One day in the darkness of a pre-dawn morning after having walked barefoot (the day before) along the rocky path around the base of Mount Arunachala with sight turned inward, and heart beating RAM with each step, I sat up on my pallet in a state of sleepy detachment in the room at Ramana Ashram where I had been staying,
As I sat on the edge of the bed my mind began to turn back on itself with one incessant question that arose in conjunction with each and every lazy awakening thought.
“Who is it that is sitting?” Who is it that is asking? Who is it that is thinking?
Who is it that moves to stand? Who is asking? Who is walking? Who is asking?
Who stops before the sink? Who asks? Who is brushing teeth? Who asks?”
This inquiry was not a process that I was doing. Rather it was being done, as ‘I’ watched. There were no answers, because before an answer could formulate, the question “Who asks?” would arise. And because an asker could not be traced, there was, of course no answer.
This process went on for many days after I arrived back at the place I had been renting at Brindavan. The questioning lasted so long and was so constant that it had virtually eliminated every trace of thought, until even the question “Who is it?” ceased. There was no surviving the interrogation, even for the interrogator. This state of suspended thought gave rise to an ever- expanding experience of spaciousness. Time collapsed into an eternal NOW and I began to feel myself (or what I had thought myself to be) being drawn, as if upward, toward an immense ecstatic joy.
Why do I write about this? I can’t really say. Perhaps it’s to remind myself that this was a 'happening'. This was not a discipline of inquiry that I had decided to practice. In fact later, after it ended I could not for the life of me make it happen by consciously trying to catch every thought that arose to ask who was thinking it. In fact all of the effort would only result in a pounding headache, disappointment, and finally giving up. Beneath the disappointment of not being able to ‘make’ it happen, however, lay an incredible and most obvious truth. I am NOT the doer. In the moments in which that truth descends the relief is profound. But if I am not the do-er, then…
who AM I?
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