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The act of knowledge that is necessary to reawaken awareness of oneness with the All is described by Plotinus much as by the Upanisadic authors. It is an act of knowledge in which “the subject is its own object … The intellection is the more profound for this internal possession of the object” (Enn. VI.6.1). The type of knowledge in which subject and object are one is the “thought that thinks itself” that Aristotle attributed to the Prime Mover, and Plotinus calls such knowing “primal intellection.” When the mind cognizes something external to it the act “cannot be the primally intellective since it does not possess the object as integrally its own or as itself—the condition of true intellection” (VI.6.1). He calls primal knowing “a unity in duality … being dual by the fact of intellection and single by the fact that its intellectual object is itself” (VI.6.1). This primal act of knowing, in other words, is simply an ultimate self-awareness. It is absolutely opposed to what is usually called knowledge, which is awareness of an other. It simply annuls all ordinary knowledge. One must turn one’s back on all ordinary acts of thinking and knowing in order to know primally. Similarly in the Vedantic schools, knowledge of brahman (para- vidya-) is opposed to and in fact annuls all other acts of knowledge (apara vidya) because it is nondual knowledge.

This nondual knowledge is so primal that every sentient being is regarded as already permeated with it at a level so basic and personal that one cannot even see it. “It does not have to come and so be present to you,” says Plotinus, “it is you that have turned from it” (VI.6.12). And Sankara: “It only removes the false notion, it does not create anything” (Commentary on the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad I.4.10).

>>13628905
You're not wrong.

Out of the entirety of all mankind, these two men were the closest to the truth as far as it can be expressed through words