Inquiry doesn’t ask you to learn more, do more, or become more.
Inquiring means looking — raw and unfiltered — straight into the heart of your experience.
For the modern consciousness connoisseur, inquiry is often associated with Ramana’s self-inquiry — asking “Who am I?” or “What am I?” or even “What is me?” And of course, the main and simple point is that you can reject all thought-based answers wholesale. Put simply, asking “Who am I?” dissolves the questioner, revealing there never was a separate I.
Many people approach it as a cumulative practice, as if so and so many hours of inquiry result in Self-realization as it’s called in Advaita.
I’d say that’s a slight misunderstanding. This might be controversial to some, but I trust you can handle some controversy. If not, remember you’re reading a piece that’s jabbing at “reality” — the whole thing is highly controversial.
I want to emphasize that I’m not rejecting the beneficial effects of regularly being still (aka meditation). Nor am I rejecting spiritual practice — do what you gotta do; I’m all for it.
What I am rejecting is the idea that you need to accumulate an indeterminate amount of hours of practice before you can recognize what you are.
Why am I rejecting this?
I could answer this in a couple of different ways, but most of them would come down to questioning your assumptions. Questioning your assumptions makes you realize that you haven’t been doing what you assumed you were doing and/or you have no clue what you’re doing (isn’t that all of us?).
What are the assumptions behind the cumulative effect of inquiry?
Space-time. For something to accumulate, there needs to be something (a container perhaps?) in which something else (spiritual prowess perhaps?) accumulates over a period of time. Is there such a thing?
Inquiry isn’t concerned with space-time. It side-steps all relative concerns and goes straight for what you really are. (For anyone yelling “spiritual bypass!” remember that you wouldn’t use a hammer to tighten a screw.) And what you really are isn’t subject to space-time, but vice-versa.
What I’m trying to say is that inquiry isn’t a practice. It’s an undomesticated, immediate in-seeing. Seeing in this way isn’t a half-measure or quarter-measure or any other incomplete measure.
When you “see” what you are, you see the whole enchilada, not just a piece of it. Incomplete seeing isn’t possible because what you’re seeing is completeness itself, and completeness can’t be chopped up.
This is the beauty of inquiry. You’re bringing the self-recognizing faculty to life. And I’m not just talking about inquiry Ramana-style. Inquiry is the act of looking at experience directly and noticing what’s actually there.
One sincere look and you’ll see a bunch of fascinating stuff.
An example: Can you find a clear line of demarcation between the seer (you), the seeing (the function), and the seen (object)? Where does any of them begin or end?
Go have a look. I’ll wait.
So the moment you open your eyes, you see there’s no separation between experiencer, experiencing, and experienced. Subject and object are not divided. This, by the way, usually doesn’t come with bells and whistles — for many seekers, the bells and whistles assumption is one of the most persistent ones.
Anyhow, everything is whole because everything is wholeness. And what that means is that there is no space left for a distinct space-time entity monkey-ing around in a separate world, though it can appear that way.
Please don’t believe this though. Take a look. Can you find this or any other entity?
Every assumption you hold about reality or yourself can be checked with inquiry. So inquiry is not a practice you should get better at (although it can seem like it) but an honest facing of the facts. And there’s not many of them going around.
When I urge you to look at your direct experience, all I’m saying is to look at what’s happening before thoughts label it.
“Look at direct experience” might sound a little more subtle than “look at this tree.” But that’s only because we’re used to being hypnotized by thinking. In fact, a tree is a perfectly fine portal for looking at experience directly. Here are two questions to guide your tree-watching endeavor:
When you’re looking at a so-called tree, what’s actually going on?
Do you need to progressively practice looking at a tree to be able to do it?
Some might say that inquiry is about stripping away falsehoods and misperceptions. Okay, sure. How about stripping away the falsehood and misperception that you need to strip away falsehoods and misperceptions?
It’s only ever the assumption(s) you bring into this that you need to leave at the door. When you come to this party without assumptions, sooner or later you’ll see all there is to see.
Some of the most devious assumptions are the ones about awakening or enlightenment. The question What is enlightenment? is a popular one and it seems to have as many answers as there are people asking it.
E.g.:
- The end of suffering — that one has probably made all our mouths and panties wet at one point.
- Knowing what you are — says everything and nothing at the same time.
- Abiding non-dual awareness — this one’s a bit technical.
- Having “me” fall away — probably a little cryptic for most.
- Being so fantastically amazingly perfect and healed that not only can nothing ever disturb you but that existence prostrates at your divine lotus feet — a tad bit flim-flam-ish if you ask me.
Some of these answers are more accurate than others, but are any of these answers actually, like, y’know, helpful?
Perhaps the best answer you can get is something along the lines of: Enlightenment is a concept that lives rent-free in your mind and you can either start charging some rent or kick the freeloader out.
I’m saying “the best” not because it’s objectively the best answer but because it invites you to forget the preconceived ideas and bring the inquiry back to non-conceptual experience.
We humans have a quirky little kink going for us. We think slapping a label on something allows us to know what that something is.
Yes, conventionally, there’s a truckload of knowledge. So many things we can know. But if we’re engaging in existential housecleaning, we must admit that all this knowledge is hearsay.
The irony is that you only need to poke at this a teeny tiny bit to notice that not only do you not know what anything is but you can’t know what anything is.
This isn’t supposed to become a form of lazy relativism, where we never again learn anything new because it’s not absolutely, ultimately true. It’s about acknowledging the limits of knowledge.
Knowledge, as in solid facts, is pretty limited. What we can know is that “something” is. That’s about it in terms of positive knowledge, and this limit applies to every imaginable and unimaginable form of sentience.
This one positive piece of knowledge has a whole bunch of implications. These implications often come as negative knowledge, as in unknowing false knowledge.
But because we believe not knowing is bad and knowledge is the antidote to ignorance, we are grasping for it as if gathering a pile of corks will enable us to plug the ocean. We look for little knowledge corks wherever we can because that’s how we try to make sense of something that ultimately can’t be made sense of.
And when we come upon spirituality, we might get all frisky — at last, something that promises final and absolute knowledge. All we’re doing is accumulating shinier corks. But no matter how spiritual your cork seems, it won’t ever plug the infinite, gaping singularity of not-knowing.
As long as we believe more knowledge is our salvation, we’ll keep chasing the end of the rainbow hoping for a pot of gold. Inquiry is like a change in position that makes the rainbow disappear. And no more rainbow means no pot of gold at the end of it.
A complex knowledge-based understanding of reality, yourself, and life will make you seem smart and people will high-five you and you might even get some groupies if your knowledge house of cards is particularly impressive. But it never amasses to more than eyes-closed abstraction.
Knowledge ends the moment you pry open those crusty eyelids and actually look. This is not as sexy as the knowledge route because it’s a private endeavor, ergo isn’t meant for approval.
Imagine you built the most intricate house of cards over decades. It’s beautiful. People weep looking at it.
Next, imagine you walk up to it and give it a good kick. Or if you’re feeling tender, just remove one card, preferably from the bottom. Either way, the castle falls.
That’s inquiry in a nutshell.
The only issue here is that card house building is kind of our shared raison d’être. While your left hand smashes it, your right hand is eagerly rebuilding it.
Now the question you probably want to ask is, how far can you take this house of cards analogy?
Thanks for asking! Let’s find out.
The house of cards you’re most familiar with is the one that represents your world and co-creates your experience of the world (e.g., if you believe people are selfish, you’ll see plenty of people screwing you over). But for many, it isn’t a representation. It is the world. Not really, of course. But that’s what is believed.
Coming to the point where you see that your house of cards isn’t the actual world is similar to realizing that looking at the dashboard of a plane telling you about the outside conditions isn’t the same as being strapped to the windshield of the flying plane.
No one claims that the dashboard is useless or that we should do without it. It’s just not what we believe it is. This one might be hard to grok, but going further into intellectual abstractions doesn’t provide us with a more accurate view of reality.
We tend to think that the more sophisticated the dashboard, the closer we get to truth, which is why we revere intellectual mastery.
But a physicist who has studied physics and mathematics for decades doesn’t know one iota more about reality than someone who has never opened the door to a school. How’s that for controversial?
Each card in our house of cards represents a piece of knowledge. Each card has the same and only function: to keep the house of cards from collapsing. We usually add a card when we notice the house wobbling. And the house starts wobbling when one card is removed — this is the little game we talked about earlier: left hand removes; right hand adds.
Most of this happens automatically. Some people do it consciously — they build the most beautiful and all-encompassing house of cards and call it a theory of everything. Sooner or later every such house topples from its own weight.
“But wait!” you exclaim. “Didn’t you create a binary here — inquiry versus knowledge, dashboard versus windshield, seeing versus thinking?”
Wow, good catch, my dear attentive reader.
Of course these contrasts can also be questioned.
Who’s the one setting up the contrast? And is all of that, including inquiry, not just another card in the house of cards?
Valid questions.
Yes, the binary is just a training wheel that can be discarded as well. Language is inherently dualistic and attacking everything I say here is fair game. All these clever abstractions are nothing but another house of cards trying to point out its own limits.
Here is the crucial plot twist: the house of cards is not the problem.
You don’t even have to pick it apart if you don’t want to. You can, in a single swoop, see that the house of cards is nothing but conceptual worldbuilding like children (or adults — who am I to judge) build worlds from Lego to inhabit and play in them.
No matter how you arrange the cards, you’ll never get any truth about reality.
You can add infinite buttons and toggles and levers and flashy lights to your plane’s dashboard, but climbing out of the cockpit and taking the first-row seat outside the plane makes all of it instantaneously irrelevant.
And all this is really wonderful news. Knowing that no combination of knowledge amounts to an overarching truth, you can have fun with the house of cards. You can build it any way you like while being unattached to its current form.
Ahhhh, what a relief. You can drop the weight of knowledge and notice what’s here in the absence of it.
Inquiry is the end of knowledge, but it’s also the beginning of knowing: the recognition that sees all knowledge as play, resting in the silent clarity of not-knowing.
So what’s left to do?
Just look.
Like really look.
No cards, no dashboard, just eyes open to what’s here.
Luka
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