---self-inquiry is infallible – you can’t do this wrong. No matter how poorly it is done, once the intention to find out what you are takes hold, self-inquiry will take you home.
---Self-inquiry is simply to look directly at yourself, to look at the plain, undeniable hereness of you, to look at the naked experience of Being, expecting nothing from it, projecting nothing onto it. This Being, this sense of presence, is the entire truth of you. It is permanent, unchanging, never missing. It has always been in the background of every moment of your life. It is present in sleep, waking, dreaming, work, play, and thought, it is here when you are wanting and when you are not wanting. It is the same in this moment as it was when you were thirteen or three or thirty. It is what makes it impossible for you to deny that you are. It is the only truth there is, and looking at truth is the medicine that destroys the lie that you are your life.
---Now you must take this medicine not just three or four times a day, but absolutely as often as you can remember to do so, and the course of this medicine is until the end of your life. But you will soon see, and will eventually understand, that looking at the reality of you is what you have wanted always, from the day you took birth, and you will, therefore, have no trouble remembering to return to that well, to drink from that water, that medicine.
When you take an antibiotic to cure an infection in the body, you do not know precisely what is happening as the course of treatment proceeds. You can’t see or feel the gradual poisoning and death throes of the micro-organisms that have invaded your body. You are not directly aware of the biological processes of healing that unfold as the grip of the disease loosens with the death of its cause. You only know that gradually, little by little, you feel better each day than you did the day before.
It’s the same with self-inquiry. Do not expect any momentous shift in perspective or state, since that is not what truth brings you. Truth is not new, and truth brings only truth, and takes from you the lie that is the sole cause of your suffering. There may be many experiences, good and bad, as the lie dies and the felt need to control things dies with it, but they mean nothing. Little by little, you will feel better each day than you did the day before with no regard to the nature of the experiences that come and go in you. And in the end, you will be at peace with it all. As you have always been.
Expect ego to continue, and with it the drama of the story of your life, but it will mean less and less to you, it will lose the feel of desperate importance to you. Ego, after all, is not the problem. The lie that ego is you is the only problem.
And remember always: you cannot do this wrong. All that’s required is the firm intention to look at yourself directly whenever you can, and all else will be taken care of.
-John Sherman
http://www.johnsherman.org/2006/11/24/this-is-the-story-of-how-i-met-gangaji-and-became-spiritual-and-finally-found-through-the-self-inquiry-of-ramana-maharshi-everything-that-i-had-ever-imagined-i-wanted/#more-14
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