The First True Statement

The Light That Never Dims

Before you can say anything else about yourself, there is one statement that must come first – the foundation upon which all other self-knowledge rests.

Ask yourself: ‘What is the first true statement I can make about myself?’

The first true statement that you can make about yourself must refer to your primary experience of yourself. What is that? Don’t think about this. Don’t try to work it out. You are experiencing yourself now. What is your primary experience of yourself before anything else?

The first true statement you can make about yourself is, ‘I am’. Any other statements – ‘I am a man’, ‘I am a woman’, ‘I am a person’, ‘I am thirty-seven’, ‘I am listening to a concerto’, ‘I am cold’, ‘I am tired’, ‘I am hungry’ and so on – come after your primary knowledge of yourself. Indeed, they all contain your primary knowledge of yourself within them.

To what experience does the statement, ‘I am’, refer? It refers to simply the awareness of being. Before I am aware that I am a man or a woman, or that I am listening to a concerto, or that I am cold or tired or hungry, I am aware that I am.

Every statement you make, have ever made or could ever make about yourself is added to this primary knowledge, ‘I am’. In other words, every statement about yourself is, ‘I am plus . . .’ – ‘I am a man or a woman’, ‘I am twenty-two or seventy-three’, ‘I am cold, tired or hungry’ and so on.

Everything that is added to the ‘I am’ is superfluous to it, a temporary qualification. The ‘I am’ is not permanent, but eternal; not everlasting in time, but ever-present now.

When your primary experience of yourself, the awareness of being, is temporarily qualified by experience – in other words, when the ‘I am’ becomes or seems to become, ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ – nothing actually happens to the ‘I am’. Nothing actually happens to the awareness of being. It is simply coloured by the awareness of experience, but the awareness of being shines in its pristine naked condition amidst the awareness of experience.

However difficult, agitated or sorrowful experience might be, the ‘I am’, the awareness of being, shines brightly in its midst. The ‘I am’ is like the full moon in the midnight sky, shining brightly in the darkness of the night.

The essence of meditation, the highest prayer, the ultimate surrender to God is simply to stay with the ‘I am’, to be only the ‘I am’, to not allow yourself to be qualified by the content of experience. Just as the full moon is never sullied by the darkness of the night sky, so the ‘I am’ is never darkened by the content of experience and, therefore, requires no enlightening. Just as the full moon shines brightly in the midnight sky, so the ‘I am’ shines brightly even in the darkest experience.

It cannot be, nor need it be, enlightened. It is already the light of the soul, the light of infinite being, the light of God’s being. All that is required is to stay with the ‘I am’, to be only the ‘I am’ in the midst of all experience, irrespective of its content. Normally, we are so fascinated by and lost in the content of experience that we overlook the simple awareness of being. Although even then, being shines brightly in the midst of our forgetting.

In meditation, prayer or surrender to God, the awareness of being outshines the awareness of experience. This is what is referred to in the Christian tradition as the transfiguration – the light of being, God’s being, emanating, saturating, outshining all experience.

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