Curiosity

September 26, 2021 1 By Lance Kelly

Many people are addictively curious about things in the world. They enjoy flitting from one thing to another, rarely absorbing any particular subject with depth. In the search for spiritual knowledge, curious men or women dip into one teaching after another and say they are receptive to the truth wherever they read or hear it. However, the minds of such people frequently become cluttered with conflicting fragments of knowledge which are often recited without having lived that truth in their own experience. Such people tend to have an answer for everything – but only at an intellectual level of mind. Consequently they have to defend what they know by quoting other masters and gurus to substantiate the shaky ground of their own assumptions.

To be inquisitive is not the same as being curious. To be curious is to skim over the surface of something without giving time and effort to absorb the idea; to be inquisitive is to have sufficient pause to apply oneself wholeheartedly to the subject matter. Animals, both domestic and in the wild, are naturally inquisitive of their environment. This is an innate expression of their innocence and instinctual intelligence, which is beautiful to behold. Young children similarly display the same character traits until the attachment to emotional experience distorts and corrupts the spontaneity of their actions.

Curious people tend to flit from one lover to the next, or they give up on love altogether preferring the mental stimulation engendered through discussion with others. They gain satisfaction from their apparent impartiality, which reinforces the ground of the emotional self. The realisation of God at any level of the psyche is not possible for the curious of mind. Curiosity, relative to self-knowledge, is an emotional impulse of fear – the feeling of missing out on knowing something which will give power to manipulate others.

The original meaning of curiosity was ‘care’ and, further back, ‘grief’. A curious person can give the impression of being genuinely concerned for others; but this usually masks their insatiable appetite for news and gossip concerning people’s lives. Unable to confront the grief of their own psychic self, they disperse their rampant curiosity through multiple outlets – which eases the inner pressure as long as they can keep busy. It’s impossible for the curious to remain still and refrain from any mental activity for long. A spiritual man or woman may indeed have interests and take pleasure in different things without being attached to what they do. They have learnt not to be curious about that which doesn’t concern them. They are responsible for life and love, no longer looking to convince others or prove what they’ve realised as the truth of their lives.