Three approaches to spiritual inquiry

Individual lived inquiry  By individual lived inquiry I mean simply the active, innovative and examined life, which seeks both to transform and understand more deeply the human condition. The examined life, as I construe it, involves four basic strands: • Opening to the immediate revelation, here and now, of being-in-a-world, of participating in the sheer presence of being, and its manifold powers and presences on different levels. • Opening to impulses to creative action and exploration, to their felt sense of fit within their total context, balancing the claims of the inner life and the outer life, and of the personal, the cultural and the planetary. • Exercising a finely-tuned discrimination about both these kinds of opening. • Engaging in dialogue and active co-operation with others on a similar path. The bottom line of all this is that, for the examined life, revelation is here and now; and spiritual authority is within. Such authority is relative to its context and unfolding, never final, and always open to spiritual revision. A self-generating spiritual culture An increasing number of spiritually-minded people are currently busy with their own lived inquiry, and are seeking open and constructive dialogue about it. I call this social phenomenon a newly emerging and self-generating spiritual culture. It is a loose, informal network of individuals and groups who are creating their own spiritual path from a diversity of ancient and modern sources. It involves a growing and significant minority of people across the planet. My sense of it is that there are three interrelated criteria which, applying in varying degrees to any one individual, identify these people: • They affirm their own original relation to the presence of creation, find spiritual authority within and do not project it outward onto teachers, traditions or texts. • They are alert to the hazards of defensive and offensive spirituality, in which unprocessed emotional distress distorts spiritual development, either by denying parts of one's nature, or by making inflated claims in order to manipulate others. • They are open to genuine dialogue about spiritual beliefs and to collaborative decision-making about spiritual practices undertaken together. Co-operative inquiry In a co-operative inquiry a group of people come together and devise a do-it-ourselves inquiry into experiences of their own extended and deepened reality, making sense of it according to their own lights. Co-operative inquiry is a very simple idea, however challenging it is to practise. It is just two or more people researching a topic through their own experience of it, using a series of cycles in which they move between this experience and reflecting together on it. It is persons in reciprocal relation using the full range of their sensibilities to inquire together into any aspect of the human condition with which an open body-mind can engage. In the inquiry cycles, the inquirers are moving between fours ways of knowing: • They conceptually define a topic for their inquiry and devise a method of exploring it in action. • They practically apply that method in their own actions. • In so doing they engage experientially with the domain of practice. • Then they review this phase of action and experience, first grasping the whole pattern of it intuitively, then appraising it conceptually, re-evaluating their starting topic in the light of it, and planning another and modified phase of action and experience in order to deepen their knowing. And so the process goes on for several cycles of inquiry, so that these four ways of knowing become more comprehensively engaged with the topic and its domain, and more congruent with each other, both within each inquirer and, with due allowance for individual perspectives, within the group as a whole. From: John Heron, Sacred Science: Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle, Ross-on-Wye, PCCS Books, 1998