The practice of ātma-vicāra — ‘self-enquiry’ or self-scrutiny

A Sanskrit term that was often used, both by Sri Ramana and by other more ancient sages such as Sri Adi Sankara, to describe this empirical practice of self-investigation or self-attentiveness is ātma-vicāra (or ‘atma-vichara’, as it is often less precisely transcribed), which is generally translated in English as ‘self-enquiry’ or ‘self-inquiry’. However, rather than ‘enquiry’, the word vicāra can be more accurately translated as ‘investigation’, ‘examination’ or ‘scrutiny’. Therefore the term ātma-vicāra really means ‘self-investigation’, ‘self-examination’ or ‘self-scrutiny’, and denotes the simple practice of closely examining, inspecting or scrutinising our fundamental and essential consciousness of our own being, ‘I am’, with a keen and concentrated power of attention.

Sri Ramana also referred to this empirical practice of self-investigation, self-examination, self-inspection, self-scrutiny, self-attention or self-attentiveness as the vicāra ‘who am I?’ However, when he described it thus, he did not mean that it is a process of questioning ourself ‘who am I?’ either verbally or mentally. What he intended us to understand by this term is that this practice is a keenly attentive examination or scrutiny of our basic consciousness of our own being, which we always experience as ‘I am’, in order to discover the true nature of this ‘I’, our essential being or ‘am’-ness.

That is, though (among its range of meanings) vicāra does mean ‘enquiry’, in the context of Sri Ramana’s teachings it means enquiry in the sense of empirical (experiential) investigation rather than in the sense of mere verbal questioning. It is not just mentally asking oneself the question ‘who (or what) am I?’ but is actually investigating what ‘I’ am — scrutinising oneself in order to experience oneself as one actually is. In other words, it is not literally questioning oneself ‘who am I?’ but is figuratively doing so: investigating experientially what this ‘I’ actually is.