If you expect inquiry to prove something, you’re going to be disappointed.
Let me show you with the example of inquiry into the belief that I am in a body.
Have a look right now. Slowly scan up and down what you believe to be your body. Take your time for this. Look all over.
All you notice is a variety of sensations and perceptions. Pressure, warmth, tension, coolness, tingling, vibration, and the visual impressions of whatever you’re seeing: colors and shapes. Auditory impressions too, like the sound of air in the nostrils.
But you don’t ever find a thing called “body.” We find perceptions. We mentally add the thought “body” to these impressions. In direct inquiry, no body is found.
Of course, “body” continues to exist as a concept — a super useful word to communicate, but not a thing in itself. It’s a useful mental representation, a handy mental map.
If you don’t inquire directly but only think about it, you don’t notice direct experience, but only look to your learned, internalized map OF experience.
You never explore the actual territory. You may think about what the body really is. You may think about whether there is ever a direct experience of the body. You may think about possible sensations, the idea of exploring the territory, but you never leave the map.
And if you expect inquiry to prove that there is no body, you expect proof to show up on that mental map!
That’s like a hiker saying there’s no proof of a river here because it’s not drawn on the map they’re holding, while they’re standing in the middle of it!
If you’re open to noticing what’s actually present beyond the map of conditioned concepts you’ve internalized, then the insight can occur that there is no body in direct experience. There’s a body on the map but not in the actual territory.
And then the insight may naturally occur: How can I be living inside something that only exists as a thought?
(And this is never denying that there are very real sensations! It’s not denying experience at all, only our learned representation of that experience.)
We believe that proof of reality must mentally makes sense to us, it needs to make sense on our map. But what we’re noticing is not even on the map!
Inquiry is noticing the territory of what actually is. It won’t make sense to the mind because the mind is stuck in the map.
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