Anyways what I find with people I’m working with who go through this initial gate-less barrier is that this initial shift is consistent and has certain aspects that are undeniable. Few people clarify ongoing non-dual realization right after initial awakening but it can happen as well. More likely it will take several months to several years. That period is one of clarifying practice, dissolving fixations, integrating/dissolving afflicting repressed emotions, investigating how the most fundamental beliefs tied to self operate which leads naturally to clarification etc.

Also I find that right after awakening the person usually seems quite enlightened for a period. They often touch into non-dual and even no-self for a time but those are usually experiential/unstable and followed by that not-so fun period of feeling quite un-enlightened. Then with good guidance and willingness to let this process dissolve the fixations more and more there can be those further refinements as described in stage 4/5 here. No-self you is sort of a whole different ballgame but it is where this leads if you’re crazy enough to keep going after awakening :0

I’ll post a link of a friend I interviewed about a week after initial awakening. It took her five months of hard core practice/ Inquiry.

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The body is tired but it doesn’t sleep much. It shakes. I wake up in the middle of the night to cry. The tears keep coming. It actually isn’t me crying, it’s the universe crying. It’s shedding all the tears that my family had to hold back, all the tears that my friends innocently swallowed.

What grace to be broken open like this.

Nobody is doing anything. This has nothing to do with me. What is me? Is it still here? Was it ever here? I don’t know. I can’t tell. ‘Me’ sounds like a pet dog.

Something is dying. But I am here. Alive. There is nothing more obvious. At times thought is quiet. At times thought is loud. Thoughts come. The mind is active. The mind is adorable. All I see are dreams. Mere whispers on the stage. Desire and aversion come and go, but they belong to no one.

There are hopes and wishes, fears and concerns. And here they all converge, they meet and kiss and dissolve into each other. ____ is changing and not changing. It’s a beautiful show. She’s still here, apparently. She still loves to work her ass off and eat chocolate and exercise and laugh and fall apart. She loves to fall apart. So what?

There is nothing to overcome. Suffering is perfection.

The most mundane is the most sacred. Imagination is sacred. Delusion is sacred. Pretense is sacred. In this play I meet myself again and again and again. Hi there you.

I’m on my death bed and outside the sun is rising. This is where the end meets the beginning. I’ve never heard the birds sing so clearly. So effortlessly.

I’m exhausted and heavy and I’m vital and light. How can this be? There’s a coexistence. Sameness. I’m moving so rapidly and yet unwaveringly still.

I’m naked and absolutely held. Held by the unknown. Kidnapped. Conquered by the unknown. Home.

Thank YOU for lighting the way. Thank you for your willingness to take everything away so gently and so radically. Thank you for feeling when I couldn’t feel. Thank you for getting out of the way, for showing up relentlessly, for the lack of filters, for everything you didn’t do. I don’t know what the fuck you did, but I suspect you didn’t do anything. Thank you for a selfless, agenda-less offering from no one to no one.

1. Important to find where intention (for awakening , living truth etc), meets surrender to flow of life/non-dual nature of immediate experience. Continue to find this sweet spot revealed in various activities, not just on the mat. Continue to investigate the pristine and dimensionless nature of sense phenomena / presence. If done correctly the sense of a world will dissolve. This is not describable but it’s true experience, nothing special and transient (just this). Like entering a non-world of as this is-Maha-radiance . From here it’s exquisitely clear there is nothing to do, yet alertness and willingness to see any and all fixation tendencies, beliefs and avoidance patterns is key. From here there is nowhere to go and spontaneity IS practice IS radiant empty nature IS everything-not-in space-and-here IS nothing at all. Endless flux so primary it can’t even know it self, just pure display . It’s radically intimate but impossibly varied. It’s no where and never not here. This carries itself forward naturally,

Self-Inquiry

We’ve already touched on the question “Who am I?” a couple times. Now we’re going to take that point of inquiry and supercharge it. We’ll use this self-inquiry vehicle as a sort of depth charge. Its purpose is to plunge you down through all those layers of belief and personal narrative, right to the core of identity. If we do this the right way, it will detonate when it reaches that core. This detonation will blow a hole right through the bottom. “The bottom of what?” You might ask. The bottom of everything. We are going to blow a hole right through the bottom of reality. You didn’t come all this way for nothing right?

“Blowing a hole through the bottom” is obviously a metaphor. The transformation that we’re referring to is so radical that even dimension (bottom, top, near, far) will be seen to be an illusion. Still, it’s a reasonably apt description. After my own awakening, these were the exact words that occurred to me. A couple of days into reality as I knew it dismantling itself, I was talking to a friend about what had happened. I knew I couldn’t adequately put into words what had taken place. I also knew it was impossible to describe what had replaced the struggle and isolation I had previously considered “normal life.” Yet my friend could sense that something had dramatically changed in me, and asked what had happened. The words came, “I was meditating and the bottom fell out.” It was exactly like this. Oddly enough, when the bottom fell out, there was nothing for everything to fall into. The framework of reality as I had known it had completely deconstructed itself. What was left was something like a deep and pervasive peace, and that’s how it remains. It’s obvious that whatever I thought was real before was only a very small “model” of reality, something like a shadow on a wall. I had stumbled upon a possibility, a way of investigating perception, that completely altered the way I experience reality.

Self inquiry has the power to bring this about for anyone who is willing to take the plunge. By imbibing it with the will to awaken to our true nature, we give the self-inquiry vehicle power beyond the limits of what we are capable of on our own. In this way, the inquiry becomes something of a portal or a conduit through which we can come into contact with forces altogether beyond the limits of the human dimension. Once this happens, you can no longer know yourself in the limited and definite way you had previously learned to perceive yourself. Your identity will find a new equilibrium with unbound consciousness, which is essentially limitless. The limitless experience of consciousness-Being, while astounding, is but the staging area for the more radical unfolding ahead. Yet it is a very important milestone in the process of realization.

Like any catalyst, this method of self inquiry functions best when the environmental conditions are favorable. Let’s spend some time discussing the optimal conditions to support this process before we will delve into the mechanics of the inquiry itself. Here are the conditions:

Alert: This inquiry works best if we are alert, without straining. You don’t want to be slack with your attention, daydreaming, or mind-wandering. On the other hand, it’s unnecessary to be hyper-vigilant or to strain your attention into a hyper-focused state. You want to be alert enough to assure that nothing escapes your attention, including any thought. A relaxed and dilated (open) attention, engaged in the process of inquiry is ideal. It is something like driving an automobile in a city you are unfamiliar with. Unlike taking a long drive down the highway where you might zone out or daydream a bit, driving in an unfamiliar city requires you to keep your attention on the immediate environment. You won’t be daydreaming or imagining events and places that aren’t in your current experience. It can take a bit of practice to strike the right balance of alertness and relaxation. Keep practicing and you will find that sweet spot where you are neither daydreaming nor straining.

Curious: Genuine curiosity is necessary for this approach to work. It’s my responsibility to relate the mechanics of this inquiry in a way that compels genuine curiosity. It’s up to you to be willing to acknowledge that innocent curiosity and proceed from it. We often circumvent natural curiosity by moving our attention to a familiar but artificial mental construct when we find ourselves in the unknown. We do this to feel some sense of certainty. This means that when faced with the unknown we often cling to old habituated patterns of thinking to help us avoid admitting to ourselves that we really don’t know. When this technique is applied correctly you will find yourself in the unknown rather quickly. The paradox here is that using thought to “cure” that sense of unknowing will undermine the inquiry. A willingness to remain in unguarded curiosity is the lamp that lights the way forward.

Empirical: One definition of empirical is, “Verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or logic.” When conducting self-inquiry, it’s best to forego comparing your experience to any idealized experience or expectation. We’re here to discover. So any description we’ve read or heard about what is supposed to happen when we self-inquire is useless. We’re only interested in what we directly discover. If you’re willing to take a strictly empirical approach, then only immediate, obvious, and self-explanatory experience matters. When you really get the spirit of this, it is quite a relief. How nice it is to not to have to stress over whether your experience is the “right” one. In a sense you’re putting realization in the hot seat. You’re saying, “OK, I trust that you really can show me something that is beyond my own capacity to construct as a mental image. I will keep my slate clean and not compare my experience to any ideal, regardless of where I acquired that ideal.”

Fresh: - When you begin this inquiry just let go of everything you know. Let go of past inquiries and results. Let go of any insights you might have had, even the last time you meditated or engaged in inquiry. In fact, let go of what happened five minutes ago. Just this one question. Just this one experiential observation. Do this every time you return to inquiry. Better yet, do this as you go about inquiry. It’s like writing on a chalkboard and there is an eraser immediately following the chalk. In this way every moment is fresh. Every time a question is asked, it’s asked from complete innocence and unknowing. We carry no baggage in this way. When we free ourselves up from the bondage of the past, we are free to synchronize with the moment to moment flow of reality.

Consistent: Initially, you might approach this inquiry during seated meditation, or when you feel inclined to introspect. Over time, as the curiosity and desire to wake up build, you will find that you can carry this inquiry with you for longer periods of time. You might be surprised as it becomes quite enjoyable to carry this throughout daily activities such as cooking, working, exercising, and even talking with others. With consistency a certain momentum builds. When I was close to awakening (though I didn’t know it at the time), I would even carry inquiry off into sleep. I would try to stay with the query even as my consciousness seemed to disappear into nothingness. I would then pick it up just as soon as I remembered upon waking. There’s no need to judge yourself if you can’t stay with it constantly, but as your passion to penetrate the barrier of illusion grows, you will find that it can be carried with you a lot of the time. After all, if you’ve come this far you’ve realized there is nothing more important than this right?

1. Become receptive to thought: It’s so common for us to attempt suppress or avoid thoughts when we want to relax and rest. We often conclude that if all those thoughts weren’t there we’d be at peace. Well when it comes to self-Inquiry we actually want the thoughts to come. We orient toward thoughts, as if we can’t wait for the next thought to arrive. This might sound counterintuitive but when you truly embrace the arrival of thoughts (regardless of their content), it can relax you in a different way than you might be used to. It’s not a checked-out sort of relaxation, it’s a checked-in relaxation. To put it simply, a lot of strain is involved in resisting thoughts, and we resist thoughts to various degrees all day long. So the first step is to simply become thought-receptive. Turn your attention to that inner movie screen. You can even affirm inwardly, “I choose to be completely receptive to thoughts, they have all of my attention right now. I welcome them.” Another way of saying it is to make the awareness of thoughts as thoughts, the most interesting thing to you in this moment. For instance, the goal is not to daydream endlessly about a beach trip to the Bahamas. Rather we become fascinated as the thought of the Bahamas forms on that inner screen. “Oh, so this is a thought! It’s showing a sort of inner movie of the Bahamas, and yet I can see it’s made out of some sort of nebulous thought-stuff.” That’s what it means to become fascinated with thought as thought.

2. Take a neutral stance: As a thought arrives, don’t evaluate its content. There’s no need to assign a value to it such as, “this is a good thought or a bad thought.” For instance if a thought arrives that says, “I’m confused,” we needn’t assign a negative connotation to it. Just take it as a neutral experience. For example, consider the thought to be like a pad of paper with the message “I’m confused” written on it. We could say that the pad of paper is primary to the message, meaning the pad of paper could be there with any message on it or no message at all. In that sense it’s neutral. When we see a thought as a thought, we have this opportunity to perceive its neutrality. It’s when we believe a thought points to some reality “out there” that we begin to struggle with polarity. As you practice with one thought at a time, you will get better at perceiving this neutrality.

3. Clarify the thought. This step can take a bit of practice because we usually have a dynamic relationship with thought inside consciousness. We tend to move past certain thoughts that are uncomfortable or partially unconscious. This is even more marked when we are feeling restless and our monkey-mind is swinging from branch to branch so quickly that we’re not fully aware of what thought branches it’s swinging from. So slow down. Take one thought at a time as it arrives. Once you recognize a thought (whether conceptual, auditory, or visual image), try to clarify it a bit. If it’s conceptual you can speak it in your mind. If you think of this like watching a slide show of thoughts on a movie screen, you want to slow down the slides. Then you want to move closer to the screen and clarify exactly what that thought/image/slide is. As you get better at holding a single thought in your mind you might be surprised how simple and even relaxing it becomes. You might also be surprised that the closer you look at a thought the less substance it seems to have. This is analogous to walking so close to the screen that all you see are soft forms, shapes, and light.

4. Notice how the thought feels like it’s about “Me.” The previous steps can become somewhat passive once you get the hang of them. This step requires active engagement with each thought, if only for a moment. This is because this step addresses the precise moment when we become unconscious, meaning the moment we become identified with thought. It’s a subtle transition, so we must train ourselves to recognize it if we ever want to finally be free of it. Here you may feel like you are doing a bit of detective work, but it’s essential to do it every time. Initially it can feel somewhat awkward, like you’re going against the habit force of the thought stream. What you’re really doing here is undermining a false perspective. The key is to observe the thought and identify the sense that this thought is about “me.” Let’s look at an example. Let’s say we become receptive to thought(step one). We turn our attention inward, and within a short time we are starting to form a visual memory of eating a sandwich 10 minutes ago. We remember thinking about what a good sandwich it was at the time we were eating it. As we become aware of this thought, we recognize, “Ok in this thought/memory there is a visual replaying of eating a sandwich. There is also self-dialogue saying it is a good sandwich eating experience. It is clear that this self talk occurred ten minutes ago. At this moment it is simply one thought in my mind, neither good nor bad.” This is step two. Now we clarify the visual experience of that thought, somewhat like we are squaring ourselves up to the internal movie screen and stepping closer (step 3). We notice the colors and textures of the room, the sandwich, and our hand holding it. We see the movement and recall the chewing as well as the internal dialogue, “What a delicious sandwich this is.” We see how peculiar it is that this is all made out of thought-stuff and yet it is quite vivid. Now for step four. In this step we recognize that this thought, this internal movie appears to be about me. It seems that I was the one eating the sandwich doesn’t it? Of course in the past I did eat a sandwich, but in this thought, it seems that it is referring to “me.” It’s not Joe or Jessica eating that sandwich. I understand this may seem so obvious as to be absurd, but it’s key to recognize that this thought clearly appears to refer to someone called “me.” In addition it seems and feels like this thought is occurring to “me.” This means that the sense of me is not only implied in the thought (the one eating the sandwich), but also it is implied by there being a thought at all. Let me explain. Not only does the thought appear to suggest it is about “me” as the star of the internal movie eating a sandwich, but it also suggests that there is a “me” that is interested in the thought at all. Can you see that distinction? More importantly can you find that sense with your own thought, whatever that is? It appears as if the thought is happening to a “me,” the thinker. It suggests a “me” right here and now that is aware of and viewing the thought. You could say it suggests a “me” in two different respects. One is a remembered me (as a thought subject). The other is an immediate me that is aware of that thought right in this moment. Can you feel into both of those? Is your internal experience starting to feel a bit different? Do you feel the edges of identity starting to soften or distort? If you do, that’s totally normal. If you don’t yet, it’s ok. Give this some practice and sooner or later those perceptual frameworks will start to loosen and fragment. If you’ve gone through this step along with me (using your own immediate thought experience) and you understand and can experience directly that a thought implies both a subject “me” which is the main character in the thought, as well as the immediate “me” which is the viewer/thinker of the thought, then you’ve completed step four. I know this can be confusing or disorienting at first, but it’s imperative to go through this process for this type of self-inquiry to really do its magic. It will get much simpler with a bit of practice.

Once you get the hang of these steps and can move through them in a short time you will notice it’s not hard to get that thoughtless gap, even if it is for a short time. The following suggestions can help fine tune to that frequency of pure self-inquiry. It’s something like tuning a radio between stations. You neither land at this thought nor at that thought, yet you aren’t rejecting any thought. Perhaps it could be said that attention moves toward a thought so quickly that it has no time to fully form. Attention becomes the thought. Over time it will become far more spontaneous and relaxing to remain in this thoughtless gap of pure looking, pure knowing without thought, and pure being.

- Recognize when another thought has emerged and has bound your attention. Often the thought will be about the immediate inquiry practice. This is often the moment we become re-identified with thought and don’t realize it, simply because the content of the thought is about the practice itself.

- Reviewing the thought chapter may be helpful. Recognize that anything you can put into words is a thought. Also any image, even vaguely defined images, are thoughts.

- You may have to reinvigorate your curiosity periodically, you don’t want to practice this mechanically.

- You can use the body as a gauge to assure you are doing this in a non-straining (relaxed) manner. You can periodically put attention into various parts of the body just to see if you’re holding tension anywhere or straining. This is especially useful if the inquiry feels strained, frustrating, or tense. Once you get the hang of doing self-inquiry without straining it may not be necessary to check in with the body in this way.

- Keep in mind that the pure looking in thoughtless gap doesn’t mean that you are out of contact with the stuff thoughts are made of (consciousness). It’s quite the opposite. It’s more like all of experience gets replaced by thought-stuff, which is also you-stuff. It’s all one endless continuum of pure conscious experience. The looking/questioning, the sense of you, the gap, and the thought stuff, are all the same substance.

- Even though we’re using a question as a launch vehicle, we’re not looking for a specific arrival place, a conceptual understanding, or a certain pre-defined experience. We’re more interested in “settling in” to pure experience itself which is not apart from the experiencer. The pure experience is infused with curiosity and fascination. However it’s a satisfied curiosity, so it doesn’t require resolution like a typical question would.

- Asking “Who Am I?” or “Where am I?” and then looking around for a conceptual answer. This simply leads to more inner dialogue, thinking, and frustration.

- Concluding “Oh there is no I/me/self.” This will lead to a dull inquiry with little interest in actually looking for the sense of “me.” The reason this happens is because we’ve become identified with the thought “There is no I/me/self.” When we are identified with that thought we don’t recognize it as just another thought. Another way of saying this is that when we adopt the belief, “There is no me/self,” the view from which that belief is held remains completely intact. The unseen (and assumed) sense of subjective self holds the view that there is no self. The self we are investigating is not a mere thought or belief. It’s a sense, frame of reference, or a feeling-assumption. So if you find yourself concluding this, you can recognize that conclusion as a mere thought. Then you can start at step two again using that thought.

- We get frustrated. It doesn’t feel like anything is happening so we feel frustration, impatience, or even anger. If this occurs it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. In fact when we start digging into our identity, it’s common for emotions to come to the surface. If this occurs. Just take a breath and relax for a minute. Then acknowledge the emotion. Feel it in your body. See if you can relax any tension in the body associated with the emotion. Then look for the thought or belief associated with the experience. It might be something like, “I’m feeling frustration.” Then proceed with the inquiry starting with step two.

- Staring at the thought/question “who am I?” endlessly without realizing that the one who feels like you doing this practice, and having a history, and a spiritual path etc, is what you are supposed to try to investigate. Whenever that dawns on you, look there!

- Concluding that because you haven’t found an I or a self, there is no value in continuing to look. The non-conceptual looking is the point.

- Being uncomfortable with the thoughtless state, then reengaging thoughts. This happens very frequently. When it occurs, we rarely realize that the mind re-engaged thought to avoid the fear response that can arise with thoughtless gaps. If we keep at self-inquiry, returning to the thoughtless gap again and again, we will often realize there is a certain fear associated with letting go of the addiction to thoughts. We are so used to clinging to the next thought, and then the next, that we often don’t recognize an underlying uneasiness that we are habitually using thoughts to avoid. If we persist in spite of any uneasiness or fear, then these emotions will settle with time and experience. If we just keep returning to this gap and remain there beyond the fear and physical responses, then things will start to change experientially. This is where magic can happen, but you have to stay in that gap.

1. Above I used the example of a thought about eating a sandwich. I started with a visual thought because they are the simple to describe. Let’s look at another example with a thought that is a bit more obscure. Let’s assume we start the self-inquiry process. We begin by becoming receptive to thought. We become aware of our inner thought-space and wait. After a short time we think, “Inquiry never works for me.” This is where the rubber meets the road. Many people will get exactly this far and give up. They give up by not recognizing that the thought “Inquiry never works for me” was their entry point. If you don’t catch it, and you believe that you were the thinker of that thought, you will give in to the stream of thoughts that follow. How do I know this happens so frequently? Well because people tell me. It’s common for someone to attempt self-inquiry and then report, “Every time I do inquiry it starts out well, but then I can’t get past...” Then they proceed to tell me the rest of the thought that bound them. I don’t blame them, the hypnotic pull of thought is far more powerful than most of us realize. When this happens I try as nicely as possible to point out that the thought that came up during self-inquiry saying “Every time I do inquiry it starts out well, but then I can’t get past...” was just a thought like any other. However at the moment they failed to recognize it as a thought, they hypnotized themself back into the thought stream and abandoned the inquiry process. So now that you have that background information let’s look at the thought, “Inquiry never works for me.” Step two is to take a neutral stance. If we believe this thought is a statement of truth, we might feel frustrated and might judge it as undesirable. However now that we’re out of the business of judging thoughts, we can regard it as neutral, because it is. It’s a thought like any other, in that it’s made of the same thought-stuff that every thought is made of. That thought-stuff is neutral in quality. The next step is to clarify it. Just repeat it once in your mind and annunciate the inner dialogue. “Self inquiry never works for me.” Can you see how it’s just like some mysterious substance of mind that can seemingly form internal sounds (dialogue) where there are none? That internal dialogue is clear somehow, but also not there at all. It’s also the same stuff that made up the sandwich thought isn’t it? Step four, notice this thought appears to be about “me.” In this case I think it’s more clear why this is important. It has to do with the story I told about how people commonly get this far and then end up getting dragged down the thought stream. If you don’t slow down enough and go through these steps then when a thought like this comes, it can really hooks you and take you for a ride. There is a certain momentum to our relationship with thoughts. The stepwise approach slows this momentum down enough to truly disentangle ourselves from thoughts. So when a thought like this catches us and drags us into the thought stream, such that we abandon the entire process of self-Inquiry, it is because that momentum has caused us to take that thought as a statement of fact. We experience that thought as if it’s defining reality. Moreover, we take it as if it’s defining reality for “me.” The “me” becomes assumed and solidified when this momentum is ongoing. This is the step where we have an opportunity to truth-test the “me” that this thought claims to be about. So now let’s perform step 4. The thought was, “Self-Inquiry never works for me.” Now we recognize that the thought seems to be referring to “me.” In fact it states it directly doesn’t it? That’s the assumed me that is the subject of the thought. More importantly there is an assumed, felt “me,” that seems to be aware of that thought. This is the sense of the one that feels disappointed or frustrated if that thought is believed. Now we proceed to step five. Look for that “me.”You’ll notice that it isn’t in the thought. Why? Because clearly you don’t disappear when that thought subsides. Furthermore you were clearly here before that thought arose. So where else can you look? You can look where it feels like you are. What’s there? Well you might notice a sensation, such as a pressure in the head or a subtle feeling in some other part of the body. Is that you? Well the sense of you can be there when you aren’t noticing that specific sensation right? So just keep looking. Stay in that curiosity. Stay in the feeling of that place that seems to be aware of thoughts, seems to form thoughts, and yet is still there even when there are no thoughts for a moment. Stay here and you’ll be physically experiencing where the sense of you the thinker, the sense of the thoughts on the inner movie screen, and the gap between thoughts are all seamlessly one. Just stay there. It might feel dynamic and it might feel very still. It might feel both simultaneously. Once you “get” the feel of this you need do nothing more than stay right there. Stay there during meditation. Stay there as you get up from meditation. Stay with it through activities to the degree possible. Stay there any time you remember to return to that gap. See if you can carry it off into sleep and pick it up right as you awaken.