Comments on “Open-ended curiosity”
Comments are for the page: Open-ended curiosity
Meditation
Yes, that is not a coincidence! The central themes of the book are influenced by my experience and of meditation and my understanding of its theoretical background.
I mention this in many places, mainly in passing. My hope is that the book will make sense to non-meditators, but that meditators will see the parallels, which may make it easier to understand, or add an extra depth of meaning.
Typo
This piece would be better with a full stop after this sentence: “As a method of stabilizing the complete stance, open-ended curiosity takes intelligence, hard work, and generosity—as well as just openness”
Peter
Typo fixed
Thank you! Fixed.
The intersection of wonder and open-ended curiosity
I enjoyed how this blended together with the last page on wonder.
In the community I’m a part of, I see a lot of and participate in a lot of closed-ended curiosity. We are skeptical, interested, and searching for new answers, but the kind of searching we are doing reinforces our system and ontology. When I was most involved in this community, open-ended curiosity felt like a waste of time.
And now this is putting words that fit just right to my aversion to our reasoning. When we only had close-ended curiosity, we never suspended our habitual interpretations, so we could never be truly surprised. We could never be surprised in a way that would change our ontology, or show us that we were asking the wrong questions.
Your “open-ended curiosity”
Your “open-ended curiosity” sounds a lot like meditation to me, both as a matter of formal practice and more broadly as an approach to living.