A Broader View of "I Am"

            It is difficult to accept the idea that, like blades of grass in a lawn or leaves on a tree, each of us is not as unique as we think we are. In fact, it is being a part of the whole lawn or the complete tree that provides us with the chance to feel like an individual at all. 

This apparent paradox is rooted in the very origin of the universe. Just as consciousness sought a context through creation because it could not experience itself in the formlessness of the eternal realm, we require a context that allows us to be able to sense our self as existing, too. For human beings, the basic rule for feeling like a self is: no background, no perception of an “us.” 

Here is another way of looking at it. We require the sun to cast our shadow and we need the ground against which to see it. We also need a guiding concept of “person” to know what the shape we see represents, and our experience with others to teach us this and other related concepts to interpret what we see, what is behind it, and how it is that we are able to see it. Without this complex set of relationships we would have no perception of our being here, period.

The “rule of existence” that applies to all of the stages of evolution before us now applies to ours: we require every bit of everything in the rest of our universe to be able to say “I am.” Even though we are in fact one of a multitude, it is only by being in the company of many others who are similar to us that we are able to think of ourselves as special. 

But special though we may seem, in a creational sense, we all are simply manifestations of the same consciousness that animates and drives and motivates the existence of all things, organic and inorganic, physical and non-physical, sentient and non-responsive, that surround us now. Each perceivable form, all of the elements of which they are made, the processes that move within them, and the programs that guide all of them, are expressions of consciousness.  Consciousness is the author of the Big Bang. It is the crystalline structure of a grain of sand. It is the fire of the sun. It is the thinking of our brains and the beating of our hearts, all of them. 

(from “Live Like a Window, Work Like a Mirror: Enlightenment and the Practice of Eternity Consciousness”)