Q: John, I’m being brought back to a point where I no longer can distinguish between breathing in or out and I feel the heart pulsing very intensely. It’s usually occurring during the night during the transition of sleeping and waking. It causes a tremendous physical feeling of panic. If there is a question it has to do with the sense of being paralyzed and the difference between the will to live and the will to die, and not seeing the difference. There’s nowhere to go.

John: Instead of relating to what you’re experiencing, relate as awareness to an openness and a softness of heart. That takes you immediately into beingness. That has you being deeper than what your self is. When you’re being deeper than what your self is, you’re also being more than what your self is. Openness and softness of heart is greater than what your self is. The way to a greater self is by first being even the tiniest little bit within that is already greater than your self, not subject to your self.

That takes you as awareness into a very fine and gentled delicateness, within. Coming from that will have you feeling vulnerable in your self. It takes you out of the reaction against your self, but then leaves you in a very delicate vulnerability, the reason why the tendency is to prefer being in a state of reaction. It doesn’t have you feeling that exquisite vulnerability.

A harder self copes more easily in the immediate than a softer self. A softer self is experienced as being less grounding, whereas a harder self is immediately grounding. That sense of grounding gives you a false sense of safety in your self, and the use of that separates you from your own being.

When you relax as awareness without trying to do so as a body or a self – relaxing as awareness because of surrendering to realization within – within realization is real knowledge, something the experience of your self doesn’t give you. That real knowledge that comes into your experience by realization moves by your surrender to it. Your surrender to it enables you to be coming from it.

Your functional self – the self that you live by – isn’t going to be helping you in this. Your functional self gives you functionality, not your own beingness. For you to be your own beingness takes you out of the functionality that’s in your self, making you feel within your self vulnerable, yet home as a being.

When you wake up after sleeping and you have something of that panic, you’re able as awareness to be gentled and quieted within in the midst of the panic, without your trying to change the experience of the panic. That has you being okay in the midst of what doesn’t feel okay.

It’s the beginning of your relating to what you are as a being instead of relating to what you are as a self.