SELF-INQUIRY IS NOT 100 YARD DASH. It is a long, long Ironman race. To get out of the stream of thought, the center of your consciousness has to be deeper inside of yourself than thought.

You have to move your center of attention into the empty awareness inside of your body to the heart chakra or below.

Spend time there. Look within. Somewhere near your heart resides for most people the sense of self, first found as a spark of energy. Attend to it. Over period of days, weeks and months, this sensation will grow into a complete sense of presence totally within, through and extending outside of your body, like a total capacitance or electrical field of some sort.

By attending to the totality of that sense of presence, one feels the empty space within, and can move your center of consciousness downwards from the brain and head area closer to the heart or in the region of the gut.

This takes one into a deeper emptiness, and at this center of consciousness, the flow of thoughts don't touch you anymore. It appears to be above you and in space like a constant chattering radio station which does not interest you at all because you are no longer immersed in the field of thought.

You never try to stop the thought, because that is the will, which is located at the level of mine still, in the head, in the brain and will just face an impossible fight with itself. Instead, just ignore the thoughts and concentrate on the IM sensation somewhere inside of your chest or lower, and fixate on it. Fixation and attending to it, and attempting to merge with it, gives it energy and makes it grow into one sense of presence. When that sense of presence is complete, you have a whole new concept of who and what you are, because you recognize you are not the body, nor the mind, but that sense of presence, that ecstatic state of flowing energies within, consciousness itself. This is your first step. Your first major step.