I Am: The Name of God

TThe two words "I AM" are the most consequential sentence you will ever speak. When Moses asked God by what name He should be called, the answer was not a name in the ordinary sense. It was a state of being: "I AM THAT I AM." Neville pointed at this verse repeatedly because it reveals the whole mechanism of the creative power inside you. The name God uses for Himself is the same name you use a thousand times a day, often carelessly.

Everything you have ever experienced, you first claimed as yours by saying, sometimes out loud, sometimes silently, "I am." I am tired. I am behind. I am not the kind of person who gets what he wants. Each of these declarations is a creative act. The world does not argue with your declarations. It simply hands them back to you, dressed in circumstances, as proof that you were right.

This is not metaphor. Neville insisted on the literal point: the I AM is the only operant power. Whatever you persistently follow "I am" with becomes the seed of your next experience. If you would change your life, you do not begin by changing the world. You begin by changing the sentence you speak in private when no one is listening.

Day one is the foundation because no further teaching makes sense without this in place. You must first remember that the one who imagines, the one who feels, the one who assumes, is itself divine. The small self that complains and worries is not who you are. It is a costume the I AM has been wearing. Today you take off the costume, even briefly, and stand in the bare awareness behind it. From there, every other practice in the program will work, because every other practice is a way of consciously directing what follows "I am."

Do not finish the sentence too quickly today. Let "I am" sit on its own, undescribed. Notice how the body responds. Something straightens. Something settles. Something remembers. That something is what you came here to recover.