The cause of suffering is the idea that you are at stake in what happens with these thoughts, and that these thoughts are you. It�s that at-stakeness that gives rise to this undercurrent of anxiety and fearfulness, out of which comes all suffering.

Take a time every day. It doesn�t have to be a long time, just long enough to see it. It could be five minutes, just long enough to actually get that glimpse again. Take a little bit of time, sit down, watch your breath, settle down, and resolve that you will look at yourself. Move your attention inward and backward, looking for that which is always here. And when it comes, go on about your business.

I would sit on my bunk, and I would close my eyes, and I would get one-pointed with my attention, and I would move my attention looking for any object within the scope of my consciousness that felt like me, by which I mean small, contracted, mean-spirited, selfish, greedy, and stupid. And I would settle on something that felt like that, and I would tightly hold it with my attention.

What is it to be here? What does that feel like? How do I know I am here? How can I be so certain? But I am here, I am here. Not here in this room, but here. Is it not true that you are here? Just look and see if that is not true. Now look at that again. And keep looking at that as often as you can.

No matter what seems to be occurring, no matter what is taking your attention within your consciousness, you are the same. You are this silent, shining, unchanging, eternal presence that is the source, the ground, and the container of it all, the space in which all of it comes and goes.

The looking is the goal. The goal of the practice is the looking. Because if you assign some other goal to it, like getting to be peaceful, or filled with equanimity, or happy, the only way you can tell whether that goal is being reached is by looking in this. life, by looking at the state of your thoughts, whether you are having wicked thoughts, or good thoughts, or sweet thoughts, whether you are being selfish or selfless. That is the only place you can look to see whether that goal is being fulfilled, which is a clue that that is not the goal.

The actual inquiry itself relies upon your own natural intelligence and common sense, your ability to discern when you are caught in the wrong direction, and to see that you are on the right track when you are going in the right direction.

When the inquiry does its work, what is missing is this underlying sense of anxiety and fearfulness, of being at stake in what is happening here. There is an easing off of the whole dramatic entanglement with the events of the life.

And in the midst of anything, you can find a time, a moment, to just stop for a second and check and see if you are not still here, and if you have been touched by any of it.

The inquiry is only a momentary seeing, without understanding or naming, the reality of what it is to be you -- this background presence that never moves, that is never absent, that never changes and is unaffected by any of it, and may seem to be separate from you. This is the reality of what you are, and it is the determined, conscious intent to look at that, just momentarily, repeatedly, that is the inquiry. It is the repeated part of it that does the work. It is cumulative.

That experience of no frame of reference, and the perception of that which has no basis for saying anything about itself, that clarity and simplicity, that is you, and that is always here.

Look to see if there were any boundaries to the mind.

Just to look at it, not to know it, not to understand it, not to name it, just to look at it. It is just the looking at it.

Ramana said that the only vasanas (a vasana is a tendency) that remain for the jnani are vasanas of enjoyment. And the truth of it is that all vasanas are vasanas of enjoyment. So that the point of this is not the destruction of these vasanic tendencies, but the freeing of them from the burden of the belief that your whole fate is riding on them. And then you see them, and they are just things. They are just the way in which reality takes form.