Questions bring changes that stimulate further questions. A question can transform you.

Have you become lazy or indifferent or inhibited about using your power to ask questions? When you were a child, were your questions belittled, stifled, or ignored? Unleash the questioner inside of you. Nothing will renew you faster than a strong direct question. Ask and find out. Then watch what happens.

It's impossible to replace just one idea. When you acquire a new concept, re-work an old thought, or simply discard an outmoded opinion, you cause reverberations throughout your mind. Each change in your thinking causes you to change in other ways. This affects your emotions and your actions and consequently others' reactions to you. Like a pebble dropped in a pond, a fresh idea sends ripples to every part of you. Why?

Your thoughts have logical relationships to each other. They are not separate; they interconnect. Revising one of your ideas has implications for other ideas, which in turn affects still other ideas. A kind of intellectual chain reaction takes place.

Sometimes this process is sudden and dramatic. Almost without warning, you feel as though you've been knocked head over heels. Usually, however, the process is slower and more deliberate. It often takes years or even a lifetime of careful, painstaking thought to work things out.

Your thoughts are your offspring and they reside inside your brain and nervous system. Even apparently unrelated thoughts dwell together within the intimacy of your mental household.

Thoughts aren't inanimate. Your thoughts are alive. They grow, develop, and mature. They interact. They even reproduce. Part and product of your living biological organism, they are nourished by your aliveness.

Because they are in your brain and nervous system, your thoughts are neighbors, roommates. Your ideas don't just affect your brain

and nervous system, they live in your nervous system just as fish live in a pond. The difference is that your nervous system can be aware of the ideas that inhabit it. Nevertheless, your thoughts are big-entities, they are as alive as your heart and your blood.

Although thoughts have life, they aren't autonomous or self-sufficient. They don't have independent existence; they aren't capable of locomotion. They can't migrate, or be moved, from one brain to another. Your thoughts are completely dependent on you for their life. They arise within and are confined to your individual psyche. They're restricted to the eco-system of your personal neurophysiology.

A thought has as its raw material what you see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. When your senses become aware of something, a representation of it enters your nervous system. Your spontaneous natural reflex of considering goes to work on it, adding to the thoughts teeming in your brain.

How could anything that your organism produces and maintains within itself not be alive, not be part of the organism? Your thoughts are connected with everything else that your organism produces. Your ideas are alive only

because you are. Partaking of your vitality, your thoughts influence you and each other, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

There is no better example of this than a question. A question is a very special kind of thought, which uniquely affects your thinking.

A question is a call to thought. It is an invitation to look, listen, and consider. It begins an inquiry. It is a kind of pointer. It directs your attention. A question can succinctly outline what you want to think about next and how you want to think about it. A question can give direction to your intellectual efforts.

A question longs for information or understanding. It wants more. It is a dissatisfaction with one's intellectual status quo. My understanding isn't deep enough, it says. My knowledge has gaps. When expressed clearly, it can also tell other people what you want to know.

Questions say, Let me grow. I will not stand pat. I am searching, seeking. A question is the most optimistic thing in the world. It indicates hope, a belief that it is possible to know what we don't currently know, to understand what we don't currently understand. Children, who are brimming with innocence and trust, are question machines.

Questions have a limited life span. They grow out of what we now know. They burn brightly until they are answered. Then they disappear and other ones light up.

Nothing is beyond question. Nothing is unquestionable. Everybody has the right to ask any question about anything. The questions that occur to you are yours. They indicate that you are ready to rise from one level of knowledge and understanding to the next. Ultimately, then, only you have the responsibility to answer your own questions. The highest form of question is the one that you ask of yourself.

A question must be crafted with care, because it will influence the tone and direction of your inquiry. The danger is that the question will bias or short-circuit your search. It is a bridge to an unknown destination, because we do not know what we do not know. A successful question makes us want to answer it. It has no hidden agenda. It isn't devious. It is sincere, open, and aboveboard. It doesn't pry, accuse, insinuate, or attempt to entrap.

Questions are not merely a means to an end, the answer. They are full-fledged thoughts. We need to give questions all of the respect they

deserve. I admire questions. A good question thrills me. I adore a mind that crackles with questions. I admire a personality with the guts to ask a question.

Answers lead to further questions. This is the endless fun and challenge of life. A question leads to an answer which leads to another question.

A good question is more than half the solution. It is never a waste of time. It takes us into the heart of the matter.

Begin with questions, lots of them. The more the merrier. How many can you think of? Now think of some more. Raise as many as you

can. Let yourself go. Ask questions without pride or shame. Ask honestly what you really want to know. Be willing to appear dumb, to ask a silly question that reveals your ignorance. Drop your pose. You will stimulate your own thinking as well as that of others.

To be ethical, questioning another person must be non-violent. There must be no torture, no threats, no inquisitions, no interrogations. Ideally, such questioning will be a relaxed, voluntary activity of equals. Nobody owes anybody an answer. Everybody always has a right to remain silent.

There is an art to phrasing a question without being offensive, although sometimes this is inevitable, when one approaches touchy people or taboo subjects. Rigid, repressive, coercive, dishonest, unresponsive, bureaucratic, dogmatic, hypocritical, and secretive people and institutions are particularly intolerant of questions. They know how vulnerable they are.

There is likewise an art to being asked a question. Don't feel pressured or attacked. Take a deep breath. Understand the question. It is an opportunity to reconsider, to take another look. It is not a cue to prove how smart you are.

Before you answer a question, quietly question it. What is it implying? What does the question assume? Is it unfairly sending the answer in a particular direction? Does it set up a false set of alternatives? Does it imply a particular conceptual framework? Does it bias the answer? A good question focuses attention without distorting anything.

We must dare to question everything, even our questions themselves.

Gerald Angelo Cirrincione preaches a timeless message that hails thinking as humanity's greatest asset.