Tag: Inquiry

• April 15, 2025

  Self-inquiry And This Divine Comedy

  Let’s really try to understand Ramana Maharshi’s teaching on self-inquiry. Why does he insist, second only to sacred silence (mauna), that it’s the next highest teaching? Consider the matter this way: In order for there to be a sense that I am experiencing such and such, there really has to be “an I” that’s playing…
• July 26, 2013

  Cultivating Discipline Lightly: A Weeklong Course at Kaos Pilots

  ‘Cultivating Discipline Lightly’ is a weeklong course running during the second week of September 2013 at Kaos Pilots in Aarhus, Denmark. This course offering grew out of the need for Kaos Pilots students, who will be on their own during their final year as they work on their social business project, to learn how to…
• May 22, 2013

  ‘I don’t know… Let’s find out.’

  Earlier this week, one conversation partner asked me to give him a better account of the art of inquiry. I replied that a certain genre of discourse would arise and would be suitable for a certain age. Panegyric and encomia would arise during, and be suitable for, a heroic age, since the poet’s job would…
• May 3, 2013

  How the art of philosophical inquiry leads to self-knowledge: A schema

  A philosophical inquiry aims at a desideratum. That desideratum is announced or implied in the statement: ‘This is it!’ The ‘this is it’ is the conclusion of the inquiry and the end of the philosophical conversation. The diagram below seeks to shed some light on this moment of self-knowledge. What distinguishes self-knowledge from other modes…
• April 13, 2013

  The magical coat room

  You hand the man your ticket but either the ticket, which looks pretty ratty, coincides with some other performance, or else its matching partner to this performance is nowhere to be found. Either way, your coat is gone and the coat check man has no recollection of having seen the coat you describe. Try as…