You Cannot Say You Don’t Know Your Self

Throughout life, our entire experience is structured in subject-object relationship: ‘I know my thoughts’, ‘I feel sad’, ‘I see mountains’. We’re well acquainted with our thoughts and feelings, but what is this ‘I’ we refer to countless times daily? The subject never becomes an object of experience. What knows or illuminates experience? You can shine a torch on every object but cannot turn the beam back to illuminate its source. Similarly, attention can shine on all experience but cannot attend to that from which attention proceeds. Yet you cannot say you don’t know yourself – if you didn’t, you wouldn’t refer to yourself as ‘I’. We know two things for certain: ‘I am present’ and ‘I am aware’. But awareness never takes on the properties of what it knows. The sun shines peacefully on everything without being disturbed. You are this inherently peaceful, free, luminous presence, experiencing everything intimately but never implicated.

Throughout life, our entire experience is structured in subject-object relationship: ‘I know my thoughts’, ‘I feel sad’, ‘I see mountains’. We’re well acquainted with our thoughts and feelings, but what is this ‘I’ we refer to countless times daily? The subject never becomes an object of experience. What knows or illuminates experience? You can shine a torch on every object but cannot turn the beam back to illuminate its source. Similarly, attention can shine on all experience but cannot attend to that from which attention proceeds. Yet you cannot say you don’t know yourself – if you didn’t, you wouldn’t refer to yourself as ‘I’. We know two things for certain: ‘I am present’ and ‘I am aware’. But awareness never takes on the properties of what it knows. The sun shines peacefully on everything without being disturbed. You are this inherently peaceful, free, luminous presence, experiencing everything intimately but never implicated.