Once you contemplate “Who am I?” enough, you come to the conclusion that you’re neither the perceiver (of the so-called world), nor the gross body, nor the energy body, nor the mind.

The most obvious candidate staring you in the face is that you are a self.

And as you begin to contemplate this sense of being a separate, individuated self, you’ll hit upon three promising proposals:

1. I am the hurt (or suffering) one.
2. I am the doer.
3. I am the thinker or knower.

Why just these three? Because plenty–most, I’d wager–of thoughts and feelings can be “funneled into” the first, second, or third category. Some will have to do with suffering–with sadness, anger, fear, hatred, alienation, and the like. Others will have to do with doing something, with failing to do some other thing, with wasting one’s life, with being unproductive, and so on. And others still will seem to confirm one’s stand as the thinker who is thinking thoughts or the knower who knows this or that (or who doubts this or that).

Self-inquiry (atma vichara) really begins in earnest at this point. For one is to invited to ask the following and then to look very closely at one’s actual experience:

1. Is there actually a hurt one in direct experience?
2. Is there really a doer in direct experience?
3. Is there, in truth, a knower or thinker in direct experience?

The first revelation is that there isn’t: there is no suffering one, no doer, and no knower.

The second is that there’s only pure being–which is to say, your actual nature. When Ramana Maharshi speaks of “I am that I am” or simply of”I-I,” he means to point out that the “false i” (the ego-i) is only, in truth, the Real–and only–I.

In short, your inquiry into yourself has revealed Only Yourself.