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 the first comment on my previous article, What happens to our mind in sleep? , an anonymous friend wrote: ‘It cannot be correct that we experience ourselves in sleep and mind is absent. If that were true, everyone is realized during sleep. And once realized, he does not come back to the world. That is why it is said that the mind is in the dormant state. The I thought exists in its primitive form’. As this anonymous friend wrote, this seemingly common sense reasoning is why it is generally said that our mind or ego exists in sleep in a dormant condition (known as the kāraṇa śarīra or ānandamaya kōśa ), but such reasoning oversimplifies the issue, failing to recognise not only some important nuances but also some fairly obvious flaws in its own arguments. Let us therefore consider this issue in greater depth in order to see whether we can understand Bhagavan’s teachings in this regard more clearly. Nāṉ Yār? paragraph 1: in sleep we experience ourself in the absence of our mind Upa...