Take Away The Stone: Resurrecting the God Within — “I AM THAT I AM”
The introduction and part I of this series are available here and here.
“I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God… I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.” Isaiah 45: 5,7
“Before anything else the One must exist eternally; from his power derives everything that always is or will ever be.” Giordano Bruno, Italian Renaissance philosopher
“God said to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM… this is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.” Exodus 3:14,15
What exactly is this I AM, the Power which keeps the planets in their courses, spurs the tiny acorn to morph into the towering oak, and regulates the beating of our hearts? Though the germ of personality exists in It as an avenue for expression, It isn’t a personal Deity with the fickle temperament of a human being as popularly depicted. Jesus emphasized this point when he said, “God is spirit.” (John 4:24) The dictionary defines spirit as “an animating or vital principle held to give life to physical organisms.”
In an effort to convey the nurturing nature of this Universal impersonal and transcendent — yet simultaneously indwelling — principle, the ancient shamans, priests, and philosophers presented it in terms which the people could grasp, such as Father, Great Mother, and the holy host of titles used by the various religious systems down the ages. In all languages a name is indicative of the nature or character of a person, place, or thing. The Name of God in Hebrew — variously translated as Yahweh or Jehovah, represented with the four characters of YOD HE VAU HE[1] — is therefore an attempt to describe within the limits of human understanding the nature of this formless, faceless, and ageless Presence, dwelling in the depths of all manifested forms.
As the writer(s) of the Tao Te Ching expressed it: “Since before time and space were, the Tao is. It is beyond is and is not.”
It is that Life, spoken of in the Bhagavad Gita:
“Flame burns it not, waters cannot o’erwhelm,
Nor dry winds wither it. Impenetrable,
Unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched,
Immortal, all-arriving, stable, sure,
Invisible, ineffable.”
It is the energy of science, interchangeable with matter, which can neither be created nor destroyed. [2] While the countless forms, great and small, it inhabits for a brief span wither away as the grass it endures forever in a state of continual evolution and expansion through the mold of matter, moving from “glory to glory.”
As far as we yet know, this Presence finds its highest form of expression on this three dimensional plane in humanity. We have unfolded to the greatest capacity the two gifts, as they were termed by the Hermetic philosophers, of “mind and speech”: the creative ability to conceive a state of being through the faculties of thought, feeling, and imagination, and the kinetic action to “speak” or bring that state into objective manifestation. This is the implanted Word — also known as the Logos or Om — that “in the beginning was with God and was God” and through which “all things were made.” (John 1: 1, 3)
We are all individual inlets and outlets of localized expression of the One I AM in the field of time and space, as the language of our everyday conversations show. When someone asks us how we’re doing, what do we preface our response with? “I am” or in its contracted form, “I’m”. When we’re happy, how do we express it? “I’m happy!” When we’re sad we declare, “I’m heartbroken.”
In each of those instances it is I AM — “the Christ in us” — expressing a state of being, according to our level of awareness. We unceasingly create and perpetuate our moods and experiences with this Power morning, noon, and night, more often than not completely unaware of what we’re doing. To illustrate with a common example, let’s suppose we’re at work. We hear several of our co-workers coughing and sneezing loudly. We’re immediately struck with a sense of dread and begin thinking to ourselves, “I’m going to come down with something; I just know it! I’m going to have to call out of work!” Or we overhear the ruminations of our co-workers or the warnings on the news about the wave of flu or cold virus sweeping through, letting those charged suggestions take hold of our attention.
Lo and behold, the next morning we wake up with a stuffy nose and a fever, our self-fulfilling prophecy having come full circle. We can lament with Job, “What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.” (Job 3:25)
While most of us would chock up coming down with the cold to purely bacterial causes, findings in medical science are increasingly demonstrating the powerful connection between our mental and emotional states and our physical health, known in medical circles as the mind — body connection. [3] One study conducted by Dr. Richard Davidson, a leading research psychologist at the University of Wisconsin — Madison, represents “some of the best evidence” demonstrating the connection between negative emotions and lowered immune system response. The research, according to Dr. Davidson, “…begins to suggest a mechanism for why subjects with a more positive emotional disposition may be healthier.” [4] This is just one finding from the growing body of evidence establishing the governing role that emotions and attitudes play in making or marring our health. [5]
It also holds true for our psychological, social, financial, and creative well-being. That is why the ancients strongly emphasized the creative power of our words and the concepts they express:
“So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” Isaiah 55:11
“What you decide on will be done.” Job 22:28
“As within, so without.” Hermes Trismegistus
“For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of… By your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” Matthew 12:34, 37
“The Word became flesh.” John 1:14
It is the outworking of the law of cause and effect, which is no respecter of persons, moving neither to the right hand or the left, acting as a mirror reflecting objectively our embedded subjective patterns of thought, emotion, and belief.
“To the faithful you show yourself faithful, to the blameless you show yourself blameless, to the pure you show yourself pure, but to the devious you show yourself shrewd.” (Psalm 18: 25–26)
“For there is no respect of persons with God.” Romans 2:11–16
How can we avoid the starts and stops on the Merry — Go — Round of Fate and step into our destinies? By learning how to bring the conscious and subconscious mind into accord, symbolized in the mystical marriage of the active (which the old writers called the male) and receptive (or female) principles: the head (representative of intellect) and the heart (emotional nature). That is why we are instructed to “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23)
Footnotes:
- Neville Goddard, “Consciousness Is The Only Reality”, RealNeville.com http://realneville.com/txt/lesson1.htm
- Karl Tate, “How Einstein’s E=MC² Works”, Livescience.com, May 19th 2014 https://www.livescience.com/45714-how-einstein-s-key-to-the-universe-the-mass-energy-equivalence-formula-works-infographic.html
- Vicki Brower, “Mind — body research moves toward the mainstream”, EMBO Reports, April 2006, 7(4): 358–361. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1456909/
- Shaoni Bhattacharya, “Brain study links negative emotions and lowered immunity”, New Scientist, September 2nd, 2003 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4116-brain-study-links-negative-emotions-and-lowered-immunity/
- “Positive Emotions and Your Health”, NIH News in Health, August 2015 https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2015/08/positive-emotions-your-health
