Michael is an educational and documentary filmmaker; writer, photographer and co-founder of Touch the Future.

In preparing for an interview with George Leonard, author of Ecstasy in Education, The Ultimate Athlete and most recently Mastery, I came across a story of a wise man who came to a Zen master hoping to learn the secret of becoming even more wise. The Zen master said nothing as he prepared a pot of tea. He began filling the wise man's cup. He kept filling and filling until it spilled over the brim and still he kept pouring. An empty cup can hold something new while a mind that is full usually ends up making a mess.

In our last interview David Bohm pointed out that knowledge is not intelligence. Any response from memory is based on the past, which is repetitive and mechanical and a mechanical process is not intelligence. What a simple concept. The original response now stored as memory may have been the result of intelligence, but the brain froze this into a limited pattern and in the process rendered it unintelligent.

History repeats itself and the expectation is that a past intelligent response may be useful in the future - and it often is. Memory is a wonderful thing. Our challenge is to recognize the implicit limitations of the past when it meets the present. Learning is this act of intelligence, immediate, dynamic and alive. Learning is an act, which changes the learner. As Leonard points out, learning can be ecstatic.

Knowledge of every kind, however, defends itself. We feel secure when we "know" and insecure when we don't. Looking back, one can trace how our life was transformed from one of wonder, curiosity and ecstatic learning to one of "conditioned - secure knowing" through formal schooling, mostly. For some strange reason we then build a strong psychological attachment to our knowing, to our test results and score card. To question the need or appropriateness of all we have accumulated is to challenge the very core of our being - at least, that is how it feels.

To learn the mind must be free. It is only the free mind that can hold or perceive something new, while the mind that is full sloughs around and usually ends up making a mess. Discovering the essence of inquiry, of life long learning, is essential in a world awash with content. This doesn't mean that we suddenly go catatonic, or stumble around in some blind state of amnesia. It means simply that we suspend our fixed assumptions and beliefs. It means that we create a mental state that is free to look, to feel and to listen. Deep questions take on new significance in such a state.