Curiosity and Inquiry are Two Sides of the Same Coin
What is curiosity?
Curiosity is a state of active interest in knowing and understanding that exists at the interface where knowing and not-knowing meet. While basic curiosity may be simply seeking information, curiosity and inquiry as a force for transformation is proactive participatory observation and involvement in immediate experience – questioning with no moving parts.
Curiosity is the impulse towards better cognition. – William James (1899)
Curiosity reflects a gap, an information gap, a knowledge gap, an incongruity of perception or understanding, or, more fundamentally, a wide-open availability to revelation.
Curiosity’s motivation arises from knowing what/that we don’t know.
Can curiosity be taught?
Curiosity is a quality of our being that cannot be taught but can be illuminated, nurtured, supported, engaged, and lived.
“Why do I get all my best ideas while shaving,” Einstein wondered.
Psychological Theories of Curiosity
- Drive Theory – innate urge must be satisfied
- Incongruity Theory – need to make sense of incongruity
Two Classifications of Curiosity
State – curiosity in response to external stimulus
Trait – innate curiosity as part of our inner being
Five Dimensions of Curiosity
- Joyous exploration – enjoyment of learning
- Deprivation sensitivity – problem solving
- Stress tolerance – need for certainty
- Social curiosity – why are people the way they are
- Thrill-seeking – seeking aliveness and adventure
What is Inquiry?
Inquiry is a process of cognitive and experiential questioning following a thread of interest.
Inquiry is a heuristic process of discovery that is driven not by answers but by dwelling in the deep questions that arise in our lives. In this sense, it is an open, rather than closed, form of learning: open to the truth that can reveal itself directly from authentic questioning. Inquiry requires living in the spirit of openness, curiosity, and respect, increasingly mindful of what it is in us that may limit or restrict our willingness to stay with our experience as it unfolds. Deep spiritual inquiry and open-hearted sharing require an atmosphere of trust. Deep learning, a vibrant, unfolding spiritual journey, and spiritual transformation are best facilitated not by the top-down provision of dogmatic, final answers but by dwelling together in the fundamental and deep questions that arise on the journey. – Joan Borysenko, PhD
Inquiry is the engine that transports us into the realms of revelation and discovery, while curiosity is fuel.
Inquiry is a hands-on process of discovery. When using it as part of a spiritual practice it’s as much an active noun as a verb, meaning it isn’t always a mental process of questioning. The deeper we go into inquiry, the more it becomes a process of being and revelation than asking and answering.
Inquiry is something that arises in the midst of your experience – as part of your experience, not separate from it. In other words, there is not a person here inquiring into something over there. The inquirer has to be within the field of inquiry itself. This is different from inquiry in natural science, where the object of inquiry is outside you and all that is needed is to not interfere with it. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey
Personality Types of Curiosity
- The Fascinated – joyous exploration of everything
- The Problem Solvers – need for congruency and understanding
- The Empathizers – curiosity engaged via empathy
- The Avoiders – curiosity limited by stress
What are inquiry skills?
Inquiry can be learned, but the facility for great inquiry involves more than learning the art of asking questions. We can learn, nurture, and develop inquiry skills and capacities that invite and fan the flame of curiosity, like:
- Awareness
- Focus/concentration
- Discrimination
- Sensitivity
- Openness
- Allowing
- Relaxation
Inquiry as Spiritual Practice
We can’t “know thyself” without curiosity and inquiry. “That’s just how I am” doesn’t cut it in knowing thyself. We need to be curious about HOW/I/AM, who I am, what I am, where I am, why I am, and on and on, and in and in.
Curiosity and inquiry in the service of personal growth and understanding involve active participation in working in concert with the optimizing force of reality of our true nature.
Discovery and revelation are where curiosity and inquiry meet. Understanding the dialectic between inquiry and curiosity opens the door to all the secrets of existence.
Curiosity is the bait our true nature uses to hook us, and inquiry is our true nature reeling us in.
Curiosity and inquiry are the drivers for all knowledge and innovation.
The Curiousness of Who Am I?
Who am I? It is a central inquiry practice in many spiritual schools and traditions. Who is this who inquires? Who is curious? Is there even a who involved, or is it more of a what?
Curiosity must be a bright flame to burn through ego’s defensive dullness and resistance to approach the subtlety underlying who or what am I?
This is a central thread of inquiry in Buddhism and the existential question of self / no self. When there is no self, then there must be no who. When there is no who, there is still perception, so what is perceiving if it is not a who?
Who am I? A philosophical inquiry – Amy Adkins
Inquiry Without Words
Most of us have seen curious dogs like this. And we know that other animals are curious, so curiosity runs deeper than our frontal lobe.
Inquiry does not have to be verbal. We may think we must ask questions with words, but if we do, we have confined inquiry. When we cock our head like a dog, what’s the experiential nature of that?
When young children are curious, they’re not verbalizing streams of words in their heads. They’re totally immersed in their experience, absorbed in experiential exploration and learning.
Love and Curiosity
Observing a child of three or four absorbed in curiosity and exploration, we often see joy as a major component of their inquiry. They’re happily digging a hole or picking something apart.
Curiosity can’t be taught, but inquiry can. In fact, curiosity is mostly “taught” out of us in school while our inquiry is stripped of its sense of adventure and exploration – the heart is stripped out of both.
But curiosity runs deep. It’s part of the fabric of our being, so it’s always there under the surface of our acquired dullness.
Love of truth is foundational to the Diamond Approach because there is no separation between love and truth and curiosity.
People seek something from the Diamond Approach or any spiritual path. They’re interested in truth, reality, who they are, the nature of suffering, or some other longing – they’re curious, and they’re in a state of curiosity & inquiry around life’s important questions.
One of the roles of a Diamond Approach teacher is to teach open and open-ended inquiry in an embodied, experiential learning way. Along the way, the heart comes forward, and the flame of curiosity flares up from the embers of ego existence.
The flame of the search is another element needed for the spiritual journey. We need a particular type of energy to engage and burn through the conditioning and dullness of the acquired self. This flame is none other than curiosity. It is the love of truth. It’s passion, value, and selflessness. It’s about being, not becoming.
Is Curiosity/Inquiry Suffering?
Is the desire to know an innate biological predisposition? Is the phenomenon of curiosity another case where biology gets superimposed on and conflated with human psychology?
Humans want to know all kinds of things. Is it one force or many at the root of desire and wanting?
The Buddha said, “Desire is the root of suffering.” To understand this, we need to discriminate the motivation/goal of ego desire (psychological, instinctual) and the logos of reality, the creative, manifest dynamism of life.
Ordinary inquiry is usually externally focused. This is where most inquiry begins. Spiritual and psychological inquiry bring more focus to our inner, subjective experience, but this is external from the perspective of nondual realization.
Inquiry requires the global awareness of mindfulness without identification so that you can see the entire situation you are working with. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey
Inquiry can take us from the objective (external) world through the inner (subjective) world into perceiving the nature of reality, which is more than a synthesis of external/internal and more in the realm of an in-touchness without distance, a purity of intimacy.
Inquiry will lead us beyond the considerations of self or no-self, inner or outer, into the heart of what is experience and knowing.
If we seek an answer, an insight, a certain state or experience, then we have already structured and placed limitations on our inquiry. This is neither good/bad or right/wrong. In fact, it is quite useful if you are traveling to Cleveland.
But unlocking the mystery of who and what we are and the underlying ground from which all manifestation springs requires open and open-ended inquiry.
Open and Open-Ended Inquiry
We always begin inquiry by seeing what is true in our immediate experience. This is one of the central elements of the Diamond Approach – what’s happening right now, right here, is the doorway into the depth of reality.
We start with anything. What is forefront in experience?
Inquiry usually begins divided – subject/object. There is a me (the who, the subject) having an experience with an object of experience (thought, person, memory, idea, feeling, thing, etc.). Mostly, we’re in our head looking at our experience.
It doesn’t take much attention and observation to feel/experience the gap between us and our experience. So, beginning inquiry has two main foci: discrimination and experiencing our experience because the experience of our experience is where the treasure lies.
In the beginning, open and open-ended usually require much support and guidance to discriminate the content and allow ourselves to be impacted by the fullness of our experience.
Ego reactions to spiritual inquiry:
- Vulnerability – unconscious content becomes conscious
- Mental relationships between ideas, thoughts, emotions, and other content become known
- The projection of the past onto the present arises
- Defensive resistance and tension
Awareness and Curiosity vs. Thinking and Conceptual Questioning
Our minds are relational. They are trained and conditioned to know through – this is like that. Give it a go. Try to describe anything without using words and concepts to describe it in a manner that is free of being in relationship to something else or similar to something else.
One of the great AHA! moments on the spiritual path is when we are curious, when we are the simplicity of inquiry’s nature. We are a particular kind of dynamic openness. We are perception, the action of perceiving and the perceived.
Knowing and knowledge are immediate and intimate – more felt than thought. In fact, if we pay close attention, we see that thoughts arise out of knowledge, not leading to it.
Knowing precedes and births not-knowing, and yet knowing and not-knowing are co-emergent. Not-knowing is knowing, is knowledge, and it is the invitation to revelation.
The Power of Now
We’ve read it and heard it and thought it a zillion times – we’re always simply here. We can think of the past and envision the future, but that happens here in the now, in this moment.
Perhaps one of the divisions between religion and spirituality is that one is more focused on earning a future and paying for the past, on the activity of doing to become. The other is focused more on being here, like the title of Ram Das’ classic – BE HERE NOW.
The ego and ordinary mind relate to the now as something that needs to be changed to facilitate being here now. We reject the now, this moment because we view it as lacking, not optimal. We have needs, demands, preferences, positions, and expectations.
We have one foot nailed to the floor, going in circles in an attempt to accomplish the impossible – leaving the now.
Curiosity and inquiry are the keys to the unfolding now. Diving into the now, we enter the realm of all knowledge and mystery. We engage the magical interface between the practical and the unbelievable.
Curiosity and inquiry are the bridge between the relative and the real. Embracing the fullness of this moment, the now is full-bodied, full-feeling, fully sensate, and even thoughts feel physically substantial. This draws our curiosity to an intimacy, an “in-touchness.”
Here, we are at the fulcrum where curiosity burns the candle from both ends.
The Great Chasm
Curiosity and inquiry carry us across the great divide, the gap that defies description. One moment, we are familiar to ourselves; the next, we are something radically different. We have moved from who to what and perhaps beyond.
If our curiosity is triggered around “What just happened?” with close attention, we can find a gap between this experience and that experience. The gap is a nano, nano, nanosecond of time, yet the infinity of all time.
The gap is the heart of the mystery of being and life.
Pure Questioning – Experience Questioning Itself
Pure questioning is pure openness.
As we explore (inquire) into our experience of this experience, we discover we ARE experience experiencing. We are the curiosity, the inquiry. There isn’t a me doing; there is wide-open awareness and revelation. Curiosity and open-ended inquiry, at first, seem like an invitation to revelation, but they are the effulgence of revelation.
It’s like the ouroboros feeding on itself. And yet, it is light, effervescent, bubbly – full of love, joy, and an excitation that is the very dynamism of being.
In the Thick of Inquiry
Being in the middle of one’s experience and feeling everything within it with:
- all our senses
- all our nerve ends
- feel the texture
- the temperature
- the affect
- the sensations
- the kinesthetics and pressures
- total personal contact
- complete involvement with experience and process
Inner contact with the totality of our experience means that we cannot avoid being in contact with the world, with other people, and with our life in its totality. There needs to be this overall in-touch-ness, this overall contact for inquiry to be full and meaningful. Inquiry is powerful only when there is enough input and enough information to allow the investigation to be personal. And this comes only from a direct, full contact with experience. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey
When we embody curiosity when who and what we are is curiosity, inquiry is free-falling; it is runaway revelation and realization. It is guileless, without artifice, and is the essence of freedom.
The aim of inquiry, however, is not to arrive at conclusions but to enjoy the exploration and the thrill of discovery. This discovery is the unfoldment of the soul, and expresses the soul’s love of truth and reality, which itself is the expression of Being’s love of revealing itself. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry
This article is based upon the writings of A. H. Almaas, founder of the Diamond Approach.
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