This is an excerpt from the new book, What’s It Like Being You? by John-Roger with Paul Kaye.
Our goal is to move from the external power of the personality into the authentic power of the Soul. The personality expresses itself in how we use the exterior senses—not only in the way we hear, see, smell, touch, and taste but also in how and when we date, eat, shop, appreciate the arts, chat with friends, and persuade others to do what we want.
Because these exterior senses are guided by the personality, if your personality is at all distorted, the way you use your exterior senses will also be distorted. The personality becomes distorted primarily through our habits and addictions.
Most of our difficulties start with wanting things. The ego-personality—the false self—instinctively wants to smell and taste and touch and feel and hear and see. That wanting draws us into the world and worldly pursuits and sets us up to be disappointed, to feel the pain of being unfulfilled. This is part of the human condition. It’s also the way we learn. If we don’t get the lesson the first time, we’ll be given another opportunity—and another and another. If we still haven’t learned, we might get counseling or educate ourselves through reading uplifting material, meditate, or go on retreat in order to put our senses back under our direction, rather than allowing them to direct us.
Every time our senses are drawn to something outside ourselves, our energy moves in two different directions. We can go ahead and do what our personality and senses want us to do, with no thought to the consequences. Or we can take the higher road and make a conscious choice to assume a more loving and caring approach to life.
In the previous chapter, we suggested that whenever you are confronted with a difficult choice, it’s wise to ask yourself two simple but important questions. Your answers will guide you toward making responsible choices. Responsible choices have loving and caring in them; personality choices often don’t. Personality-based choices arise from our desires—from the wants of the ego, the false self. When we make a responsible choice, we bypass the personality and the senses and tap into Soul energy. When we tap into Soul energy, anger and greed disappear. Anger is the false self saying, “You’re not doing what I want you to do.” When someone doesn’t do what we want, we often judge them and make them wrong. Judgments, as we’ve seen, come out of the false self.
When we judge, our body lets us know that’s what we’re doing. We feel energy draining from the power center in the abdomen. In an effort to get our energy back, we experience fear. Fear is a call to action that triggers the release of adrenalin. When adrenalin kicks in, we feel a surge of power, but it is not authentic power. Authentic power comes from the Soul.
Unless there is real danger at hand, this call to action is the ego asserting itself. Whenever you react from the false self, you are setting yourself up for defeat. Inevitably, you will exhaust yourself and then attempt to regain energy by filling yourself with the nearest stimulant—alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, junk food. The false self perpetuates itself by saying, “What else could I have done?” The answer is that you could have made a choice from the true self instead.
But, you might ask, how does the false self, which doesn’t even realize it has choices, make a true-self choice? The key is a positive shift in attitude. This is not “positive thinking,” which can be negated by a negative thought, but positive direction, truly understanding that you are a spiritual being, a divine being who is living in the world. As a divine being, a Soul, you bring spiritual light and love into this world. You create a space for grace to be in your life. Grace is clear Spirit energy that comes to you without any conditions on it.
When you act out of the false self, there are all sorts of things you feel you must do, and they all take energy from you. When you live out of the true self, you draw on a source of infinite energy. But as soon as you give attention to your true self, your false self is likely to say, “Hey, what about me,” and do anything it can to drag you back into the exterior senses. The true self doesn’t say, “What about me?” The true self knows we must eventually return to it, so it is patient. It can wait, because it is eternal. The false self may be patient for a while, but it can’t wait for long before it has to do something, then something else, and then something else. Living out of the false self, we become fragmented and procrastinate, not finishing what we started. Then we feel frazzled because life isn’t going the way we think it should. When we finally look at the mess we’ve created, we once again rush to judge. But as we’ve seen, judgment is a serious matter. In judging our experience, we separate ourselves from our own divinity.
Yet the Soul is always standing by, waiting to be called, waiting for us to put our judgments aside. We can call upon the Soul right now. In this moment, we can forgive ourselves for forgetting we are divine. We can say, “God, Thy will be done.” We can surrender the self-preserving nature of the false self and enter into the eternal life of the Soul—not as a religious concept, belief, or a hope, but as a living reality that exists in all of us.
Self-preservation is the false self speaking, expressing itself through ego concerns (What will happen to me?),relationship concerns (Who will love me?), money concerns (How will I get along in this world?), or a fear of poverty (What will happen if they take this from me?). In the world of the false self we have to be concerned with the effects of all our actions: “If I do this, then this will happen. Then if do that, that will happen. . .” and so on,endlessly.
In the world of the true self, there’s no need for such calculations. All we have to do is call on divine nature authentically—honestly, directly, forthrightly—by going within. The kingdom of heaven is within. The Soul resides within. Whether we call it prayer, meditation, silence, stillness, communion, or spiritual exercises, making contact with divine energy is the way to tap in to authentic power.
When we tap in to authentic power, we do not then need to become anything in the world. We just become present with the true self. The true self is joyful and loving. It needs nothing external to be joyful about.
