BEHIND THE BIG CONVERSATIONS:

THE SEARCH FOR BETTER QUESTIONS
BY HONORA FOAH, CO-PRESIDENT OF MYTHIC IMAGINATION INSTITUTE

...As we count down the days until Mythic Journeys 2006, we find ourselves confronted with excitement and anticipation… and with questions. Questions are the work we do that sets all the world working to answer us. Questions are our obligation. If we do not ask, we do not receive. Recently in struggling to answer a question I was asked about the purpose of Mythic Journeys, I found myself ruminating on the efforts we make to solve our ‘problems,’ to know how to act rightly.

...I do not believe there is any shame in using cognitive and behavioral approaches to our problems, just as I find no shame in an aspirin on a day of headache. But these things are insufficient in themselves. The problems of the soul, the psyche, ultimately must be addressed on the level of the soul. Instinctively, Freud looked toward the great stories as he began his modern investigation into psychology. Jung carried that aspect further. Psychology deeply influenced the artists and art that has been made in the last century, and art in turn has been the food of psychology and psychologists.

...Much of the greatness of James Hillman’s work has to do with his penetrating look into the old stories and his love of art. And asking
better questions.

...Lately at Mythic Imagination Institution, we’ve been working on how to describe what we are and what we are doing. Honestly, it isn’t easy. Here’s one thing we can say: We are trying to create good conditions for Imagination. Our route is by way of the wisdom stories of the world -- the sacred and the profane, those that present bombastically, those that present wistfully, those that present whimsically.

...But here’s the thing. If people were more imaginative, if our responses to life and problems were more creative, less programmed, less knee-jerk, more alive, what would it look like?

...I don’t know. Here is a clue I’m following: the questions will be better.

...I have had the good fortune in my life to speak with some very interesting, brilliant, wise people, and if I were to make a generalization about them, it would be that, first of all, they can take a stupid question and transform it in such a way that the entire room can suddenly breathe. They do not start with the answer. They do not accept the premises the questions are predicated upon. They first look at the question. I have seen this phenomenon over and over. Some Amazing Person is asked a question that just makes you want to squirm, full of idiocies, conceits or partialities. It is especially painful if I happen to be person asking the question.

...There is usually a pause. There is usually a “Well...” And then the Amazing Person begins to ask a much better question than yours, but actively related to your question.

...“Do I have to see my lying, alcoholic father?” The question the Amazing Person poses will almost always change the scale of your question from ‘do I have to see my lying, alcoholic father’, to “Well...what is our responsibility to the damaged among us, whose damage has penetrated into the moral sphere? What is our responsibility to those who have severely damaged us? What is our responsibility to those who have brought us into existence, who have given us life?”

...At that point, it begins to be clear that the discomfort that has brought us to the point of asking for help at all is actually a matter of powerful consequence, for us, and — this is another hallmark of the Amazing Person’s answer — for others. So very often the Amazing Person will manage to enlarge our consciousness to include others: the others in our problem, the others who may have similar problems, the relationship to existential universal problems. And at that point, the need we have for each other, the need to be serious about how our own choices in regard to this problem will affect others grappling with it, begin to stand out.

...The Amazing Person is always re-constellating. I find my response to this changing of the question, even if the new questions are “harder,” is gratitude and relief. The Amazing Person has released me from the prison of myself into the world and, usually at the same time, suggested I have a definite place in that world.

...This is the blessing I also find in both myth and imagination. The shoulder Mr. Shakespeare put to the wheel in trying to understand the follies and tragedies of parents and children is a contribution we cannot afford to overlook as we attempt to become human beings. That may be the main value in Mythic Journeys itself, this working on better questions together. We have asked the Mythic Journeys presenters to consciously go at this in the Big Conversations — to ask authentic questions of each other. The Mythic Journeys presenters are too valuable to simply waste them on answers.

Imagination leads to good questions. Good questions lead to imagination. That’s my story. I’m sticking to it.