Who Am I?

Who Am I?

This I AM within you, the reader, this awareness, this consciousness of being, is the lord, the God of all flesh. I AM is He that should come; stop looking for another. As long as you believe in a God apart from yourself you will continue to transfer the power of your expression to your conceptions, forgetting that you are the conceiver.

Consciousness precedes all manifestations and is the prop upon which all manifestation rests. To remove the manifestations, all that is required of you, the conceiver is to take your attention away from the conception. The manifestations will remain in sight only as long as it takes the force with which the conceiver – I AM – originally endowed it to spend itself. This applies to all creation from the infinitesimally small electron to the infinitely great universe.

Be still and know that I AM God, Yes, this very I AM, your awareness of being, is God, the only God.

This presence, your unconditional awareness, comprehends neither beginning nor ending; limitations exist only in the manifestation.

Begin now to identify yourself with this presence, your awareness, as the only reality. All manifestations but appear to be; you as man have no reality other than that which your eternal self, I AM, believes itself to be.

"Whom do you say that I AM?" This is not a question asked two thousand years ago. It is the eternal question addressed to the manifestation by the conceiver. It is your true self, your awareness of being, asking you, its present conception of itself, "Who do you believe your awareness to be?" This answer can be defined only within yourself regardless of the influence of another.

I AM (your true self) is not interested in man's opinion. All its interest lies in your conviction of yourself. What do you say of the I AM within you? Can you answer and say "I AM Christ"? Your answer or degree of understanding will determine the place you will occupy in life. Do you say or believe yourself to be a man of a certain family, race, nation, etc.? Do you honestly believe this of yourself? Then life, your true self, will cause these conceptions to appear in your world and you will live with them as though they are real.


Your Faith is your Fortune
Neville Goddard

Self and Being

Self and Being

Consider the possibility that there are two distinct aspects of your-self. One is what you are originally and naturally. It is your “being,” who you really are without pretense, affection, programming, or any supplementary process. The other aspect is what you have come to know as yourself – a self identity that is created and maintained through all the beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge you’ve acquired in life. Since it’s all you know, it’s not easy to see that this identification of your self is strictly a secondary process. Your self-identity is conceptual; your real being exists prior to concept.

Our ability to transcend the conceptual aspect of self is simply the ability to locate and become deeply conscious of a genuine experience of “being.”

Making a distinction between our real selves - what we might call "being" - and our conceptual selves can sound simple enough on paper, and essentially it is. But in practice we find that we continually bump into obstacles that arise from our habitual thinking and familiar emotions, and from assumptions we unknowingly share as a culture.

In our culture, we spend most of our time looking outward in search of some satisfying experience. We focus on the circumstances of life - attaining our desires and avoiding our fears - yet, when all is said and done, we still find little satisfaction. 

It seems that an honest and clear perception of oneself is "incompatible" with any familiar and habitual self-identity. Rather then dwell in the uncertain realm of the real, it's much easier for us to revert to an already established and acceptable sense of self. Wary of uncharted territory, our awareness falls quickly and easily back into habits and routines that serve our many self-concerns. What we don't realize is that anything we do, think, or feel from here simply adds more layers to the self-identity, further burying what is real. We substitute information for wisdom...So immersed are we in our cultural setting that we unable to recognize how the very methods we use to try to fill the void actually make an authentic experience nearly impossible. 

This way of perceiving ourselves and the world around us greatly hampers our ability to discover new possibilities outside of our familiar experience. Since our experience is dominated by assumptions and beliefs, we`re limited to pursuing a self that is more conceptual than real. 


The Book of Not Knowing
Peter Ralston

Beyond the Self Mind 2

Beyond the Self Mind 2

It’s not hard to discern when other people’s beliefs and assumptions are self-serving or mistaken, but recognizing this dynamic in ourselves is another story. Just as an eye cannot see itself, the awareness from which we perceive the world has no ability to perceive itself. This makes recognizing and questioning our own beliefs a uniquely difficult undertaking. As with an eye, we are constantly aware of the view, while giving little or no thought to what is providing it. We don’t notice the set of assumptions from which we comprehend the world, and yet it determines our reality in every moment.

Our “knowing” is like a closed circuit that limits possibilities in our thinking, our relating, and in our way of being in the world. To step outside of it is very freeing, but it takes effort, and questioning ourselves in this way can be uncomfortably open-ended. We have to be willing to let go of familiar “landmarks” like our self-identity and cherished beliefs. Whether these ideas are based on truth or untruth is insignificant here. To go beyond the 'Self Mind', we need to loosen our grip on what we already hold as the truth.

The alternative is simply to continue operating as we always have: rather blind to the mechanisms that run us, and living at the mercy of our predetermined reactions. People often accept this as inevitable, but it need not be. Making even a small a small shift away from this "programming," we find that our experience of life and self are altered significantly, and a new kind of freedom becomes possible.

The cultural attitudes we share regarding both knowledge and self can sentence us to a lifetime of low-grade desperation and superficiality.


The Book of Not Knowing
Peter Ralston

Beyond the Self Mind

Beyond the Self Mind

People seldom look for answers when they don’t have any questions. When reality is perceived as solidly “known”, it engenders no investigation – why would it? We seem to live our lives at face value and rarely look beneath the surface of our daily existence. We move through different circumstances – engaging in events, interacting with others, judging, perceiving, reacting – all within our taken-for-granted worlds. We act as if we know what it’s all about. But something at the core of our being remains apprehensive about the possibility that our sense of reality and sense of self are somehow fabrications.

From infancy, the human mind struggles for certainty, continually drawing conclusions in an attempt to discern the meaning of everything we perceive. Many such skills are needed for self-preservation. We learn to recognize a relationship between hand and mouth, and pick out the sound of our mother’s voice, then quickly move on to essentials like “Will it eat me?” or Can I eat it?”

As we grow, we assimilate and develop very basic beliefs and conclusions, not only about the world but also about ourselves. These core beliefs fall into the background as permanent organizing factors for all new information. As a survival mechanism it’s quite efficient, but one of the major drawbacks is that all future encounters will be biased by these previous conclusions. This is no small matter. Anything we perceive – even whether or not we perceive it – is subject to the filter of our beliefs and assumptions. What we don’t realize is that we are so deeply entrenched in these convictions and beliefs that they are unrecognizable. Our core beliefs simply appear to us as reality. 

to be continued...


The Book of Not Knowing
Peter Ralston

Nothing has ever Appeared 2

Nothing has ever Appeared 2

When man discovers his consciousness to be the impersonal power of expression, which power eternally personifies itself in his conceptions of himself, he will assume and appropriate that state of consciousness which he desires to express; in so doing he will become that state in expression.

The law of consciousness is the only law of expression. "I AM the way." "I AM the resurrection." Consciousness is the way as well as the power which resurrects and expresses all that man will ever be conscious of being. 

  

Turn from the blindness of the uninitiated man who attempts to express and possess those qualities and things which he is not conscious of being and possessing; and be as the illuminated mystic who decrees on the basis of this changeless law. Consciously claim yourself to be that which you seek; appropriate the consciousness of that which you see; and you too will know the status of the true mystic, as follows: I became conscious of being it. I am still conscious of being it. And I shall continue to be conscious of being it until that which I am conscious of being is perfectly expressed. 

Yes, I shall decree a thing and it shall come to pass. 

Man is pure formless consciousness and that which he conceives himself to be is an illusion or reflection of the particular ideas he holds true. These illusions exist only so long as man focuses his attention upon them and gives them life. 

The conscious mind forms beliefs and opinions from the evidence of the senses or the perceived outer world. The creative power within each of us accepts as true that which the conscious mind impresses upon it. Your creative power takes those ideas, which are thought of with great feeling, and projects them in your outer world.

Your Faith is your Fortune
Neville Goddard

Nothing has Ever Appeared

Nothing has  Ever Appeared 

Nothing has ever appeared in man's world but what man decreed that it should. This you may deny; but try as you will you cannot disprove it for this decreeing is based upon a changeless principle. Man does not command things to appear by his words which are, more often than not, a confession of his doubts and fears. Decreeing is ever done in consciousness.

Every man automatically expresses that which he is conscious of being. Without effort or the use of words, at every moment of time, man is commanding himself to be and to possess that which he is conscious of being and possessing.

This changeless principle of expression is dramatized in all the Bibles of the world. The writers of our sacred books were illuminated mystics, past masters in the art of psychology. In telling the story of the soul they personified this impersonal principle in the form of a historical document both to preserve it and to hide it from the eyes of the uninitiated.

Today those to whom this great treasure has been entrusted, namely, the priesthoods of the world, have forgotten that the Bibles are psychological dramas representing the consciousness of man; in their blind forgetfulness they now teach their followers to worship its characters as men and women who actually lived in time and space.

When man sees the Bible as a great psychological drama with all of its characters and actors as the personified qualities and attributes of his own consciousness, then - and then only - will the Bible reveal to him the light of its symbology. This impersonal principle of life which made all things is personified as God. This Lord God, creator of heaven and earth is discovered to be man's awareness of being...

I AM; man's unconditioned awareness of being is revealed as Lord and creator of every conditioned state of being. If man would give up his belief in a God apart from himself, recognize his awareness of being to be God (this awareness fashions itself in the likeness and image of its conception of itself), he would transform his world from a barren waste to a fertile field of his own liking.


Your Faith is your Fortune
Neville Goddard

In the Beginning…

In the Beginning…

"In the beginning...," it does not mean a phenomenon happening somewhere back in time, but rather an original state in the sense of "initially." It is only when we have become conscious of how far we have deviated from our actual, original condition that there can be a connection to the past. This is true religion (relegate = turning back).

Hajo Banzhaf

In the beginning was the unconditioned awareness of being, and the unconditioned awareness of being became conditioned by imaging itself to be something, and the unconditioned awareness of being became that which it had imagined itself to be; so did creation begin.

By this law – first conceiving, then becoming that conceived – all things evolve out of  No-thing; and without this sequence there is not anything made that is made.

Before the world was - I AM. When all of time shall cease to be - I AM. I AM the formless awareness of being conceiving myself to be man. By my everlasting law of being I am compelled to be and to express all that I believe myself to be.

I AM the eternal No-thingness containing within my formless self the capacity to be all things. I AM that in which all my conceptions of myself live and move and have their being, and apart from which they are not.

I dwell within every conception of myself; from this withinness I ever seek to transcend all conceptions of myself. By the very law of my being I transcend my conceptions of myself, only as I believe myself to be that which does transcend.

I AM the law of being and beside ME there is no law. I AM that I AM.

God (thought/consciousness) spoke the Word and brought everything into being out of himself. Everything you perceive is made of the one substance - God. The one substance back of everything is energy and that is God or the "Word".

The Word is thought or imagination. God imagined the world into being and became that which He conceived. This is the principle on which all creation rests. Since God became man to give man life, man must contain that same creative principle within himself. "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." We have created our personal world through thought. If you are experiencing lack, limitation, illness, disharmony or any other unwanted condition, you have either consciously or unconsciously brought these conditions into your own experience. The majority of people do not realize that thought, belief, and imagination has created their individual worlds. There is no other cause for the conditions of your life. You may choose to disbelieve this, but whether you believe it or not, all that you behold in the outer world was conceived within your own consciousness prior to your experience of it.

Your Faith is your Fortune
Neville Goddard