Accessing the Subtle

The world is filled with subtleties. By a subtlety, I mean something that is difficult to detect; something that requires patience, quietness, concentration, focus, and time. Noticing subtle differences between plants or a subtle change in the weather are things that the casual observer will miss, as well as someone highly focused on a goal to be accomplished. Accessing the subtle requires the absence of a specific goal; the only goal being to see what is there. The mind must be open so as not to miss what we did not expect.

Just like the physical world, our mind is filled with subtle knowing - what we often call wisdom. Our mind accumulates millions of tiny experiences each day, and they get stored somewhere, seemingly inaccessible. Yet, when we stop to sense those subtle feelings and experiences, we discover that a knowing arises. This knowing may create some conclusion we hadn't thought of until that moment. Through quieting ourselves, focusing, and remaining open, we can gain access to knowledge that the busy mind may never have known.

We have different ways of focusing. One such way is a masculine focus that concentrates on one thing, obliterating all else - we focus on accomplishing the goal, and we deliberately ignore all irrelevant information so that we are not distracted from our goal. This is unarguably a powerful and necessary kind of focus whose achievements serve us well. However, accessing the subtle requires a more feminine kind of focus - one that is still intense but diffused, aware of everything, setting nothing aside as irrelevant, yet allowing nothing to take center stage. This kind of focus keeps listening for something that we can't anticipate. We don't know the goal until we have found it. 

The characteristics we need in order to access the subtle are lack of anxiety, lack of urgency, calmness, a focusing over a wide range, a noticing of nuances, a willingness to hold any discovery lightly, and a continual watching and listening.  We scan over a situation and take in a lot of stimuli. 

We then begin digging inside for feelings that are relevant.  As the awareness of our feelings increase, we may discover a need to articulate the feelings. We need to articulate, not necessarily to another, but at least to ourselves. That forces our knowledge into a rational form that we can solidly grasp.  As long as it remains feeling, it is difficult to do anything with it; but when we can put it into a rational form, a sentence, then we can work with it.

Inquiry is a way of opening yourself and settling yourself to start to acquire subtle information about a given subject. A question seeks an answer; an inquiry is content with the question. What color is your shirt? Red. The answer is gotten, the question satisfied, and we can go on with our business. An inquiry, however, is a call to gather subtle information. It is like a suggestion, almost a hypnotic suggestion, to enter a different state of mind, a different relationship with the field of inquiry. That relationship is less about analyzing and more about observing, noticing, and learning.

The deepest questions of life cannot be answered by analysis; they are rather accessed through deep inquiry into the subtle.