In the last segment, we explored how Self-enquiry can become a portable practice, accompanying us through the challenges of daily life. By observing passing emotions, habits and reactions without being identified with them, we begin to recognise the conditioning that sustains the illusion of a separate self. Rather than pursuing each thought, enquiry turns attention towards the one behind thought, to the one to whom our thoughts arise.
Through poetry, literature and familiar stories of being lost, we considered how the search for security and belonging often drives us outward, away from the Heart where true refuge lies.
We looked at David Wagoner’s poem Lost which reminds us that wherever we find ourselves and in whatever surroundings, no matter how unfamiliar, we are ever and always “Here.” The disorientation that occasionally comes in the course of life may compell us to ask: Where am I, and what can truly be relied upon? The task is not to escape our circumstances but to meet them with clarity and self-understanding. Portable vichara thus transforms life’s interruptions into opportunities for investigation.
In this segment, we continue exploring how this practice can be deepened. If great stories of the past often turn on a violation of expectation—a child banished to the realm of death, a king losing his kingdom, a respectable man discovering he is dying, we can accept that in the unfolding of our own lives, there are sure to be times when portable vichara becomes indispensable and circumstances serve as an involuntary summons to enquiry.
Nachiketa
We may recall the oft-quoted account from the Katha Upanishad of Nachiketa who undergoes another kind of exile. Sent to Yama, the god of death, after experiencing the wrath of his father, Nachiketa goes willingly and arrives while Yama is away. He waits three days and nights without food or water. When the Lord of Death returns, he grants Nachiketa three boons. Nachiketa asks first for reconciliation with his father, then for knowledge of the sacred fire, and finally for the truth about death.
Yama tries to tempt him with wealth, long life, pleasures and power, but Nachiketa is not interested. He knows the distinction between preyas—the pleasant—and shreyas—the truly good—and knows the difference between the impermanent and the Atman, that the true Self can never be touched by bodily death. Nachiketa becomes a model of courage and discrimination because he does not flee his crisis but rather, questions through it.
Here we see enquiry centering on the mysteries of earthly existence, leading to true knowledge:
The intelligent atman is not born, nor does he die; he did not come from anywhere nor was he anything, unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient; he is not slain though the body is slain.[1]
If contemplative traditions have long employed practices of reframing, Nachiketa moves toward the ultimate frame to stimulate inner transformation. Religious traditions have always used meditations on impermanence to contemplate mortality. Consider the Buddhist monk who practises the cemetery contemplations, i.e. meditating in the presence of a corpse. Or the Carmelite nun who stops each morning at the convent graveyard, turning a spadeful of soil where her remains will one day lie—a bodily reminder of life’s transience.
Paradoxically, contemplating mortality can free us from the anxiety of modern life, after all, fear arises from a constricted vantage point. Enquiry helps us recognise that our apprehensions are passing mental states rather than faithful representations of reality. Enquiry is thus rooted in discrimination. We come to understand that freedom from suffering involves enlarging the frame, moving from helpless victim to detached observer. Over time when pain, loss, and death are met frontally through vichara, everything we know of the world “out there” comes to be seen as taking place through experience “in here”. The distinction between inner and outer as well as the experiencer himself is encountered within experience. Bhagavan confirms our intuition:
The distinction between inner and outer is only with reference to the body. In truth, there is neither inner nor outer.[2]
What we come to see through portable vichara is that the experience of so-called “external reality” is conditioned. By enlarging our frame, common fears lose their authority. As awareness expands, we are less compelled to organise our identity around a particular hurt, fear or disappointment. Though worries may not completely disappear, by enlarging our capacity to hold them, we no longer mistake them for reality. Consider how the Buddha compared the effects of a large crystal of salt dissolved in a small cup of water with the same crystal dissolved in the River Ganga. The water in the cup becomes undrinkable, while the great river remains unaffected.[3]
Stated in brief, while enquiry may not eliminate every painful feeling, it expands our capacity to hold them. What once overwhelmed us may become bearable within a wider field of seeing. This field can become our safe haven—a place of refuge and orientation for all future enquiry.
Riding the Waves of Experience
A mind less preoccupied with defending has greater room for empathy, patience and compassion. When we are no longer continually struggling with internal disturbances, we become lighter and more available, less preoccupied.
Nachiketa’s case shows us that nothing can remedy our condition more readily than being present to it, i.e. making peace with internal unrest and with the challenges that come from outside. Bhagavan called this: suffering what comes our way.[4] Each time we muster the courage to greet a moment of discomfort, we learn to let go a little and avoid being force-marched into complete identification with our mental states.
It has been said that we can never truly know ourselves until we face a crisis. In the following stories, we hear about people in crisis. Seeing how they deal with it is instructive. If in the middle of a crisis, we can avoid anxiety’s insistent demand to flee toward the next thing, if our response is neither defeat nor resignation but an instinctive accommodation to circumstances beyond our control, over time we learn to ride the waves of experience rather than exhaust ourselves fighting against them. After all, the only demon that can harm us is the one we run from.
Lear on the Heath
In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the storm takes the shape as an identity crisis. Betrayed by his two elder daughters and stripped of court, authority, retinue and obedience, Lear finds himself on the heath asking, “Is man no more than this?” Kingship, rank, clothing and social role begin to appear as overlays rather than the essence of a human person.
Lear’s identity had always depended on power, recognition and role. On the heath he begins to encounter something more basic: human vulnerability, mortality, nakedness and shared suffering.
By the time he is reunited with his youngest daughter, the loyal Cordelia, he no longer speaks as a king. “I am a very foolish fond old man,” he says. The crisis has broken him open to a deeper self-knowledge and he, though now a man of modest means, is set free.
Ilyich’s Enquiry
In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, we find another example. Ivan has spent his life constructing a socially respectable identity through career, marriage, status and possessions. His values seem unquestionable because everyone around him shares them.
Then a fatal illness strips away his security. Gradually, he suspects that the life he regarded as meaningful may have been false. The dying process becomes an involuntary enquiry, dismantling the self-image he has spent a lifetime constructing. At one point, he confronts his terror:
Yes, there was life, and now it is going, going, and I cannot hold it back…. There will be no me, so what will there be?… Can this be death? No, I don’t want it.
Ivan’s crisis offers an illuminating contrast with Bhagavan’s death experience in Madurai. Both confront mortality, but Ivan carries a lifetime of attachment and conditioning. His enquiry is prolonged and resistant, whereas Bhagavan’s was immediate and decisive, culminating in direct and permanent recognition of that which does not die.
Yet Ivan’s struggle reveals the transformative power of enquiry. As his familiar identity collapses, an unavoidable question suggests itself: If everything I have taken myself to be is falling away, what remains? In his final hours, compassion for his family replaces self-preoccupation and the fear of death resolves itself:
Instead of death there was light. “So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud. “What joy!” … “Death is finished. It is no more.” [5]
What begins in terror culminates in acceptance, compassion and surrender. Ivan’s final days become a severe form of portable vichara, with life itself demanding: What is real, what is false, and what remains when the constructed self falls away?
His story reminds us why identification with what is perishable makes death so threatening. Whatever we take ourselves to be—body, personality, memories or accomplishments—is subject to time and change. As Bhagavan reminds us, whatever is acquired in time must eventually pass away in time.[6]
Karmic Accumulations
Ivan’s life helps us understand Bhagavan’s observation that living without knowledge of the Self rests upon a flimsy foundation.
We recall Avanti Brahmana, whose loss of wealth and standing becomes the occasion for examining the mind’s role in suffering.
The biographies of saints often speak of early loss. For example, Sri Ramakrishna lost his father early in life and often said that his childhood bereavement carved in him a vast inner void that only God could fill. Likewise, the young Jnanesvar, orphaned and outcast, entered profound states of absorption before the age of ten. Mirabai once said, the wound in my heart was made before this body was born.[7]
The early wounds of these spiritual luminaries became vichara portals through which divine grace might enter. Like Bhagavan, they stumbled, by grace, upon vichara as a natural consequence of conditions that arose early in life. In not averting their gaze, adverse conditions became transformed into grace. It not only led them out from immediate adverse conditions but to complete resolution of the human predicament.
Knowing the Heart
Portable vichara thus brings unconscious internal disharmony into awareness and allows us to assimilate what circumstances reveal. Therefore, vichara can be understood as a way of processing karmic accumulations and coming to know the heart directly.
The option of greeting adversity with enquiry is available to everyone. We are free to face current conditions and past mistakes without being oppressed by them.
As for the former, we take stock of what is arising before us in real time, seeing it as that which comes to us woven in the pattern of our destiny. After all, what could be more apt for our needs?[8] As for the latter, we acknowledge past actions, learning from them, making amends and ceasing to recreate the identity that brought about those intentions, choices and actions.
Vichara functions as a moral clarifier, illumining the inner field of thought, emotion, memory, imagination, desire, conditioning, and self-image. In time, it loosens the patterns that keep egoic identification alive.
As our vichara develops, it grows increasingly subtle, even silent, and soon we find we have no further need to formulate word-questions. In time, we find ourselves being present to whatever appears. In time, our silent seeing becomes the ground of a wordless enquiry.
Now enabled to observe plainly with no intention beyond clear-seeing, we do so without the least grasping, condemning or identifying, without the least urge to escape the conditions at hand. What had been confused becomes clear, born of repeated efforts at uncovering what had been hidden from view.
Grist for the Mill
We no longer entertain fantasies of bypassing unresolved moral or psychological conflicts through the provocative language of non-duality. If we once declared, “All is one, I am the Self,” while refusing to examine inner conditions that give rise to resentment, fear, dishonesty and other unwholesome mental states, we are now at ease with whatever mental states arise, viewing them as grist for the mill.
Deep Down Things
Lines from the Irish poet Gerard Manley Hopkins centre on a lament about humanity’s trampling of the earth and its growing insensitivity to the sacred presence and deeper reality abiding within all things. Yet the poet concludes on a note of hope:
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.[9]
Beneath the exhaustion, conditioning and apparent corruption of the heart lies an inexhaustible source of renewal. Portable vichara helps us loosen the bonds that conceal inner treasures. Behind our troubles, no enduring ego is to be found, but only the Self—eternal, joyous and pure.
Conclusion
If the ego is sustained by unconscious reactivity, portable vichara offers an alternative. Instead of automatically grasping at what we desire or resisting what we dislike, we become curious about the impulse to cling and reject. Through sustained enquiry, the samskaras perpetuating such reactions gradually lose their hold. When hatred, anger and other difficult mental states are brought into awareness without being acted upon, familiar patterns of reactivity cease to be reinforced.
The purpose of portable vichara is therefore not to make life’s circumstances conform to our wishes, but to discover that the one demanding such conformity is only a creation of the mind. Every crisis, disappointment and disturbance becomes an opportunity to expose the phantom within and in so doing, rediscover the Heart.
Portable vichara therefore replaces reactivity with observation, constriction with openness, and unconscious habit with the spirit of enquiry. Becoming our guide, refuge and home, it accompanies us through the changing circumstances of our lives, ever leading us with wise attention and skilful action. In this way, even the difficulties of everyday life become part and parcel of the path trodden by the saints and sages of old, not least of all Bhagavan Sri Ramana. —
Footnotes and References
[1] Katha Upanishad, 1.2.18.
[2] Self-Enquiry, §8 in The Collected Works, p. 9.
[3] Lonaphala Sutta, “The Salt Crystal Discourse” is located in the Anguttara Nikaya, 3.100.
[4] “Encounters with Bhagavan, Part II”, T. R. Kanakammal, The Mountain Path, July 2006, pp. 31-32.
[5] The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
[6] For a well-written summary of this novella, see Alasdair Black’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich at: <https://tinyurl.com/ynjh2mna>.
[7] “Fleeing the Realm of Zero, Part II”, Saranagati, Dec 2025, p. 12.
[8] Adapted from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
[9] “The Grandeur of God”.
