Inquiry is Not About Resolving Issues, Understanding the Past, or Having Spiritual Experiences
A couple of months ago, I was talking to a friend., who is also a teacher of the Diamond Approach. Part of our conversation involed a golfing buddy who had left the Diamond Approach for a more meditative spiritual practice. One reason mentioned was being tired of inquiry – “if I ever have to do another inquiry or repeating question…!”
Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who informed me that she was taking a sabbatical from the Diamond Approach. She, too, was exploring a more meditative oriented discipline. One reason – too much emphasis on inquiry.
Several years ago a fellow student in my group left the work because, to her, it was too much head and not enough heart.
These situations speak to a curiosity of mine around how inquiry is viewed, practiced and incorporated into one’s life.
Inquiry continually focused on issues, reactivity, the past, object relations, difficult situations and such can become heavy and carry more of a sense of work and burden than the thrill of revelation.
Using inquiry in an attempt to resolve issues and life situations seems to me to be ego oriented toward feeling good, getting free or being present (from the ego’s perspective).
I hear very few complaints involving a sense of “work,” tedium, effort, boredom, inertia and such around “positive inquiry” – inquiry involving essential states, boundless dimensions, diamond vehicles and the like.
It seems true to me that when people leave the work feeling a sense of burden, fatigue, inertia or complacency around inquiry that their experience is not dominated by inquiry of essential realms and presence or even inquiry that generally ends in deeper essential experience. There seems to be an overall sense that inquiry is some kind of analytical efforting that involves too much thinking. I find this very interesting as I find inquiry to be – more heart oriented with a huge assist from the head for deeper understanding — but then, it is difficult for me to distinguish a heart/mind ratio in my inquiry.
Too Much Mind, Too Little Heart
Inquiry is susceptible to mental process dominating the exploration –
- Because many of us have mind/body and mind/heart splits in our psyches
- Because we confuse asking questions with inquiring
- We use questions to focus and orient us toward our experience not analysis
- Even when we love discovery, revlation, insight and understanding, we may still view inquiry as more head oriented and maintain a mind/heart split.
Love of Truth
Love and Truth are inseparable. They are merely different ways of seeing or experiencing the same “not one, not two.” Mind/heart split can support misperception that Truth or Love resides more in one body center than the other.
I Got You Babe
Reactivity is the Gorilla Glue for maintaining the dynamic inertia of psche chaos. Reactivity is spinning our wheels, running in place, mental masturbation, emotional milking, a BB rattling in a can.
- Reactivity has a perverse logic – If/when I can resolve this issue or situation, then I will be able to _____.
- Reactivity helps maintain a psychic vortex that traps us in cause and effect thinking.
- Because inquiry is effective in freeing us from cause and effect, it is very easy to make it a cause – a tool that will create a desired effect.
Affect – The Great Destabilizing Force
If we explore reactivity, we find that affect and imagination (projection in this case) are two critical components for maintaining our inner terrorism and suffering. Helplessness, powerlessness, hopelessness, sadness, heartbreak, guilt, anger, fear – there’s a long list of fuel to drive the reactivity machine – a runaway movie projector (popcorn not included) for leaving concrete physical reality for fears and concerns around the future or a heavy dose of the past in the now.
Isn’t it interesting how we can spend years and years in a dance of torture with our favorit affective partners? We even have a “logic that makes sense” as to why we continue to dance.
I’d Rather be Shitty than Sane
If we were to say that real sanity was free of reactivity, what does that mean?
- That we see things as they are?
- That we are present?
- That we are free from the past and projection?
Why do we choose suffering over sanity and freedom? (please, no quaint answers) Obviously our suffering must be the lessor of two evils? This predicament is only obvious when we finally see that we cannot “do” our way out of our suffering.
Only the Past Can Hurt Me
Over the past 3 years, I have been inquiring into pain. What exactly is pain? Not physical pain, but the emotional, psychic or spiritual angst that seems to be so prevalent in the human condition. As yet, I have not arrived at a conclusion, but I am currently pondering two interesting elements.
- The experience of this type of pain is always alleviated by a state of presence – leading me to agree with what I have read – “suffering is separation from Being.”
- Only the past can hurt me. I notice when I am in pain or a state of suffering, the past is always in play.
The Wound Will Never Heal, the Hole Can’t be Filled
Many people suffer with wounding and trauma from childhood. We carry an inner-child or soul child with a deep wound or deficiency and have hopes of finding what is need to heal this child and fill that gaping hole or void. But the truth is this – nothing will ever fill that void and heal that child because that child is an identity trapped in the past and the hole or deficiency is an integral part of the identity. In fact, the hole is the central component of the identity. If the hole goes, the identity goes – that suffering child will dissolve along with its need for love, intelligence, value, acceptance – whatever. Sounds good except we are very attached to that child and getting what it wants.
The Real Will Disappear You
When my best friend died, I learned something about why I hold on so dearly to my issues and suffering – the real will disappear us. Whereas, suffering is a great organizing dynamic for the ego identity.
Grieving is an endless abyss that amazed me each day with how it would bring more depth to my suffering. As I became curious about this, I realized that the grieving was reflecting the depth of love. As I began to focus on the love instead of the loss, I began to disappear. Staying with the real will dissolve everything except the real – in this case love – all that remains is love. Even the loving person disappears.
Affect – The Great Organizing Force
I think it was Kohut that introduced the notion of affective nuclei. One way the mind organizes experience is to file and reference experience according to the affective component. No wonder we sit on a freight-train load of anger, guilt, resentment, hatred, loneliness, and etc. No wonder the now is so susceptible to the past taking over. Our capacities for feeling, sensitivity, impressionability and knowing through being are a two-edged sword.
No Conclusion, Only Continuing Inquiry
These are a few of my thoughts and curiosities around the notion of inquiry and why some use the notion of inquiry as an explanation for seeking something else. We all seek wholeness and what is right for us. I am not of the opinion that inquiry as a central practice is the right fit for everyone, I’m just curious about how people really see it.
Items of Interest
Links of Interest
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Comments
2 responses to “Misunderstanding Inquiry”
John, I am blown away by this post. Very useful to me in my own process to have this fresh take on such issues.
To one of your points: One friend of mine who left the work several years ago went to work with a spiritual teacher functioning on his own (= not having trained other teachers) who offers what seems to me a much simpler take on presence and stepping beyond one’s old identities. One of her objections to the DA was its many metaphorical/literal descriptions of elements of essence using for instance color, which as she angrily said, “I’ve never seen!” Another was the many DA books using what I call discriminating intelligence and a grasp of the many shades of human experience along this path. There were strong overtones of what seemed to me outrage at narcissistic insult in her angry rejection of the DA, including what looked like a sense of being intellectually surpassed by the head elements of the work. Three others I’ve known who have left the DA showed a similar pattern.
I’m sad to see my friend still suffering actively from a pervasive sense of emptiness, frailty, fear, and self-devaluation, while continuing to grasp for old object-relations and outworn identities. Her moments of transcendence experienced with this other teacher never seem to translate into the the ever-strengthening presence and, yes, developing capacities in the world which I see in my Ridhwan friends. Even though we all of course still cycle through these old structures, the cycles seem to me way shorter and more fruitful in terms of learning.
So yeah, I am partly looking at the instrumental benefits of this work! But I also find it lets me off absolutely none of the challenges and sufferings of life, in fact rubs my nose in them more often than not. So that leaves only the love of it, my personal affinity and sense of its deep and far-reaching meaning.
thanks again, John–
Kathy
Kathy
I was up most of the night with where I am on object relations and inquiry = it seems to be an issue of space versus structure. I notice that I have a growing tendency or impulse to move toward space instead of engaging specific object relations.
This is not a rejection of the object relation or even a lack of interest in the content or history, but rather a movement toward not leaving the ground of being. It seems the pattern is shifting from working through something toward presence to remaining in presence and engaging from there.
From this perspective, I am noticing the endless line of things that want to engage me and pull me from space and presence. There is a lot of drag on me from them individually and collectively to remain in a structured state.
Space seems to be asserting itself these days