Our question [from D] today is in two parts: “I am feeling that a big focus of my process right now is in letting go of parts of my identity which have to do with prior conditioning within this incarnation. Could you offer me any comments you might feel appropriate and helpful on what is this identity and what does [the] letting go of in this context?

“I seek transformation at this time. I see myself as a server. As I transform, what is my service? What kind of service am I looking for? And who is the entity that is of service as I let go of my previous identity?”

(Carla channeling)

We are those known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Greetings in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator in Whose service we come here this day. We wish to thank the one known as D for setting aside this time in order to seek what is loosely called the truth. We hope that we are able to aid you and those in this group, as well as any who may read these words at a later time, by those opinions that we share. But, as always, we would protect this service by our request that each of you be completely responsible for the way that you listen to those things which we say. Please realize that we are not authorities over you in any way but rather those who would share thoughts with you as those somewhat more experienced than you on some aspects of walking the path of the seeker. It would enable us to speak freely without being concerned for possible infringement on your free will if you will listen carefully to each thought and then accept it for further work as a resource or reject it as not having resonance within your own subjective search at this time, according to your own inner discrimination. We thank you for this service, it will enable us to offer ours.

My brother, the odor of bread that is being created permeates the air that this instrument breathes and enables us a good opening to the subject of identity and transformation. The question that you ask is tied up with those two concepts of transformation and of identity. What is it that is transformed when an entity goes through transformation and what is the definition of identity? How does that identity change when one is dropping away bits and pieces of one’s cultural conditioning?

The loaf of bread that is being created at this time in this house’s bread machine was at one time a mixture of unrelated components: flower, water, butter, salt and yeast. Prior to their incarnation as a nascent loaf of bread, their only identity was of the pool of wheat-ness or water-ness or salt-ness that such elements and green and growing things possess. Now, as heat is applied to them and pressure in the baking process, they are shortly to become a new and living entity: a loaf of freshly baked bread. And they will carry that identity until each crumb of that loaf is ingested by the humans of this household, or, too stale to eat, given to the squirrels and the chipmunks and the birds outside this household in the yard. It will then become food to nourish and nurture the living things that dine upon it.

Where shall its identity go? Shall it cease to be? May that never be so. Each loaf of bread, indeed each grain of salt and speck of wheat, never ceases once it has found existence in the illusion that you know as third-density Earth. The energy that was created out of nothing in the wheat, the water, and the salt, is transformed into bread. It is then transformed into energy for those who eat the bread. And the energy of those who eat the bread is eternal, and in its turn, that energy is a gift given to the one infinite Creator which, in Its way, eats it and is nourished by it. All that you are, all that you have been, and all that you will be is of one piece. As you drop away things that seem to be you, we ask you to realize that you are not dropping away the identity of that unique being that is yourself. You are refining that identity in the refining fire of the furnace of third-density Earth.

It is fairly said that your Earth is as the athanor and you are as the magician that places base elements into the athanor in order to make gold. It is not that you are altering beyond recognition your identity in refining yourself, but rather that you are burning away those things which you perceive as being no longer necessary to bolster or support your identity. Transformation, then, can be seen not so much as a dropping away of one whole identity and the picking up of another, as it can be seen to be a process of simplification where you are cleaning away the crumbs of self that have been used up, brushing the garment of self to remove these crumbs from your invisible and shining self so that the clothing which you wear before the one infinite Creator is ever more truly a representative of your heart and your soul.

Let us look for a bit at this question of identity. It is certainly true that the entities around you and around almost all entities who are brought up in traditional western culture are taught that their identity is a matter of who their parents are, what their religion is, where they live, and where they go to school. Depending upon the nature of the culture, various children will be given other information concerning who they are and why they are on planet Earth. However, in almost all cases the details are circumstantial, having to do not with what one feels oneself to be from the inside out, but rather of what one’s circumstances of birth and circumstance are, the estate into which one was born in terms of class, race, location, belief system and so forth.

We do not deny that these details remain important to any entity within third density for the duration of their incarnation. Many of these primary relationships represent agreements for what this instrument might call lessons that one has agreed with another entity to undertake because of that relationship. In this instrument’s case, for example, this instrument agreed with both parents to come into an environment which required that one of her incarnational lessons, that is, one of those lessons that would loom large for the entire incarnation, would be given a good start by them in that they would require her to love them without any expectation of return. This instrument’s parents have passed through the gates into larger life over a decade ago in this instrument’s life and yet she does not find any lack of those who would help her to practice this incarnational lesson of loving without expectation of return.

In this kind of way, the details of birth and circumstance remain important. They have set you up for those points of focus upon which you wished to center your attention during this time of living and blooming. However, to lean too heavily upon such circumstantial details in forming an idea of one’s identity is to embrace the superficial and to distract oneself from the deeper issues involved in incarnation and in transformation within that incarnation. These details are as the bread and the salt and the water—they are not the yeast.

The yeast, or growing agent for incarnation, lies within you and is part of you. It could be called love. Love is that word which is so overused by your culture that it virtually means nothing and so we would ask you to take a fresh look at what loves is and how it acts to grow the elements of your personality into a cohesive, rich and fragrant offering to the one infinite Creator.

In your Bible are the words, “In the beginning was the Word.” That creative Word is love. And we use that word as we would use the word, “Logos,” and as the one known as John used the word Logos in writing that opening phrase to the gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Logos.” You came here to incarnation upon planet Earth as a certain kind of creature. You are a creature of love, you are a child of the Father Whose name is love. You are an agent of the creative principle and you have dropped into awareness within this very skewed and delimited version of awareness that is life on planet Earth in order, basically, to bloom.

It is very difficult to think of the main and centrally constituent service to the one infinite Creator as that of being and yet that is what you came to Earth to do; you came here to be yourself, to breath the air, to participate in the illusion of planet Earth, to go through each and every detail of receiving catalyst, responding to catalyst, moving through the periods of joy and suffering that this catalyst offers you, and always your chief responsibility is to be yourself, to feel truly, to examine yourself as fully as you can and to know yourself to the very limit of your ability. You wish to know yourself not to judge yourself or condemn yourself or to pat yourself on the back but simply to become aware of who you are.

This process of becoming aware takes you down many a street. Some of the streets of self down which you walk are broad and have a good deal of traffic. Others of the by-lanes and byways that you explore are far off the beaten track and do not have a great many other entities walking them. Every avenue, street, and lane which calls to you has information to share with you and is worthy of your exploration. However, you have undoubtedly found already that many streets both wide and narrow have not been profitable or useful for you to explore beyond a certain point, and so you move on.

In a sense, your life as you have experienced it up until this point could be looked back upon in the eyes of one who keeps a journal of one’s life on the road. And yet the places that you have been and the relationships into which you have entered do not in any way define or limit your identity—for much has been going on within that consciousness that you carry as part of your being.

Now what is it that you are? That is a question about which we could speak for a long time but, to give a shorter answer and one more useful for this conversation, we would say that you are a very organic mixture of mind and consciousness. The mind portion of yourself encompasses your physical body, the biocomputer that you inherited with the physical body at birth and that you call your mind, or brain, and the emotions that you possess that are of an instinctual nature. These are all a part of the dust from which you came as a body and to which you shall return as a body. As you return to the dust, so shall your personality shell and the untutored, untaught emotions connected with instinctual behavior as inherited with the body that you now experience life within.

Your consciousness is the part of yourself that flowed into manifestation not only in this incarnation but in all incarnations in which you were embodied from what we may loosely call a soul stream that is infinite and eternal. Before the world was created you were who you are. Your identity is now as it was then and that same identity shall be taken with you when that portion of your soul that is embodied now within incarnation moves back into the full soul stream that is your cosmic identity.

When you speak of dropping from yourself those things that would keep you from being a more refined and real version of yourself, you are not actually speaking of dropping anything that is intrinsic to your identity; you’re speaking of dropping aspects of your personality shell for which you no longer feel that there is any use.

This is a subtle process and cannot be said, in most cases, to be one which has clear-cut steps. Perhaps you have cut into an onion and then attempted to peel the onion. As you cut into the onion, you may see layers of onion skin and then matter, and then another layer of onion skin and softer matter and so forth. The only portion of the onion that is taken away before the food itself is used is that outer skin which was as the field surface that protected the vulnerable fruit within from spoiling until it could be used.

So it is with your personality shell. Various details of the ego, as this instrument would call it, with which you came into incarnation, you may well have found increasingly inutile to you. And you have decided that since they are no longer useful, they may be peeled away and dropped into the recycle bin. And we congratulate you upon this. There are, however, many, many layers to go. There is much of your selfhood that is quite stubborn in adhering itself to you as part of your identity. As you drop away items of personality such as the station into which you were born, the skills with which you were given credit for having as a young person, the facets of personality which were particularly praised or for which you were given particularly blame, [they] can be found in the maturing process to be less and less useful and so, eventually, more and more, such details are found to be mere crumbs of matter that are no longer useful or efficient at describing the self or defining the characteristics of who you are. And so they are refined away, healed away, or burned away by the decision of your consciousness to do so, by the natural processes of loss within incarnation, by circumstance, or by sudden or gradual realizations of the self, by the self, that create a new point of view, a new place to stand from which you view the world with new eyes. And suddenly, great chunks of what you thought was yourself are no longer useful.

It is not that you are trying to cleanse yourself of secret faults, or clean house by pulling away anything that you still feel akin to, or a kinship to, within you. It is a much more organic and natural process. You are not asked to drop things away from the self before their time. All of the distortions which you possess are useful to you until you consciously perceive that they have lost their kick, they have lost their usefulness to you and are no longer necessary. And so they fall away from you, whether or not you intend for them to. Like old habit, you may reach for one of these old points of identity and find that it simply is no longer there. This is, perhaps, the most benign and natural way to evolve.

What is identity? It begins with the letter “I,” and that letter sums up identity: “I.” What is the “I” of you? As you become more and more interesting to yourself, we believe that you will find that the “I” of yourself has more and more to do with consciousness and less and less to do with mind. As you circle ever closer to the center of your onion and see layer after layer of false self fall away, we believe that you shall find the “I” of you to be ever more involved with the soul stream from which you came, which is, in its essence, a spark of the one infinite Creator.

Now let us look at the concept of transformation. If we view transformation from the standpoint of space/time, we shall be looking from the past to the present to the future. We would specifically rather not take that point of view in looking at transformation, for we are not suggesting to you that transformation has to do with changing a past self in the present to a future self. We would rather give you a model that makes little sense in terms of looking at time as a stream with past, present and future. We would give you a circular model of time and space in which, at the beginning of an evolutionary process, you are experiencing yourself on the surface of a ball of selfhood, and you are roaming around on the surface of that ball in search of who you are, much as you wander around on the surface of the globe, wandering from place to place, seeing affinities of self with various places and in relationship with various people in those various places, always restless and always wandering, and never able to penetrate into any depth of awareness of what it is to be yourself and what it is to know the self and therefore to know what you were thinking when you decided to enter incarnation on planet Earth.

At the center of that selfhood lies the center of that precious word, “I.” The heart of who you are lies at the center of that onion of self and you have been hungry to penetrate the layers and to go to the heart and to serve from that center. We congratulate you, my brother, on aiming your focus at such a profound depth and we would like to do all that we can to provide resources for you to use in achieving your goal. We can assure you that the process of transformation does take place within the illusion of space and time but we can also assure you that everything that you need will be provided to you seemingly from the surface of that onion, seemingly from one present moment after another in which you receive the harvest of much guidance that is all around you at all times so that you are always being given hints and inklings of what the creation would like for you to consider on any given day at any particular moment. Sometimes you will notice your thoughts echoing back to you in a particularly resonant way and we encourage you to take a good look at what you’re thinking at those times, using your intellect as well as your heart, to look as deeply as you can into the processes of thinking and the burden of those thoughts.

This instrument has a good friend who once said to her that she felt as though she were an entity whose center was nothingness. She said that she was capable of dazzling people with her wit and so people expected her to be interesting and humorous and she produced the fodder that they expected, they munched upon it and were happy and felt that they knew her, but she said that she felt she knew better because she had been inside that [which] created that fodder of wit, intelligence and humor, and in her own judgment there was nothing at the center that was herself.

We would ask for you to look at that figure once again of the onion. Indeed, if one peels away layer after layer after layer of the onion, at the last layer one is left with the material in one’s hand of nothing at all, and that is where consciousness begins. You stand now at that point of awareness where you see that the center of your earthly personality is nothing at all. And we ask you to stand right there and feel how firm that footing really is. What have you lost when you have lost your earthly identity? My brother, you have lost the details of a life, you have not lost its essence, you have not lost your identity. You have lost space and time and you have come into a new world. It is a world of essences and concepts. Words and details have been left behind but essences and purified emotions fill this new world with richness beyond all imagining. You are, in fact, a far richer and more complex entity, once you have shed the everyday, than you could ever create using the dull crayons and waxy colors of space/time and the locality of the illusion which you experience on planet Earth.

That unimaginable richness that is you has, however, a good use for the relatively meaningless details that go into creating the personality shell with which you can meet the faces that you meet within incarnation. Your physical vehicle and the details of your Earthly pilgrimage are very useful to you. Without a body you would have no way to interact with those other entities that are so unimaginably rich and so incredibly unaware of who they are, with whom you come into contact each and every day. Celebrate your humanity, therefore, and do not look down upon it simply because it is very minor in terms of its importance within your identity.

[Side one of tape ends.]

Rather, take hold of that error-prone, distorted and heavily flawed creature that is you within incarnation, that creature that is aging and that has many false ideas that are continually being updated and the old ideas dropped. Know how much more than that you are and yet celebrate the rags and tags of personality that are you as you are today, because without them you could not go on this pilgrimage, you could not give yourself as a living gift to the one infinite Creator and you could not have the time and the space to bloom and to be.

My brother, in all truth, you came here to give yourself to the Creator, to the world in which you live, and to yourself. The giving of yourself to the one infinite Creator is easier and easier as you go through the maturation process, for you are irresistibly drawn to that Creator out of simple devotion and the need to be ever closer to the source and ending of your identity. To be a servant of the world in which you live becomes ever easier as you grow more and more aware of who you truly are and become aware at an ever deeper level of what that means. Once you begin to have some idea of the richness of who you are, once you come into that open heart of self and feel your kinship with and eventual identity with the one infinite Creator, that very realization draws to you with increasingly simplicity and accuracy and rapidity those situations in which you can be of help, those relationships within which you can be of service, and those moments when your open heart shines its truth and its light as a lighthouse shines its beacons over a stormy sea, helping others find their safe places and alerting them to the rocks and the reefs of error that are stumbling blocks before them.

Much of what you came here to do as service lies before you, you do not have to reach out to it. Being who you are is the magnet that will draw all things that are needed to you, day by day.

Before we leave this main subject, we would simply encourage you, my brother, to find for yourself a daily round of centering activity that brings you into the silence of your inner room. We encourage you to use some of that silence passively, sinking into the space created by not speaking and not following the unbidden thoughts that arise. We encourage you to dedicate part of that time of self-discovery to contemplation. What you contemplate depends very much on what is of interest to you on that particular day. You may wish simply to move through an analysis of the thoughts that you have thought that day, the feelings that you have felt, looking for points of resonance and patterns of repetition, looking fairly mechanically to begin to grasp the nature of your walk, the nature of your own path of seeking. Many entities lose the chance to follow their own thoughts simply by shrugging them off as being less than clear or less than advanced. And yet we assure you, my brother, that all of those things that have moved you are grist for your mill and the harvest of understanding that is potentially available simply from observing the self, are many. And lastly, we encourage you, in your times of inner seeking, to remember to ask for help, for you have a very generous and capable guidance system that is always eager to communicate with you. Whether you wish to do this through journaling, analyzing your dreams, or simply by contemplation, is unimportant to your guidance system. It will work with whatever structure you create in order to hear it.

Giving this time to yourself is not selfish, it is the act of one who knows that in order to be of service, the self must be known to the self. The phrase that this instrument learned as being indicative of the motto of a white, ceremonial magician is, “I desire to know in order to serve.” And this is the motto that we recommend for you in terms of taking the time for yourself in order to avail yourself of the riches, the unimaginable riches that lie within you.

We would at this time ask if there is a further question from the one known as D.

No further question.

Is there another query in this group at this time?

Not from me, Q’uo.

We are those of Q’uo, and since we have exhausted the present questions in this group, we leave you as we found you, in the love and light of the one infinite Creator. It has been our pleasure and our privilege to speak with you this day and we thank you once again for creating this moment and this circle of seeking within this sacred place.

We are known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Adonai. Adonai.