They had asked themselves a spectacular breakthrough question. And they had gotten there by asking themselves a cluster of other questions first. It was a logical and beautiful sequence, supple and able to leap from one snare to a question to a different snare to another question until it arrived finally at that most liberating question of all. In later years I would label that one an ‘incisive question’, because it was, indeed.

I have said that we have also very recently begun to understand that the mind seems to think in ‘waves and pauses’, not in ‘parts’. (Formerly I thought the road to the incisive question consisted of ‘parts’ and could be mapped. I was wrong. The mind is not so predictably linear.) It then determines in the pause the ‘just right’ question among those ‘innate questions’ to generate a new wave. As the listener, we are now able to navigate that same ‘pause’ process to determine the right question when the person cannot do it for themselves.

The key block to thinking is an untrue assumption, lived as true.

The key block to thinking is an untrue assumption, lived as true.

The key liberator of thinking is a true liberating assumption.

An assumption is often the answer to why we do or feel something.

The criteria for assessing the truth or untruth of an assumption are:

Information (is the assumption factually provable?)

Logic (is the assumption logically provable?)

Assumptions have their most severe impact as the key blocks to human thinking. Untrue assumptions lived as true are what block us nearly always. And so we can bypass the usual question about blocks (‘What is stopping you?’) and head right for the key block by asking:

What might you be assuming that is stopping you?

If you knew’, is hypothetical. So the question has to start that way. And ‘how would you’ is hypothetical. So the question has to end that way. And in the middle has to be the truth: the true liberating assumption. It is not hypothetical.