Who Am I?

TODAY’S READING
68.3-70.2

In this section of my copy of the book I have many lines highlighted and underlined except in one part. The entire paragraph with the heading “Spirit Knows Itself” has no markings except the question in my handwriting next to it: How does this feel?

That’s an odd question. I am trying to understand the context for when I wrote that question, and why.

Spirit Knows Itself.

Is that true? Well we teach that Spirit all knowing, so from that perspective Spirit must know itself. If it doesn’t know itself, then it is not all knowing. But what is knowing? Knowing is awareness… which I tend to use separate from conscious although most people would use them interchangeably. Ernest Holmes really uses them interchangeably, in fact.

Since this whole section is about the nature of the Infinite—that is, the Infinite is all there is, was, and ever will be—then knowing is important.

To be tapped in is to know. We human incarnations of the Infinite are tapped in. So in that regard, we could say we know ourselves (some better than others). But is self-awareness what sets us apart from other expressions of life? I think we know more than that even. I have, in the past, used my cats as illustrations for this point. My cats demonstrate behavior that suggests to me that they are self-aware, beyond the awareness of say, a plant, or a stone. They demonstrate this at a different degree of “livingness” than the plant or the stone. So what set’s the human incarnation apart from cats and other self-aware animals? I think it is not just self-awareness, I think it is super-awareness—awareness of something beyond the self. Cats don’t seem to have that—humans do.

Of course it’s all an assumption made to help understand my place in the grand scheme of life.

What is most important in this little section is this: through self-knowing the creative process is set in motion. All creation begins with the premise that there is an infinite creative power, and that we are that creative power expressed as self. I guess that is self-awareness—an awareness that we are that power. Being that power, we initiate the creative process in exactly the same way as the Infinite (there can be no difference in the way the power is used, otherwise there would be finite limitations.

The power is defined in this way by Ernest Holmes and a metaphor can be found in the old testament as well. When Moses, while on Mount Sinai, encounters the burning bush and asks how to identify the power of the Infinite to the Children of Israel, God responds by saying, “I Am that I Am…thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

I Am that I Am.

It is self-awareness express as “I Am.” This awareness runs deep, for it is not an external expression of God that will prove its existence, it is the internal “I Am that I Am” that we all are that proves God.

I Am is all of us. We are that.

To know and embody “I Am that I Am” is the understanding of the Infinite Divine that sets us free in our own mind. In Exodus, the great metaphor is Egypt as the oppressor—Egypt is akin to our own limiting thought. It is only in self-knowing that we are made free. I Am that I Am is ultimately remembering who you are. And that is Infinite freedom.

PS - I could get into a lot of the metaphor in the story of Moses and the Exodus… but that is for another blog and another time!