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In a comment on my previous article, Self-investigation ( ātma-vicāra ) is just the simple practice of trying to be attentively self-aware , an anonymous friend asked, ‘Does this practice work?’ and went on to explain why he or she asked this question, saying, ‘There are so many Gurus each offering a unique method — a method that might have worked for them. The real question is does it work for others? Michael, from your writings I gather you have been practicing this for more than two decades (?). What is your realization so far? Have you been able to achieve what Bhagavan describes? Honestly, if the answer is no, then I will be very skeptical of this method’. Should we rely on what others claim to be their experience? What is the goal that we should aim to experience or attain? By knowing what goal we should seek, we can logically infer what must be the means to achieve it No matter how long it may take us to reach our destination, patient perseverance is required 1. Should we rely ...

In the comments on one of my recent articles, Can we experience what we actually are by following the path of devotion ( bhakti mārga )? , a friend argued that self-investigation ( ātma-vicāra ) is a two-stage process, and though I tried to explain in my latest article, Trying to distinguish ourself from our ego is what is called self-investigation ( ātma-vicāra ) , that it is actually a single seamless process with no distinct stages, various friends have continued discussing this idea, and at one point this discussion branched off into a discussion about the reliability of what is recorded in the ‘Talks’ section of Sat-Darshana Bhashya , which prompted me to explain ( here , here and here ) why I generally do not consider anything written or recorded by Kavyakantha Ganapati Sastri or Kapali Sastri to be reliable. Since discussion of these two separate subjects continued side by side for a while, in one comment a friend called Wittgenstein suggested that it would be useful to consid...

In certain contexts it is of course necessary for us to distinguish our ego from ourself as we actually are, because our ego is not what we actually are, but drawing this distinction is not necessary or helpful in every context, because what seems to be our ego is nothing other than ourself as we actually are. This seeming paradox can be reconciled by considering the analogy of a rope that seems to be a snake. The snake is not what the rope actually is, but what seems to be the snake is nothing other than the rope as it actually is. If we were walking along a narrow path in semi-darkness and were to see what seems to be a snake lying on the path ahead of us, we would be afraid to proceed any further and would wait till the snake had moved away. However, if after waiting for a while we see that the snake does not move, we may begin to suspect that it is not actually a snake, in which case we would cautiously move forwards to look at it more closely and carefully. If it were not actually...