Self-Inquiry — From Egg-Shells to Self-Realization (LA002)
⁘ Created: 2025-10-23 ⁘ Updated: 2025-10-23
What is real self-inquiry? Let's be very clear. It's not an affirmation repetition exercise. It's not a disconnected philosophical indulgence. It's a method of shifting attention to your source.
In our quest for the source of raw prime consciousness, we discover and extract our attention from veiling shells. Five shells: Physical, vital, emotional, rational, causal. When you make these your nest, you dwell in the sub-self.
Go deeper, go further inward. Seek the ultimate inquirer. Is there pure white light prior to the prism of attention? Is there a real self in the domains of our living experience? Exit from your little egg — be nothing and everywhere at once.
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- ¶ The Core Practice of Self-Inquiry ↴
- ¶ Our Five Shells — The Phenomenal Selves ↴
- ¶ Seek the Perspective — The Essence of Inquiry ↴
As we return to self-inquiry, let's be very clear. This is not a verbal exercise. This is not an intellectual indulgence.
The Core Practice of Self-Inquiry ¶
It's not that you will attain self-realization by the simple mechanical repetition of "Who am I", "Who am I", "Who am I". Nor will you attain self-realization by philosophical inquiries into the nature of the self, disconnected from your living experience.
These two, mantraic repetition and philosophical reflection, will support you — but they are not the core practice. The core practice in itself is the simple opening of a perspective into the focal point of your attention. To bring you to the center of the ground of being of your ongoing subjective experience — that is self-inquiry.
Whatever ground of self and being you may then reach, realize — This is hollow. I'm holding on to it. It is not the ground of being — it is still the ground of becoming. Go deeper, go further inward. Seek the ultimate inquirer. Recognize deeper and deeper planes of awareness. Still, framings for prime consciousness — undifferentiated, underlying all phenomena.
Our Five Shells — The Phenomenal Selves ¶
And many are our phenomenal selves. In classical teaching, as is found in living experience, we speak of five bodies and five sheaths, five shells around the underlying raw consciousness.
First, at the most concrete end of the spectrum is your physical food-made body. Second, there is the vital body of embodied dynamic energy. Third, there is the mental body of feelings and flavored atmospheres. Fourth, there is the rational body of thought-forms and cognitive structures. And fifth, there is the causal body, hosting our latent impressions, the subconscious and unconscious domains influencing and containing our existence.
These are the five shells in our existential egg. The five sheaths shrouding our cocoon of consciousness. As our attention shifts and migrates between these shells of being, there is benefit in the inquiry — "Where am I, and what am I there?" Also, who am I? Who is, what is, and why?
But, where am I? To know the places you keep on landing, planes lower than the summit of your undifferentiated consciousness. White light, cast through prisms into countless shapes, countless forms, countless dynamisms — and there you are. And in there, inquire — "Where am I, what am I, and who am I?"
Seek the Perspective — The Essence of Inquiry ¶
Do not make these statements. Rather, shift your attention to the inquiry, the essence of the inquiry — a perspective. Through that perspective, enter into the underlying field of awareness. This is self-inquiry.
This process, the more constant it is, the more thorough it is, will lead to your self-realization and the realization that there is no self to be realized in any of these domains of our operation. They are simply domains of operation, with no need to establish our nest of identity in any of them.
Then hatch from your shell, you cosmic egg. Fly afar from your nest — the nest will be filled with space. You will be nowhere at all — but everywhere.