Curiosity

2015-01-22

In the online group today we each gave our own understanding of the reasoning process. One person started with a question, another with “first principles”, and another through feeling. However, one of our online participants said he often started with ‘curiosity’, and this curiosity was located in the emotional center.

I found this approach to be quite interesting, especially since I’m quite sure that I would never have come up with this idea myself. Curiosity also seems to have an odd if not unique characteristic of not being ‘goal oriented’. Most reasoning processes seem to come out of needing to solve a problem, deal with a situation, arrive at some known destination, or achieve some aim. Curiosity is largely an end in itself.

That doesn’t mean that there is no outcome or benefit from reasoning through curiosity. After considering it, I’ve come to see that with the relative freedom that curiosity affords, our sub-conscious and/or our higher selves… or even the so-called higher powers… have a greater range of freedom to lead us toward an understanding or realization that only in hindsight reveals its purpose for arising. Or maybe, just maybe, curiosity, even when used as an approach to reasoning, really is an end in itself.

But it’s not just in the possibilities for a point of focus that curiosity holds great freedom. During the reasoning process itself, the approach of curiosity seems to have a greater range of exploration, creativity, humor, space for contemplation and several other quite joyous possibilities that often get shoved aside in more goal oriented approaches.

Since I’m a newbie at using this method, perhaps there are others who can comment below to expand our understanding of curiosity as an approach to reasoning.

Comments

Melinda's picture

Submitted by Melinda on Thu, 2015-01-22 11:01.

My immediate response is - along the lines of my recent post - that I've come to the conclusion that reasoning needs separation, it needs a state in which I can observe myself to some degree. Curiosity strikes me as something that provides this kind of separation. Curiosity is what makes me want to see and find out things about an object. It is different from identification, since it carries a sense that the object needs to be discovered, i.e. it is "other" in some way. Curiosity initiates processes that open and unfold, identification processes that implode. I would say that I wouldn't be able to do any reasoning about my processes if I weren't to some degree curious. Maybe the reasoning processes initiated by curiosity could be seen as triads that start with the reconciling element? (I haven't really reasoned about this).

JohnH's picture

Submitted by JohnH on Thu, 2015-01-22 15:41.

I hadn't thought about curiosity as carrying the reconciling force, but the moment you mentioned it I could see that it most likely does. So in terms of the triads that are initiated by the reconciling force, Order and Freedom, what do you think is happening here?

And by the way, I think you can let go of this "I can't use my intellectual center." refrain.

Melinda's picture

Submitted by Melinda on Thu, 2015-01-22 17:53.

I guess I'll have to use my intellectual center for that ;-)

I'm holding on to your question. More later.

Melinda's picture

Submitted by Melinda on Thu, 2015-01-22 17:53.

do you erase a comment?

JohnH's picture

Submitted by JohnH on Sat, 2015-01-24 15:55.

Generally one can't delete (erase) a comment, even one's own, because to do so would delete all of the replies to that comment from others. However, a simple request to the all-powerful keeper of the tradition, or his humble servant (that be me), will do the trick.

Or... we can extend that option to everyone, and hope that nothing useful gets trashed.

JohnG's picture

Submitted by JohnG on Thu, 2015-01-22 22:11.

Well, just regurgitating what I've recently read, in both books on the 'ladies of the rope' accounts, I was taken aback at how Gurdjieff would rake them over the coals without mercy whenever they spoke from their 'famous curiosity' as if it was a sign of emptiness. I was taken aback because I've always thought of curiosity as a sign of initiative towards any subject.

JohnH's picture

Submitted by JohnH on Sat, 2015-01-24 15:50.

Gurdjieff had a very active curiosity which he documents in a variety of places. He even enshrines it in the 5 obligolnian strivings. "To know ever more about the laws of world creation...".  But there is a different kind of curiosity, what we might call "egoic curiosity". This he roundly criticized.

I think if you interrogate your experience, you'll be able to get a taste of the difference. And that's not to say that these are the only two kinds of curiosity.

Submitted by Giovanni Mastrangelo on Tue, 2015-01-27 08:51.

 

Let's go back for a moment to the usual parking-lot, an example set by John H. some times ago, which started a reasoning process in me which is still going on. Suppose that to reach the car means 15 minutes of mechanical thinking, probabily identifying with my thoughts, lack of emotions related to the present moment, automatic movements, daydreaming and so on. In one word: sleep. My efforts to come out of that sleep, involve curiosity. In some given moments, can intentional curiosity become an internal shock that starts a process which takes me back to a certain level of presence? I think of a particular kind of curiosity which is not predetermined. Usually curiosity in adults arises mecanichally in different areas that suite different types. I have never been courious of cars for example, never really liked them, so the parking lot turns out to be a real problem for me, but if my aim is to be curious intentionally, I have to open myself to the outside world in that moment and find a subject for my couriosity. Light, passersbys, buildings, patterns on the pavement. As children I bet we have all played that game that makes us jump over the lines of the sidewalk. Isn't that a primitive but effective way of reasoning? At a childs' level that game makes us reasoning with the moving and emotional centers without apparent effort. In other words we adapt to a dull situation (our parents are dragging us to the car and we escape negativity with a very funny and amusing game - children's natural talent?).

Curiosity can become an attitude in my adult self, a choice, at times an exercise. If I am able to take the dull moment as an allarm, I discover that I almost always have a choice: I can go to sleep for fifteen minutes or I can direct my attention to something in particular while walking to the car, trying to divide my attention. Curiosity, in this case, has for me a few similarities with the Secret Impulse of Wish, even before I focus my attention on something in particular, whatever it might be. Let's leave now from the parking lot and try to think of somwherelse in our lives. Not necesserely a geographical place, it could be a state, or a period of time in my life, and I see for myself that curiosity has helped me a lot to stay alive despite the many chances of being taken by negativity and it's mechanical processes. Of course there are risks: Couriosity can become an obsession, but if I recognise the allarm call in time and decide each and every time to use it intentionally, it can help me to be more awake. The centers involved in this process are for me certainly 2: intellectual and emotional. At times and in some situation the moving/instinctive center join in as well.