There may arrive a point in many of our lives where we begin to feel a natural, indwelling sense of encouragement to question the nature of our lives. I don’t mean that in the traditional sense of reflecting upon who we are and where we are heading with our partners, career and so forth – although that certainly can be a part of it.
Really what I am talking about is looking at is the nature of the entire worldview that we have inhabited, and what is has meant for us to occupy our place within it. Our beliefs, our judgments, our compulsions, neuroses and habits – what has it all meant? Why have we done the things we have, and where did our investment in energy take us along the way?
Self-inquiry in some form or another is often the precursor to great shifts in our understanding, not only of ourselves, but also the way in which we view reality, and ultimately how we move through the world.
Self-inquiry could take the form of ‘something in my life needs to change’. It could derive from a sense of overwhelming dissatisfaction. When I am talking about this line of inquiry, I don’t mean how we can be bigger, better, or different versions of ourselves. Personalities are already very much engaged in this kind task at any given time, so we aren’t talking about that aspect of reflection.
What is however revolutionary in our inner world is to begin to question that which has been fundamental to our entire way of operating.
Changing a partner, a name, or a profession is a little bit like swapping out one pair of shoes for another. We are not talking about touching upon a superficial change. The task of self-inquiry questions in a way that does not emerge from any of assumptions about getting somewhere else, being someone else. It centres its focus on pursuing a clear and direct understanding of the way things are. This is not a relative understanding – how we think they should be, or how they were, but how they actually are right now – in other words, what is actually real?
Who am I really, when all of this personal history with all of its various wants and habits falls by the wayside?
Some people will not feel any clear pull to do this. There are some people who are compelled to do so even from an early age, and even when it was far from comfortable to do so. This inquiry is not necessarily outward – asking our parents or teachers, for example. It is more that is a very direct inner experience of questioning in which we hold in a light of unremitting scrutiny, again, not to look better or to feel better – but to actually know.
The renowned Indian sage Ramana Maharshi famously likened self-inquiry as being like a stick used to stir the embers of a fire. The stick of ‘who am I?’ would stir the hot coals, and in doing so, would itself catch fire and eventually be burned away. This analogy demonstrates something important about the nature of the self-inquiry process – it isn’t really about the power of our answers, but the power of our questions. What is energetically real within those questions does not remain for us as psychological form, but is reclaimed by the truth.
Nothing is perhaps a clearer sign of awakening than the falling away of questions.
When there is any confusion inside us about the nature of things or our true identity, there is usually a persistent sense of being unsettled. Whether we give voice to this confusion or not, there is a yearning for closure that has a way of gnawing at us internally.
Usually, the response for this kind of disturbance or discomfort is some form of going along with a temporary distraction as an analgesic. Making the sense of discomfort going away can work temporarily by any number of methods. Some people do things as simple as ride a bike, watch a movie or listen to the radio in the car.
In other more acute forms, the disturbance of unresolved energies can lead to more dysfunctional patterns. Once you begin to look in earnest upon your inner world, you will begin to see how much of your strange behaviour, built upon years of habit, has been recruited and held in place just to manage certain persistent kinds of unpleasant feelings. My experience has been that in any case in which we experience painful or uncomfortable inner states, we are really being presented with an issue being brought to our attention that asks for closer examination.
Sometimes, the path of inquiry can appear relatively simple. We might have had one feeling haunting us for years when all it was really asking of us was to be looked at once, only to dissipate.
This is not altogether that rare, and it is something I have observed first-hand.
It can be a strange experience waking up into the next moment, only to no longer think or feel something that you might have been unwittingly committed to for decades. Understanding can be a very quick or gradual process of uncovering layers of error. Mostly it is some combination of both. We aren’t problem solving, or committing our inner world to any kind of rigorous psychoanalysis. We are starting out by just looking in the energetic direction the question is coming from.
Do we want to be a bigger, better ‘me’, or do we want to meet the truth with our entire being? Sometimes these confusions and questions carry an immeasurable power behind them. This is why the negative effects we experience from some unresolved questions can seem so turbulent.
Usually the question ‘who am I?’ being the basic question of identity has an enormous momentum, because the reality is that we have either discovered who we truly are and we have stopped seeking, or we haven’t and we’re left unsure.
There’s an enormous amount of energy that can be tied up in this question. Strangely enough, this can also be one of the reasons people are so terrified of dying (specifically our ideas about what death might be), because they don’t know who they are yet, and they feel an extraordinary compulsion issuing from within for them to find out before it is too late.
It is a grand irony that the one thing that is asking you to stop for one moment in total stillness, also happens to be very same the force within us prompting our frantic searching in all directions.
Have you ever had the thought occur to you ‘Imagine what I would get done in life if I no longer had to worry about this?’ It is very much like that. What the process of self-inquiry is doing for us is freeing up our energy so that we can really get on with this task of living, and not persist in driving with our brakes on.
My own experience has shown that the most powerful of these questions have been, for me: ‘who am I?’ and ‘what is actually true?’ The form your own questions take will vary, but choose whatever you feel resonates as the most important and meaningfully worded line of inquiry for you.
There are no predetermined answers here – a volume of written answers would not be worth one true revelation within you, however small. It is critically important that you meet this inquiry, whatever the result, in the privacy of your own heart. After all, the benefit of the authenticity of this intimate process is that you are not taking anything for granted. In this inquiry, no reference is being made to what anyone else has taught you or imposed upon you. You are a free agent.
If the will is pure, and you will know the degree to which you seek truth for its own sake, you will happen upon whatever is most important for your own unfolding.
In what we call spiritual affairs, there is no truth so certain and universal that is justified asking someone to believe on your behalf. It simply doesn’t work this way.
This is illustrated in the Chan tradition (the Chinese origin of the Zen tradition) in the following way: to have a piece of knowledge as a belief or a commitment is like someone giving you a cup of tea. You could be anyone, holy, righteous, high ranking – if you had the tea given to you, you could show everyone else that you had the tea, and bring it out any time you wanted. However, having the tea is not the same as tasting the tea – if you have not tasted it, then you haven’t connected with the real value in having it.
All true spiritual revelation comes to us by way of tasting the tea. Many people insist on believing things they have never experienced that have simply been bequeathed to them by other people they once placed their trust in, whether it was friends, family or cultural institutions.
If someone attempted to tell you who you were, in the closest, most exact definition possible in your native language, that would still get you nowhere. You would maybe have a nice definition, and you would run around reproducing that definition as a thought form. It might even change your life in all kinds of ways, but it would never be the truth. In self-inquiry, we’re not after mixing things up in our life, we are after a revelation of truth. Therefore, we have to meet it directly, or not at all.
This process can seem intimidating for a number of reasons, the first of which is that we have erroneously been led to believe that the unknown is always dangerous, and therefore to be avoided. The second reason, whether we are aware of it or not, is that our sense of psychological survival is tied up in who we believe ourselves to be as a conglomeration of memories, thoughts, beliefs and identities imposed by ourselves as well as others.
When these are met with challenge, this arouses within us a kind of existential fear. In the realm of self-inquiry, both of these fears are unfounded. They really are phantoms of conditioning. Of course, it will not help you to believe that, but I hope this at least gives you a sufficient nudge of encouragement to brave the first meeting with yourself.
You will not disappear, die, or be possessed by evil spirits.
The only thing that is real in us is what has been here all along, so know that you will not be facing anything that cannot be met fully. The ground of being is a little like a universal safety net. You’re not going to lose ‘you’, but you likely have entertained very distorted ideas of who ‘you’ were thanks to our collective enculturation. You may arrive upon a very different understanding of who you are, but you are only going to find more of what is real inside there, not less of it.
Who you are is something that is not an idea. It is not encapsulated by ideas. The only things that can fall away are illusory. Because what is real in us is very powerful, it is also prone to misunderstanding. When you come upon it, it is likely to surprise you. Sometimes losing our psychological definitions can be sudden, dramatic and unsettling, but more often than not, the alterations are more gradual, nuanced and bring with them a sense of having weight taken off your shoulders.
These moments of realisation, even when they are small, carry the quality of having woken from a troubling dream.
Likely everyone has had the experience of being asleep, fully convinced that something very complex, involved and stressful was happening, only to realise upon awakening that actually this wasn’t true at all – you were dreaming the whole thing. Waking up from the dream of personal identity is much the same type of experience. Don’t take anyone’s word for it – go and discover this all for yourself. You will not regret it.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
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