In the essay "From East to West" in Romanticism Comes of Age, Barfield offers his own reading of its significance for the evolution of consciousness:

In the Greek expression or "Know thyself!" we really find the same principle [as the Buddhist conception of Tat Tvam Asi] embodied. This was no exhortation to introspection, but rather, in modern jargon, an exhortation to make the unconscious conscious. If "I" in my true self--that is, if you choose, in my unconscious self--am that (the apparently objective), then it is only by knowing that and by knowing it imaginatively that I can "know myself." (30-31)