The Great I am is not “Me” and Descartes

The most dangerous risk of the Great I am, (is it born of the enemy?) is the risk of egoism. We can agree that theology points to the necessity of humility as primary. Self-sacrifice and the abandonment of self seems to be central to all the great spirtualists. Christ said of himself, the greatest of History’s sacrifices and sacriments, “I am come not to be served but to serve”. Buddha’s central theme is the abandonment of the ego, of the self. The danger of the Great I am is that if flies in the face of this if viewed wrongly. The first lesson of the Great I am then, must be that it is not “me”. It is a greater whole of which the me is only a small part. If sin is the choice of one’s own will over the will of God, then so is the exaggeration, the priority of the me, the individual self, over the Greater Iam.


Descartes, in his pioneering reasoning on existence and God, whether he knew it or not, was arguing the G Iam. In fact, he was arguing very much from John 1. The I am in “I think therefore I am” would be the same as the birth of consciousness expressed by John. I am not only proves the existence of the self but at the same time provides the stepping stone to the Greater I am, known and unknown; the super consciousness. And it is the very self that is discovered that must be lost in the Greater I am if one is to go beyond the “me”. This all echoes Buber’s I and thou, but I have no idea what he had to say about Decartes.

Still the central question left in the end is, "is there a centrally to the "I" that speaks of a personality or just a vague wondering consciousness?", God forbid.