I AM, Page 8

It is most significant that it was Lazarus/John who both noted that Isaiah had seen and spoken with the Christ (Jn 12,41) and identifies him as the “I Am.” And John’s Gospel extensively characterizes Christ as the “I Am” (see I-72):

Several more Johannine “I Am” passages deserve notation, including:

In each of the synoptic Gospels, the adoption of Jesus of Nazareth as “Son of God,” upon exit of the Zarathustra Ego and entry of the Christ Spirit into him at Baptism,¹⁴ is pronounced by the Father as follows (emphasis added):

Mt 3,16-17: (16) And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; (17) and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Mk 1,10-11: (10) And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; (11) and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

Lk 3,21-22: (21) . . . and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, (22) and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

These take on added meaning in conjunction with Ps 2,7, Is 42,1, Jn 1,12 and Rom 8,23.

The more human beings take the Christ “I Am” into their own Ego, and thereby transform the lower three bodies into the higher three states (see I-9), the greater the enhancement of their consciousness. When that consciousness extends beyond the gates of birth and death, then one dwells always in the Kingdom, having overcome death and the river Lethe’s oblivion (Jn 1,12; Job 38,17). It is then that the three loaves (lower bodies) are fully leavened and one dwells in full consciousness in the Kingdom (Mt 13,33). The Ego, or “I Am,” is after all a matter of consciousness. We see in I-1 that there are to be a total of seven Conditions of Consciousness, of which Earth evolution is the fourth, the one in which the Ego is added to the older three bodies (members) in the human being’s evolution and becomes their ruler, i.e., the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (cf. Is 11,6d, “and a little child shall lead them”; also Job 32,4,6). The powerful significance of this has yet to dawn upon the bulk of humanity, from which the “Face of God,” and the meaning of his “Name,” thus remains “hidden.”

Steiner had a great deal to say about primeval sounds, the origin of speech and the meaning of words. We cannot explore all that now, but we do note that long ago in humanity’s evolution the meanings of the relatively few sounds were uniformly understood (Gen 11,1, probably mirrored in Acts 2,1-13). In one of his significant works on the subject, Speech and Drama (SD), a nineteen-lecture cycle, Steiner speaks in Lect. 1 of certain primeval sounds which have a haunting similarity to the sound of the “I Am.” Here I refer to the Oriental meditation mantra AUM. Because of the relation between consciousness and the “I Am,” the following extract seems pertinent:

Suppose now we want to express what is contained in O. In O we have the confluence of A and U; it is where waking up and falling asleep meet. O is thus the moment either of falling asleep or of awaking. When the Oriental teacher wanted his pupils to be neither asleep nor awake, but to make for that boundary between sleeping and waking where so much can be experienced, he would direct them to speak the syllable OM. In this way he led them to the life that is between waking and sleeping.

For, anyone who keeps repeating continually the syllable OM will experience what it means to be between the condition of being awake and the condition of being asleep. A teaching like this comes from a time when the speech organism was still understood.

And now let us see how it was when a teacher in the Mysteries wanted to take his pupils further. He would say to himself: The O arises through the U wanting to go to the A and the A at the same time wanting to go to the U. So, after I have taught the pupil how to stand between sleeping and waking in the OM, if I want now to lead him on a step further, then instead of getting him to speak the O straight out, I must let the O arise in him through his speaking AOUM. Instead of OM, he is now to say AOUM. In this way the pupil creates the OM, brings it to being. He has reached a higher stage. OM with the O separated into A and U gives the required stillness to the more advanced pupil. Whereas the less advanced pupil has to be taken straight to the boundary condition between sleep and waking, the more advanced has to pass from A (falling asleep) to U (waking up), building the transition for himself. Being then between the two, he has within him the moment of experience that holds both.

It is not, perhaps, extending our contemplation too far if we suspect that in ancient times what came over “from the east” (Gen 11,2) carried with it, as the seminal “I Am,” an awareness of the enhanced consciousness relating to the “AOUM.”