Community > Curious Skepticism
Curious Skepticism
“The hallmark of curiosity is honesty. A desire for social status, intellectual or spiritual authority, or wanting to be certain and right, can all get in its way.”
Evolving Ground encourages both curiosity and skepticism.
These are combined in curious skepticism—an attitude towards understanding. Curious skepticism assumes there can be no dogmatic certainty. Evolving Ground yogis tend not to accept truth on the basis of authority or revelation.
Curious skepticism welcomes disagreement and the expression of doubt.
Skepticism
In Evolving Ground, we aim to understand and transform our experience and our interactions. Traditional religions often go beyond our immediate situations to make dubious global claims about realms elsewhere such as heavens and hells; details of philosophical concepts such as emptiness; or metaphysical issues such as the relationship between minds and bodies. In Evolving Ground, we generally set these ideas aside as largely unresolvable, and irrelevant to our practice. Occasionally we explore them to understand the history and development of particular methods.
“Skepticism” can mean a dogmatic rejection of someone else’s dogmatic claims. Instead, we advocate unwillingness to accept claims without good enough reason. That kind of skepticism is compatible with curiosity: “does this particular theory of emptiness have concrete implications for my meditation practice?”
Curious skepticism recognizes the difficulty in establishing objective facts about unusual subjective experiences. From verbal descriptions, it is impossible to know for certain whether two people’s meditation experiences are “the same.” However, it is possible to generalize personal experiences by describing, comparing, and contrasting, to reach a shared understanding about what a type of experience is like. In Evolving Ground we use word clusters to describe specific, shared experiences in the landscape of perception. For example, we find that there is an experience we call “spacious presence” which is reliable, clear, vivid, bright, and vast.
We can know types of spiritual experience and become familiar with them, but it is impossible to say with certainty that they have any metaphysical meaning—that is, any independent existence outside of human experience. Skepticism rejects leaps from subjective experience to objective reality: “I experienced the presence of God, therefore God exists.” Feeling certainty does not imply irrefutable knowledge.
Curiosity
Curiosity is open-ended. It avoids rigid, predetermined answers. It begins with what is unknown and goes exploring, delighting in the unexpected and enjoying the familiar. The hallmark of curiosity is honesty. A desire for social status, intellectual or spiritual authority, or wanting to be certain and right, can all get in its way.
When the knowledge held by a community becomes fixed into a realm of unchanging certainty, represented by spiritual gate-keepers, the honesty of fresh inquiry surrenders to convention. “Stock” answers—which sound the same whoever is responding—are a sign that curiosity has been channeled into predictable outcomes. “Stock” questions—which sound the same whoever is asking—are well known, often philosophical questions that crop up across many meditation contexts (for example “who is the I that is watching?”) Instead, asking questions that arise from your own meditation keeps your practice relevant to your life.
The same question might arise multiple times, but the answer may vary according to the questioner’s experience and their frame of reference. Finding a response that speaks to the person asking is a way to keep your own curiosity alive. “I don’t know…” and “in my experience…” are valuable responses, from teachers, mentors, peers, and friends, in any circumstances.
We suggest finding ways to describe your experience in relation to an individual, a practice, or a system, rather than being subsumed by a system, adopting its language and presentation verbatim. It’s also okay here to express doubt with regard to the claims of any method or system.
Curiosity gives rise to wonder: to be curious is to inquire, to want to find out, and to learn how things are. Wonder and discovery both rely on comfort with uncertainty. Wonder is the capacity to rest in appreciation without knowing.
Openness and Precision
Curious skepticism is comfortable with not-knowing and with incomplete understanding.
Skepticism without curiosity can become sharp, closed, and aggressive. Default skepticism without openness might reject methods that are effective but whose principles of operation are unfamiliar. A rigid skepticism assumes that conceptual systems either fit the world or don’t. It tries to find answers to well-defined questions, in terms of fixed systems; to locate the missing pieces of a puzzle that fits a perfectly knowable world.
Bringing curiosity to skepticism changes the emphasis from universal truth-seeking to context-driven understanding. You can regard another person’s metaphysical beliefs as a useful method without worrying whether they are true or false. You can personally engage with a traditional, ritualistic, or mystical world with sincerity, without needing to believe in its eternal, metaphysical reality. What matters is whether engaging with a method brings about personal change.
Curiosity without skepticism is imprecise, naïve, and ineffectual. Lapsing into wonder without attention to practicalities might waste time and lead to mediocre results. Willingness to believe without “understanding how” can lead to fooling yourself that something is working when it isn’t.
Bringing skepticism to curiosity channels the energy of unbounded enthusiasm towards practical results. You can judge which methods are most personally applicable and reject those that don’t fit. You can trust your capacity to discern when something feels off. You can articulate reasons to question dubious claims. What matters is integrity and honesty in communication.
Experimenting
In eG we encourage stepping into the unknown, with care and support, especially when you feel confident in one area and less familiar with another. It’s fine to experiment with more skepticism, or more curiosity, and to learn from others how to do that.
Meditation and other spiritual practices are explorations of unknown experiential territory. They require diligent investigation and reflection. The Happy Yogis community is a place to carry out such explorations and to share practice experience. We welcome questions about methods for fine-tuning practice and expanding repertoires. We encourage questions about experience to learn what else is possible, and to find words that fit personal understanding.
Being disputatious or contentious is not synonymous with skepticism. Argument for its own sake is a move away from authentic expression. It will not make you more alert and discerning. So we suggest intelligent skepticism, staying in touch with what you actually think and feel; speaking sincerely from your current understanding. Slipping into an automatically argumentative stance, whatever the context, is self-limiting—you miss a whole world of experience when you forget to hear and respond honestly.
Skeptical questions test understanding. They ask for clarification and precision:
They might sound like…
“How do you know… /how could I know that…?”
“Could you say more about…?”
“In what way is…?”
“How does… function?”
“I thought that… but you said… this seems like a contradiction?”
The expression of curiosity should be sensitive to context. It could take into account the atmosphere in the room, the relative openness of others, the emotional dynamic, the purpose of the conversation, and practical constraints such as group numbers and time. The spirit of the question comes through in the tone: “How do you know… ?” for example, can be asked with interested curiosity, or defensive aggression.
Curious questions are often about the texture of others’ experience:
“Could you describe… more?”
“How does that feel?”
“I don’t understand what you meant… am I missing something?”
“What’s the most important aspect of this for you?”
“Is this a familiar experience?”
Curious skepticism combines openness with precision. When both are present, the conversation is alive and playful: it can be deep, meandering, philosophical, or practical—and it is almost always unpredictable and interesting!
Further reading
This page about open-ended curiosity describes how confused attitudes to mystery lead to denying or fixating ignorance.
Next Community Page: Expressing Doubt