Consider the possibility that you think and feel that you know yourself but in fact you do not truly know yourself. Therefore, consider the possibility that what you think and feel is not ultimately so.

Give yourself up to this possibility.

The great trouble is that we presume to know ourselves and hence we close ourselves off from the possibility of actually becoming intimately acquainted with ourselves. Which means: of actually, fully being ourselves.

I am saying this: To know yourself is to fully be yourself. And to fully be yourself is to love yourself.

You think you know yourself when you say what you say to yourself about yourself. Yet thinking and feeling may be shrouding from you what is otherwise available to you. And it is available to you because it is you.

Let yourself be open to the possibility that “I Am” yet this “I Am”–so pristine, so clear–has been veiled by identification with thought-streams, feeling-streams, and so on. It is as if the pure nakedness of being has been clothed and it is also like forgetting that there ever was the pure nakedness of being in the first place. You therefore come to believe, feel, and act as if you were always draped in clothes.

Hence, you forget and, by virtue of forgetting, you live in a dream.

You can begin to come back to yourself by asking (for example): “Who is the one contemplating this thought or feeling? Who is this one who is always here ‘behind’ the thought or feeling, loving it?”

See that the I Am = a kind of energetic field, which is rather like a “background,” “space,” or “container” for all experiences (thoughts, feelings, etc.). That energetic field, which is not just very peaceful but which is peace, is that in which all thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. arise. In time, it becomes clear that these are also that as which everything appears.

Know the knower knowingly. Which means: be being knowingly. Which also means: love knowingly and beingly.