What does real inquiry feel like, day to day?
You pick a single question. You live with it. Not for ten minutes — for days or weeks. You return to it in quiet times. In the morning. In the half hour before sleep. You bring what happened during the day to bear on it.
Inquiry does not have to wait for that quiet half hour, though. It can also be triggered by the day itself. The moments when your composure breaks — anger flaring, sadness out of proportion to the situation — are material for it too. Each one is samsara showing itself. Trace it back honestly to the expectation, or the sense of self, it was defending. Then you are doing the same inquiry, just from a different entry point.
You will not get a full answer the first time. You may not get one the tenth time.
What does come, slowly, over weeks and months, is a quiet change in what feels obvious to you. The things that once seemed clearly true — I am this body, I am this mind, I am these thoughts — stop feeling so solid. Something behind them begins to show.
The inquiry produces a recognition: that you are awareness, not the body and mind. That answer is clean. But it touches only one question.
The rest of your life is full of other moments. Relationships. Fears. Losses. Successes. Ordinary mornings. The inquiry did not directly examine any of these. What does the recognition mean for how you hold your fear of death? For how you respond when someone insults you?
The inquiry has shown you what you are. It has not yet shown you what that means everywhere else in your life.
This is the work of contemplation.
You take the recognition and hold it up, again and again, against the actual situations of your life. You watch what happens when you bring it to the small irritation at breakfast. To the long anxiety about money. To the moment of pride. To the moment of shame.
Slowly, the recognition stops being a fact you remember sometimes. It becomes the lens you see through.
This is how conviction is built. Not by a single insight, but by the same recognition, met again and again in the situations of your life, until no doubt is left standing against it.