The I AM gives Living Insight

“Again Jesus spoke to them, saying I AM the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12

In the last reflection we looked at the I AM as a new name for all those who unite with it. It is “so Old Testament” to give heredity prominence in our life. Those in whom the I AM is vibrant and alive should now call themselves David I AM, Kristina I AM, Julie I AM – together we belong to the I AM family. This is the picture of the future, of individuality and freedom.
John 8 speaks about the birth of the individual. It begins with the Pharisees bringing the woman caught in adultery. As they accuse her, Jesus had deep insight into their past lives and karma which he “wrote with his finger in the ground.” Her accusers slithered away because through Jesus they also had insight into their own sins, their own karma.
What happens when we experience insight? What does it feel like at the moment of insight? Our being is lit up. We have the “light of life”.
True insight allows the will to shoot up into our intelligence. Mostly our will slumbers in the depth of our being; this will is blind and our intelligence is abstract. We lazily regurgitate second hand information which contains nothing of our own self in it. Rev Mario Schoenmaker always said the only information worth having is first hand information. “Every word I speak to you is second hand,” he said. Steiner said, “You ought not to believe my words, but think them, that is to say, make them the object of your thinking.”
To make spiritual truths the object of our thinking takes enormous strength of will. We have to strive to think through the thoughts, compare them with the thoughts that we already have and rigorously reach our own understanding. It is much easier to draw on other people’s conclusions. If we resist this, when we have that personal insight we can feel the lightness of our will and the clarity of our mind. We feel alive. We have the “Ah ha” experience.
Blind will and abstract intelligence (second hand information regurgitated) are actually spiritual entities, spiritual beings who “walk in darkness”, we know them as Ahriman and Lucifer.
Blind will and abstract intelligence do not live; only insight, which infuses our intelligence with will, is living. What does it mean to be alive, to be living? Anything that is alive is active; expanding and contracting (breathing) and metamorphosing (changing). To have the light of life is to have active insight. It means that the I AM is the captain of our soul; we are no longer a slave to second hand, lifeless information.
Furthermore, the I AM is our eternal essence, it is our personality, it is that part of us that endures from incarnation to incarnation. So through our “I” we have access to all our potentials. We are cut off from these potentials if we do not strive to connect with them, ie if we are lazy. The amount of effort we exert dictates the brightness of the I AM light that shines within our soul. If our I, our light, is not shining brightly in our soul then our astral is in charge, we walk in darkness and we are the tool of the anti-forces. Our insights are not original, our thoughts are abstract and our will is asleep.
If we allow the Light of the I AM to irradiate our soul, if we put effort into having personal insight, grappling with the truths spoken by Rev Mario, Rudolf Steiner and others, then the thrilling words of John 8:32 will be a reality: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”