promptly as a result of different interpretations. I need to study these interpretations, I want to study these interpretations. What leads to wellbeing is MY biggest question. Decide where you focus. The way we perceive the world is much more important than the actual circumstances. Our state of mind is the master of the game because it has the freedom to choose to focus. Emotions are determined not only by external circumstances but by internal as well. Emotion creates motion.
“What kind of motion do your emotions create?”
Start thinking where do you distort reality in terms of evaluation of your thoughts.
The biggest trap of all is the type of questions we ask. No one has taught us the importance of thinking. The importance of asking the right questions. They only teach us to have all the answers, to know best, to be sure, to make sure, without asking the most obvious question of all: “How on earth is that possible if we do not also study the best?”
Study the best in life, study other people’s best but, most importantly, of all study your best!!
That is how you prescribe your future. Never forget that a true philosopher always asks, never answers. He has no answers. He is in constant quest of asking the right questions.
