Q: You say that there is a difference between what is real and what is actual, and I wanted to know how to see what is real.

John: Everything that’s actual activates your self. It connects into thinking, feeling, will and emotion, but that doesn’t make it real. The real directly nurtures you. The real doesn’t appeal to your self; it appeals to your heart. What career you have is actual, but not real. The way that you are in whatever career you have, if you’re gentled and quieted within, you’re nurtured within despite your career, and in the midst of your career that’s real. The real isn’t your career. It isn’t your job. The real is what you are being within in the midst of your career. In that way, it doesn’t really matter which career you choose. What really matters is what you are being within in whatever you do.

The self, your self, is actual but it’s genetic, and until you’ve integrated your self from within your heart, your self is artificial. It’s not real. The way that you are being within, in the midst of all of your self, if it’s true to what you really are, that makes your self real just by virtue of you being in it. If you’re not being what you really are in the midst of your self but instead you are being the conditioning of your self in all of your self, that makes you, in all of your self, artificial – not real.

When you are rested within, you are real. When you are rested within in the midst of anything in your self – your self being artificial – your beingness infuses your self with what’s real. Your self becomes real by virtue of you being what is real, you being what you really are, in your self. You coming from your heart, unconditionally, at any personal expense, in the midst of your self, transforms your self from being actual but artificial, to being real.

A child still in its innocence is real. Any movement that a child comes into of its genetics, while it remains in its innocence, converts that genetic matter that is very actual into what’s real. It’s the movement of the innocence of the child, in its self, that makes its self real. As soon as a child leaves its innocence, its movement in thought and feeling, will and emotion isn’t real. It all becomes a performance.

Love the difference between you and your self. Your self is made of thought and feeling, will and emotion. You are made of nurture and love that is able to fill all feeling, thought, will and emotion, which converts your self to what you really are. It transforms your self from being actual and artificial to being real, just by you being true to you: you being true to nurture and love, within, in the midst of thinking and feeling, will and emotion.

A child, still in its innocence, is a beautiful living example of the real.

Q: Thank you very much.