The Self-Knowledge of This That Is

Ask yourself: What am I prior to the arising of experience? You are that. Be that knowingly. As a teaching’s followers mature, it is less necessary to make description concessions with reference to and in contrast with the content of experience, so there is increasingly silence. If this that is prior to experience were to say something true about itself, it would first name itself ‘I’, because ‘I’ is the name that that which knows itself gives to itself. If it were then to make a statement about its nature, it would say simply, ‘I am’. Thus, the statement ‘I am’ is the highest truth. If the mind were to say something true about this that is prior to experience, it would call it ‘being’, ‘awareness’, ‘peace’. But these are less true than ‘I am’ because they are second-person perspectives. Only the knowledge this that is has of itself is absolutely true.

Ask yourself: What am I prior to the arising of experience? You are that. Be that knowingly. As a teaching’s followers mature, it is less necessary to make description concessions with reference to and in contrast with the content of experience, so there is increasingly silence. If this that is prior to experience were to say something true about itself, it would first name itself ‘I’, because ‘I’ is the name that that which knows itself gives to itself. If it were then to make a statement about its nature, it would say simply, ‘I am’. Thus, the statement ‘I am’ is the highest truth. If the mind were to say something true about this that is prior to experience, it would call it ‘being’, ‘awareness’, ‘peace’. But these are less true than ‘I am’ because they are second-person perspectives. Only the knowledge this that is has of itself is absolutely true.