How is karma destroyed only by self-investigation?

A new friend recently wrote to me asking, ‘When we do meditation on I or atma-vichara will all the previous karma be destroyed? How is that?’ The following is what I replied to him:

In order to understand the essence of Sri Ramana’s teachings, we need to carefully study his original writings

In various comments that he wrote on one of my recent articles, Dṛg-dṛśya-vivēka: distinguishing the seer from the seen, a friend called Joshua Jonathan expressed certain ideas that other friends disagreed with, so the comments on that article include some lively discussions about his ideas. I will not quote all of his comments here, but anyone who is interested in understanding more about the context in which this article is written can read them here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. The following is my reply to some of the ideas he expressed in those comments:

The ego is essentially a formless and hence featureless phantom

In the fourth section of one of my recent articles, ‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana, I wrote:

The important principle that he [Sri Ramana] teaches us in verse 25 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu is that this ego is only a formless and insubstantial phantom that seemingly comes into existence, endures and is nourished and strengthened only by grasping form (that is, by attending to and experiencing anything other than itself), so we can never free ourself from this ego so long as we persist in attending to anything other than ourself (that is, anything that has any features that distinguish it from this essentially featureless ego). Therefore the only way to free ourself from this ego is to investigate it — that is, to try to grasp it alone in our awareness. Since this ego itself is featureless and therefore formless, and since it can stand and masquerade as ourself only by grasping forms in its awareness, if we try to grasp this ego alone, it ‘will take flight’ and disappear, just as an illusory snake would disappear if we were to look at it carefully and thereby recognise that it is not actually a snake but only a rope.

Dṛg-dṛśya-vivēka: distinguishing the seer from the seen

In a comment that he wrote on my previous article, ‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana, a friend called Venkat quoted two passages that record what Bhagavan replied on two occasions, first in response to a question that he was asked about the teachings of J. Krishnamurti and second in response to a comment about them.

‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana

In a comment on one of my recent articles, What is meant by the term sākṣi or ‘witness’?, a friend called Sankarraman wrote:

I wouldn’t say that JK advocated witnessing of thoughts, since he has said that the witness being the ego is tied to thoughts. So that position extenuates him from that charge. But he speaks of the observation without the observer, which is similar to Patanjali’s extinction of thoughts as paving the way for liberation, which is called transcendental aloneness. There are a lot of parallels one can find in the two teachings except that they don’t constitute the flight of the Ajada.

In reply to this I wrote the following comment:

What is unique about the teachings of Sri Ramana?

Last Sunday I talked via Skype with a friend in Argentina about the teachings of Sri Ramana, and at the end of our discussion he asked me to write a summary of the main ideas that I had explained to him, because English is a foreign language to him, so he wanted to be sure that he had correctly understood and grasped all that I had said. This article is the summary that I wrote for him, so some of the ideas that I express in it were what I said in reference to what he had told me. For example, what I say about our inability to meditate on ourself continuously for five hours, or even five minutes, was with reference to what he told about how in the past when he was practising other forms of meditation he was able to meditate continuously for five hours, but that now when he tries to practise self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) he finds that he is unable to do so for even five minutes.

Being attentively self-aware does not entail any subject-object relationship

In a comment on my previous article, Trying to see the seer, a friend called Diogenes wrote:

Is it at all possible to be attentively self-aware, that is, paying close direct high concentrated undivided attention and looking intensely-carefully to anything featureless? To try to keep our entire mind or attention fixed firmly and unshakenly on that which sees, i.e. our ego, is surely a reflective activity of the subject, i.e. ourself. You say that we ourself are not an object. But to gently see, attend to or observe ourself seems to be just an objective process to which the subject is involved.

The following is my reply to this: