my article

A friend recently sent me an email in which he asked: I had mentioned to you that in my view there appear to be three different approaches to self-investigation, i) self-enquiry, which involves asking who am I and going to the root of the I thought, ii) meditating on I am, excluding the arising of any thought, and concentrating on I am, and iii) trying to notice the gap between two thoughts, expanding the gap, and being without any thought, summa iru. You had replied that these are not three different approaches but constitute only one approach. Could you please elaborate your comment? This article is adapted from the reply that I wrote to him. Nāṉ Yār? paragraph 16: ātma-vicāra is only the practice of keeping one’s attention on oneself Our aim should be to destroy the illusion that we are this ego Upadēśa Undiyār verses 24 and 25: experiencing ourself without adjuncts is experiencing what we actually are To destroy our ego we must try to be attentively self-aware Being attentively ...

In a comment on one of my recent articles, The fundamental law of experience or consciousness discovered by Sri Ramana , Palaniappan Chidambaram asked, ‘If the whole sadhana [spiritual practice] is in just being one self […] then why do we use the term vichara or investigation? When thoughts come we don’t investigate but just ignore and turn attention to ourselves. So ideally there is no investigation or enquiry?’, to which I replied in a comment : Since pure self-awareness is our essential nature, being ourself entails being clearly aware of ourself alone. Therefore trying to be aware of ourself alone is the only means by which we can succeed in being what we really are. Since we (the ego) have long been in the habit of being aware of things others than ourself, being aware of ourself alone seems (from the perspective of our ego) to be a skill that we can develop only by practice, and the practice of trying to be aware of ourself alone requires trial and error. That is, since we se...