The Middle Way experience takes us altogether beyond thinking in extremes—beyond our usual assumptions about the world. It does not suggest we reject suffering to seek a nirvana elsewhere. It does not advise us to leave our ordinary functional life and enter a “spiritual” one instead. It does not affirm the existence of things, and it does not deny our experience of them either. Instead, the path of the Middle Way leads us through a process of inquiry that questions the nature of existence, non-existence, self, other, happiness, suffering, spirituality, and the world of experience. If we follow this process of inquiry, it will take us to a place of certitude beyond conclusions. This is exactly what happened to the Buddha.
Buddha gave up hope in his search for answers, he found an alternative he didn’t know he had—the mind of an open question. The Buddha discovered that when he asked a question, his mind was engaged yet open. The process of inquiry itself protected him from the extremes of either ignorance or false certainty, providing room for the expression of mind’s creative intelligence. He found a way of being in the mind of an open question that was profoundly clear, engaged, and full of adventure, and he called it the Middle Way…”
Excerpt from a book ‘ The Power of an Open Question ‘ by Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel
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