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.

Meditations in dependent origination-cessation

In meditation, one seeks the personality that is evident at that state.
The birth - jati can be seen as
the present personality that is evident. This is pointed out by Ajan Chah.
The cause of that can be seen
as becoming-bhava. We became this (momentary) personality because we
held to something strongly - clinging (upadana). That clinging
happened because we liked it- we craved for it- tanha. The craving was
caused by the feeling- vedana, caused by the contact-phasso. contact
of sense objects with the sense spheres occurred as there are the
sense spheres - salayatanam. The senses are because of our mind and
body- this is the key link - nama rupa. This pertains to our mind made
body- the mental concept of our body. It is interesting that in the
components of nama rupa, the sankara is included.- it is due to our
past impressions that the present concept of our mind body exits. What
exits in the mind, as a cause of mind body ? what is beyond that ?
Buddha says it is consciousness-vinnanam. I think this is where a link
Ramana Maharshi's idea of self enquiry- "the feeling of I" exists. The
cause of that Buddha says is sankara. Sankara is caused by ignorance-
Avijja. What is this now ? Is it the concept of self ? It it the
limitedness one perceives ? Is it the concept that every one of the
above links exists because of the central concept of self ? Is it,
like in the Kachayana vacha gotta sutta, the extremes of the feeling
of "is" and the other extreme of 'is not' ? Or is it the substance
view- the view that all these are existent as absolute entities ?

The mind cannot perceive, the thought cannot touch. Here another link
to Krishnamurti's idea of "Precipice" looks close.

Now, at every step Nagarjuna's idea that each of these cause effect
links are not temporally connected and are not absolute, but each
exist because the other came to be will help us from falling into the
trap 'existentialism'- considering that each this links are absolutely
existent.