How To Start Self Inquiry?

[Peak]

How to start self inquiry?

[Dodo]

To start go watch ramana maharshi video on the subject. It has to be the best starting point.

[Leo Gura]

@Peak https://www.actualized.org/articles/how-to-become-enlightened

[Mulky]

Just my approach

Don't reject or deny anything, cause if you do that then the sense of I will become connected with a sense of tightness and rejection, and you will blind yourself to whatever you think you are right now.  Accept and love what you think you are right now and keep looking deeper.  Look for what you think/feel like you are right now, and accept it, like feel good about it, then look deeper.  For a long time I would try to ignore what I thought I was at the moment, trying to just get the pure self,but this made a big wall, get all soft and see whatever you feel like you are and keep looking more but let everything be as you go.   You;ll forget your identity faster when you just look at it and accept it and then look deeper, than if you somehow try to go straight to the deeper while trying to block out all your thoughts of identity.  Don't indulge identity, just be cool with it appearing and then going away cause you accepted it's appearance and let it sort of morph around and change into whatever.  Cause you don't really know what you are, but theres like this crazy movement all the time with all sorts of ideas of what you are, how you relate to things, etc.   So you just watch that move around remaining completely clueless, you're just watching a show, you're completely lost in a sense, I mean what the heck are you?  Whether you're there or not, you're still there.  

If when doing self inquiry an image of yourself and your job and family appears fine, whether that's you or not the reaction is the same, feel good about and love and accept it.  If you see another person on the street what you should do is love and accept them,  if you see an image of yourself, if its not you but some phenomenon in life, you should still love and accept it, if it's you, same thing, it's just a safe bet amidst the times when you're barely thinking and thus not controlling things, to just see, love, accept, it might be the real you, it might not, but either way this is a good response.  This will clear out everything that isn't "real" gets sort of accepted so much it just automactially morphs in with the rest of reality and starts to flow and dance with it.   I mean, literally everything is you anyway,  so you could do self inquiry and pretty much feel like everything that comes up is you, it's just as much you as anything else.  Brain is fried, peace.

 

[Mulky]

If you're pretty new, and especially if you're still knee deep in logic, this might help.  If your not in logic be careful overdoing this as you can rapidly lower your state of conciousness and become completely blinded to that fact for who knows how long(It might actually be happening to me right now).  I'm going to ask you to use just a bit of logic for a specific purpose for a small amount of time and then let it go.  People are currently obsessed with logic, practically worship it, but they don't do it any justice, because they ignore it's ability to completely destroy any sense of self, they have a blind spot to all logic that proves free will doesn't exist, everything is connected, there is no individual self, when clearly these things are true.  Because their logic is mostly to maintain the ego, they conveniently abandon it when someone uses it to destroy the ego or since of individuality.

From be as you are, a book from the teaches of Ramana Maharshi, who is the biggest teacher of self inquiry I know about. "It will be remembered that in the chapter on Self awareness and Self ignorance, Sri Ramana maintained that Self-realization could be brought about merely by giving up the idea that there is an individual self which functions through the body and the mind"  As long as you apply some logic to this, and don't give yourself self preserving logic blind spots(aka doing everything you can to believe in free will even though if you look at it at all you'll find it doesn't make any sense and is in fact impossible).  Bring everything you learned in school, such as cause and effect, if you're really honest with yourself you'll find the idea of an individual self makes absolutely no sense, it's all just 1 infinite thing.  Your best definition of a self you could make would be like a system contained within "your body", but clearly we can see that system is effected by, effecting, and connected with everything else so absolutely that if you were to define yourself as a system that system would have to be all of existence.

[Peak]

Tricky question?

How can the phrase "What am i" work if its just a sound that has meaning in the English language?

[Peak]

This video talks about how "what am I" is not the body, or the mind or the thoughts, but is the consciousness of one self. It seems like to get there you got to let go of all that conditioning, concepts, and any label you put on yourself. Even the personality you have is constructed. All beliefs are false since you made them up. Any emotions or thoughts is just your body responding to conditioning you made up.