This essay is the kind of thing I'd normally keep private.
Not because it's too personal—though it is that—but because documenting practice is uncomfortably close to recommending practice. And I've already said this isn't a teaching. The gap between "here's what I do" and "here's what you should do" is wide in intention and narrow in practice. People collapse it without meaning to.
But I think the documentation is worth attempting, for a specific reason: abstraction is the enemy of inquiry. When someone says "investigate the sense of self," that can mean almost anything. When I say "I sit on the floor with coffee and stare at my hands for ten minutes and notice that I can't find where the seeing is happening"—that's specific enough to be useful, or at least interesting, even if it's not yours to repeat.
So: what follows is a lab notebook. Not a syllabus. I'm sharing what I do and what I've noticed, not what I think you should do or what I think it means. The line between those will slip. Call it out when it does.
Why "practice" is the wrong word and I'm using it anyway
The word practice implies something you do to get somewhere you aren't yet. You practice scales to get to music. You practice free throws to get to the game. There's a gap, and practice closes it.
This is probably not what's happening in inquiry about the self.
What I'm doing is more like... repeatedly creating conditions under which something I already am becomes visible. The practice isn't building toward insight. It's clearing away the noise that makes the signal impossible to find. Or—depending on the day and what I've been reading—maybe it's more like: the practice is just what happens when you can't stop noticing something and the noticing has to go somewhere.
I'm using the word anyway because I don't have a better one, and "things I repeatedly do" is clunky.
Sitting with perception before concept
This is the most basic thing I do, and the hardest to describe without it sounding either trivial or mystical.
Before I reach for the interpretation of an experience, I try to stay with the raw experience a little longer.
Concretely: I'm looking at a coffee mug on the table. The ordinary move is perception → naming → relating. The mug appears, I identify it as mug, I note that I need to refill it. This takes about a quarter of a second. I've already moved through the perception.
What I'm working with is the moment before the identification. Not the mug, but... the appearing. Whatever is happening before "mug" is the right answer. There's something there—color, shape, the sense of an edge—that I tend to skip in my rush to categorize. Staying in that moment, even briefly, does something.
What it does is harder to say. The clearest I can get: the appearance and the awareness of the appearance feel less separate. The gap between "the thing out there" and "me in here seeing it" gets thinner. Not gone. Not dissolved into some mystical unity. Just... thinner, like the border between two countries that turns out to be a painted line rather than a wall.
I don't do this as a formal sit. It's more like a gear I've learned to shift into at odd moments—waiting for the elevator, looking out the window. A brief pause before interpretation. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I'm just staring at things.
What doesn't help: forcing it. When I try to make something happen in that gap—try to achieve a state, try to have a realization—the moment closes. The trying is itself another object in the field, another movement away from whatever I'm trying to see. This is frustrating enough that I've mostly stopped trying and started just waiting.
Tracing the sense of 'I'
This is more formal. I do this when I sit down specifically to do it, usually in the morning before other things crowd in.
The instruction, if you want to call it that, comes from Ramana Maharshi's version of self-inquiry: follow the sense of "I." Not the word, not the idea, but the felt sense of being a self—the subtle thing that says this is me without any particular content.
In practice, here's what happens:
I notice I'm aware. Okay. Something is registering. I try to find where that awareness is located. Not physically—I know my head is where my brain is—but experientially. Where is the sense of "here"?
Usually I find I can't actually locate it. There's a reflex to place it somewhere—behind the eyes, in the chest—but when I check, I find that the checking is already in the field I'm trying to locate. I can't step outside experience to see what experience is happening inside. The observer and the observed aren't separate things I can compare.
What do I find when the location question gets genuinely interesting? Honest answer: nothing in particular. Not nothing in the sense of absence—there's clearly something happening. Nothing in the sense of no firm edges, no bounded entity I can point to. The self I expected to find when I looked isn't there in the form I expected. What's there is more like... a field, an openness, an unlocated awareness.
And then: the experience of "figuring that out" already includes a sense of being the one who figured it out. The 'I' immediately reconstitutes.
This cycle—locate the 'I', find something odd, watch the 'I' reconstitute—repeats. I don't know what to make of it. Sometimes it feels like progress. Sometimes it feels like the same groove playing. The times it's most useful are when I can stay with what was found before the reconstitution happens. Those moments feel different in a way I can't cleanly articulate.
What doesn't help: trying to "stay in no-self" or hold onto the moment of not-finding. That's just a new agenda for the self to pursue. The inquiry works better as genuine curiosity than as a technique with a target state.
Working with resistance
I got this from a Scott Kiloby adjacent thing and I'm not sure I understand it fully, but I notice it does something.
The observation: when something feels contracted—anxious, irritated, defended—there's a subtle movement of rejection. The contraction happens, and immediately there's a response of not this, get away from this, when does this end.
The experiment: instead of going with the rejection, face the contraction directly. Not to analyze it. Not to fix it. Just to look at it as an experience. What is anxiety, exactly, as sensation? Where is it? What's its texture? What am I actually experiencing, versus what story am I telling about what I'm experiencing?
What I find, pretty consistently: the sensation is significantly smaller than the story. The actual experience of anxiety, examined closely, is something like pressure in the chest and a slight shortness of breath and some muscular tension in the shoulders. Not nothing. But survivable, finite, locatable.
The story—this is going to get worse, I'm falling apart, something is wrong with me—is enormous by comparison. And the story is happening now, in response to something now, but it's made entirely of past pattern and future projection.
This isn't a new observation. Lots of traditions make it. The practice—and I mean practice in the modest sense—is noticing the moment when I'm in story versus in sensation. That's earlier than I usually catch it.
What doesn't help: trying to eliminate the story or dismiss it as "just thoughts." The story is real. It's just not an accurate description of what's happening. Dismissing it tends to push it underground, where it operates without oversight. Better to see it as what it is—a very active habit of interpretation—and be curious about it rather than trying to shut it up.
Noticing when separation hardens into belief
This is the subtlest one and maybe the most important to document because it's the one I'm most likely to miss.
There are moments when the sense of being a separate self is just... running, like background software. And then there are moments when I've made it into a position—when I'm separate has hardened from a felt experience into a held belief that I'm actively defending.
What tips me off that this has happened:
- I feel a faint but real need to distinguish myself from the people around me. My perspective, my experience, my insight—with an emphasis on mine that goes beyond possessive into territorial.
- Ideas about non-duality become ways to feel more evolved than people who haven't "gotten it." The inquiry, which is supposed to erode the sense of superiority, becomes another ladder.
- I get attached to what I've noticed. Not curious about it—attached to it. The attachment is the signal that I've turned an observation into an identity.
I can't reliably catch this in real time. I usually see it in retrospect—reading something I wrote, or mid-conversation noticing I'm defending a position I don't actually need to defend.
What I've found useful when I do catch it: not attacking the belief or trying to argue myself out of it, but going back to the direct investigation. What is the experience of being separate, right now? Not the concept, the experience. Almost always, when I look directly, the separation is softer and more porous than the belief suggested. The belief is a snapshot that got treated as permanent. The actual experience, examined fresh, doesn't quite support it.
This doesn't cure anything. The belief reconstitutes. But there's something in the gap between belief and fresh examination that loosens the grip just enough to be useful.
What I'm not doing
I'm not meditating in any formal sense. I've done retreat, I have some background in vipassana, I know the framework. I'm not using it right now, not as a regular practice. This is worth saying because a lot of inquiry happens in the context of formal meditation, and I don't want to imply mine does.
I'm not working with a teacher. I've had teachers. I know how valuable that can be. Right now the inquiry feels like it wants to stay informal and undirected. That might be a mistake. I can't tell from inside it.
I'm not expecting to arrive somewhere. This is possibly the most important thing in the list. The practices I'm describing are not, as far as I can tell, building toward a shift in permanent status. They're more like: ways to spend time that feel alive, that keep the question open, that occasionally produce a moment of genuine surprise about what experience actually is.
What I've noticed, without conclusions
Some patterns that seem real, without claiming to understand what they mean:
The more I investigate directly—looking at experience instead of thinking about experience—the less solid the boundary between self and world feels. Not in a dissolving-into-everything way. In a "there's less definite edge than I assumed" way.
The question what is aware right now? seems to point somewhere useful even when it doesn't resolve into an answer. Maybe especially when it doesn't.
The moments that feel most like what the traditions are pointing at aren't peak experiences or altered states. They're more like: ordinary moments noticed freshly. The mug on the table. The sound of rain. A sentence that stops me mid-reading because something in it is exact. These feel less like achievements and more like attention landing somewhere it doesn't usually land.
I haven't "arrived." I don't expect to. That expectation is probably part of the structure I'm investigating.
A note on what follows
This document will change.
What I practice changes. What I notice changes. Things that seem important become less so; things I've dismissed resurface. I expect to look back at this in six months and find that some of it was exactly right and some of it was confused in ways I couldn't see from inside.
That's fine. The point of a lab notebook isn't to be definitive. It's to record what you're seeing so you can track what changes and what holds.
This is what I'm seeing. Right now. From here.
Not a method. Not a map. A view from a specific position that I can't currently get outside of—which is, I think, one of the more interesting things about the inquiry.