After twenty-five years of guiding people through inquiry, I've watched countless students struggle with what they think inquiry should be. They sit there, wrestling with their thoughts, trying to think their way to truth. And nothing really moves. Nothing opens. They're stuck in what I call "the mind that already knows" — endlessly recycling the same stories, the same conclusions, the same familiar territory.
But real inquiry? That's something entirely different. It's what happens when the heart leads and the mind follows, when our natural love for truth meets the diamond body's discriminating awareness.
When the Mind Already Knows, Nothing Happens
Let me be direct about this: most of what we call "self-reflection" isn't inquiry at all. It's mental analysis. The ordinary mind — what we might call the ego mind — approaches experience like it's solving a math problem. It categorizes, labels, compares everything to what it already knows. "Oh, this feeling again. I know what this means. This always happens when..."
"The mind is only the instrument to articulate what is the experience. So the mind of the story, the mind that already knows, can do inquiry and nothing happens."
I see this constantly. Someone will say they've been "working on" the same issue for years. They can tell you all about their patterns, their childhood, their triggers. They have a complete psychological map. But they're not actually meeting their experience — they're thinking about it. The diamond body's intelligence works completely differently.
The red Latifa — that lion-hearted aspect of our essential nature — brings a fierce love for truth that cuts through all this mental spinning. It gives us courage to actually look at what we've been avoiding, to challenge our own positions rather than defending them. When the red quality infuses our inquiry, we develop what I call discriminating awareness — the capacity to see clearly what's actually happening in this moment, not what our story tells us should be happening.
The Heart Leads, The Mind Articulates
Here's what I've observed about how real inquiry works: the heart has to be engaged first. Not the emotional heart — though that's included — but that deeper heart quality that genuinely wants to know. Even when the truth might be difficult. Even when it challenges everything we thought we knew about ourselves.
I remember working with a woman who kept saying her relationship was fine, everything was working out. But I could see her body contracting, her breath getting shallow whenever she talked about her partner. The mental story said one thing; her actual experience was saying something else entirely.
When she finally let herself feel what was actually there — the disappointment, the loneliness, even the relief of possibly being alone — her whole inquiry shifted. Suddenly the mind had something real to work with. It could articulate what was actually unfolding instead of repeating old conclusions.
"So the heart is leading and the mind is narrating, is articulating. And as in the articulation of the experience through the mind, it promotes insights and clarity, understanding."
This is how the diamond body works. The mind becomes like a scientist taking notes on an experiment in progress, one step behind what's actually emerging. It's discriminating — "This is sadness, this is relief, this is fear" — but it's not controlling the process. It's serving the direct experience, not the other way around.
The Courage to Look Where We Don't Want To
The Theory of Holes teaches us that we avoid looking at exactly the places where we feel most deficient, most stuck. We develop elaborate strategies to tiptoe around these areas. But here's what I've learned: that avoidance actually makes the issue more powerful, more complex. We end up behaving differently in relationships, making decisions from fear, creating all kinds of complications.
The red quality of the diamond body gives us courage for a different approach. Instead of avoiding our limitations, our fears, our stuck places, it says: "Let's look at this directly. What am I actually afraid of here? What would it mean to let go of this position?"
Sometimes when we finally look directly at what we've been avoiding — a relationship that's ending, a limitation we don't want to accept, a truth about ourselves that's uncomfortable — something remarkable happens. We feel heartbroken and relieved at the same time. The truth, even when it's difficult, is liberating.
This isn't masochistic. It's recognizing that we naturally love truth. We're built for it. When we stop defending our positions and let ourselves see what's actually here, inquiry becomes an adventure rather than a mental exercise.
The Lataif — these essential qualities we work with in Diamond Logos — aren't abstract concepts. They're living capacities that transform how we meet our experience. The red brings warmth, aliveness, courage. It infuses our inquiry with genuine curiosity rather than mental analysis. It gives us the heart to stay present with whatever we find, and the discriminating intelligence to see clearly what's actually happening.
What would it be like to approach your own experience with this kind of lion-hearted curiosity — loving the truth enough to let it surprise you?