[Self-inquiry is almost 180 degrees away from enlightenment (read if you are a seeker)]

2 hours ago, Pierre said:

@molosku I totally agree with you. The term "Self-inquiry" gives the impression of a very active mental activity. It's an excellent exemple of how a crappy translation can badly mislead people. A more accurate translation of Atma-Vicara would be "Self-resting" or "Self-Abiding", a relaxed way of just being this spacious awareness. 

I really got to give credit to Rubert Spira for giving me a whole bunch of new ideas about what I probably should be doing. He speaks exactly about that: the mistransaltion of "atma-vicara"

[Self-inquiry is almost 180 degrees away from enlightenment (read if you are a seeker)]

Provoking and arrogant title, eh? Well, got your attention    I'll try to keep this post not to long as my point/thought is simple. All of this is coming from someone who has not had an enlightenment "experience", but has had a few glimpses of it through psychedelic experiences, and has some ideas to share. If you have loads of beliefs what enlightenment is or how to get there, i suggest you empty your mind a bit and read this with an open mind. Some of the claims made here are intended to be a bit provoking and even harsh, try to read between the lines. I do contradict myself on purpose. What I claim here, is not intended as a truth, more like an opening for a discussion.

What enlightenment is not (as i have understood it intellectually, having done research for a little over 2 years now):

• Some trick you can "hack" with your mind
• An experience, state or mystical or even spiritual "happening"
• Something done with the mind with years and years of super hard work
• A "product" of any kind of "consciousness work"
• Something you need to rise your awareness to (just bear with me)
• Anything done or experienced through the mind (image, thought etc.)
• Anything that requires a "way" or a process
• "Higher knowledge" you do not currently posses, any grasp of something
• Something you get closer to by reading and researching about it
• Something you get closer to by meditating lots (i know i know, just bear with me)
• Something that is hard to reach
• Something someone or some tradition could ever teach you or get you closer to

What enlightenment is:

• "Its not something you gain, its something you lose" - Adyashanti
• That which you always have been: your being as it is.
• Your being
• YOUR BEING!! HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE IT?!
• BE IT NOW!
• BE! IT! NOW!

 

Why on earth you should spend hours upon hours on "concentrating" (not even going to detail on how hard it is to build your concentration abilities, even more stuff to be put before enlightenment before you allow yourself to be "developed" enough) on something that you already know is not there? If you seriously contemplate the method that is inquiry, and compare it to what you are trying to "achieve" whit it, the whole notion of inquiry as a process or non-process or non-non-process should rise your eyebrows (assuming you don't have massive misconceptions about enlightenment). There seems to be a mismatch of the end and the method. You are trying to put out a small, harmless looking yet very persistant fire  with a flamethrower.

I DO think that self-inquiry is important in the beginning so that you begin to get in touch what you currently think and feel, and how groundless your beliefs are, but after a while (for me it was after about 50 hours total of self-inquiry) you begin to realize that what you essentially are doing will never ever work because its just hard labor done with the mind, extra work that blinds you from your actual being. Its the mind wrestling with itself asking silly questions it has no authority to answer anyway and just juggling with words, images and thoughts.

I do admit that self-inquiry could potentially  trigger some "i really don't know"-experience, which certainly would be profound to experience, but that would still be a realization about the groundlessness of your beliefs, and not about your direct being nature. I would imagine this experience to be something like an intellectual realization of the big picture of your web of beliefs.

I don't disregard self-inquiry entirely here, but I'm questioning the the directness of it, as it is often sold as such: THE most direct way to enlightenment. I do not claim that inquiry will never get you enlightened, but I do claim that it might be the opposite of what is being sold: the most strenuous and longest path to enlightenment. The method you are going trough in your mind over and over again is like realizing that you don't know where your wallet is, going to google and finding out that you never had a wallet in the first place, and then going to the Himalayas trying to find it just because hey, I haven't checked there yet and I don't really feel like my wallet does not exist, even though I know it doesn't  and it certainly wont be in the Himalayas once I start looking for it there! ......wait, what?

I have heard stories of zen-monks getting enlightened after years of trying and trying and meditating hours upon hours and then experiencing a total collapse of their spirit and trust to the path they have chosen, a true realization of utter failure. And then it hits them. Could it be that the point of self-inquiry is actually to send the seeker to the wrong way on purpose, so that they have to realize their wasted efforts themselves?

 

Here's a fun metaphor i came up with:

 

Imagine enlightenment as the essential realization of the taste of ice cream . You are interested to actualize that, and you know that you don't yet experience it because some people wrote so in some books and made videos about it in youtube. You intellectually understand there is a big possibility that what they are saying is true, but the personal experience is lacking. So you sit down to eat ice cream and with an open mind, inquire about the taste for an hour every day and it goes a little bit like this:

*take a spoonfull and toss it around in your mouth*

"what do I believe is the taste? Is the taste the ice cream the box it was sold in? Is it the chunks I can feel in my mouth?"

*another spoonfull*

"not sure it's these chocolate chunks. Is it? is it? what is my answer to this? Is it me who is coming up with the answer or the ice cream?"

*another spoonfull*

"hmmm I still dont get it.... maybe another bite will do the trick? Maybe i'll try not to think about it too much and see where it gets me"

*another spoonfull, ice cream now sitting and melting in the mouth*

".............. iiiiiis THIS my enlightenment? no? hmmm.... curious...." 

 

See where I'm getting at?  What that guy should have done is just shut up and                      ______'blank' , 'nothing' , 'emptiness'______

 

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There is no process to realize the taste, there is nothing more or less to it than that which it always was, you could do absolutely nothing to realize the taste that you are already tasting 100%. For me, counter intuitively only the total giving up of the search (and accepting that it is so) seems to be a step in the right direction. That and also disregard of any further research about it, in fact I wish i forgot everything I knew about it except maybe a small gentle guiding sentence like: "Be what you are, and nothing else" would be enough instructions to actualize enlightenment.

With a quick google search, the word inquiry is defined as: a seeking or request for truth, information, or knowledge an investigation, as into an incident, the act of inquiring or of seeking information by questioning, interrogation. 

So if you intellectually accept that the question "who am I" or "what am I" has no real answer you can derive with your mind, and that you "are already" enlightened and you are the awareness, why on earth would you spend any more time trying to figure out  the only single thing you have always known for absolute certain: the knowing part of your being, the knowing of experience or the awareness. It is already 100% there for you and it has nothing up its sleeve that you don't get to see. Nothing is hidden. For you, it should be the only thing you literally CANT inquire into, and it should sound like a joke to you. There are infinite amount of things you could try to wrap your mind around and to contemplate upon and you are spending your time inquiring into the only thing you already know 100%? What are you doing???!

What do you expect to find out with inquiry exactly? If you inquire into a cucumber, do you expect to eventually after years of hard daily work, to realize something about the existential nature of the cucumber that is fundamentally and profoundly more cucumber than the cucumber?

There is no further knowledge to be gained about yourself after you first learn what the truth of no self is. This does not mean there is no further experience that can be had about/from consciousness, just not about YOU. Just because you don't fully realize it now, does not necessarily mean that there is lots of work to be done (although there is, and also is not, but also is, and is not, but there really is some, but there really isn't.... i wont go into this here).

I really have to question the whole notion of "doing the work" to reach enlightenment, because it stink of human nature: we see and conceptualize a feat (build a hut, protect the family, kill a deer, reach enlightenment) and then attack it until an end is met. Could it be that this approach has limits? 

 

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Counter intuitively, it would seem to me that the bigger and more significant the subject, the more research should be put into it, but the most ultimate subject of them all should be left with as little research as possible. Reality is just so twisted and tricky and plain impossible that this kind of paradox would be JUST the kind of joke reality would dig. I won't go into detail here what I think one should really be doing, but i a have a gut feeling that rising your consciousness and meditating might be acts worth considering, that much i'll guess, and my guess is just that: a fools hope. After all this is said, a very important notion has to be mentioned:

 

 

Everything said here is just another belief

 

 

I wish everyone some ice cream time in moderation!

"We should really be concerning ourselves not with the pursuit of happiness, but with the happiness of pursuit" - Raja Ram

 

 

[Balancing "questioning/doubting" Vs "just Being As Awareness/ As The Self" When Self-inquiring]

(This is an I and me-friendly & "enlightenment is a happening"-friendly post)

So I have been self inquiring for some time now, and Im slowly moving towards having a little sense of what the hell Im supposed to be doing/not doing, but Im a little confused about the subject mentioned on the title. 

Questioning the I and the self-concept and asking verbal questions like "what is the i, who am i, am i, what seperates me from this x object etc" seems to be an important part of the self-inquiry, differentiating it from just sitting or meditating (with a more or less blank mind), and really driving your mind towards this "doubtfull" , open minded "state" that opens the curtains of consciousness just a little bit.

Then on the other hand, there is the "just being" aspect, which i can resonate with way more. I clearly recognize that i absolutely can NOT be any kind of mental image, sound or word, and I keep reminding myself about this whenever i notice that I drifted into monkey mind when self-inquiring. Rubert Spira very elegantly said something like "the highest meditation is just abiding in the self / resting the attention at the self / letting attention sink back at the heart" and it really makes sense to me, because I intellectually know that i already AM IT and there is nothing i can do with my mind to be more me as I already am: I already AM conscious and that is my true nature. He also said that what ever you focus your attention to, is an object of attention, therefore not you, and to realize the self the attention needs to "collapse" due to lack of objects to focus on. Makes sense i think.

So my question is this: how to balance these two aspects? They both seem important, but its hard for me to see how asking questions could ever cause enlightenment, because it seems to me that what ever i could ask myself, is basically just noise, it would be the equivalent of chanting "my who aware I is consciousness are me my is myself..." etc. It has ultimately no meaning, no question to ask really. The "just being" _seems_ to be a more higher, purer form of self-inquiry. Everyones 5-cents is appreciated

ps. I have once experienced a psychedelic enlightenment-type of state on moderate dose of LSD, where I entered a state where my awareness was floating in my body but I was not the body or the mind. In that state there were almost no thoughts, just awareness of awareness, so I have a small taste of what possibly could be and awakening experience. I entered this mystical state with no questions asked, just focusing on my direct experience and it suddenly happened, it lasted a couple of minutes but I did not feel enlightened afterwards, just more elevated than normal.