A Puranic story of Sage Ribhu and his disciple Nidagha, is particularly instructive in this context.

Although Ribhu taught his disciple the supreme Truth of
the One Brahman without a second, Nidagha, in
spite of his erudition and understanding, did not
get sufficient conviction to adopt and follow the
path of jnana, but settled down in
his native town to lead a life devoted to the
observance of ceremonial religion.
But the Sage loved his disciple as deeply as the latter
venerated his Master. In spite of his age, Ribhu would
himself go to his disciple in the town, just to see
how far the latter had outgrown his ritualism. At times the Sage went in disguise, so that he might
observe how Nidagha would act when he did not
know that he was being observed by his Master.
On one such occasion Ribhu, who had put on the
disguise of a village rustic, found Nidagha intently
watching a royal procession. Unrecognised by the
town dweller Nidagha, the village rustic enquired
what the bustle was all about, and was told that the
king was going in procession.
“Oh! It is the king. He goes in procession! But where
is he?” asked the rustic.
“There, on the elephant”, said Nidagha.
“You say the king is on the elephant. Yes, I see the
two”, said the rustic, “But which is the king and
which is the elephant?”
“What!” exclaimed Nidagha, “You see the two, but
do not know that the man above is the king and the
animal below is the elephant? Where is the use of
talking to a man like you?”
“Pray, be not impatient with an ignorant man like
me”, begged the rustic. “But you said ‘above’ and
‘below’, what do they mean?”
Nidagha could stand it no more. “You see the king
and the elephant, the one above and the other below.
Yet you want to know what is meant by ‘above’ and
‘below’?” burst out Nidagha. “If things seen and
words spoken can convey so little to you, action alone can teach you. Bend forward, and you will
know it all too well”.
The rustic did as he was told. Nidagha got on his
shoulders and said “Know it now. I am above as the
king, you are below as the elephant. Is that clear enough?”
“No, not yet”, was the rustic’s quiet reply. “You say
you are above like the king, and I am below like the
elephant. The ‘king’, the ‘elephant’, ‘above’ and
‘below’, so far it is clear. But pray, tell me what you
mean by ‘I’ and ‘you’?”
When Nidagha was thus confronted all of a sudden
with the mighty problem of defining the ‘you’ apart
from the ‘I’, light dawned on his mind. At once he
jumped down and fell at his Master’s feet saying,
“Who else but my venerable Master, Ribhu, could
have thus drawn my mind from the superficialities
of physical existence to the true Being of the Self?
Oh, benign Master, I crave thy blessings”.
Therefore, while your aim is to transcend here and now
these superficialities of physical existence through atma
vichara, where is the scope for making the distinctions
of ‘you’ and ‘I’, which pertain only to the body? When
you turn the mind within, seeking the source of thought,
where is the ‘you’ and where is the ‘I’?
You should seek and be the Self that includes all.