I Am That I Am

 

Yesterday, I was listening to Alan Watts. His voice and his loving thoughts always bring me a great deal of comfort. He was talking about duality. This subject intrigues me; especially when a speaker segues and begins talking about nonduality. Watts said, “People say that non-duality has an opposite; and that it is duality, but that is not so.”

I’ve been exploring this thought for a while now. When we say that all is One, we still seem to think of That One as it stands apart from none, but Watts was basically trying to show that One and None were still just two ways of expressing the same no-thing.

“A mirror has no color,” said Watts, “But what you see when you look in a mirror is color.”

“The lens of an eye is transparent.”

Can you see how difficult it is to suggest non-duality?

This is getting very close to my own personal beliefs. All is One, but not as if One stands out from anything. Non-duality has no opposite. This is the tricky part and one we cannot fully comprehend. I suppose I should speak for myself, but I have always been reminded of my own, finite capacity. If I try to consider the edge of space, for instance, I find myself wondering what lies one foot beyond that edge. If it is more space, well, I have not defined the edge, but some sort of limit.

That limit seems to be my thought alone. There are many ideas I cannot fully comprehend. This limitation does not mean that the things I cannot comprehend are not possible; it means my thoughts cannot make sense of them for myself or anyone else.

Isaiah 45:5 says, “I am God and there is none else.”

This is non-duality in a nutshell.

It is not just that there happens to be a God and that He doesn’t like competition; it is that there is only One-No-Thing.

We try to explain this point of no-view by calling the No-Thing God, but this thought sometimes makes us feel as though there is a God, apart from us. Essentially speaking, and fundamentally, there could not be a God apart from us. We are within whatever The All is and The All is within each of us.

Watts also helped me to see this. I will paraphrase, but he said that you have a body and that body has an inside and we usually don’t have trouble with thinking of our body and its insides; but, Watts says, we also have an outside; and that is everything that is not inside.

To take this one step further, ill say this: you may be standing somewhere, looking at a mountain. And you may say, “I have a headache.”

This is probably not very uncommon. We may have a pain inside our skull and we identify with our body and that body’s pain. But we look at the mountain and don’t seem to realize it is ours too. The mountain is as much a part of you as a headache would be in this case. You have an inside and you have an outside.

If we stopped with our beingness where our skin stops, we would have no experience of what might be beyond our skin. When you stand there, looking at a mountain, that mountain is your mountain. If you see a star in the night sky, that would be your star. You are not just your insides; you are your outsides too.

This is why we can enjoy nature. Nature is I Am. Look at a mountain and call it That. Now look again and say to yourself, “I Am That.”

Now, alternate your that-ness with your am-ness and say, “I AM THAT I AM.”

This is Non-Duality and it allows you to think about where you fit in with The Whole. Inseparably so. Your thoughts will naturally try to distinguish out from in and come up with a different formula, but this is because thought is a bodily function. This shows the difference between thoughts and awareness. Thought is local and awareness is everywhere, all at once, forever.

Thought is in your brain, but plugged in to the station of awareness. Thought is a ram memory where zipped files are stored temporarily, and for quicker recovery; while awareness is where the hardest drive of all completely contains and retains ALL Experience as well as ALL Being.

Here is the ultimate key: You are not RAM. Random, accessed memory is thought and you are not thought. You think you are because you think with thoughts. It is only when you are not thinking that you transcend thought and find yourself with your awareness; the Hard Drive.

Thoughts are generally stored with images and words. In the beginning was the word. If you want to know what awareness is, you have to consider all that is not a word or an image. It is All, and includes thoughts and images, but also what is not thoughts and/or images.

You are always going to find yourself most aware when you are not thinking.