I Am the I of God

When I say I, who or what is speaking? The only possible answer is infinite consciousness, that which is aware and alive in and as all things. The reason this is the only possible answer is because awareness is what makes experience possible in the first place, and the experience of I is primary and central to all other experiences.

My first experience is I.

I am. I exist. I am aware.

My second experience is I am aware of a body and mind in a world.

Since awareness is primary and central to all experience, I am awareness first and am not limited to the bodies and thoughts and objects that I am aware of any more than the sky is limited by what floats through it.

The incredible thing is that in order for I to appear, infinite consciousness has to forget itself and go to sleep so that it can dream me. I am a character, an eyeball, a perspective, a dream character in God’s mind.

This is why the Hindus talk about Maya, or deception and the Buddhists talk about emptiness.

The universe is what God looks like when viewed through a space/time perspective.

Its not identical to God any more than a brain scan while you’re eating chocolate is identical to the taste of chocolate. The point is that parts of the brain light up when you eat chocolate but it doesn’t tell you anything about the experience of tasting chocolate.

All we have and know is experience, awareness of I and what I am aware of.

All experience is built out of awareness, which expresses itself as I.

The dog knows her name and knows when you are speaking to her. The spider spins her web to catch food for her babies. Infinite consciousness forgets itself and surrenders itself to all beings without restraint.

The awareness in the spider and dog and you and me is identical.

The differences between species is like the difference between sunglasses, microscopes, and kaleidoscopes. All perspectives create their own unique refraction of the Infinite Light of Consciousness.

The reason this is important is because the Infinite Ocean of Living Light is eternal. The bodies and minds and universes appearing within it are finite and are created and destroyed in an endless process of transformation.

That’s what Infinite Radiant Awareness likes to do.

God goes to the Movies. In fact, God is the Movie.

As God’s dream character, the Game is to play the part well. Study your lines. Practice your acting skills with a coach. Take your part seriously. The audience can smell a bad actor and ruin a good story. The best actors are the ones who don’t look like they’re acting. They convince us that what we are seeing is real.

For years I have had a dream in which it’s opening night at the Metropolitan Theatre in New York and I am the Lead Actor in the Play. I am surrounded by actors in costumes. There are thousands of people in attendance and I am about to walk out onto the stage. I haven’t studied my lines, I have no idea what I am supposed to do or how I am going to fake this performance in public. The curtain is pulled back and then, thank God, I wake up.

Another dream I had repeatedly decades ago was my tongue was like a roll of toilet paper and I was furiously pulling it out of my mouth until it laid on the floor in a pile.

These 2 dreams are related and are relevant to the claims I am making in this essay.

The second dream is about other people’s words in my mouth.

The first dream is about a complete failure on my part to understand who I am and who my character is, and the difference between them.

I couldn’t remember my lines because I didn’t know who I was or who my character was. Other people’s words occupying my mind and tongue didn’t help either.

Now, through a brutal process of destruction and creation, I have stabilized and understood my true nature to be absolutely infinitely free and spectacularly beautiful and happy.

All of us share in this Nature.

Reality is so shockingly magnificent and so wickedly beautiful, a single glance into its core is more than enough to shatter your fear, arrogance, and vanity forever.

The point of this essay is to honor and respect what we usually take for granted, our ordinary human life, our mundane day to day routine.

When you think about what had to happen in order for you to be bored on a lazy day, things don’t look so mundane anymore.

The centrality of Awareness is the best kept secret in the world, hiding in plain sight. We think God and Infinite Consciousness is at a great distance from ourselves. But that’s not true and that’s not why we miss it.

We miss it because it is at a great closeness to ourselves, so close we don’t notice.

The point of authentic spiritual practice and study is to Notice.