Q: I’d like to ask you about the self. When we say ‘my self’, this ‘my’, it seems as if the nature of the self is selfish. When I feel the peace it seems irrelevant but in daily life it’s very difficult to stay in that peace that’s not of the self. You draw the distinction between the heart and the self. Is the self the same as the body-mind?

John: That’s close enough. The self isn’t inherently selfish.

Awareness developing in the womb is awareness not just coming into a body but coming into the more subtle form of its own being. Awareness within the womb relates as a being. It doesn’t relate as a self, even though it is already within the environment of selves.

When you were in your mother’s body, you related to her as a being. Your being was your nature and you were relating directly to the nature of her being. In that way, you were an influence on her. In you relating to her as a being, she experienced you as a being and she experienced something of her own being. It brings about a wholeness, a restedness, a goodness that was palpable to her and that others could also see in her face.

While you were developing in the womb you were re-familiarizing her with what she really is. In those months when you were in her body you were, in a manner of speaking, teaching her everything that she’ll need for the next twenty years in raising you. Everything that mattered most in raising you was predicated on her being the same way that you were to her when you were in her body.

She was brought back to an intimacy of being. It wasn’t understood by her; what she understood was her self, but while you were in her body relating to her as a being, she was experiencing directly, from you and with you, a nurture that far surpassed any goodness that she knew in her self. This is all the goodness that is in her own being.

After you were born, when she would hold you and look into your eyes and you would look into hers, you continued to relate to her as a being. When you looked into her, she was being known and seen by you. In her self when she would consider and try to fathom what was occurring, she couldn’t. You were more than she was in her self, and in her heart as she held you and as the two of you met, she marveled.

She continued to be brought into what she is able to relate from, in relating with you. She acted like a self to you but, even in acting like a self to you, she was in her heart toward you. The beingness that you were of kept bringing her into her heart, in her heart where she understood little and knew much.

In the same way that she was being brought back to her being through your relating – experiencing the nurture of it – you, through her, her being in her self, were slowly being introduced to what a self is. As you became introduced to her self, every little bit of her self awakened you and brought you into your self.

As you came into your self, you began to come into all of your unintegrated power. In your self you related with feeling and with emotion. As you realized how you’re able to move in your self, as you began to realize the powers of your self because of being with the powers in her self, you developed and you learned very quickly. You learned how to use that power. It was necessary for you to come into these powers. It was necessary for you to come into your self. As you came into your self, you functioned slowly less and less directly as a being. It still remained very easy to see in you, and you still very easily found it in her.

As you came more and more into your self, realizing its powers and its limitations, you realized its powers because, in your self, you had power to do. You were able to do. You were able to influence and you were able to control. The limitation that you also realized as you came more and more into your self is that the more you used your control the more you were not coming from what you were first coming from. When you would move in your self, you would easily compromise and diminish the value of your own beingness. The selfishness that you came into was you coming into a self-orientation: a necessity in realizing your self, in coming into the form of your self.

While you did, you didn’t lack in knowing. As awareness, you moved as knowing. You read everything through knowing, regardless of what information you came into through your self. Your clarity, within, always came from knowing. You always knew what you saw. You knew what you saw in those around you, and it would take you years to come into understanding of what you were already seeing and knowing from the beginning.

As you came into your self and you came into the full development of your self, through many years of development you were able to relate directly to what you knew and to the beingness, within, that you knew, or to relate to what you experienced in your self. How you were affected in your being was not at all the same as how you were affected in your self, and you clearly knew within each. All the way through, you were making micro-choices in your relating: relating to what you knew, relating to your own beingness, relating in being able to find that same beingness in others, relating from that beingness or relating from your heart and also relating from your self.

While you were developing in your self, while you were developing your self, you were able to maintain your own real continuity. Your continuity as awareness, within all of your forms, was knowing. You always knew what was true. Not understanding it didn’t at all make less that you knew.

You were able in your micro-choices to depart in your relating from what you knew and to depart in your relating from your own being, to relate exclusively to what you felt and experienced within your self and as a self. You were able, in that relating to your self, to attach to your self and to regard the experience of your self as being everything.

When you related directly to your self, it would be easy for you to be unconsolable within the experienced loss of anything, and you would be uncontrollable but you could be appealed to. As you came into reason, you could be appealed-to in your thinking which promoted the development of your intellect. You could be appealed-to in the openness of your heart, which would easily bring you back to your heart and, when you experienced the beingness of those around you, that would appeal directly to your own being.

Your self wasn’t selfish. Your self was innocent as you were.

You developed naturally in your forms, including the development of your body and your self. You also had the capacity and the ability to fragment as awareness, creating attachments within your self that you knew were not true, but you would furnish these attachments because you had the power to; you were able to.

All of the micro choices that you made as awareness within your self contributed to your subconscious self. You were slowly – in adding to your own subconscious self through the conscious micro-choices in your conscious self – you were forming your own behavior. All of these formations then, in your experience, began to stand in your way. They stood in the way of your return back to your own being. When you began to awaken consciously and intellectually to the value of your own being, you had everything of the conditioning in your self to deal with.

You experienced it in your self as a terrible liability. It wasn’t a liability. It was there to help you, to help you in your integration as awareness, your integration of your self: not just of your self, but you as awareness integrating what it is to be a being that has heart, the place from which you choose as awareness. When you make choices as awareness you do so in your heart. Your heart is the form, and the level of form, between your being and your self.

The beauty of that is that with every choice that you make and every micro-choice you make, because it is made in your heart, you can see your being and you can see your self, and you’re able to move in either direction. You move by way of relating. You can relate to your being or you can relate to your self, or you can relate to your being within your self, or you could relate to your self in trying to have your being.

In all of this, within every micro-choice, you are as awareness sorting out the minutiae of being in form. You’re sorting out every tiny little bit of what it means to have these different levels of form. Whether you understand the levels or not, you’re not able to not sort. Within every choice, you’re sorting out. You’re sorting out what you are, in your experience, in the context of form.