You Are Not Book.indb - Stephen H. Wolinsky Ph. D.

The Physiology of I AM / 19
before the “I” appears, YOU ARE NOT. This represents a major
deviation from Korzybski’s work. He was interested in timebinding
and enhancing survival; “I” am interested in only I
AM THAT—YOU ARE NOT, or the discovery of who you are,
by discovering WHO YOU ARE NOT and the realization of
THAT ONE SUBSTANCE.
In short, and daring to move 100 pages ahead of “myself,”
the “I” “you” call “yourself” and the idea that I AM—“I am
a person”; “I am here right now”; “I have a past, present and
future”; “I have a purpose and mission”; “I makes choices”—is
a fantasy, an illusion that is a representation created by the
nervous system and represents the first veil of consciousness.
The “I” “you” call “yourself” appears because chemicals called
neurotransmitters have come together to form I AM and what
“you” call “you”; and being a person, and more importantly,
the “I” that imagines it is and claims doership for “what is,”
appears after the action has already taken place. Moreover,
without this chemical reaction, which produces I AM and
the idea of being a person, this “you” and all “you” imagine
“yourself” to be; would not be. Possibly, it is for this reason
that A. R. Orage, a student of G. I. Gurdjieff, suggested that
when “you” look at a person, “you” should see them as a mass
of chemicals (Orage, On Love).
The “i Am” is a by-product of the nervous system
Chemicals
EXERCISE
(From Orage)
1) Look at someone.
2) See them as just chemicals.
3) “Look” at the “you” that “you” call “you,” and
“realize” that the perceiver (“I”) occurs only
through a chemical reaction.