Facilitating self-inquiry

Self-inquiry, as per Ramana Maharshi, consists of the simple question ‘Who am I?’ asked repeatedly until ones essence is realised. From that point onwards, only awareness is necessary to bring oneself back to the experience of this essence. It is this experience that is real. Conceptual understanding of it constitutes further illusion. 

The role of the teacher is to facilitate inquiry to the point of realisation and assist students in bringing back awareness to their essence, as it looses itself in the world again. Ones primary attention is always with this essence, from which events in peripheral awareness are faced effortlessly. Increasingly, the role of the teacher also includes wiping out any conceptual understanding and knowledge of this essence, that is accumulated as ‘inquiry’ grows in popular culture.

Teaching spaces are to be considered whole, not separated into students and teacher, the inside and the outside, and so on. This fallacy should be pointed out as part of the teaching. The whole consists of different parts which cannot exist outside it. Parts must be be seen in the context of the whole, for which teachers have to give up their identification with the teaching space itself, as parts cannot see the whole from the perspective of a part. 

The universal, eternal, or whatever you call it, is simply the sum of wholes, to put it without the glamour. 

Students represent both a part in the whole as well as a whole in itself, with different personal patterns or sub-personalities on a psycho-spiritual level and various body parts and organs on a biological level. The realisation of oneself as the body and more than the body, a pattern and more than a pattern, the system and more than the system, is the key to this inquiry. 

The intention of inquiry is not to hold parts in their place, confirming rigid teaching and personality structures, but to experience the fine interplay between parts, realising oneself as the whole that is aware, and in power, of it.

It is a process of psychological dis-identification from ones individual parts (archetypical sub-personalties or personality patterns) such as the inner critic, the fearful warrior and the rebelling child – and re-integration of these parts into awareness of the whole (read more about this in Psychosynthesis).
Why would one want to dis-identify? Because conflict is inherent to parts, since they are psychologically split from the whole. The division has each part be in conflict with itself as well as the other parts. This needs to be understood at the opening of any teaching space for students to experience the opportunity that lies in dis-identification and re-integration: to be at home with themselves, or better at one with themselves. A term used for this is self-realisation – to realise what is already real.

Initially, this is likely to be met with resistance by the students, some may even leave the teaching, as personality patterns are staked on their concepts, beliefs and assumptions, that are being eradicated, or at least loosened, in the process.
Containment of the teaching space is therefore indispensable, which requires sustained awareness of the teaching team, inside and outside sessions. Participants should feel carefully held so that they can focus on the inquiry at hand.

The activities of self-inquiry include, but are not limited to, dialogue, creative reflection, constellation and meditation.

The following questions can guide an inquiry over approximately three days. They benefit from a group setting and are not meant to be answered consciously but instead continuously held until answers emerge naturally, without any effort.

Day 1

What is self-inquiry? 

How might I sabotage my inquiry? 

What are the roles I play in life?

How do these roles relate and what are their conflicts? 

Which of my roles self-inquires right now?

Day 2

Which roles are showing up today?

What might they be resisting and why? 

What do I get from my roles?

How do they limit me? 

Would I be willing to let them go?

Can I be aware of the whole?

Day 3

What am I aware of?

Who am I?