Questions that change reality?

I love a question, questions expand your thinking, changes it,  evolves your understanding and re-frames your point of view. They can lead you to the hard cases and real-life consequences that can challenge your sense of right and wrong, if a general idea leads to a specific wrong, it is always the general idea that needs modifying not the wrong individual circumstance that needs ignoring. Right ideas that lead to wrong action are inherently incorrect or too abstract to be useful in real life. They might be useful teaching tools but it
should be explicit that they do not apply in reality, otherwise there is the risk of people taking them far too serious.

However some questions reveal and change the way you frame reality, they show the problems
with the mental model that you have been carrying around about the world, they reveal to you that you are just plain wrong incorrect in your assumptions. It is a very useful guide that if a question makes you think in absolutes and encourages your belief in an idea or ideology, it is more likely to be a question that is trying to
persuade you to accept someone else idea for their purposes, rather than a question that is designed to free you from your beliefs and questions your action. Questions can be weapons of force, the intellectuals equivalent of an arm-lock, a wrestling move to force their dominance upon you and forced you into the submission of accepting their ideas as yours.

Luckily, the same counterforce that defeated the monopoly of power that was physical strength, the undeniable fact that being subjected to force feels bad, and when enough good people feel bad they can change the world. It is one of the ongoing miracles of being a human being, that people just decide one day that living in a society where you were free of force felt better than one where you were not, and it happened (not quickly or easily) but once it started there was no stopping it. I firmly believe that the minimisation of the use of force will continue into every single domain where force can be used, especially the soft invisible force of economic and emotional force.

Which will be felt first in a societies that rewards intellectual dominance, there will eventually be a backlash similar to one against physical violence and force, any power structure makes some people feel bad and when it is the majority, things change (hello, right wing populist politics) they spring up when people feel bad, and they react against that very same thing. Somehow it is surprising to the intellectual class, that their instrument of power is hated, that the thing that made people feel bad is now seen as bad, hence we have the anti-fact, anti-science, anti-intellectual movement. They are blinded by virtue of ideas, that there is absolute truth and beauty in them, but they do not see that ideas have been used for economic, political and
individual advantage, and that there has been losers.

And people, despite being told that reasoning is superior to emotion, do have the awkward habit of continuing to feel, and feelings always trumps thinking and physical violence. You cannot beat someone into respecting or fearing you, equally you can scare someone into silence, you cannot make them agree with you, whether you scare them with threats of physical violence or social violence, you can stigmatise, tell people they are evil, have ugly characters, defects of personality or perversions of belief, you can never change their core beliefs about themselves. They will know that they are deserving of love, that you are making them feel bad and that you are the one in the wrong. That is the thing the intellectuals do not understand, feelings are more powerful than anything, they are what guides decisions and the ultimate direction of our civilisation. They are the persistent drip that carves cathedrals in rocks over thousands of years, like gravity
everything turns towards it in the end.

And it is feelings that protects us from our own thinking, from being too impressed with an idea, from going too far with a fad, getting too involved in a crusade. It is feelings that finally finish a war, the greatest enemy
is always the morale of your own people, when they do not feel like they can fight any more, that is when the fighting ends. You do not have to wait for an idea to mature and digests, you always have the option to have a direct route to your feelings, you simply have to bring your awareness to your body and feel the energy moving within it, and there is a distinct difference in the feelings between better and poorer action, better actions and ideas quite simply feel better, you feel more peaceful with them, the energy flows naturally around your body, they feel right. And the more you practice listening to your body, being aware of it, the less you try to out-think it, because thoughts, especially ego thought come from the outside, they are direct representations of our external world. They are by nature caught up in the ways we think the world should be, who we think we are, the sort of person we are and what kind of thoughts that sort of person should be having, ideas are contagious, shared between people, they are the internal demonstration, and our practice at being people in a social situation, we try out our ideas on ourselves, we have our first ideas inside our heads.

The confusion that can arise is that we are actually our ideas, our concept of the self that operates in the world, and it is very real, it just is not reality. It is the concept of a person that is able to function and get things
done in the physical world, but it is not you, you are not your thoughts, you are not your sense of self, and when you ask the question who are you, any answer that you can think of is not correct, because it is another thought. The only correct answer, is the sense of awareness of the question being asked, that is the watcher, it is the awareness of the objective point of view, watching the watcher, and this awareness does not change who the ego is, but it does allow you to watch yourself in action in real-time, you get to take yourself out of the moment and view yourself from a timeless point of view, you get to reflect on what you are doing as if you
were a month in the future and you have the benefit of hindsight in the present moment.

Which is as useful as it sounds, you have a greater opportunity to take the high road in any given situation, the mature and reflective course of action, that is the most elegant and skilful one  that is plausible to you. You get to take the personal out of things, that the action of other are probably nothing to do with you but become of their drama, you are able to act with kindness and compassion as you would do in the best of circumstances, and the way to get to better action is by asking question of who you are, how you are feeling and by
genuinely having curious awareness about yourself, and questions are how you get to reach that state. So, ask who are you, and listen to the answer it will be a lot more interesting than you can imagine.