Q: Hi John. So I’m not much of a spiritual person or believer. What I do know is I feel this calmness from everybody in the room and some sort of openness. And when you spoke of your true inner self, it did speak to me a bit, but inside that I feel a nervousness that I can’t really get rid of. It’s in the way. I’m not sure how to leave it behind. Could you tell me more about that?

John: That deeper inner nervousness is there because you’ve connected your sense of well being to your experience of your self. Once you’ve connected it to that by a conclusion of yours and a judgment of yours in your past, your self holds you to that. But because it isn’t real, there is an anxiety associated with that. The anxiety comes from the lack in your self that you’ve given your responsibility to. What you really are is responsible for your well being, not your self, but when you hand that over to your self, empowering your self, you, in what you really are, become disempowered. Your self, empowered, is anxious about that empowerment.

When lack is empowered and lack is given responsibility for what it isn’t able to do, it becomes nervous. Your sense of self, and your self, isn’t responsible for you or your inner well being. It’s the other way around. You are responsible for your deep inner well being, and if you use your sense of self to fulfill that deep inner well being, you’re using what starts with lack to fulfill something that has no lack.

Q: Your self and what you see as your identity, those are two separate things?

John: Yes. Your self is your seen form. Your self is made of unintegrated powers of thought and feeling, will and emotion. On its own, it’s innocent regardless of its condition. But when you, awareness, identify you as your experience of your self, that forms an identity based on your experience of an unintegrated self, an unintegrated form.

Q: Does that mean to get to know your true inner self, you have to try and lose your identity?

John: As you, awareness, relax in the midst of your self, the way that you identify you as your self also relaxes. Your identity comes apart through your relaxation, and your self remains in all of its unintegrated form and lack, which on its own is innocent. As you relax within your self as it is, your identity in it passes away. Your self remains and what you are being in your self is what your self becomes. Your self turns into whatever it is that you are being in it. If you are being your self in your self, your self becomes more of what it already is. If you are being what you really are in the midst of your self, which is not the same as your self, your self becomes like you. It changes, it transforms, matching you.

In that way, your self is a form, unintegrated, of yours. Your self, your mind, is something that belongs to you. It isn’t you. When you are being what you really are in the midst of your self, you will be, by virtue of what you are being, raising your self. Your self is like a child of yours. If your child raises you, you become like your child. That doesn’t go well for you. If you raise your child, your child becomes like you. You are raising your child based on what is deeply quietly clear to you. That brings your self into you, into what you are being, by you being what you really are in all of your self.

Q: It’s really weird, I think I just lost some of that nervousness that I was talking about.

John: When your self is sweetly disempowered by you, allowing the power that you’ve put into your self to return to you, your self loses its nervousness. When a parent holds a child responsible, gives a child the responsibility for the wellbeing of the whole household, that’s going to be really hard on that child. That child will become nervous. How is it going to be responsible for something that it isn’t able to even really understand? It isn’t capable of the responsibility. Your self is like that.

Your thinking, your feeling, your will and your emotions are not responsible for you. You are responsible for them. They will be whatever you are being in them. If your thinking is closed and hard, it’s because you are. If your thinking is open and soft, it’s because you are. It isn’t your thinking that first controls you; it’s you. If what you really are deep within is what controls you and what governs you in your thinking, your thinking reflects what you really are. If you trust your thinking to tell you the truth, then you will conclude whatever it is that comes up as a thought. So you will falsely conclude the truth of things.

Once concluded, and you give your emotion to that, you have formed a judgment. That judgment holds. That remains intact throughout the whole of your self, not just your conscious self. It holds in your subconscious self and it will control you. What you form in your self holds your self together: form made is form that holds. Once you form a judgment, even when you are really little, that judgment controls your behaviour from within your subconsciousness right out into your conscious self for the rest of your life. In that way, your past judgments made that were false, that you used in an effort to control something, then control you.

Q: But how can you reach that level of relaxation and calmness in your self? How can you just let everything, your identity, everything that you have been brought up with, go?

John: By not reaching it in your self. You are, before your self. Your self isn’t you; it’s an unintegrated form that belongs to you, that you are in – but it’s not you. That would be like going into your wardrobe, choosing what you will wear, you look in the mirror and you say this is what you are. And depending on what you wear determines how you feel and what you think. It’s not real. Once you buy into that, as soon as you take that on, then you will be controlled, your inner well being will be controlled by what clothing you wear. It’s all held together by conclusions that you draw about your relationship with your clothing.

Your self is also like clothing that you came into in this world. You inherited your self. Your self is made of what your ancestors were being in their body. It’s passed on to you. You come into that inheritance. It doesn’t matter what mix the inheritance is. It doesn’t matter what style of clothing you inherit that is in your wardrobe. Wear your clothing, wear the different styles of clothing that you have – some of it you’ve inherited, some of it you’ve borrowed or purchased – but whatever you wear, don’t believe that it’s you.

Apply that to your self. Your self isn’t you. Your self is like inner clothing. You have different regions of clothing. Put on one particular garment of your self, your intellect, put that garment on and you can think and you can reason. Another garment of yours that is on you, you’re able to feel and have emotions. Another garment of yours, a power that’s in it is your will. They are all connected together. They are all somewhat integrated together in a way that has a measure of functionality but it’s not yet integrated by you. When you are being your self, you are being your unintegrated self. It isn’t you.

You’re able to be what you really are in the midst of your unintegrated self. If you are being closed and hard in your self, your self becomes the same. If what you are being is open and soft, your self opens and softens in all of its inherited patterning and comes back together differently, that is like you.

That’s the transformation of your self by virtue of you being what you really are in it.

Q: Thank you, John.