Honest Inquiry begins inwards, backwards. The assumed Subject had to be clearly identified, the Inquirer’s Platform laid bare, prior to any investigation on an Object or else one keeps tripping on the Self-Loop. It was the defining difference that marked early Dharmic Inquiry.
The modern assumption that the Subject can be ignored as long as the Object was clearly in view was, after repeated and painful experimentation, found to be false.
In time there spread a wider appreciation of the issues involved. That this type of Inquiry was of a very special and perilous character, that any inquiry on the nature of the Subject, by an assumed Subject, was fraught with miscues, wrong turns and short stops.
Vedic Truth: from Vid; To Know, To See; Proto-Indo European Weid, as in Vide, View, Video. Hence Schools of Philosophy as Darśanas, from dṛś: ‘To View’.
The Philosopher [Phílosophía: ‘Lover of Wisdom’] is replaced by the Seer. I can debate you to the grave. But I can’t unsee what I see. One loves Wisdom of course, yet the conviction is unstable until I see. To ‘See’ is the irreducibly simple act.
‘Seeing’ in its analytic meaning is is all about catching the beam in your own eye. I catch the beam in my eye: and catch myself catching myself; and catch myself catching myself catching myself. And so on.
I See. I See that I See. I See that I See that I See…I Know. I Know that I Know. I Know that I Know that I Know…I am Conscious. I am Conscious that I am Conscious..and so on.
This is the unwinding. Each element ‘eats’ the one prior to it once it catches the beam in its own eye. Step-back until you are in clear view of what is going-on.
The issue of Self-Reference, a defining difference between Dharmic and other religious templates, leads to the evolution of its primary investigative tool: Formal Meditation Practice.
Vedic inquiry begins with Formal Meditation Practice [Dhyāna], the original ‘Laboratory For Inquiry’. [‘C’han’ and ‘Zen’ for example are morphed extensions of the word ‘Dhyāna‘.]
An elemental and time-tested tool, it is the single-best practice to catch yourself catching yourself, to grab the swirling cat’s tail.
How do ‘I’ investigate ‘Me’? How do I spot the beam in my own eye?
Meditation isn’t an aimless open-ended Sitting. There isn’t anything warm and fuzzy about it. Properly done it should gut you out.
Aside from the Dharma, I continue to remain incredulous that self-referential loops whether in Language or Mathematics or even social-systems such as Post-Modernism or Marxism, are so routinely missed.
No person should teach, write books [or websites], or hold-forth on the Dharma until his bottom is permanently numb from long hours of Sitting. The Numb-Bottom Test.
See the Posts on Science, in particular the ‘Scientific Stance’ which ironically shares this requirement in order to identify the ‘Objective World’. It was the steep decline in Dharmic Traditions of Inquiry that made it miss the Scientific Revolution altogether.
Not-Two 
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