How can we refine and sharpen our power of attention so that we can discern what we actually are?

In a comment on my previous article, How to practise self-enquiry (ātma-vicāra)?, a friend called Rajat Sancheti wrote:

Desires, fears, etc belong to the ego or to the person? The person is insentient and cannot desire or fear anything, so they must belong to ego, I suppose. But then why do these desires and fears have such a personal nature? For example, the desire for money, lust, status, etc, they are only the body’s desires. Is it that when ego identifies this body as ‘I’, it takes this body’s desires and fears to be its own? Or are desires and fears only the ego’s desires and fears?

How to practise self-enquiry (ātma-vicāra)?

A friend recently wrote to me, ‘Please forgive me, as I suppose this question has been asked thousands of times, but can you describe in basic everyday language how YOU practice self-enquiry? Perhaps you have addressed this somewhere else. If so, please be kind enough to direct me to the source’, and in reply I wrote:

The ultimate truth is ajāta, but because we seem to have risen as ego and consequently perceive a world, Bhagavan, Gaudapada and Sankara teach us primarily from the perspective of vivarta vāda

In several comments on one of my recent articles, Whatever jñāna we believe we see in anyone else is false, there was a discussion about ajāta vāda, so in this article I will reply to some ideas that a friend called Venkat expressed in the course of that discussion, and in particular I will highlight the distinction between ajāta vāda (the contention that nothing has ever arisen, appeared or come into existence) and vivarta vāda (the contention that whatever has arisen, appeared or come into existence is just an illusion or false appearance), because in some of his comments he seemed to confuse the former with the latter, of which it is actually a denial.