Q: How can I discern how and when to have boundaries in a relationship?
John: The answer to that depends completely on your level of awareness and your orientation as awareness. For example, if you’re just completely identified in your self, then boundaries are really important. If you don’t move with those boundaries and set them in a way that is fair to your self and the other, then you go out of balance. If you awaken to deeper levels within, all of that changes and it becomes increasingly more important for you to have no need of setting boundaries.
Q: But I can feel so overwhelmed by such pressure that I feel boundaries are really necessary.
John: If you’re going the way of deeper levels because you’ve awakened to them and that’s your life, you’re not going to relate much to boundaries. Ultimately you’ll relate to being able to set boundaries, but not at first. At first, most of the boundaries that you normally set, you don’t need. That doesn’t mean you would allow your self to be harmed but, for the most part, the boundaries that we set aren’t needed.
If you’re coming from deeper levels within, where you would normally set a boundary and you don’t, a structuring in your self is going to come apart and you’re letting it happen. The emergence of these deeper levels that you’re coming from, into that place in your self coming apart, is going to bring your self back together differently.
If you set the boundary, you’ll still have a self that isn’t like your being and you’ll be developing your self. There’s value to the development of your self but if it’s in a way that’s still not like your being, you haven’t actually gained anything. If you don’t set a boundary because of coming from your deeper levels, and that aspect comes apart, your deeper levels come into it and that aspect will move more like your own being. That’s transformation from the inside out.
You begin to deeply realize within your self that you have no rights, so it’s a completely different perspective. When you come into realizing that you actually have no rights in your self, then the underlying core beliefs that you have – your right to individuality, your right to have your self and keep your self for your self, your right to a good life, your right to all of these goodnesses – those underlying beliefs will come apart. And that coming apart frees you of how you’ve related to your self.
Without those core beliefs you have a depth of mobility in your self. When they’re in place, you don’t have real mobility because you’re always hemmed in by their mechanisms and you’re controlled by your sub-consciousness.
If your awareness shifts its orientation from your self and reality in the way that you perceive from your self, to your deeper levels and your being, you can really live in your life virtually all the time not relating to boundaries and how you’re affected by others.
As you integrate that, you’ll be able to set boundaries without that having personal significance to you. You can set boundaries and be free of them; they don’t control you.
Q: I sense there’s some sort of a neediness in it because if I don’t need anything from the outside then there’s no problem; I wouldn’t need to set the boundary.
John: If there’s any mix in you setting a boundary, that tells you to not set that boundary.
Q: What do you mean by a mix?
John: If there’s a mixture of self orientation or personal interest. To use the example of a referee in a game: if no-one does anything that’s outlawed, he doesn’t do anything. But as soon as someone does something that doesn’t belong in the game, the whistle blows, the game stops, someone gets a penalty and then the game continues. Everything is fine.
You need to introduce a goodness referee which is you in your self. As soon as you do something that has a mix, something that you know doesn’t actually belong, it doesn’t matter how little it is, you blow the whistle. Everything stops and then you continue without that mix; everything is fine. If you’re setting a boundary and there’s a personal interest, well, the whistle goes because as soon as there’s self-involvement in terms of the game, the game isn’t real anymore. You’re crossing a line in something that’s real.
Then it doesn’t matter how right you are. In crossing that line you’re wrong. If you cross a reality line inside, it doesn’t matter the goodness you’re holding in one hand; when you cross something with the other hand, you’re wrong. The fact that you’re doing something good doesn’t justify anything. It doesn’t make anything right. So as soon as there’s self involvement, the whistle goes and then you realize that the whistle is going all the time.
That’s when you begin to really see. Then everything flips and you deeply comprehend because you are all about your deeper levels; you’re about your being, and you’re being that in your self. Instead of taking injury when someone injures you, you receive injury. Instead of taking offence when someone offends you, you receive the offence.
Taken seriously, it is a completely different life.
Q: I somehow know not to take offence but it can feel really important at the time, and I get drawn into it.
John: Then first deeply integrate that it’s not important. You can work with the very little part that is important later. First, integrate the biggest part which is that all of that isn’t important.
Q: So just receive it?
John: It can be pretty powerful. It can even be as severe as when you see a young child in its innocence, and a parent slaps that child across the face really hard. That child, in its innocence, is just in complete dismay and shock; it has no comprehension of what’s going on. The movement of energy in that small child, if it remains in its innocence, goes straight in and opens up its being.
So a blindsided slap like that on this innocent little child does not remove that child’s innocence. It just takes it even deeper, and that’s just with a little one. You’re not a little one; you’re able to work with perspective. You have powers of absorption in your self that a little one hasn’t developed into yet. A little one can do this without all of the abilities that you have. It doesn’t even understand what it’s being and what it’s doing, but the abuse doesn’t remove or compromise its innocence.
Q: That happens when you lose the importance of the self.
