On Self Enquiry

Ramana Maharishi propounds self enquiry. The method, as I understand is
1. Every being has an irrefutable feeing of 'I', of one self.
2. Observe the feeling.
3. See the attributes of 'I' as different from the 'I' feeling.
For eg. If I say I am Krishnan. Krishnan is my name, not me. Who am I ?
Iam a man - again my gender, not me ... the sequence to be applied to all the mental personalities that we observe when in introspection.
4. Bhagavan says that this I feeling is like a knot that between the mortal life and the divine. A knot is not an entity in itself. He also says that the I world and God arise and vanish together.
5. If we could de link all the modifiers from the I feeling, the 'I' feeling would dissapear and Divinity would shine forth. This is the most important point, one feels.

This method is marvellous. A one step method. Notice JK speaks about observing oneself in action and speaks about observing all the conditioning in it's completeness and the mind would be silent.

One feels an instinctive connection to dependent arising. As mentioned earlier, the Buddha speaks about the mental concept of body-mind (nama rupa), conciousness, sankara (samskara) and at the last ignorance in the reverse order. But what is ignorance ? Is it not the feeling of 'Iam' ? To be distinguished from 'Iam this vs that' which acomes in nama rupa etc.- Just the feeling of this limited I, separate independent but existing in this space time ?
This feeling of I, as in dependent arising is the basis of samskara. But what causes this feeling ? remember each limb arises depdendent on the other-it is not a linear chain. Hence, the feeling of I is nourished by the samskara itself.

Isn't Bhagavan's instruction directly leading to the 'ignorance'- avijja - first step in the dependent arising ? However, observation of this 'I' without the backdrop of Dhamma could mislead the mind to constructing some theories about the 'I self' - Iam consiousness and the kind.

Ok, suppose that we observed the 'I' on the backdrop of dependent arising, dropped all of its attributes (one should be very very careful not to have any mentations at this point too), what's left ? Would that result in the JK's state of observaing the conditions in its totality ?

we are somewhere, but what's the next step ? Is that the last step ?

On a different note, the textual versions of dependent arising some how do not stress the I feeling, although that feeling is most obvious and potent. It is not surprising, as the guiding principle is anatta. So it would be tricky to emphasise about the self-I feeling- at the beginnning and reject there after. Unless of course one where to resort to a Bhakthi kind of approach where the Other personality is emphasised.

A practisioner could be at cross roads - he/she feels the 'I' but can't accept it- bacause of wrong grapsing of Anatta. Negetivism creeps in. Practising the Bhagavans self enquiry in the same plane as the dependent arising seing the harmony of both, one feels, would help.