Is your house burning?

Photo: Siva’s thiurd eye which turnes everything it looks upon into ashes. By Barbie Robinson

This was J Krishnamurti’s famous question about the nature of inquiry. It signals the urgency that is at the heart of an inquiry of unconditional freedom.

For many of us, spiritual practice is a parallel stream that flows alongside all the other activities we have to undertake like earning a living, taking care of families and all the other roles we are required to perform. We may also have a number of spiritual practices we undertake, each of them targeting a particular aspiration in us whether it is about relaxation, acquisition, interest or escape.

And then are some of us whose houses are burning. We do not even know why it's burning because it has nothing to do with psychology, success and things we already know. But we feel as if dying without turning towards the burning would be the worst thing that could befall us.

Turning towards that “I don’t know why I am yearning” is when a practice becomes an inquiry. An inquiry is unconditional freedom. It is not about answering that yearning, it is about freedom from all answers. And that is the full potential of this dance.

Of course we can encounter the dance in any way we desire. And in all ways it brings insight, including about the distance between us and the sensation of our house burning. And there is much in that space that is also a teaching.

But these times in the consciousness of the world are not for walking on egg shells about the nature of an inquiry of unconditional freedom. We have tamed the ferocity of this inquiry to make it palatable, but in doing so we lose its very reason for existence—to make us unconditionally free. And here we are in these times where bypassing inquiry has created a forgetting of what it is to hold passion and urgency in the body without any care of its external affirmation or solution.

And so I feel impelled to share these words today. Radical insight is not possible with what we already know, no matter how authoritative the source of that knowing. For unconditional freedom, inquiry itself has to be completely free of prescription.

Ancient dance is the inquiry in freedom, the very movement of which is unconditional freedom. It is not a method, a technique or “knowledge”. It is an encounter with the unknown and the uknowable which compassionately reveals what constrains our liberation, not as a doctrine but as our own intimate insight.

Truth is an intimate sensation and not somebody else’s theory. And when we taste that Truth through our own bodies, we need no Guru or doctrine to liberate us!