Profound Questions

The questions a body returns to rather than answers — kept open on purpose, because the returning is what does the work.

What is thought? What is mind? The canon's page holds two such questions and no answers, and the form is the content. A profound question is not an unsolved problem waiting for someone competent. It is a question whose value lies in being asked again — by each person, at each stage, and in each generation — because the asking changes the asker, and the answer that satisfied at twenty does not at fifty (Mind · Consciousness · Asking Questions · Mystery · The Ineffable).

Keeping them open is a discipline, not laziness. A body that answers its profound questions has usually just stopped asking them, and the settled answer then quietly governs everything downstream without anyone re-examining it (We Do Not Know · Do Not Concretize the Absolute · Shoshin · Unlearning · Drift).

They are distinct from the questions the Game actually runs on, and the distinction is worth keeping. What is the most important thing this week is meant to be answered, and answered again next week (Most Important Things · The one question · Closing question). What is mind is not. Confusing the two produces either paralysis — no decision without metaphysics — or shallowness: a body that decides everything and wonders about nothing (Decision Making · Wisdom).

Their proper home is a room and a rhythm rather than a document. They are what a gathering turns to when the work is done and there is still light; what a Jam is for when nothing needs deciding; what an elder is asked (Dialogos · Jam · Council · Wise Eldership · MindWeaving · Sacred spaces).

And a body should keep its own list. Not to close it, but so that it can see what it has been returning to, and notice when it has quietly stopped (Register · Retrospective · Gaps Not Yet Closed).

Also called: the open questions Stands on: Mystery · Asking Questions · We Do Not Know Opens onto: The one question · Most Important Things · Dialogos · Council · Mind · Consciousness · Philosophy · Epistemology · Pillar IV — Sacred Learning and Mastery In play: the Room, after the work — and every season, when a body asks what it has stopped wondering about Sources: Profound Questions (root page, stub — two questions and no answers) · Most Important Things (root page, stub, which carries a longer list of great questions) · lionsberg.wiki: Profound Questions Open: The canon holds two questions here and a much longer list of similar questions under another name, and nothing relates the two pages. · Everything above beyond the two questions is a first articulation. · Inbound links were not counted.