The aim is not to be told what a tradition holds. It is to discover where your own lived experience actually stands in relation to it: what you can honestly say you know from the inside, what you can only follow on the tradition's account, and where your own ground quietly diverges from its summit. An AI is well suited to this — not because it knows the answer, but because it can ask one good question at a time and follow your answer without needing you to arrive anywhere in particular.
One Load the tradition
Ask the AI to lay out what the tradition actually says, across the eight ways of knowing: what the summit is, how it is practiced, under what conditions, who transmits it, how it lives in the body, how it is told from its counterfeits, why it matters, and the stories that carry it. Ask it to name, in advance, the false friends — the shared words that sound alike across traditions and point to opposite things.
Two Probe your own footing, one question at a time
This is the heart of it. Ask the AI to put a single question to you and then wait, and to weight its questions toward the doing and the felt sense rather than the doctrine — it is easy to answer a question about ideas, harder to answer one about what actually happens in you. When your own words shift from concept to sensation, that is the signal to follow.
Three Declare honest footing
Say what you can report from the inside, and reserve what you cannot. If a tradition's peak is something you have not reached, say so plainly and let yourself follow its account rather than claiming the view. Where your own experience diverges from the tradition rather than falling short of it, hold the difference open; the mismatch is information, not failure.
Four Let a different voice challenge it
Bring the footing you arrived at to a second AI, or to a knowledgeable person, and ask them to argue against it: what would someone inside the tradition, and a skeptic, each say? The discipline that made this book was that no voice checks its own work, and the same discipline keeps a reader honest.
Five Let one tradition reshape the whole inquiry
Sometimes a single tradition will reveal that the very question you were asking was not its own. When that happens, do not force the fit. Let the discovery change the question.
This is the method the book used, turned around to face the reader. The Reader's Inquiry is its shortest form — eight questions, one for each way of knowing. This is the longer form, for anyone who wants to walk into a tradition not their own and find, honestly, what of it is already true in them.