The Assumptions of an Organic Inquiry
One of the crucial differences that comes into play when considering Organic Inquiry in favor of another methodology is that the Organic approach uses an expandedand more than cognitivenotion of the self, and makes that notion part of its gestalt throughout. By way of the (adapted) six principles model of the sacred, personal, chthonic, numinous, relational, and transformative as well as the three part process model of engagement with the liminal, Organic Inquiry draws on a concept of the self that is wholistic.
This wholistic concept is one wherein the self is recognized as not necessarily being boundaried by our physical bodies, our personal thoughts and ideas, or even our understandings of who and what we may be. It opens up possibilities of identity and paradigms of possible realities that are beyond the scope of this primer, but that researchers using this methodology should be prepared to encounter and allow themselves to evolve into.
By wholistic, we mean that Organic Inquiry opens the doors to the many subjectivities, using them as appropriate to the topic at hand, so that the rational-analytic mode of generative knowledge is not privileged over the intuitive, somatic, affective, experiential, social, and cultural ways of knowing, and forms of knowledge. As a methodology, and without prescribing specific procedures that could become limiting for researchers, Organic Inquiry clears the way for researchers to use every part of who they are, of who the participants are, as well as what the reader brings, as tools to understand the topic under investigation.
Stimulating transformative change in the researcher(s), the researched, and the eventual reader is an explicit goal of the Organic Inquiry methodology. Transformative change might be viewed as a kind of re-orientation of the self whereby the primary way we have been, and the core understanding we had held about ourselveswhatever these wereare undeniably altered at a root level. With this view of transformative change in mind, allowing and holding the largest possible definitions of self and the nature of reality are essential for the Organic researcher.
Designing a research project to allowor even encouragetransformative change can be challenging, particularly when transformation is understood to possibly be a profound, lasting, paradigmatic shift. We suggest that it may be more reasonable to understand transformation as including a perceptual shift, or a radical insight, such that one's understanding is altered, or so that obstacles to change are removed so that further transformative changes can later occur. Transformative change might also be understood as that which emancipates experients' attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, or life from the oppressions of shame and fear, allowing them to come out into the warm light of authenticity.
These transformations may be as simple as discovering new ways of relating to the people in one's daily environment, to radically altering one's life pathways, changing careers, moving to a new location, re-evaluating intimate relationships, or awakening new understandings within one's spiritual life. The possibilities are infinite.
Organic Inquiry has a certain power of sympathetic resonance that connects with the researchers' yearning for a way to explore transpersonal topics that honors the experience under investigation, and does not distort it in order to gain the data of objective science which may carry its own biases. As such it is a living method for exploring and describing lived experiencing, and holds promise for applications to topics hitherto considered unresearchable.
Special Demands on the Organic Researcher
Operating as if research were a sacred endeavor, and proceeding in partnership with spirit are no easy tasks. How to do this is left wide open by this methodology's founders, so that persons of all religious and spiritual affiliations as well as non-believers, can incorporate practices that are meaningful to them.
In our view, upholding these central features of the Organic Inquiry requires the researcher to go beyond conventions and to bring herself or himself into the study in a deeply personal way. Researchers who routinely incorporate spiritual practices into their lives will have a ready source of processes to drawn on in their research design. Contemplative prayer, meditation, chanting, drumming, or use of sacred texts for guidance could all be used in an Organic Inquiry, as might sacred dance, divination, analytic discourse with spiritual elders, vision quests, sweat lodge ceremonies, and any of a number of other practices or rituals.
However, it should not be thought that only persons with such experiences or views of reality can use this methodology. All that is really required is to be able to allow one's mind to relax and to allow the possibility that the way the new physics (see Bohm, 1980; Briggs & Peat, 1984; Sheldrake, 1995; Wolf, 1999) posits the interconnectedness of all thingson a quantifiably measurable levelmay be true. It is this state of mind, one that allows for this awareness of the interconnectedness of life and the ability to relax one's mind to allow the neurochemicals in the brain to shift into what has been called the relaxation response (Benson, 2000), that are the most essential abilities that will allow anyone to use this approach to research.
Researchers who do not routinely fall into this category and who do not incorporate spiritual practices into their usual daily routines may find this aspect of an Organic Inquiry challenging, and ultimately transformative. By adopting practices that allow spiritually-novice researchers to conduct research as if it were sacred and be in partnership with Spirit, researchers open themselves to the possibility that they will be transformed by their own studywhich is one of the fervent hopes inherent in an Organic Inquiry. This is not to suggest that Organic Inquiry is some kind of religious conversion experience or that it has a proselytizing agenda. On the contrary, in our view Organic Inquiry embraces the wide diversity of spiritual and philosophic expressions possible in human experience, and invites researchers to open to and be explicit about whatever resonates for them as sacred.
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