During the epiphany I described, I lost my individual consciousness. I blanked out, lost my reflected consciousness because the manifest reflecting substance was dissolving? Became one with the unmanifest and then all of the reflective medium seemed to disappear, so I couldn’t know myself anymore as Awareness? But without a doubt Awareness/existence was absolutely self-existent and self-knowing. Difficult to describe what actually took place. I know I can’t lose my existence because I am existence, but still… up to this day I don’ t understand it completely.
James: You’re right, the reflection couldn’t know it because it wasn’t there. It dissolved, as you say. This experience is called nirvikalpa samadhi, the absence of the subject/object split. You didn’t think to know it because the thinker, the reflection, wasn’t there. So the thought that you knew or didn’t know it only arose once the samadhi ended, the reflected medium (the Subtle Body) reappeared, and the doubt arose. So there is no direct knowing of the Self because the Self is never an object of experience or knowledge. The reflected you can only know it indirectly by inference, which is a valid means of knowledge. When you look in the rearview mirror of your car you don’t see the cars behind, you see only their reflection, but you know there are cars there.
You know it when the reflection is absent because you are it. When we say you know it because you are it, we mean that you are so satisfied with What you are that you don’t need to know it, so the mind doesn’t arise. Everyone knows it, which incidentally is a big secret. This is why nobody ever told you that you exist or that you are conscious. It is self-evident. It doesn’t need to be know or experienced. When a person has been in a coma for a few months and wakes up nobody tells them they have waked up.
If you are aware and you don’t know you are Awareness, then you need thought knowledge (vritti jnanam) which removes your ignorance. In rare cases you can gain thought knowledge by inference after nirvikalpa samadhi or during savikalpa samadhi, when the reflection is shining brightly in the reflecting medium and the intellect is still active, meaning the subject/object split is present. Vikalpa means thought.
Direct and indirect knowledge are for the Jiva. Innate knowledge is neither direct or indirect, which is duality. It is isness-awareness-fulness that does not imply non-existence, ignorance, emptiness or incompleteness.
