As humans, we likely have a range of experience, some pleasant, some not. Chances are, we experience more unpleasantness than we like. If we are particularly unlucky, the unpleasant can come to dominate our lives.
There are various approaches available to help shift this balance, e.g. talking therapies, medications and more.
In this article, I want to present a new one: inquiry. Drawing on ancient Buddhist practices and supported by modern neuroscientific theories, the practice of inquiry can be particularly effective at influencing how we experience life.
This practice is central to the Odoki Method. We could say the Method involves us learning how to use Inquiry effectively.
But what does inquiry involve exactly?
Let’s start with an image. Imagine you’re in a room. It is pitch black. You need to find something. Perhaps your keys, to unlock the door to leave. How might you go about finding them? Likely we will fumble about with our hands. As we do this, we begin to build a mental model of the room we are in. There is a table here, a chair there. What was once a blank, black nothingness, slowly starts to take a shape. As we feel our way around, and as our mental model develops, we can begin to reason more, could the keys be on the table? Or under the table? Where is the door? Is there a light switch next to the door? Without the mental model, finding our keys would likely take a lot longer.
Consider another scenario. We know there are two rooms in this building. We have been in, and seen both. But this time it is dark. We are told we are in one, but we are actually in another. We start to move around this room with assumptions about what is there that don’t apply. We start to bump into things. Two things might happen here. Either we continue to bump into things, or we accept the evidence - we realise we are in the other room.
A little neuroscience might help us unpack these imaginary scenarios.
According to the neuroscientific theory of Predictive Processing, our experience is made up of an interplay between prior experience and sensory data. Sometimes, we can place a greater weight on prior experience, which can lead to us dismissing sensory data, or can lead to us not even acquiring the data in the first place (no point looking if I know what I will find).
This process generally works well in the visual field, where we can validate our experience easily with others: “is this a chair?”
However, when it comes to internal experience, the chance of accepting invalid prior experience over the sensory is higher. And when this happens, we typically suffer for it.
This is where inquiry comes in. Inquiry is a tool that helps us redress this balance. We guide our attention into our inner sensory experience, without judgement, paying attention to what we can actually feel rather than what we assume to be there.
We could say that, through this practice, we are increasing the weighting we apply to sensory experience, increasing the chance we will believe it over our expectations.
But why do this? What value does increased internal sensory sensitivity give us?
It turns out that much of what we value is experienced physically - our emotional life for example.
If we dig deeper into the neuroscience of emotion, we start to find that emotions are a part of an amazing way that the brain summaries sensory experience. This means that paying attention to sensory experience can influence our emotions. In fact, it can totally change them. And this is where the Inquiry practice comes in. By learning how to give our attention to our direct sensory experience, we feed our brains a richer stream of information. Sometimes, the summaries we have been operating with turn out to be incorrect. Thus, new ones form. These new ones are often much less painful than their predecessors, which is no bad thing!
Having established the basic skill of non-judgemental internal inquiry, another possibility opens up. The simple act of inquiring can change a lot of things for an individual. However, there are some places where the human mind tends not to go - particularly relating to our own sense of ourselves and who we are. These are taken as true - not worthy of questioning. At this point, another person, acting as a guide, can direct attention to a sequence of inquiries. We could call this particular paired practice “direct pointing”. The inquiry process is much the same, but the subject of the inquiry is different. And it is in this process that true long lasting change can occur - particular changes that lead to a deep wellbeing, as the inquiries deepen, leading to a wellbeing that is increasingly independent of external circumstance.