 The concept of self-awareness informs the epistemological and ontological aspects of Suhrawardi’s metaphysic of lights. Building upon a basic type of self-awareness found in Avicenna (but without its inference to the substantiality of the human soul) and the selfhood (of the contemplative soul) of the Arabic Plotinus, Suhrawardi introduces a pre-cognitive level of self-consciousness or self-awareness, logically prior to any distinction between subject and object (Kaukua 2011, 141–4). Self-awareness of human beings is equated with the self-awareness that incorporeal lights possess and share. Suhrawardi writes, “It has been shown that your ego (ana’iyya) is an incorporeal light, that it is self-conscious, and that the incorporeal lights do not differ in their realities. Thus, all the incorporeal lights must apprehend their own essences (dhat), since that which is necessarily true of a thing must also be true of that which has the same reality” (PI, §127; cf. Kaukua 2011, 150). He thus distinguishes the ‘object of cognition’ from the ‘subject’, the latter embodied in the ‘I-ness’ (ana’iyya) coined by Suhrawardi to identify the “mode of being proper to a cognitive subject”; self-awareness, as mere apprehension and existence, is now distinguished from the awareness of separate objects (Kaukua 2015, 113; Marcotte 2006). 