Brhadaranyaka Upanisad - Stalk of Grass

The Self cannot be known in an isolated objective manner. Here are some citations to that effect.

Though it is so, yet during the waking state that light called the self, being beyond the organs and being particularly mixed up in the diversity of functions of the body and the organs, internal and external, such as the intellect, cannot be shown extricated from them
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Therefore it cannot be taken apart from anything else, like a stalk of grass from its sheath, and shown in its self-effulgent form. It is for this reason that the whole world, to its utter delusion, superimposes all activities peculiar to name and form on the self, and all attributes of this self-effulgent light on name and form, and also superimposes name and form on the light of the self, and thinks, 'This is the self, or is not the self ; it has such and such attributes. or has not such and such attributes ; it is the agent, or is not the agent ; it is pure, or impure ; it is bound. or free : it. is fixed, or gone, or come ; it exists. or does not exist,' and so on.

(from Sankara's commentary on Brh.Up. IV.iii.7)

Certain yogins claim that samadhi or immersion in pure consciousness is enlightenment and they thus try to extract it from the normal everyday awareness by stopping the mind's activity. Sankara in his commentary on the Vedanta Sutras (Brahma Sutras) discounts this version of the enlightened state:

As in natural slumber and samadhi (absorption in divine consciousness), though there is a natural eradication of differences, still owing to the persistence of the unreal nescience, differences occur over and over again when one wakes up

(from B.S.B. II.i.9)

The Self is not to be extracted in the manner of a stalk of grass. How the Self might be manifested we can only know from the presence of a realised sage. That it is is all we can know.

This movement between the two worlds is merely due to its resembling the intellect-not natural to it. That it is attributable to its resembling the limiting adjuncts of name and form created by a confusion, and is not natural to it, is being stated: Because, assuming the likeness (of the intellect), it moves alternately between the two worlds. The text goes on to show that this is a fact of experience. It thinks, as it were : By illumining the intellect, which does the thinking, through its own self-effulgent light that pervades the intellect, the self assumes the likeness of the latter and seems to think, just as light (looks coloured). Hence people mistake that the self thinks ; but really it does not. Likewise it shakes, as it were: When the intellect and other organs as well as the Pranas move, the self, which illumines them. becomes like them, and therefore seems to move rapidly ; but really the light of the self has no motion.

This contrast between the Self and the Intellect/Mind is paradoxical from the point of view of Western thought. In Upadesa Sahasri Sankara's original non-commentarial work he puts it thus:

The intellect has no consciousness and the Self no action. The word 'knows' can, therefore, be reasonably applied to neither of them.


The word 'knowledge', in the sense of the action of knowing, cannot, similarily, be applied to the Self. For the Self is not a change only (as is indicated by an action) inasmuch as it is taught (in the Srutis) that It is eternal.


The word 'knowledge', in the sense of the instrument of the action of knowing, is applied to the intellect and not to the Self as an instrument cannot exist without an agent. Neither can the word, in the sense of that which is the object of the action of knowing, be applied to the Self.

(from Chap. XVIII Thou Art That)

How then has the idea that the Self is acting become so firmly entrenched? Superimposition (adhyasa) is the answer. That is a very complex doctrine/theory/transcendental hypothesis and requires clarification. Anon.