We've all been brought up in school according to the idea that each correct answer we accumulate constitutes another bit of knowledge that we possess. In this episode, Mr. B openly questions this equation of knowledge with the possession of the correct answer. Instead of a paradigm that bases knowledge on the answer, Mr. B proposes that a more complete paradigm of knowledge must be centered instead on questions. It is only when we move beyond stopping at and holding onto the one correct answer, to welcome and embrace all the questions which follow, that we will recover the beautiful natures of our own curiosity and our inherent attraction to endless learning...
Rumi's Life...
"His [Rumi's] life seems to have been a fairly normal one for a religious scholar -- teaching, meditating, helping the poor -- until in the late fall of 1244 when he met a stranger who put a question to him. That stranger was the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, who had traveled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could 'endure my company.' A voice came, 'What will you give in return?' 'My head!' 'The one you seek is [Rumi}.'
The question Shams spoke made the learned professor [Rumi] faint to the ground. We cannot be entirely certain of the question, but according to the most reliable account Shams asked who was greater, Muhammad or Bestami, for Bestami had said, 'How great is my glory,' whereas Muhammad had acknowledged in his prayer to God, 'We do not know You as we should.'
Rumi heard the depth out of which the question came and fell to the ground. He was finally able to answer that Muhammad was greater, because Bestami had taken one gulp of the divine and stopped there, whereas for Muhammad the way was always unfolding. There are various versions of this encounter, but whatever the facts, Shams and Rumi became inseparable. Their Friendship is one of the mysteries. They spent months together without any human needs, transported into a region of pure conversation. This ecstatic connection ... began [Rumi's] transformation into a mystical artist: 'He turned into a poet, began to listen to music, and sang, whirling around, hour after hour.'"
Baha'u'llah...
"O SON OF SPIRIT!
The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behooveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes."
Claude Levi-Strauss...
"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's the one who asks the right questions."
Rachel Carson...
"A large part of my life has been concerned with some of the beauties and mysteries of this earth about us, and with the even greater mysteries of the life that inhabits it. No one can dwell long among such subjects without thinking rather deep thoughts, without asking himself searching and often unanswerable questions, and without achieving a certain philosophy... Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one."
Richard Feynman...
"I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say 'look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. Then he says, 'I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,' and I think he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe....
I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. It don't understand how it subtracts."
Stuart Firestein...
"Perhaps the most important application of ignorance is in the sphere of education, particularly of scientists.... Instead of a system where the collection of facts is an end, where knowledge is equated with accumulation, where ignorance is rarely discussed, we will have to provide the Wiki-raised student with a taste of and for boundaries, the edge of the widening circle of ignorance, how the data, which are not unimportant, frames the unknown. We must teach students how to think in questions, how to manage ignorance. W.B. Yeats admonished that 'education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.'"
Mr. B...
"I know as much as I know, not less and not more, because I've come to accept my own ignorance, my own limitations. It's not a vice. It's not something that I'm ashamed of. It's not something to hide. I invite in and embrace 'I don't know.' I do not stop at or cling to the "correct" answer. For me, each answer fuels the excitement and anticipation of the next question. I immerse myself day after day into the deepest end of the ceaseless process of seeking what is most True. Not only have I developed my own capacity to learn (to some extent at least), but, in the process, because I do know more, I've gradually placed myself into a better and better position to befriend others as they, too, decide to leave the comfort of home and embark upon the same adventure -- turning their whole being toward becoming fully awake and alive. It's funny. I'm 64 years old, and I'm more curious, more energized, more enthusiastic about learning than ever...."
Rainer Maria Rilke...
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and 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."
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