Q: I experience that there can be no trust in the self at all, no matter what the experience. I’d say, give me a challenge, give me a battle, give me some pain, and it’s okay, but give me my own way and I lose everything.
John: No one can make it through this without being pointedly disloyal to the self. And all of the loyalty is gathered up and it’s all turned toward what you most deeply know in your heart.
Q: For me, it was more the actual letting go of something and then you get the expanded freedom and bliss that comes after letting go of something.
John: But that’s an experience in your self. You can be in the midst of that while being pointedly disloyal to your self.
Q: That is trickier for me. It’s much more subtle. It’s much harder to really see my self at work in that state of experience. With the pain and discomfort, it’s easier to see where the line is. Whereas the subtleness of the blissful experience, that’s when for me I didn’t see.
John: There needs to be both. You need to be pointedly disloyal to your self in the midst of increase and in the midst of decrease of experience. When everything is really coming together on deeper levels, to be pointedly disloyal to your self when all of this is experienced in your self, to be in the midst of the truth of that experience, while being pointedly disloyal to your self, is an extremely fine line.
Q: Can you give any help, any clarification on how to be in that? It is really, really subtle. The first time I didn’t see it and I’m almost scared of being that again because I genuinely didn’t see it. I spun my self out and it’s taken me a long time to go back in again. I can feel my self resisting that gentleness, softness, openness, that got me to that state in the first place because I don’t want it to be that way. I don’t want to spin out again.
John: You have to discern the truth you know within that experience. Within this high-level experience, you’re loyal to the truth within it, no matter how strong the experience is. The experience and the truth within may be very divergent.
Q: Is it like not being taken by the bliss, like staying in the deeper knowing that brought it about?
John: In your self, be not taken by it at all while being completely present in it, so you’re not denying the bliss, you’re not turning it away and you’re not separating from it, you’re completely in it. It is a fine line and and there’s a pitfall in everything. If you don’t see the pitfall, then you’re probably in it and the pitfall is germinating like a virus and you don’t even see it yet. It’s like catching a cold that hasn’t registered yet.
