What is the prison that we never see?

What is the pale white room you are in that doesn’t feel like a prison because it feels like the whole world?

What is an unquestioned condition, pattern or behaviour? A loop, a well-worn path, a mental model, a pattern of behaviour, a set of rules.

What happens if you question it? When was the last time you or someone in this condition (like a workplace) questioned a pattern there, or the whole system, or the whole premise?

What happens when you start questioning a premise that feels like the whole world? Once a question is asked it’s impossible to put back in the box - at least for the question-asker.

I have had two dreams recently that showed me:

• Using the rhythm, however artificial, of the prison you are in, to help free your creativity from a cage - to give you a picture of this, picture a small set of holding pens filled with water that rises and falls every few seconds. There’s a dolphin at the back pen, and there’s a small portal at the front. Using the rhythm of the rising and falling water, we wash over each fence til we reach the escape portal. In this dream, the dolphin is the creative life, you.

• Questions open possibilities, questions help you realise the prison and escape the prison. Creativity - sitting with a question til it makes sense - unlocks the understanding and opens the way out. In this dream, there were layers and layers of different types of prison. Each floor had different types of prisoners on it. The top floor had prisoners on it who didn’t realise they were in a prison, and the guards had forgotten they were too. Everyone thought this one white room up in a tower was the whole world. The dream perspective was a fly on the wall, asking the prisoners out loud: what’s the next level of this prison? again and again til someone understood: this was a prison - and escaped by flying out the window. Creativity isn’t just the key to escape though, it needs what the prison removes: rest, deep time, mystery, uncensored questioning and wondering.

Out of further interest: One of the levels of the prison kept all the prisoners there through a system - there were all these orange beans scattered about. In an empty room, with no other activity, people would reach for the beans automatically. As soon as someone held the bean, it would grow uncontrollably large, but as a big orange shadow, which would follow them around and be all they could see. The way to break out of this prison level was to not touch the beans. The prisoners on this level were all compelled to reach for the beans, but if you refrained from it, if they eventually learnt not to reach for the beans, they reached enlightenment of this level and graduated to the next. The shadow behaviour became so large each time they engaged with it, they could not ignore it, and they finally learnt.

Unquestioned systems are the lock, the guard, the whole self-maintaining operation. Without time, space, capacity, no one notices they even need the key, and creativity is blocked because of frenetic and clogged flowways in the mind/body.

What is your question that can’t be unasked?