Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 4, Brahmana 3. The self-luminous Self: waking, dream, and the light of man
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Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
Knowing that can never be lost
That he does not know in that state, that is because, though knowing then, he does not know; for the knower's knowing can never be lost, since he is imperishable. But there is no second thing apart from him, set off from him, that he might know.
When we say he does not know anything in deep sleep, it is not that the power of knowing has perished. Even then his knowing can never fail, since the self is imperishable. What is missing is only a second thing, separate from him, to be known. This is the summit of the whole series: consciousness itself never sets, only objects do.
In the commentaries
Sankara takes this final member as decisive: the knower's knowing is eternal and indestructible, so in deep sleep consciousness does not vanish; only the separate known disappears, which establishes that the self is self-luminous awareness that shines whether or not any object is present.