John 14:10 Meaning Don’t You Believe That I Am

The awakened part of the mind claims nothing as its own doing, because it has remembered that it is not separate from its Source. What speaks through it is not a private self but the love it shares with God, and the works it seems to perform are His extending through a mind that no longer resists.

Here the mind learns that true power is never personal. The self that would act alone is the ego, insisting on separation, while the Self that has healed lets love do everything through it. Nothing needs to be done by the mind; it need only stop blocking what is already given.

Father: the Source that acts through the mind once it stops claiming to act alone, the love that does the works the mind takes credit for.

When the personal self, the small 'me' made of thought, steps out of the way, something far greater begins to act through you. To speak 'not of myself' is to speak from the living source within rather than from the ego's constant commentary.

This is the essence of surrender. You stop being the anxious one who believes he must make everything happen, and you allow a deeper intelligence to move through you. The Father that dwelleth within is not a figure in a distant sky. It is the formless presence at the core of your being, and when you let it work instead of the striving mind, action flows through you without struggle.

The self that speaks and the formless awareness it rests in are folded into each other, each within the other, one being under two names. The words a person speaks in imagination are not his own in the small sense; the power that dwells within him is what carries them into fact. The self does not do the work by straining; it names the state, and the deeper awareness performs it.

This is why effort applied from the surface changes so little while a quiet assumption changes everything. The doing belongs to the Father, the imagining at the center, and the visible self only gives it a word to act on. When a person speaks from the feeling of the wish fulfilled, he is not producing the result himself. He is letting the power that lives in him do its work through the state he has assumed.

The awakened self and its source are not 2 beings standing apart but one life flowing through 2 names, so that the deeper power lives inside the outer person and the outer person lives inside the deeper power. Nothing genuine issues from the surface mind acting alone; every true word and every real work rises from the higher source dwelling within, using the human instrument to speak and to act. The son is simply the visible motion of the father, the outward doing of an inward power. What theology reads as one man describing his God is consciousness describing its own hidden depth working through it.

The father is not far off in a sky; the father is the inner source doing everything the awakened person appears to do.

Father: the hidden inner source and higher power dwelling within a person Works: the actions the deeper power performs through the human instrument

Fanāʾ: The passing away of the self Junayd's word for the self dropping out of the way. Someone in this state has stopped keeping track of what belongs to them, so nothing is held back for credit and nothing is added on top. A listener hears straight through the speaker to whoever sent the words.

You did not throw when you threw, but God threw: the act belongs to God A line from the Quran, spoken to the Prophet about his own hand in a battle. His arm moved and everyone watched it move, and still what carried the throw came from somewhere else. A person who has seen this can work hard all day without feeling like the author of the result.

I become the hearing he hears with and the sight he sees with: closeness that reaches inside A saying of the Prophet giving God's own words about a servant he has drawn near. Nearness of that degree reaches all the way into the person's eyes, hands, and mouth. The works you watch them do belong at once to them and to the one working through them.

Baqāʾ: Living on after the self has gone quiet The condition Sufis place right after the self drops away. The person does not disappear; they keep eating, talking, teaching, and sitting with friends. Nothing is left for them to guard, so their ordinary day turns into the place where God's work gets done.

Tajallī: God shining out through a form The tradition's name for God becoming visible in something you can look at. Al-Ghazali held that one light exists and everything else is lit by it, the way a window has no light of its own. A person can become clear enough that looking at them is how you come to see God.