Not through our eyes alone. Not even through our experiences, as “real” as they feel. The world reaches us filtered through a quieter thing, the question that is running in the background, shaping what we notice, what we ignore, and what we decide something means.
If the question inside you is “What could go wrong,” life becomes a room full of sharp corners. If the question is “What do I need to prove,” every conversation becomes a stage. If the question is “Where is the beauty,” the same street you’ve walked a hundred times suddenly has light on leaves, dust in sunlight, small kindnesses between strangers. The street didn’t change. The lens did.
Indian thought has always treated the question as sacred. Not in a motivational way, but in a foundational way. Our oldest stories and philosophies are built like conversations, not like manuals. A seeker approaches a teacher, a student approaches a king, a human approaches the unknown, and what moves the story forward is not an answer but a question asked with enough honesty that it rearranges a life.
The Upanishads are full of this spirit. They don’t begin with “Here is the truth.” They begin with someone daring to ask, “What is real,” “Who am I,” “What remains when everything else falls away.” Those aren’t small questions. They are questions that change what a person is even capable of seeing. When you start asking “What is lasting,” you stop being hypnotized by what is loud. When you start asking “What is the self,” you begin to notice the difference between your mind and your awareness, between your roles and your being. The world doesn’t become simpler, but it becomes clearer.
There is a story in the Mahabharata that makes this idea unforgettable because it turns questions into a test of life itself. The Pandavas are thirsty. One by one they drink from a lake and fall. Yudhishthira arrives, and a mysterious presence, the Yaksha, stops him. You may take water, the Yaksha says, but first you must answer my questions.
What follows is not trivia. It is a mirror held up to the human condition. The Yaksha asks about happiness, about duty, about fear, about what is truly surprising about life. And what saves Yudhishthira is not strength or strategy. It is the kind of mind he has trained, the kind that can hold meaning without arrogance, the kind that can answer without violence, the kind that has lived with better questions long enough to become wise.
That scene contains a quiet lesson. The questions you can answer are the questions you have been living with. And the questions you have been living with decide who you become when life asks you something you cannot escape.
Even in the Ramayana, you can feel how different questions create different worlds. Ravana’s gaze is shaped by the question “What can I take.” It turns the world into a field of conquest, where desire is destiny and other people are objects in the way. Rama’s gaze is shaped by a harder question, “What is right, even when it costs me.” That question turns the world into a moral landscape. The same world, the same power, the same stakes, yet two completely different realities because the guiding questions are different.
This is why stories survive. Not because they are perfect history, but because they are precise psychology. They understand that humans don’t just act. Humans act from a story, and the story is written by the questions they keep repeating.
Indian history carries the same truth, only dressed in real consequences. Think of Ashoka. Before Kalinga, the question of an expanding empire is usually some form of “How do I win.” It makes violence feel like a tool, not a tragedy. After the war, the remembered transformation begins with a different question, one that changes the direction of an entire reign, “What have I done,” and then, “What should power be for.” When the question changes from winning to reducing suffering, a ruler stops seeing people as territory and starts seeing them as lives. You could call that politics, or philosophy, or remorse, but at its root it is a shift in the lens.
Or take Akbar’s court, remembered not only for administration but for curiosity. When a ruler asks, “How do we hold difference without tearing ourselves apart,” the empire becomes more than borders. It becomes an experiment in coexistence. Even when history is messy, the question matters because it decides what kind of future is even imaginable.
Questions are not innocent. They are architects.
And the most powerful questions are often the ones we didn’t choose consciously. They were handed to us by upbringing, by culture, by fear, by praise, by pain, by what we were rewarded for, and what we were shamed for. A child who grows up around unpredictability may learn the question “How do I stay safe.” A child who grows up around comparison may learn the question “How do I stay ahead.” A child who grows up without being seen may learn the question “How do I become impossible to ignore.”
Then we grow older and assume we are seeing the world.
But we are often seeing our question.
This is why two people can sit in the same room and live in different universes. One is scanning for rejection. One is scanning for connection. One is scanning for threat. One is scanning for opportunity. It isn’t that one person is smart and the other is not. It’s that their attention is being directed by different internal questions, and attention is the beginning of perception.
The modern world makes this even sharper. Algorithms thrive on predictable questions. If your question is “What should I fear,” the feed will supply fear. If your question is “Who should I hate,” it will supply targets. If your question is “How do I become more,” it will supply endless ladders. A question can be a doorway, but it can also be a leash.
So the real practice, the one that quietly changes everything, is not “find the right answers.” It is “notice your default questions.”
Because you cannot change a life you are not aware of living.
Ask yourself, gently, what question is running most of your days. Not the question you say you care about, but the one your behavior reveals. Is it “How do I avoid discomfort.” Is it “How do I look.” Is it “What if I fail.” Is it “When will I finally feel enough.”
Then, without drama, try placing a different question beside it, the way Indian stories place a rishi beside a king, or a student beside a teacher, to change the direction of the conversation.
When the mind asks “What if this goes wrong,” add “What if this teaches me something useful.”
When it asks “Do they approve of me,” add “Do I approve of the way I’m showing up.”
When it asks “How do I get more,” add “What do I already have that I’m not valuing.”
When it asks “Why am I like this,” add “What happened that taught me to be like this.”
When it asks “Who is to blame,” add “What is my responsibility now.”
You don’t have to force positivity. You just have to widen the frame.
This is what the best Indian stories keep doing. They take a person trapped inside a narrow question and open the space around them. Arjuna’s crisis is not solved by pretending the war is easy. It is addressed by changing the scope of his seeing. Yudhishthira survives because he is trained in questions that lead to dharma, not ego. Nachiketa, in the old story of the boy who approaches Yama, becomes memorable because he refuses the easy questions of pleasure and asks the hard question of what is real beyond death. These stories are different in setting, but they agree on one thing, a human being becomes the kind of world they keep asking for.
If there is one thought worth carrying from all of this, it is simple.
Your life is shaped less by what happens to you and more by what you keep asking about what happens to you.
The world will always be complex. People will always be mixed. Days will always contain both beauty and disappointment. The only real choice you have, again and again, is which question becomes your guide.
And if you ever feel stuck, start small. Ask a question that gives you breath. Ask a question that gives you honesty. Ask a question that gives you agency.
Because we see the world through the questions we’ve learned to ask.
And the most quietly powerful thing you can do is learn new ones.