Enquiry is not suspicion; enquiry requires love || Acharya Prashant (2014)

Questioner (Q): Sir, in one of your videos you say, "Faith is giving up everything to the enquiry." Can you please elaborate on what sort of enquiry? If I have five friends, should I enquire about everyone? Should I enquire about everything and everyone I am associating with?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Good. Enquiry is not suspicion. To enquire does not mean to doubt. Understand this very clearly. Usually when we say, "I am enquiring", it means collecting information, it means being confused, it is a kind of suspicion. But when we are talking of real enquiry, enquiry into the world, self-enquiry, that means coming so close that you know the truth. That is real enquiry. Real enquiry is closeness. What prevents us from knowing the actuality of anything? What prevents us? Our fears prevent us. How? How can you know the fact when you refuse to come close to the fact? And why will you refuse? Because you are afraid. I am afraid of a particular kind of reptile, will I ever really know about it? Tell me, will I ever really know about it? Some of you will be having pets at home, and you play with the pet and you know so much about the pet. Don’t you? How do you know? You know through closeness.

Closeness is the gate to knowing.

Real enquiry is closeness. Real enquiry does not mean that you are acting like a detective and keeping an eye on everybody. "What am I doing? Enquiring." That is not an enquiry. Real enquiry is the ability to love because only in love can you come that close. And when you come that close then the truth simply opens up!

You need not read about it in any book, you need not ask somebody, "What kind of person is he?" You will simply know. That is real enquiry. Many times we confuse enquiry with collecting information. I am repeating. Enquiry is not to collect information. If you really want to know who I am (referring to the speaker) and somebody tells you how much money I have, will that help you? Money is information, but will that help you? If you really want to know who I am and somebody tells you the registration number of my car, will that help you? Now all this is information coming to you. If somebody tells you where I graduated from, how many people are in my organization, somebody tells you what is my age, where do I live, what do I like eating, will that help you? Information is useless. The thing with our world is that we think we know a person if we have information about him.