Q: I’d say, in general, I live within the context of purity but it still feels like purity is an emanation from the source, and it’s rare that I drop beyond that into what I’d say is the absolute. So the daily experiences of having to drop into and maintain levels that I think should be natural …

John: They are natural. They’re natural to you, but to you without your self. These levels are not natural to your self. Your self isn’t configured yet in the same way that these levels are. Your self cannot synchronize with these levels; there’s too much of a disparity, and that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you or your self.

The level of the self is the level of raw resources for your being to come into and to have form by. These raw resources are not disorganized; they are organized and structured. For the resources to be used is the undoing of your self, the reconstitution of your self. For you to be what your being is in the midst of your self would undo your self. That undoing and the experience of it is necessary. In that, you recognize the value of your own being through the experience of contrast, and the cost to your self for your being to come into your self. Your self doesn’t get to be what it has been. Your self is re-made to match what you really are and to match the forms of your own being.

Your self enables you to relate to your environment, to the others that are around you. Your self enables you to move and to relate to the general state of all of us, that general state being far removed from what a being is like. Your self gives you functionality in this world, but it doesn’t give you connectivity to your being. That connectivity needs to come from you, by you relating from your heart and not from your self, and from within your heart your relating moves to what you know in your heart, connecting you directly to your own being, and then you being that in the midst of your functional self that relates to this world, which shifts, in your self, your relating.

With the shift of relating the structures in your self loosen because you are being something of your own being in midst of those structures. As you sustain that, at cost to your experience of your self, your self becomes little bit by little bit just like you are in your own being. Then you really are a being that has a self, instead of a self that has a being.

You turning right side up will feel like your self being turned upside down. Its whole way of relating and moving, how it connects and why it connects, changes. The old felt purpose of your self passes away and you come into new and actualized purpose to your self.

Your self is there to give accurate form to your own being. That is your self being fundamental change. That makes it a self of change. Its raw materials are available to be moved and shaped and constituted in the way that your own being is.

Q: I’ve recognized the lack of depth of being for some time and I see that more opening, more softening in the heart.is a way of being in itself that leads to a depth of being.

John: Which changes how you move in your self. The change in the heart is of beingness: instead of a beingness that is like your self, a beingness that is like your own being. A shift of beingness in your heart is the first change. The next change is that beingness in your heart having form in your self. That form is how you move in your self, how you move as a self. The self isn’t like openness and softness of heart, and that doesn’t make your self wrong. It’s just not like you yet.

When you are being openness and softness of heart in your self, as you move your self, your self cannot be, in its movement, what it was before. This accomplishes the undoing of your self, making its resources available. It makes its form, its materials, available to be re-made so that your self is as you are in your heart – a real continuation of you into your self.

The integration of your self is the transformation of your self. What you really are isn’t changing; your being doesn’t change. The first change is in the heart. That’s a simple change. It is just a change of beingness, where your beingness isn’t that of how you experience your self. Your beingness comes from what you know in your heart which is very simple: it is an opening and a softening. As that beingness comes into the next level of form, your self, the change is very involving. There’s a great deal of complexity – much to come apart and much to move differently.

Q: That first step you described of opening and softening and being the heart is a change of identity.

John: Yes.

Q: So if my pure attention is on the heart, that’s a proper place to start.

John: Which puts you into what you know in your heart. Being what you know the truth of in your heart purifies your heart. You being that in your self purifies your self. The purification of your heart is really simple. The purification of your self is really complex and you experience every little bit of it.

Q: It seems to feel like the heart doesn’t need purification. It’s right being in it. I don’t get a sense of impurity there.

John: When you take your self seriously, you take your self, as it presently is, to heart. That makes your heart not at all like your own being. It makes your heart impure. When you take to heart only the little bit that you know the truth of, that cleans your self out of your heart, making your heart pure.

Bringing your self into your heart, when you take your self to heart, you also take to heart the conditioning that is in your self. You take to heart its patterning. That corrupts your heart. That being there in your self doesn’t do harm, but that brought into your heart does do harm. When your self is taken to heart, that closes your heart and hardens your heart, making its beingness, in form, not at all like your own being, which makes you, in form, separate from your being, separate from what you really are.

When your self is swept out of your heart, the beingness that your heart is of – openness and softness – cannot relate to what your self is like. That doesn’t make your self bad or wrong. It doesn’t make your self unclean or corrupted. Your self is then available materials, available form, to turn into and change into whatever you’re being in it. Your self is innocent. Your self will innocently be whatever you’re being.

First you are mastered by what you know in your heart, making your heart just like your being, and from there, as that, you master your self and in that way you make your self to be just like you are. When you take your self to heart you let what your self is like, in its raw form, master you, which makes you just like your self. That change corrupts your heart. It makes its beingness not like your own being.

By you simply being in all of your heart what you know in your heart, and that knowing has only to do with beingess. Your heart is purified. It’s made clean of your self so then your being is like you and your heart is like you. Your self is not yet like you and that will change.

Q: So the present impurities in the heart are from bringing the self into the heart.

John: Yes.

Q: And the orientation change is being the heart as it truly is.

John: Which is not at all like your self. Your heart is like your house. Being in your house doesn’t mean that there’s home in your house. Home in your house comes from what you know in your heart. When the beingness that is in your heart is the same as your own being, then you have home in your house.

Your self is a little bit like your workshop. Your workshop doesn’t belong in your house. Home belongs in your house. Whatever fills your house determines what you’ll be making in your workshop. It determines the direction of your creativity, the depth of it, the realness of it.

Q: I’ve been mistaken. I thought I had shifted the identity in my heart.

John: Believing, you’re able to project what you know in your heart onto your thinking and then believe your thinking, which makes it feel like you’re being what you know in your heart, enabling you to believe that you are something that you are not yet.

Q: I just sensed a relief in knowing that. The belief in the shift had created some tension in me. it’s as if the belief would hold me back from the real shift.

John: It’s easy to believe what you know you really are in your thinking, without directly turning into the beingness of that in your heart. It’s like skipping grades. If you skip a grade, in some way, what you think you’re learning, you’re not really, because the learning isn’t based on what it belongs on. It’s based on something that’s missing.

In that way, you believing that you’re being real doesn’t at all mean that you’re being real. Life will show you that. And regardless of what you believe in your self, if you are opening and softening in your heart, you are being real, and when you are being that in your self, you are being real in your self, whether you believe you are or not, bringing belief no longer to what you experience in your self and as a self, to what you know in your heart.

When you believe what you know in your heart, you are absorbed into what you know and what you know in your heart completely absorbs you, so then there’s no difference between what you really are and what your heart is like. As that, you are warmly not loyal to your self. You’re not loyal to what you experience in your self. You’re not loyal to what your experience tells you is real. Your self doesn’t inform you of what is really you; your being does, and your connection to that in life is your heart, what you know in your heart.

Spirituality is part of the raw materials in your self and, along with your self, it doesn’t belong in your heart. Your being belongs in your heart and you can’t bring it in through belief of that. It’s brought in by you believing what you know in your heart: awareness believing direct knowledge and awareness not believing information.

You believing information about your being does not make you, in your heart, like your being. When you believe that information in your self, that makes you not like your being, and life will show you that. Life will help you see that it’s not like that. When you are being the direct knowledge that is in your heart, life will show you that you’re being that.

Life shows you where you are meeting, where you love, where you commune. And life shows you where you are just being your self. It’s all helping.