Q: What’s the difference between the person and the self?

John: Your person is what you do with your self to others. It’s the form of your self that you develop and use, and that shows to others. It is what you’ve developed to communicate your self.

Q: Why do I seem so trapped in it and unable to expand completely?

John: If you develop your person in coping with what doesn’t work of your self – in what your self and how it has been has shown to others, been seen by others and not accepted, or didn’t fit – you’ll develop your person to please what others want, making a split between your person and your self. Your person then becomes structured as a projection of what you would like others to see, or what you don’t want others to see.

As soon as you create that, you need to maintain it. The need to maintain it will be greater than what was your need to create it. That will have you locked into your person. It won’t be able to expand because it isn’t truly representative of your deeper self. For your person to really expand you need to return to your deeper self and to let that be represented in your person, in what you communicate to others, and how. The less disparity there is between your person and your self, the more that your person and your self can expand.

In your return to your deeper self you’ll be honest to knowledge concerning what your deeper self is, enabling you to be true to your deeper self in what you’re letting others see. You’ll be standing before others as openness and softness of heart representing what you think and representing what you feel, with the representations being on the terms of what your being is like. The weaknesses in your self, in being allowed to be visible, will become strengthened by your own beingness in it and by others being able to see, regardless of what they might do with that.

You’ve withdrawn it because you didn’t want to take responsibility for it, and also because it was being abused, making putting the projection of your self forward to others as a way of coping. The form that you give to that is then the form, as a person, that you’re confined to. You’ll need to keep performing for others in what you have developed for others to see.

You’re able to be the same kind of person that you are in your deeper self; not in the self that you’re accustomed to, but in your deeper, hidden self. It will mean your standing, standing as openness and softness of heart before others, standing in what you know and also standing in what you don’t know, neither pushing forward nor backing down: just simply standing as knowledge, owing no explanation yet giving it where you can.

Any sense of self-esteem that is contained within your projection of your self to others and managed in the form of your person will fall away. On the level of self-esteem, your own self-esteem will be stripped down and you’ll be experiencing the actual vulnerability of your deeper self standing as a person before others. But it isn’t self-esteem that you need; it’s just being true to knowledge within, in your self, as your self, in person and as a person, giving you a foundation of being, a foundation within of living knowledge, much more sustaining than self-esteem is.

Self-esteem gives you a comfort level and a confidence, but being living knowledge, standing open-hearted as a self and as a person before others gives you you: an unshakeable you. The self-esteem that comes of that is of real you. It isn’t subject to what others do or don’t do, what others are or are not. It’s subject only to your real knowledge; the forms of your self and your person manifesting it and supporting it.

Q: Thank you, John.