Self-inquiry should feel like looking for something right here and yet is maddeningly elusive

People confuse self-inquiry with trying to *understand* what the I is intellectually, or to seek the nondual Self. This is incorrect. Self-inquiry is simply looking for that most common, fundamental data point of our experience -- the fact that our experience occurs *to us.* That sense of our own existence and awareness -- which is so obvious, so concrete-seeming -- we try to turn our attention to that. When we do, we find ourselves landing on thoughts, feelings, perceptions -- anything but that. And we refocus. And it happens again. And that continuous practice is self-inquiry. How can something so right here feel so incredibly difficult to grasp? That's what self-inquiry should feel like... until there is a perspective shift.