The nondual teaching says that one must turn inward in order to know that one is, right here and right now, being-peace. And yet, actually turning inward seems, at first, to be nearly impossible. I touch on this conundrum in this talk:

The question then arises, “What is it that makes an inward turn possible?”

Patanjali’s raja yoga makes plain that certain ethical practices as well as certain forms of inner purification both make possible meditation. It seems to me that he’s on the right track.

In my view, the first stage would take us through a virtue education (“the good”) while the second stage, that pertaining to inner purification, would involve attenuating ego (“the pure” or “the clear”).

Let’s start our course with ethical practices and, in particular, with the virtue of self-control. The longstanding and very sticky problem, which is exacerbated in our technological society, is that the attention is habitually directed toward sense objects–specifically, toward objects that are thought to be pleasant and away from those that are believed to be painful. If we wish to turn the attention inward, then this tendency must stop.

To begin to reverse this process (i.e., from outward-goingness to inward-goingness), one can ask oneself, “What are (a) common actions and (b) common speech acts that evince a lack of self-control? What sorts of things make me feel as if I can’t stop doing them or as if I can’t not say my piece?”

Start here–only do so with the aid of the witness teaching. Rather than trying to use willpower to do the opposite of what’s ordinarily done (since this will invariably lead to a seemingly interminable push-pull between “wanting to do what I shouldn’t do” and “resisting this temptation”), let the action or speech act not be done while standing knowingly as witnessing consciousness.

See what this stand is like.