There is only one miracle in this world: You are alive. How and due to what you know that? How do you know yourself? I am not involving any philosophy here. I am asking a simple question: How do you know yourself? You are, what is it? This feeling of "you are"? What is it?

To be ignorant means to lack knowledge, information, and understanding about this question. My wife reads this web pges, just like you, so I cannot say that she is unaware or uninformed about the matters. Regardless, she doesn't investigate and she doesn't search for the answer, and that makes her ignorant. The state of being ignorant is known as ignorance.

I am trying to find the causes of her ignorance. 

I love her very much, this has nothing to do with our relationship, she is a wonderful wife, smart and brilliant; funny. She has lovable and bubbly personality. She looks amazing, a perfect example of elegance, positive radiance and good manners. As she said: if you are excellent in just one thing you are good in everything. She is a great cook, too.

My wife is an intellectual woman, she has M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering - major Electronics, and in her work career she held high managerial positions. She knows well human behavior. Sometimes she is impatient, too honest, too direct, almost blunt in speaking to others. This is a sign of high intelligence and uncompromising personal character.

When my wife decides something, or makes a plan or have a goal, she stick to it, regardless of difficulties, she follows it without pardon. So with persistence and hard work she really can accomplish anything she wants. 

So that makes me wonder why she does not occupy herself with this question, with the greatest miracle in life? Why is she ignorant of this?

Since childhood I have had a deep urge to find out truth. I have understood universe early in my life. The sheer vastness of universe presents us with impossibility to travel as physical objects, it teaches us that physicality, materiality is a great obstacle. But as spirits, as a spiritual beings we are able to travel everywhere and see the miracles of universe.

My search for truth started with this understanding. I believed that besides my physical self (body) there is my astral self, so if I can be aware of that astral body I could travel and visit any place in universe. My study of Theosophy and read of The Secret, Madam Blavatsky book, at the beginning of my spiritual path gave me certainty that I am going in the right direction.

After reading Theosophy books I was hungry for more knowledge, so I found The Forth Way, Gurdjieff teachings. I am a practical, not too much philosophical or theoretical. Immediately I started to practice self-observation and self-remembering. I also practiced zazen meditation every morning, Carlos Castaneda's dreaming techniques in order to awake myself in dreams. I also did psychological exercises suggested in The Emerald Tablets of Thoth. I had flashes in my head and I believed I was progressing.

Several years passed until one day I bought I am That book by Nisargadatta and later the books of Ramana Maharshi. I read them completely transfixed. I found out that spiritual self is not visible, that all visible things are ignorance and that real self is a kind of presence. They pointed me to "I AM" sense and to real question of spirituality - Who am I?

This is a main reason of why my wife is ignorant. She has heard truth from me but she did not come to that realization by her own work, by her own investigation. She took spirituality as an intellectual endeavor, something to be learned. But this is misconception.

Whatever we can learn is accumulated in our mind as knowledge and the knowledge is a greatest obstacle for finding who we really are. If you try to learn spirituality not a single step is taken towards awakening. Knowledge is the greatest ignorance.

It is impossible for intellectuals to get self-realization. Knowledge should be used to recognize our real position, our slavery to mind and thoughts and then knowledge should be forgotten, left on the side. The knowledge must be replaced with being. Being is setting mind in the presence, a state before meaning of words, into "I AM" sense and inward looking, looking it with love and persistence.

If we do this all answers will be revealed to us. And of course the answer of how we know ourselves will be there.