Know Thyself

Socrates was the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing. The Hindu sage knows and makes no bones about it. He views dialectical slicing and dicing to be ignorance because the truth cannot be attained by these routines. γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself) is the injunction of the oracle at Delphi and this is what the sage claims he has achieved. The response to that claim might be ‘ Look in the mirror and say ‘that’s definitely me, no question about it, there’s the scar on my forehead where I fell as a kid’.

the teacher said. “Listen. It is true that the Self and the body are well-known, but they are not well-known to all people to be objects of different knowledges, like a human being and a trunk of a tree. (Question). How are they known then? (Reply)(They are always known) to be the objects of an undifferentiated knowledge. For no one knows them to be the objects of different knowledges It is for this reason that people are deluded about the nature of the Self and of the non-Self, and say, ‘The Self is of this nature’’ and ‘It is not of this nature’. I

(from Upadesa Sahasri by Shankaracarya)

What I take from this is the idea that the Self cannot be separated out from any particular state of awareness. It permeates each state. You realise the Self but you cannot know it as an object of special knowledge. The knowledge that a jnani (knower of the self) knows is that the passing states of awareness are merely transient manifestations of the Self.

Some suss!