Yesterday, on the flight from Detroit to San Francisco, I read Geneen Roth’s new book – Lost and Found – Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money. The book is an eye-opening exploration of how the past and our unconscious attitudes about money can wreak havoc in our lives.
Geneen pulls no punches in the book. From “grovelling for dollars” to “Madoff rage” to the “specter of homelessness,” Lost and Found is a candid revelation about what Geneen learned by losing her life’s savings in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme. The book gives us insight into Geneen Roth’s open-ended inquiry into her relationship with money, her unconscious attitudes toward money, her life habits around money, and how she has begun to free herself from it all through awareness & inquiry.
It takes a lot of courage to reveal so many personal and intimate details as Geneen has in her book. The gift of it for the reader is that we can connect with her and her experience in a real way. Lost and Found isn’t a dispassionate treatise on the effects and insights of falling victim to one of the greatest con men of all time, nor is it a tale of “woe is me.” Lost and Found is more a journey of revelation from a person responding to a “wake up call” from reality.
We are fortunate to have a person like Geneen Roth who can show us the beauty and power of bringing awareness and inquiry into all of our life.
(BTW – The magazine cover is wishful thinking, though
I hope to see Geneen Roth soon on the cover of Time!)
Two elements or dynamics that seem to have engaged my attention for sometime now are analysis and revelation, particularly in regards to their role or functioning in the process of inquiry. (Inquiry is a powerful methodology for removing the blinders of the ego-self.) Both of these dynamics, analysis and revelation, play a significant role in what I refer to these days as non-verbal inquiry.
Let’s begin with analysis or the analytical functioning of the mind and how it serves the process of inquiry and supports revelation. For most of my life, people have been telling me I am too much in my head – I even tell myself this at times! People often say I think too much, but many of those people do not understand that what is happening in me is not what is happening in them.
Often, when I am describing my experience or insights to someone, they think that I am engaged in what I call mechanical thinking – the mind is chewing its way through something, examining the details, looking in every nook and cranny. But these days, that is often not the case.
These days what is happening, more and more, is an analysis that is more synthesis than thinking. That is to say that I see more than think. The various elements , details and components of a situation or thread of inquiry just appear. The articulation of them can often appear to others like I am thinking about them, when in fact I am merely trying to express the relationships I am seeing between them and the various roles they play.
So, these days, telling me to stop thinking so much is wasted breath. It would be more on point to tell me to quit seeing so much which seems impossible because mostly what I see is not dependent on my eyes. Isn’t this part of your experience, too?
It is beyond me to explain or articulate revelation. Things are revealed – seems simple enough. What amazes me is the power and simplicity of revelation. Seeing and experiencing the affect of revelation on my mind, consciousness and experience is always surprising, amazing and fresh. “Seeing is Believing” seems to apply here.
These days I find myself engaged in a form of inquiry that is not so much a Sherlockean (I made that word up) experience, that is deductive or inductive reasoning. In fact, this form of inquiry bypasses articulation or my need to language or verbally interpret my experience. This experience of inquiry seems to be happening in an arena beyond the conceptual mind. It is more like free-falling into the depth. It feels more like open-ended revelation that is more a felt sense than seeing, hearing or conceptually understanding.
In this process, I feel the dynamism of the soul revealing itself in subtle ways. So far, my experience is that, it does me little good to think about things after returning to my normal sense and way of thinking and understanding. My mind seems unable to grasp the experience, but there is knowing and understanding – I can feel it in myself.
The result of this non-verbal inquiry is that as I live my life, I see the results of the process showing up as revelation or analysis/synthesis. My life reveals my understanding as I live it – there is nothing to apply, no burden to produce.
And that is about as much as I can say about non-verbal inquiry at the moment. What say you?
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.
Yesterday, on the flight from Detroit to San Francisco, I read Geneen Roth’s new book – Lost and Found – Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money. The book is an eye-opening exploration of how the past and our unconscious attitudes about money can wreak havoc in our lives.
Often, when I am describing my experience or insights to someone, they think that I am engaged in what I call mechanical thinking – the mind is chewing its way through something, examining the details, looking in every nook and cranny. But these days, that is often not the case.
A couple of months ago, I was talking to a friend., who is also a teacher of the 
Inquiry is susceptible to mental process dominating the exploration –
Affect – The Great Organizing Force