Turning attention back on itself — who or what is aware?
The practice of turning attention back on itself — 'Who is aware?' 'Who am I?' — attributed to Ramana Maharshi and central to many neo-Advaita teachers. Several accounts describe years of philosophical inquiry collapsing into direct recognition.
What distinguishes self-inquiry from ordinary philosophical questioning is the direction of attention: instead of looking outward at objects of experience, attention is turned back on the one who is experiencing. In several accounts, this leads to a moment where the seeker can't be found.
Yeah, I think when Ramana advocated self-inquiry, he wasn't encouraging people to engage in a new form of mental chit-chat, you know, or who am I, all kinds of mental agitation, he was advocating a much quieter, settling in to, you know, a much more experiential.
I suppose what I see more from people that have been doing self-inquiry is that because they're looking and there's a sort of questioning, there's something, you know, looking right at what they are and then taking off another layer and taking off another layer.
I look back at it now and I wouldn't know this if I hadn't started looking through self-inquiry.
And so somehow the mind had posed a question when I was a child that was insoluble to the mind, but that was in a sense solvable experientially much later and after decades of searching and seeking and wondering and self-inquiry.
Experience types that appear most often in accounts with this trigger.
Other triggers that co-occur most frequently in the same accounts.