If we are able to be steadily self-attentive, where do we go from here?

A friend wrote to me explaining how he is practising self-investigation and asked, ‘Where do I go from here?’ The following is what I wrote in reply to him.

When you write, ‘I seem to be “witnessing” or aware of the I am thought all the time now’, what exactly do you mean by ‘the I am thought’? The reason I ask is that people tend to objectify everything, so some people assume that the I-thought is some sort of object that one can watch, but the term ‘I-thought’ is just another name for the ego, which is not an object but the subject, the one who is aware of all objects. Therefore what we need to watch or ‘witness’ is not any object but only ourself, the subject (the ego or thought called ‘I’).

Asparśa yōga is the practice of not ‘touching’ or attending to anything other than oneself

In a comment on my previous article, Names and forms are all just thoughts, so we can free ourself from them only by investigating their root, our ego, a friend called Roger cited extracts from two verses of Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, namely 3.44 and 3.46, saying that the practice Gaudapada describes in them is similar to what he is practising, and after writing some reflections on this practice he invited me or anyone else to comment on what he had written, so this article is my response to his invitation and is therefore addressed to him.

Names and forms are all just thoughts, so we can free ourself from them only by investigating their root, our ego

A friend recently sent me a long email in which she began by saying, ‘The ego generates words in consciousness. The ego presents in consciousness as streams of words which form the so-called “stream of consciousness”’, and then went on to express her reflections on this idea, saying for example, ‘We all know how the mind races at times with endless streams of words which form thoughts of countless subjects, fears, hopes, memories, etc.’, and ‘Language forms words into thoughts, objects, events, time, space, memories, etc. creating the dream of a populated earth in a vast universe’, and she explained how she tries to apply such ideas in her practice of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra). The following article is my reply to her.