I want to point to a specific type of curiosity, one I call Open Curiosity. This is an open movement. It’s open in the sense that it doesn't seek to accumulate knowledge, experience, or impressions. Its very movement is from not-knowing to not-knowing, and in that space, the Now introduces a not-knowing that is endless.
I’m quite sure this is something other people have touched. I don't believe you can be a living human being without, here and there, coming into contact with this movement of Open Curiosity—from the unknown to the unknown. The strange thing is how rarely, it seems to me, people realize the immense freshness, aliveness, passion, and beauty this movement is.
And it's a mystery why. To me, it remains a mystery why this Open Curiosity doesn't act on people's minds, on their field of consciousness, and demand their attention.
I think the answer has to do with its nature, which is absolutely free. It never imposes. It never demands anything but itself, for itself. It isn’t something that acts upon something else; it is, in itself, endless. The ordinary demand of the human mind, in contrast, is for entertainment. It's a demand to keep busy with something interesting, something enjoyable, but at the very least, something distracting enough to avoid being in that movement of curious openness—a movement that has no purpose, no goal, no identity, no benefit. You simply cannot do anything with it.
The nature of the two is profoundly different. It’s like the difference between words, which can only describe, and water, which contains and purifies whatever it touches. Words can talk about water, but they can never touch it. And water remains completely agnostic to words.
So, what does it mean to stay with that? To stay with this Open Curiosity? Does it mean you must freeze time? Or does it mean you lose time altogether? The truth is, only Open Curiosity can stay with itself. I can never do it. But when I finally cease to create my own movement, my own internal noise, only then does the movement of aimless, open curiosity exist.
And in it, is newness itself. It is fresh to a degree that it never was before. Everything happens only now, and forever now. Nothing could be more simple, because it demands absolutely no contribution from the thinking, imagining, and experiencing mind. Zero. A complete, infinite zero.
This is written simply to encourage you, the reader, to look into this without needing to respond to it. Just to stay with it for a few minutes. See if it awakens in you that very movement—aimless, endless, fresh, new, authentic, present. Perhaps, in it, you will come to life, as if before, all you knew was the competing movement of distraction and consumption. And then suddenly… there is air. Something lets this air reveal its own nature, a nature more pure and sacred than anything the mind could ever invent.
And this is not mystical at all. It has nothing to do with recognition, or experience, or the qualities of the mind. It is nothing. That is its most precise quality. But it is not the nothing the mind points to when it discards things. It is the nothing that is pure, that has been purified from the fake assets of the thinking and imagining mind.
Anyhow, over the past ten years, this flowing has been given so many names—Free Creative Flow, The Now, Endless Openness, Presence. All of these are just attempts, pointing from different directions to something that can never be recognized, but which can and must be lived fully.
It is the quality of life. The quality itself, now.