Continued from Verse Twenty-Seven
28. Just as a man would dive in order to get something that had fallen into the water, so one should dive into oneself, with a keen one-pointed mind, controlling speech and breath, and find the place whence the 'I' originates.
Commentary: ”I” is a kind of illusion that depends on your not looking in its direction. You — or what seems to be you — believes yourself to be aware and independent, beliefs which cannot be sustained if you see the background from which what seems to be you arises. That background, and not you — in other words, not the “I“ — is what is aware and independent. Noticing that background fully, however, destroys the very ideas of background and foreground.
The one who seeks to destroy the illusory I needs to move the attention away from all changeable objects and “inward” towards the one observing those objects. The “I” is what feels like what is noticing everything. It is the sense of being awake, alive, aware. When one turns the attention in pursuit of it with intense concentration, we can find from where that I originates — meaning, that when we look for the I, we find that it did not originate at all, that it is in fact not what we thought it was. It turns out that what seemed to be a separate I was in fact nothing but the Self, which is beyond separation.
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