The God of IAM
Photo of Glacier National Park by Cole Allen on Unsplash
I've been doing "SOHAM" meditation for more than a year now. SOHAM is essentially "I-AM," a meditation that focuses on that primal sensation of consciousness. That "only thing that you know:" that you are.
Later, I came across material by Sri Nisargadatta that goes deeper into the meaning of IAM. The idea he expresses is that it is actually an error, but it is your only way into truth, because it is your very founding.
You believe you were born and that you live here now because you exist in the causal stream flowing from the idea of IAM-ness.
You really have nothing else beyond this idea. If you turn back towards it, it will feel like God, to you. It is your god. Or, said another way...the real God that is can only reach you through the pinprick-hole of this idea.
It is as if you live in a giant dark sphere, with one brilliant point of light. Reality is outside the sphere. That would be Brahman. Your God, which would be Ishwara or Jesus Christ, is the hole through which the Light of reality comes to you.
Nisargadatta explains that by lingering long enough ("for a reasonable amount of time," he says) at the time-location of the purest instantiation of IAM, you cause IAM to recognize its essential falseness.
At this point it "goes away." And the darkened sphere which you take to be the world is gone. Your many cares and obsessions are revealed to be silly preoccupations.
The fact that there is a body and a consciousness attached to it...a world and others, is no obstacle to the loss of the sphere. All of that continues. But it is viewed differently.
Think of watching a movie. You are interested in the protagonist. But you don't suffer with him. You do wish him well. But if he dies, you'll reflect on the meaning of his life rather than aching with pain or having a heart attack.
You will see yourself in this way. That is the real "you" is more like the one watching the movie. And the protagonist is the one you used to identify too closely with.
Anyway. That is a summary of the idea.
Today, I came closer than ever before, after recent weeks of asking and being curious in daily life. I continually detached from myself, and sought to sit back down in my seat in a theater watching events. I am more calm, and this means my thought is more efficient...no longer needing days or weeks to calm down from a recent upset.
I saw that this whole operation is actually proof by contradiction.
Here is what I mean:
The idea IAM came upon the self. The self became absorbed in the idea. "What if I really am independent..out there...alone...what if I must act in a bracing, sometimes hostile world?"
The self begins to divide at this point into witness and doer. You, reading this, and I writing this, are doers. We believe we must do.
We sometimes feel the witness consciousness within us. If we meditate, we cultivate it.
In fact, the witness is just the reflection inside the darkened sphere of the true Self outside the sphere. I think I can call that the soul. So knowing the witness might lead to knowing the soul. It is at the very least, interesting, and useful to investigate.
Well...on to the principle of contradiction.
Here "you" come. You have investigated this world sufficiently. You have found that it is missing something. You find that all of your works crumble. Nothing is truly substantial.
There is a seed in you which knows what is really real, and that it is timeless and never takes a form, so that it never dies.
This seed propels you to pull away from the things of the world more and more. You sit and contemplate your idea of God. For there you find solace! There is "something really there," you feel.
Now...in time you become more pure. Your psyche and body are less filled with the errors of the world, reflecting the way your thoughts are becoming more pure.
Finally, you attain an audience with the God of IAM. You sit before the hole in the darkened sphere. You feel love, peace, and timeless positive regard for all that you are.
And yet...
And yet...you do not know what you are.
You. You who did many things in the world, and now sit here, free of all desires save the one for God.
You have no idea what you are.
Who am I? you are allowed to ask. For don't you have the right to ask your God this?
How strange that you do not know.
And this is the contradiction.
If the IAM idea is truth, then no contradiction may follow from it.
However, here the idea lives. And its fruit returns to it.
And that fruit, which is YOU, does not know the basis of itself.
Is this not a great contradiction?
If something thinks "I Surely Am." But then that thought becomes personified, lives a thousand combinatoric existences, then finally returns to the source asking what it is...then is not the IAM confronted with it's essential falsity?
It is.
It is false.
For at long last, its expression has returned to its bosom, and knows not that it is.
I urge you, as I urge myself, to stay here by the hole in the sphere, and to keep asking. For time in the realm of vast, world-building ideas may be different than our time. We must become a mountain blocking the light. Our geology must arise to speak with the geology of IAM.
For where else is there to go? At least here, we feel God. Our lives are...more right if we stay here. Even if I am wrong about the contradiction at hand, I will stay.
However...something will happen. There is a crackle in the air!
To gain hope, only ask yourself: "what do I do when I discover I am wrong about something?"
I know what you do: you immediately change. You apologize as needed. You pick up the threads of things and move on, discarding the false idea you had.
Well...you are made in the image of God. You did not become "so polite" on your own. It is in your nature already.
God will do the same. The God of IAM will do the same. For all that you know of reality, which I should perhaps name all-upper-case GOD, came through the light of the God of IAM.
IAM is a particular idea. But an idea at the highest level. It is the plaything of real gods, of divinity (perhaps it is like "floaters," those particles seen in the eye, leftovers from the first creation of the eye. Perhaps it is a discarded idea from the birth of reality itself, but it does not yet know it's falsity). It moved onto you and caught you. At your most miserable, you believed in it so fearfully. But now, thanks to the signal of reality coming through it to the you inside the sphere, you see beyond it.
It will be as polite as you would be in error. It shall vanish.
Consequences...
In the days following, I noticed that this information is more subtle than I've been able to portray. How does one worship a God in which one feels there is a contradiction embedded? Because the most important thing is worship.
In worship we share in the life of God from our limited position. Worship is a raising of consciousness to "reach," as best one can, the state of perfection.
Now...if you have formed the idea than in IAM there is falsehood, can you commune with this God? If you are not careful, you may have created a problem for yourself. That is...you are now the judge of God.
This is not an extreme statement. It is not entirely wrong to "be the judge of God." After all, before you discovered worship, you had a lengthy period of judgment. Of weighing in your mind the pros and cons of abandoning the modern world and returning to near pre-history in your conviction that there is a living God. So judgment, or better, discernment is essential.
I have found I can sit in love of the Father if I take the knowledge I gained about IAM and treat it like this:
Lord God, I have an idea that your IAM-nature separates me from complete union with you. I do not know if my idea is correct. I only know I want to be with you forever. God, I know you will use everything I bring you for the benefit of all beings and in the best possible way. If I bring you something false, it cannot hurt you, for you make the world and all things in it. If I bring you something true, it only reflects your glory.
Perhaps the idea of separateness is something I have added. Maybe it is a bug on the windshield between us, and on the inside. I only know that it seems so high up and so far back, that I feel it at the same depth where I feel You.
I do not know! I submit to your will, Father.
This is how I plan to integrate my "insight" about IAM.