Incorrect and Correct Self-Inquiry

When you practice self-inquiry incorrectly, all that you will find is emptiness, the void, the vast, internal, self-effulgent space that I call the imaginal realm.  This is the area that Buddhism makes a big deal about, forms and emptiness are equal phenomenally, as appearances.

For example, you ask the question, “Who am I?” and begin “looking” inside that internal imaginal space, the self-lighted Void for an I-entity, for me.  You will never find it.  There is no internal I-object at all, anywhere.

The same is true when you ask, “Who has this thought”?, or “Who feels this emotion”?  There is no “Who” as an entity.  What will happen though is through the process of inner “looking,” that "your" internal space will grow larger and larger, spreading throughout one’s  internal and external world and "presence" until the inner light and space are the same to you as the external light of the sun and of lamps, and the same as the external space that contains the world.  

Then one day, you see that the inner and outer world are the same, and you experience Oneness for the first time.  No I anywhere and no division between internal and external.

However, this is hardly even a beginning.  This is not awakening.  This is grasping directly the oneness of form and emptiness, and the identity of internal and external.  This is the initial insight of Zen and not the end.

For now you will realize there is "something" observing all this, "someone" who has attained an understanding of oneness, someone who both witnesses the oneness of all phenomena, but also who has knowledge of that oneness.

This knowingness principle is the subject, the I as not-entity, not-object, but an ability to know, to be aware, to be conscious, and as such is beyond consciousness.  This principle, this ability to know, this ability to be aware lies ontologically before the knowing and the known.

Once you “know” this, you no longer search for an I-entity, but deeper, for that which lies before awareness, before  consciousness itself.

It is at this point you enter a area of complete mystery, and yet where your sense of self seems of come alive.  You feel as if you are coming home to rest at the deepest level of yourself.

Operationally, as a method, you try to fall backwards into yourself, into the observer, and you do that until your mind disappears altogether, and then you are the Self of all. You do not become the self of all, you realize you are the Self just as you are. You have arrived home.  You realize that until this point you have been searching for an existential entity as the self, but, in fact, YOU DO NOT EXIST!!! YOU ARE PRIOR TO EXISTENCE, its creator and sustainer.