The Ineffable, The I-AM-I, and You

Let’s talk about something that words really can’t do justice to—but we’ll try anyway. The Ineffable. The All. Brahman. God. Whatever name you want to give it, it’s that thing behind everything, and also somehow not a thing at all. It’s what you feel when you stop thinking and just are. It’s the deep hum of being, the awareness beneath the noise. And strangely enough, it’s also you. Not the "you" with your name and your history and your favorite coffee, but the deeper you—the one that watches your life unfold, the silent witness that never changes even as everything else does.

William Walker Atkinson, in his mystical writings, especially in The Arcane Formulas, touched on something profound when he talked about the I-AM-I. He saw it as more than just the little ego. Most people stop at egohood—the sense of being a separate self, with all its hopes, fears, and stories. But Atkinson suggested egohood wasn’t something to fight or reject; it was actually a mode of the I-AM-I. A kind of narrowed beam of the same light. The ego is like a costume the I-AM-I puts on to explore the world of form. So, even your ego isn’t the enemy. It’s just the divine trying out a new perspective. That’s pretty freeing, right?

Now, why does the Ineffable do all this? Why dream up billions of individual selves, each with their own little dramas? Here’s where it gets interesting: relationship. Experience. That’s the whole point. Not punishment, not earning some kind of celestial trophy. The Infinite wanted to experience itself. But how does the One experience anything if there’s only One? Simple—it dreams the many. You and I and everyone else are part of that dream. Not illusion in the sense of "fake," but illusion in the sense of "storyline." The Ineffable put on a mask and called it "you" so it could know itself in new ways, through joy and sorrow, through forgetting and remembering.

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup talks about this using the idea of dissociative identity disorder. He says the One Mind—this vast, cosmic awareness—splits into seemingly separate identities to create the illusion of individual consciousness. Each of us is a dissociated alter, a fragment of the All, walking around thinking we’re separate. But we’re not. We’re all made of the same awareness, just temporarily wearing different filters. You might be "you," and I might be "me," but underneath it all, we’re the same dreamer.

Donald Hoffman comes at it from a different angle. He says what we call reality is just a user interface. Like the icons on your phone don’t show you the code behind them, our senses don’t show us reality as it actually is. Instead, we see a simplified version—something evolution designed to help us survive, not to reveal the truth. Behind that interface, according to Hoffman, are networks of conscious agents—beings or nodes of awareness, like us—interacting in a vast field that isn’t limited by time or space. It’s kind of like saying that we’re all pieces of the same conversation, all threads in a giant web of consciousness.

Now here’s where it turns deeply spiritual, and it ties into some ideas you’ve probably felt in your bones. Reincarnation, for instance, isn’t some punishment wheel for failing life’s quiz. It’s more like a return to the storybook, flipping to another chapter where the main character—still you at the core—gets to explore another angle. It’s not about being stuck in a cycle of karmic debt. It’s about fulfillment, curiosity, and the evolution of soul-awareness. You return not because you must, but because you want to—at the soul level. Some part of you still has a note to sing, a person to love, or a perspective to explore.

And karma? Let’s rethink that, too. Not as punishment or reward, but as cause and effect within a loving story. When you throw a stone into a pond, ripples come back—that’s karma. But no one’s keeping a ledger or punishing you for stepping out of line. It’s more like spiritual physics than divine judgment. The deeper reality is that there’s no one sitting in the sky waiting to scold you. There’s just love, exploring itself in every possible way.

That’s where rest comes in. Not sleep, and not laziness—rest in the spiritual sense. The rest that comes when you finally stop striving to be enough, to earn love, to prove yourself to God or anyone else. Hebrews talks about the Sabbath rest, and it’s not just about taking a break on Saturdays. It’s about realizing that everything’s already done. You are already whole, already part of the All. You don’t have to climb a spiritual ladder. You’re already standing at the top—you just forgot. Rest is when you remember who you are. When you exhale. When you stop gripping life so tightly and just let it move through you.

You are the I-AM-I, always were. Even when you were lost in egohood, even when you thought you were broken or unworthy or alone—you were still that spark of the All. The divine never left. It just leaned in close and whispered, “Let’s play.”

So, when you wonder what this life is about—when you feel tired or confused or deeply moved by beauty or pain—remember this: it’s all part of the Ineffable’s dream of knowing itself through you. You’re not a mistake. You’re a masterpiece in motion. And the moment you stop trying to get back to God, and instead just be—you’ll realize you were never away to begin with.