What is the point of asking questions?

To gain knowledge.

To gain an accomplice for better or worse.

I've been waiting for *years* for somebody to ask this! (Well, days maybe, but who's counting?)

I sometimes say there are 3 kinds of questions:

a) ordinary questions (those which have a simple, factual answer). Example: "when did Columbus land in the new world?" is an ordinary question. Ordinary questions are useful or interesting, but -- of course -- they're ordinary. People ask these questions in order to get correct answers.

b) provocative questions (those designed to stimulate thinking, where answers may be multiple, creative, ambiguous, etc.) An example would be "what were the causes of the American civil war?", or "what's the best way to ask for a date?". There's no single factual answer, rather the question calls up a spectrum of possibilities. The purpose of provocative questions is to provoke thought, to expand the mind, to generate possible solutions, etc.

c) transformative questions. A transformative question alters reality. That is to say, the way in which we perceive and interact with ourselves and life is transformed by the process of asking -- and continuing to struggle with -- a transformative question. One of the classic transformative questions is "who am I?". Another good one is "what is the purpose of life?".

Lots of people get messed up with transformative questions -- they approach them as if they're ordinary questions: i.e. they try to get "the answer". But approaching a transformative question that way totally misses the point. The idea is to take up "residence" inside the question: to live with it, to study it, to consider it from all sides, and to allow the question to break down your ordinary, fixed viewpoint regarding the subject.

Living inside a transformative question is like bathing in solvent: it dissolves the rigid beliefs you've inherited from the past and opens up new possibilities for being and relating to life.

Those are the questions that are really worth asking and re-asking. Of course, the trouble is that the answers don't render well into simple explanations, so most people don't really work on these questions too much. That's really a shame, because there's a lot of value in the process.

To progress...without answers to the questions we need, we are forced to stay in the places where we are

The point of asking a question is to ask a question of which you don't know the answer. Evident.

Because you are curious and want to know what other people think. How else do you learn? Happy Tuesday! :)