Self-Enquiry
The devotees of Sri Bhagavan are spread all over the world. It is impossible to contact them individually. I am writing this piece through The Mountain Path, but it is really written in a personal way – as if to each one separately.
The Sage says: in all possible difficulties or problems – personal, domestic, even political or religious. enquire for whom the problem exists. By this honest (serious) enquiry we go deep inside and come to a point which is really (in the beginning) a conceptual Self, a Self of mentation and not the real Self.
The real Self – or simply the Self – cannot be “reached” or experienced in the sense in which we experience “something”, because it is beyond the trifold phenomenon of experiencer, experience and experienced or seer, sight and seen.
The Sage simply says “Enquire”....
And here lies the crux of the matter.
Though we say (as we have read and heard) that Self is the source, we ourselves have not actually found it so, because our preconceived ideas come between. Our ideas of the Self are certainly not the Self. We suppose that it is the Self that we are coming to, but it is certainly not that Self: though later we may reach that state.
I will try to explain.
Our grief, our yearning for something, in short our problem, brings us to this conceptual Self, to our theory of a Self; but eventually the Real (call it Self) comes into being, or rather that ever-existent comes into our “experiencing”. (But this is not experiencing of the trifold experience-being.)
Many of us get stuck in the conceptual Self and never reach this nature referred to above, of knower-knowledge-known ; it is direct experience, thus get nowhere.
Devotees of Sri Ramana Maharshi should see with an open mind – devotees of Sri Ramana Maharshi who are really sincere and want to tread the path propounded by Him.
If I can offer a helping hand – a friend’s hand – If any find it of no use they can leave it; if any find it useful it may serve for dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s of the original teaching.
It is a thing to be understood in oneself, privately – each one for himself.
It is not a matter for discussion.
– April 1966, p.194, (download)