Our society is bursting with ideas, opinions, solutions, and plans, with analysis, debate, and carefully reasoned positions. And yet we suffer - both individually and collectively - from a pervasive sense of being lost, confused, and unsure of our direction.

Clearly something is missing. If we want to break out of these patterns, We need to stop telling ourselves worn-out stories that leave us feeling stuck and hopeless. We need new ways to ask questions and also new questions to ask. Creative inquiry is about waking up to these kinds of new possibilities - across disciplines and in every field of human concern.

Creative inquiry offers a different approach to knowledge. It asks us to break through old ways of thinking and to craft new methods and approaches to knowing. Without abandoning concepts and analysis, it starts from our immediate experience, our deepest convictions, and the concerns we care about most, and it asks: "Could I be doing all of this differently?"

Let's take a specific example of the kind of question creative inquiry invites. In the years you've been on this earth, you've built up a lot of

In asking these questions, the point is not to come up with an explanation or a theory. If you want to understand the way the past operates in your life, look for yourself, in this very moment. Be ready to question your commitment to a particular way of understanding the weightiness or gravity of the past.

Are there ways to do this? Plenty! It's not a question of learning specific techniques, but of getting really specific about your own experience and your own assumptions. The point is to be both precise and audacious at the same time. The more you can do that, the more the gravity of the presupposed loses its hold.