Ramana Maharshi’s own engagement with Self-Inquiry began with a radical inner event in adolescence, when an intense fear of death arose. He lay down as if a corpse and vividly imagined the body as dead, destined to be carried away and burnt. In that deliberate facing of death, there was a clear recognition that, although the body could be regarded as lifeless, an undeniable sense of “I” remained present as the knower of the whole drama. From this, there was a direct discernment that this “I” could not be the body or the mind, but was instead a formless awareness that witnesses them. This shift was not an intellectual conclusion but an immediate reorientation of identity, from the perishable body-mind to the deathless Self. That recognition did not present itself as a temporary experience to be regained, but as a stable background of pure awareness.

In the years that followed, his “practice” was essentially an unbroken abidance in that Self-awareness rather than a technique applied at intervals. Living in silence in temples, caves, and later the ashram, attention remained or naturally returned to the fundamental sense of “I,” while thoughts and tendencies were allowed to arise and subside in that light without deliberate suppression or pursuit. When thoughts appeared, they were not followed outward into their content; instead, attention rested in the very source from which the “I”-sense and all other thoughts emerged. This is the inner stance later articulated as tracing the “I”-thought back to its origin, not by discursive analysis, but by a steady, wordless turning toward the knower rather than the known. In this way, the division between seeker and sought did not hold: the Self was not an object to be attained, but the ever-present reality in which all mental movements came and went.