Āṉma-Viddai

A person is a body, but not a dead body, because only a body that is alive is considered to be a person, and we are never aware of ourself as a dead body.

The problem is that though we always know ourself, in the sense that we are always aware of ourself, we now know ourself as something other than what we actually are, because we mistake ourself to be a person consisting of five sheaths, namely a physical body, life, mind, intellect and will.

The more we practise being self-attentive, the clearer it will become to us that we are always clearly aware of ourself, and the more our love to be aware of ourself as we actually are will increase in depth and intensity.

Because we are so interested in being aware of other things, we tend to overlook our fundamental awareness of our own existence, ‘I am’, but even when we overlook it, it is still existing and shining clearly within us as our own reality, and it is what we always actually are, so we never cease to be aware of it.

‘ātma-svarūpa’ (the real nature of oneself), is pure awareness, which means awareness that is not aware of anything other than itself, and since it is immutable, it never undergoes change of any kind whatsoever, so it is always clearly aware of itself as it actually is and is never aware of anything else, and hence in its clear view no body or worl

even when we are aware of ourself as a body and are consequently aware of a world, the clarity of our fundamental self-awareness does not perish.

Whatever actually exists must exist independent of all other things, which means that it must be aware of its own existence.

Awareness (in the sense of what is aware) certainly does exist, because its existence is self-shining (svayam-prakāśa), which means that it knows itself by its own light of awareness.

If we ourself did not exist, we could not be aware of our own existence, nor could we be aware of the seeming existence of anything else, so the fact that we are aware is conclusive proof of our own existence as awareness.