Читать книгу The Way of Nowhere: Eight Questions to Release Our Creative Potential - Nick Udall - Страница 11

a book of breakthrough questions

This is a book of breakthrough questions.

Breakthrough questions are like keys to doors. Each door opens us up to a greater aspect of ourselves, making available a wider and deeper reservoir of internal and external resource. This expansion of resource, of heightened self-awareness and self-knowledge, is vital if we want to call forth our creative and collective potential.

Breakthrough questions lie at the heart of the Way of nowhere. They are essential for unlocking our personal creativity. For creativity rarely begins with an answer. As soon as we discover an answer, learning tends to slow down and curiosity diminishes. By reframing an initial insight, intuition or notion as a breakthrough question, we are able to trigger our curiosity. Curiosity creates vitality, and together they generate enough energy to start and sustain the creative process.⁴

Breakthrough questions should therefore lead us into the unknown. They should create a sense of excitement, enthusiasm and momentum, yet at the same time generate a sense of trepidation and fear. They are designed to reveal their magic over time as we learn to ‘hold’ as opposed to answer them.

Like a Zen Kõan,⁵ the challenge is to find a way of transcending our intellect,

allowing each breakthrough question to take us over, so we can learn to become the question. It is then, and only then, that we can break through the question. And it is in the moment of breakthrough that we see things we have never seen before, as if by magic … out of nowhere.

This book introduces eight breakthrough questions which are designed to reveal and unlock eight different doors to our creative potential. By working through these questions we can expand our consciousness, evoke our creativity and co-create our future.

Each chapter opens up a different question by offering pointers to insight. We have intentionally refrained from including our own answers to the questions. The insights we have gained and applied to date, on ourselves or with the organizations and communities with which we work, have been what we have needed to discover. You will need to find your own answers.

By holding these breakthrough questions, sometimes lightly and sometimes firmly, you will find they will begin to reveal their magic. Some will reveal themselves quickly, as you connect with those aspects of yourself that are already available to you as a resource. Some of the questions will be more difficult, as you discover aspects of yourself that are less accessible. The chapters that you find harder to engage with are likely to be the ones that will ultimately offer you the greatest movement forward in your quest to unlock your creative potential.

4 Inspired by a lecture by Moishe Rubenstein entitled ‘The role of intuition in the creative process’, presented at the Second Annual Global Intuition Network Conference at York University, Toronto, Canada, 20–22 August 1992.

5 Kõans are riddles used by Zen masters as a means of awakening, for example John Daido Loori, Two Arrows Meeting in Mid Air, Tuttle, 1994.