Watch the kurius podcasts with curious guests

These videos are excerpts of the longer podcasts that are available on the podcast site:

https://www.youtube.com/@theoldcuriositypodcast

Explore deeper questions

Discover the art of asking deeper questions to enrich your life and enhance your experiences.

Engage in activities that promote self-discovery and deeper understanding of your life's journey.

Kurius podcasts:

https://www.youtube.com/@theoldcuriositypodcast

kurius blog: https://kurius1.blogspot.com/

kurius facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kurius11

Reader forum and discussion

With the permission of readers, their comments, questions and guest blogs will be posted here. There is also an easily accessible open discussion forum on the Facebook page for this project: www.facebook.com/kurius11/

Socrates is a classic example of someone who used questions to strive for wisdom.

These images and other images on this website are original creations from ideas of Shawn Thompson. The images are a type of question in themselves requiring interpretation. You do that to expand yourself.

Images for you to interpret

The images are a type of visual question that transcend words and requires your interpretation. After you have interpreted an image, ask yourself, What would be a totally different interpretation? Ask yourself, why am I interpreting this image this specific way? Ask yourself, What am I not seeing? All images are original from concepts of Shawn Thompson -- Click image to open larger

Imaginary blueprint of Michelangelo

What do you do with the images?

The author of the website won't interpret the images for you, to avoid interfering with your personal process of thought, discovery and meditation. It's suggested that you keep a diary or journal to make notes of your interpretations. Then ask yourself why you made that interpretation and are there alternate interpretations. Then maybe continue the same process with other images and ideas that you encounter. Writing your answers is an important step you don't want to skip. It also allows you to see how your ideas progress and what you learn from that progress. The eventual book by Shawn Thompson will do this in book form. You are testing the process.

The Kurius blog has written excerpts from the podcast interviews

About the author

Hi. My name is Shawn Thompson. I'm a retired university professor, a book author and a traveller. I've published six books of non-fiction, numerous magazine articles and was an online columnist for Psychology Today magazine. This website is a work-in-progress of what will be my seventh book. As a writer, I have been curious about the similarities and differences in points of view between different groups of people on our planet. We are all individuals and yet we are all members of a series of larger and larger groups. Thus, we think both as individuals and as members of groups. Sometimes we don't understand how others think and feel. Sometimes we don't even understand our own thoughts and feelings. We can ignore that and just stumble forward or we can be curious and seek to understand and empathize better with others. We can do that if we cultivate our curiosity and learn to ask deeper, more probing questions. It's a kind of self-therapy. When I followed my own thread of curiosity, I interviewed people in river cultures, prisoners in penitentiaries and spent time with intelligent species trying to understand them. I learned that the better and more original the questions, the better and more original the answers. But not everything had an answer. That's the dilemma of Socrates in ancient Athens. Some things we just don't know, even if we try to convince ourselves that we do. I think that we need to expand our minds about what we don't know and also recognize the limitations of what we can know. How do we do that?

In terms of work experience, in addition to being a freelance writer, I've worked for over a total of 40 years as a journalist and university teacher. My publications in books and numerous magazines articles come not from my own knowledge, but from being able to interview diverse types of people from politicians, to scientists, to lawyers, to federal prisoners, in locations from Europe to Southeast Asia. I've trekked through jungles, been chased by wild pygmy elephants in northern Borneo, and slept inside the Jakarta zoo. I've sailed on a navy submarine to interview submariners. I tracked down a fugitive from the police to a villa in the Dominican Republic, to do an interview. I was an expert witness in a trial in Buenos Aires to help the judge rule whether an orangutan, as an intelligent creature, should be kept in captivity in a zoo. The judge decided that it shouldn't and the orangutan was freed and sent to a sanctuary in Florida. I've been a consultant on wildlife documentaries. Combine all that with teaching in a university for 25 years where academics can seem like a strange, isolated tribe in their own remote mental jungle and I've been exposed to a diversity of points of view over my 70-something years. In the terms of the visionary poet and artist William Blake, who I studied years ago as a university student, I've been a "mental traveller." We are all mental travellers wherever we are, if we can open ourselves to new experiences, new points of view. We can ask ourselves, Are we willing to do that?

So, what's the connection to this website? From my lifelong experience as an interviewer, I have now turned from developing my own skills in being curious, in asking questions and interpreting others, to wanting to help others do that better. I want to introduce ideas about how to enrich our lives by how we deepen our curiosity and formulate more original, more authentic, more creative questions. You can join me in this. On this website and on my Facebook page on the same topic, I will try to guide you in deepening your ability to ask questions. The images on this website are original creations from my ideas, as a work-in-progress of my next book. I am inviting you to join this venture and to interact with me and others. The images are a type of question in themselves requiring your interpretation. The process of interpretation is then an experience of curiosity and questioning. By experimenting by posting images for interpretation before the book is published, I can write a better book. In a sense, this website is a way to test the ideas of the book and to interview others in the process. The images on the website are part of an interview and a session on interpretation to deepen our understanding. All this is being done in public. My name is posted. I am not hiding in anonymity and secrecy behind a digital wall. My email is on this website. I can do Zoom consultations with anyone writing for a good cause to help people and wildlife. I will engage as much as possible in the time I have. What do you think?

Shawn Thompson, some years ago, with a friend.

Three of Shawn Thompson's non-fiction books. If you click on the images, they will open into a larger view.

Author of a magazine cover article about legal rights for intelligent species

Older, greyer, but still curious

As a magazine columnist:

Inquire

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email: old.kurius@gmail.com

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Expanding curiosity, exploring images, asking questions

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Author's page on Amazon:amazon.com/author/kurius