Summary: How To Do Self-Inquiry

[StarStruck]

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How to do it?

• Self-inquiry is extremely simple (and therefore extremely difficult):
• Step 1: Sit down in a quiet place
• Step 2: Create a possibility in your mind that you do not actually know who or what you are.
• Step 3: Ask yourself, "Who or what am I?"
• Step 4: Genuinely wonder what you could be other than a body/mind. Probe your direct experience for answers. Discard all verbal or rational answers. Try to burn through all your beliefs, assumptions, and images of who you are. Drop all of them over time.
• Step 5: Enlightenment spontaneously dawns after tens or hundreds of thousands of times of asking the question.
• That's basically all there is to it. But of course, in practice, it will feel 1000x more complicated and more challenging.
• Van <https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/1040-self-enquiry-how-to/>

Self inquiry is about looking past your false self and see your true self

• Self inquiry = Observe observation itself = meditation
• Satori = breakthrough
• You do self inquiry because you think you are in your head and you are actually not there.
• When you see you are not what you think you are, you will break out of your prison
• The sensor is not you, the sensor is everywhere

What you are

• You are not your hand, your body, your brain. You are the consciousness
• You are not all those physical things, you are the thing that is aware of that.
• You think you are the one who perceives things? No, that is the subject self. Not the objective true you.
• True self has no properties; especially no physical or mental

Be aware of

• Avoid speculation and conceptualization
• Be aware that observation trumps conceptualization
• Creating duality instead become aware of form/formless, mundane and divine, and material/immaterial(spiritual)
• Start separating formless from the form, concentrate on the formless and then merge formless with form
• Answer you are seeking is not a verbal answer

Exercise: find your deepest sense of who you are (inside your psyche)

• Pre self inquiry = stare at your finger for 5 minutes and then do the actual self inquiry
• Put your awareness on your hand, then the couch, then put awareness on your consciousness.
• Do it with your empty mind; feel what it is
• Put your focus on the emptiness
• Calm down so clouds go away so you see the stars
• Separate form from formless so you won't be absorbed by suffering
• Think of physical/emotional pain: and ask yourself who is experiencing it? Your answer is wrong, that is your false self!
• First disassociate and then put things together to reintegrate the form and formless.

You need to do both self inquiry(finding yourself) and meditation (concentration)

 

[AlphaAbundance]

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