So people often ask me what is inquiry and there are so many ways to describe what it is that I often get a little lost.
So I want to talk about it in a number of different ways and hopefully each of them will give you some sense of what this is and why it might be both valuable and important for you.
So last year over the summer I was on holiday on the beach with some friends and one of my friends was talking about his new hobby which is scuba diving and it was it was so wonderful to watch him talk about it.
He lit up like a Christmas tree sort of his excitement and his delight and his joy in what he'd found in scuba diving and he spoke about how it's like entering just a whole new universe a world that you you could never even have imagined right this world of these miraculous colors and these beautiful exotic life forms that swim around and all the different kinds of places you can find yourself like in a coral reef or in a kelp forest creatures like sharks or you know tiny beautiful colored miraculous little creatures that are right there right and it's a living world that you're in right you're not it's not like a picture or an imagination that's palpable and right there and vivid and 3d and all around you and as he was talking about this I sitting there thinking oh my goodness that's exactly what inquiry is for me and the only difference is that with inquiry we're not going swimming in the outer world right in the outer ocean we're diving into the ocean of the inner world we're getting into our very own consciousness to discover what is actually there what's going on there and it turns out that in a world of our consciousness can be felt and touched and known and experienced in every bit as tangible and palpable away as swimming in in a beautiful coral reef right the inner world is not just imagination not just ideas and thoughts and fleeting emotions but it is something that we can vividly experience and explore and that as we do so it yields up all kinds of riches and secrets as human beings we're somehow usually more focused on the outer world right we're more aware of the circumstances of our lives of the projects that we're engaged in or the people and the relationships and the connections that we have and we sell them or at least much less tend to really notice how all of that everything that's going on in our lives is really driven by what's happening inside us right by our thoughts our feelings our emotions our sensations that's one level on but actually if you look even deeper than that there are all kinds of forces inside us that drive us to connect or drive us to want to do things or to actualize ourselves in certain ways or to survive or to make ourselves secure so there's all kinds of drives and impulses and qualities of our nature that are playing out in our lives right so to dive into the inner world is to begin to explore those forces those things that are going in inside you that are actually you right that really are you not just what's happening around you but the you that is engaging in all of those circumstances the you that is living in your life so with inquiry we get interested in that right we begin to find out what actually is that and of course we discover literally literally a whole universe a whole inner ocean and with all kinds of creatures and from raging sharks all the way through to miraculous wondrous coral reefs things like that so really it's it's an adventure of discovery and the discovery what makes the discovery is so rich and so exciting is what you're discovering is even more exciting than discovering something out there you're discovering you you're discovering these new possibilities and new potentials that are actually your own nature your own potential that can then live in your life in ways that you may never even have imagined before right so this is really one way to think about the journey of inquiry
