Sacred Inquiry: Questions That Can Transform Your Life

In sacred inquiry the focus and direction of our attention is itself the avenue through which greater understanding and freedom are revealed.

At any moment you may need to act, decide, discriminate, make a judgment, etc. Any of these actions may seem to come from a solid self, but upon deeper investigation, any self-sense is but a temporary, changing, and fluid form of consciousness.

We meditate to realize the source of our being. And the quickest way to do that is to be still, with a curious mind and an open heart.

To call something a thing, or to give it a name, is to conceptually impose boundaries upon it where they do not actually exist. A tree does not exist independently of its environment; it is its total environment. It takes a cosmos to produce a tree—no cosmos, no tree. To say “tree” implies the entire cosmos. The same is true of you.

Stillness, in its most spontaneous and authentic sense, is a state of nonresistance. It is not stillness in the conventional sense of non-movement, but in the sense of non-interference by the ego-self.

Someone in a state of great suffering will naturally want to change their emotional state, but this is different from wanting to change your essential human self. Wanting to change your essential human self is an act of violence. Not wanting to suffer is understandable and natural, but not wanting to be you is violent. I may be overstating the case

To let inquiry show you how you have identified yourself with a whole array of ideas, beliefs, judgments, personas, and opinions takes both intention and courage. It takes courage to clearly face the false self that we have clung to and the ways that we have become addicted to approval, acknowledgment, victimhood, judgmentalism, power,

We are each an aperture through which the world knows and experiences itself. Each person embodies the infinite nature of life and consciousness within the finite form of their particular human life. Our questions are life’s questions, and our spiritual instinct toward connection and freedom are life’s deeper instincts. You and I, and the entirety

We must be willing to suspend the compulsive drive of the ego for quick and convenient answers to our deepest questions and be willing to live in the creative tension between the known and the unknown.