Why These Two Identities Matter

Donald E Coleman 0:21

Hey, welcome back. And we're picking up right where we left off in the last episode: protective self-doing and beloved self-doing. But I wanted to spend some time here making sure that I give you some definitions behind protective self and the beloved self because I don't want to lose you. And the point of this is that the beloved self and the protective self are identities. And we have a choice in our walk, in our day-to-day walk, to live from the protective self or the beloved self. So in the previous episode, I kind of went through and I used the term protective self and beloved self multiple times. And I explained to you where the protective self comes from and how it exists. But I want to give you a little bit more meat specifically in this episode so that you can go back and you can reference this anytime so that you have a full understanding of what I'm discussing and what I and why I'm calling the protective self, why I'm calling the protective self the protective self and the beloved self. Because it it the thing that we have to understand throughout the Christian journey, we've had many amazing people and contemporatives, and they defined, like Paul defined the protective self. He said, the old man, the flesh, right? He gave an analogy and then the new man. And then we see as we continue keep walking, we hear of the false self and the true self. We have all these different things, but for me, the protective self is not an indictment. And I think it's important to understand that. And I use that definition because through my work with positive intelligence, I was able to connect how the saboteurs function in the protective self. And it just opened up everything for me. It opened the Bible up for me. It opened up the whole aspect of what I had been sensing for years, but I didn't have a modern language for it. So let me take a moment here. Well, not a moment. This whole episode is dedicated to this. Let me take some time to go through this. All right. So first, I'm gonna work with the protective self, and then I'm gonna flow into the beloved self so that you can understand exactly where I'm coming from. All right. So buckle your seat belts. And here's the thing. Let me say this first. My prayer is that you stay open, that you allow yourself to remain open. And I'm gonna be talking to your protective self at times. But allow yourself to keep coming back and opening up and being available to receive. Remember the six empty ceremonial jugs. Part of our responsibility is once those jugs are being emptied, is that we protect that. We literally remain empty, constantly letting go anything that's gonna try to fill us with stuff that is not needed, or I'm gonna say, fill us with protective stuff that is not needed anymore. Now, let me define it. So the protective self is the false but functional identity of a person's construct in response to unmet belovedness or unmet needs. And let me say this: this

Defining The Protective Self

Donald E Coleman 4:28

all started from the time we came out of the womb. And it's the survival architect built by the soul, the imagination, our conscious, our intellect, our memory, our reason, and our affections to manage pain, control outcomes, and preempt further wounding. So based on our environment that we were born into, we started to develop patterns or practices that literally helped us to survive in the environment. So at its very roots, it started out, we started out as a survival tactic, and then it generates into protection and it served the purpose for a time. But what happens is the protective self, we bring it into adulthood where we technically may not need it anymore, but because it's been an habitual habit forming and it's been on automatic pilot, it just operates. And sometimes you hear the word like, oh, that that person triggered me, or or they got me upset when they said this. That's the protective self going into operation. But here now, let me let me let me say this because I want you to see this. The protective self is not evil. I want you to get this now. It is not evil, it is exhausted love seeking safety in all the wrong places because it has yet to trust the safety that safety was already given in the heart. Oh, let me let me say that again, man, because I this is it right here, y'all. This is it. The protective self is not evil, it is exhausted love, seeking safety in all the wrong places because it has yet, it has not yet trusted the safety that was already given in the heart. Now, notice I did not use the term agape when I said love here, because this is a form of the human love. It is the perception, the perceived love of the person, of myself. And because I didn't receive that love the way that I was looking for, that's when it happens. That's when it starts to build the patterns. And I want you to really get that, man. Really understand that because this right here, this is going to literally break down traditional and generational understandings that we've been living by for centuries and in some cases millennials. Because here's the key now where the beloved self is received, you gotta get that. Agapitos is received, the protective self is constructed, where the beloved self rests in what it receives, the protective self performs or strives. Not because God has withdrawn. We already know that God did not withdraw, but because the soul no longer trusts what the heart already knows. And I let me let me explain that. Now, when I say soul, I said this before, I want you to get it. Soul is the imaginations, the conscious, the intellect, the memory, the reason, the affections, our emotions, all those things that operate in our in what we call the soulish realm. That's what I'm referring to right here. That's that's the key here. And this is what I want to make sure that you grab a hold of. Because once we understand that it's not the core of our being, right? Spirit, soul, body. So in the spirit, our beloved state, that's what I'm gonna get to here. That's what I'm calling from the perspective, that's where we operate from our beloved state, the agape toast state, the amago day state. But in the soulless realm, which is the realm that's in between spirit and body. And God desires for us to live this way. Now, let me say it first how God desires. God desires for us to live spirit, soul, body, so that we are dominant, we're living a dominant life by the spirit of God that is communicating with the spirit

Reordering Life Spirit Soul Body

Donald E Coleman 10:41

of God that is inside. So my spirit is communicating with God, and I am living through that. So because I am in constant communication or with union with God, as Peter would say, that we become partakers of the divine union, right? Of the divine nature of God. Peter said it that way, right? So that we would, so from that perspective, we become partakers. So I'm living from my divine union with God, spirit first, and then it affects my soul, and then I show up in the body differently, or I show up using my five senses differently. However, before we come to know that we have a choice to live from our belovedness, we actually have been living body, soul, spirit. So we've lived through our five senses what we can see, what we can taste, what we can touch, what we can smell, and what we can feel. And those things have been how we have functioned, how we have actually determined what and how we're going to show up. And the key here is because we are in Christ now, we know that there is another way. And I want you to grab a hold of that way. So now let me give you the breakdown from a protective self from a theological anchoring perspective, right? I don't want to talk theological from a biblical anchoring perspective. So the protective self is the functional opposite of agapitos, a belovedness, and it distorts, right? It distorts what the Isaac principle in particular,

When Trust Becomes Vigilance

Donald E Coleman 12:50

in a particular way. So the Isaac principle, remember what I said is that whoever eventually we're going to have to let go and give back to God all the things that we've been holding on to from a trust perspective. That's what the Isaac principle is. Abraham received the promise, and then God said, Okay, now I want you to sacrifice the promise or to give the promise back to me. And the Isaac principle is not a one-time process, it is a continuous process that invokes all and every aspect of who we are and what we do. So let me say that again. The protective self literally distorts, it distorts the Isaac principle in a particular way. Look at it this way now. Ready? It treats past surrender as a completed transaction rather than a recurring posture. And in the look, when you hear it this way, the protective self will say it this way. It says, in effect, I have already trusted enough. Now I must manage what's left. Or, like Frank Shinoccher said, I did it my way. I want you to grab that. That's the key now. This is the protective self's central, I would say the word I'm gonna use deception and distortion. Because it does not reject God outright, it simply believes the work of trust is finished and the work of vigilance has now begun. This is where you see all the time where we're trying to strive to make something happen in the kingdom. And here, hear me now, because I'm not saying that we don't have an active part in it.

unknown 15:05

Sorry, I don't understand.

Donald E Coleman 15:06

Because we do have an active part, because there's times where you'll hear people say that I am I am doing a work for the Lord. That's not scriptural. God never asked us to do a work for the Lord. The Bible says that we are co-laborers with the Lord. So that that distinction between with and for can mean you doing something in your own strength or you being led and doing it from the agape toe state, your beloved state. And when I get to that, you'll understand why that is so important. Now, let me just finish up what I was just saying. So it believes that the work of trust is finished and that the work of vigilance has now begun. We pick it right up in Genesis 3. It is Adam's fig leaf, it's Jacob grasping, it's Peter's sword in the garden. A soul or the soul trying to protect what only agape can actually secure. I just want you to grab that. It's not, it's not wrong, it's incomplete. I want you to really understand that. I want to make sure that no condemnation shows up. It's incomplete. And for a lot of us right now, for many of you listening to this episode right now, it's time literally to put the sword down. As Jesus told Peter, he said, put it down. We've been carrying a load that we were not destined to carry, and God is delivering us right now from the carrying of that load. Now, it's important for you to catch this now because I use the term protective self, but I also use positive intelligence's language of the saboteurs. So how the protective self shows up in the PQ saboteur language. And I see PQ for me was was, oh my goodness, it was a complete Gods. And I know a lot of people have a problem with science and psychology and those different things, but I'm telling you, I see it differently now. And through the four movements of divine love, I see how God, in this age that we're living in, there is a sacred convergence taking place. So God is using the sciences, neuroscience, psychology, uh, philosophy, all these things to bring a greater understanding of what we already know. And I let me say this: we don't have to debate it anymore, y'all. We don't have to even try to prove it anymore. What is more important to prove now, because if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, is 1 Thessalonians 5, where it says that Jesus is coming back. Because there's been enough evidence, and we're going to keep getting more evidence, but there's enough evidence to show that the Hebrew scriptures and the gospels and the Christian scriptures validate truth. And I want you to pick up what I just did here because I want to honor something that has caused division in the body for a very long time and without Jewish brothers and sisters. Because for a long time, operating in dualism, we've said Old and New Testament. It's not wrong, but it's incomplete. Because we know as a Christian that our mother faith is Judaism. So we don't want to upset or we don't want to like throw that away. Jesus said, I didn't come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it. So for me, as a way of honoring that now, moving forward, you will hear me use the term Hebrew scriptures. And then I will use the term as the gospel, which is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, because I believe the gospels represent the threshold. And then the Christian scriptures are from the book of Acts to Revelation. But look how beautiful that sets up everything. And look how beautiful it becomes inclusive, and it actually allows the agape of God to flow unhindered. I just want you to catch that now. So now let me just finish up here with the protector self, how it shows up in PQ. Because positive intelligence names 10 saboteurs, the judge and its nine accomplices. I want you to get that as a mental pattern that generates unnecessary suffering or self-sabotage. Did you catch

Saboteurs As The Protective Self’s Voice

Donald E Coleman 21:00

that? So, and within our framework, or what I call the rooted framework, these saboteurs are best understood not as isolated bad habits. But as the dialect of the protective self speaks, the specific vocabulary it uses to keep a person managing life from the womb rather than resting in belovedness. Now, let me give you a few examples here, and I'm going to give you an opportunity. If you want to get, I have a handout that has all ten of these. By all means, you can get the handout, right? So here, a few examples. The judge is the master saboteur, it's the voice in Genesis three, turn inwardly and outward and interrogate self and others rather than resting in the God who already asked, Where are you? with tenderness and not accusation. With conviction and not condemnation. So, very simply, the judge judges self and others. Whenever you see yourself, you ever you hear yourself, your inner voice judging you. Why are you doing this? What's wrong with you? You know better, all that stuff, right? And you see the same thing going outward to others. Why are they doing that? Why are they wearing that? What's all that? And again, I want you to understand that. That is what I'm saying is the judge. Now, here's the thing I want, there's a thin line here. Because you're gonna notice that some of the saboteurs show up in the same way that the enemy shows up. And this is where the thin line tension lies. And this is where discernment and the wisdom of God will actually need to be built up in us so that we can operate. And this is where you get it, from the agape tose to the agapeon, that is the forming and the shaping that takes place that fills the vessel to allow the vessel to be filled with the agape so that it can overflow outward as the agapitan. Did you just catch that? There's the four movements: agape, agapeos, agapitan, and agape. All right. So now let me just another couple of others. The controller protects against helplessness by seizing what only surrender can rightfully hold. The sole substitute for the Isaac principle, ongoing, yes. The achiever. This is for me. And I'll tell you straight up, for me, it was the controller and the achiever. And you'll know the another one is called the stickular, right? So the achiever protects belovedness by trying to earn what agape toast already declares freely given. The being doing diagnostic laid bare. And another way you see the achiever, you're never satisfied. It's like even when you get what you said you were going to get, you don't even take time to enjoy what you received before you're even off to something else. And for me, it was the fact that I never even acknowledged the process. For me, it was always about the in-destination, getting there, got it. Okay, let's move on. We need to conquer more. And God revealed to me through the power of the Holy Spirit, He and through all my achieving, all of this has happened in the last six years, a true understanding of it. It says, God says, Listen, I need you to enjoy the progress and the process and not focus on the destination. Because if you're focusing on the destination, that means you're never present. Catch that? You're never present in the moment. You're never there. You always miss that God is there with you in those moments. Now, here's another one: hyper-vigilant and the restless. So they protect against pain of stillness. They keep the soul in motion so that the heart is never asked to sit still long enough to hear. You are my beloved. Restless. Oh, that's that was me. VP had a whole division of people working and could never sleep. Living by on my cell phone, constantly thinking about how many other emails I got to do, or who I got to meet with this day or that day. All this other stuff is flowing. It's restless. Or if if you're not flowing from a restless, the hyper-vigilant is, is you're always constantly thinking about the worst thing that's going to happen. And I'll share something with you. I know you've heard this. Hypervigilant is a form, or let me put it this way: the imposter syndrome shows up in hypervigilant. Here's a big one, y'all. I want you to get this one. Pleaser, the pleaser and the avoider. These are two huge saboteurs. They protect against the fear that belovedness is conditional. Right? So you're the pleaser and the avoider doesn't want the pleaser always constantly keeps saying yes because it wants to keep everything comfortable and staying the same. The avoider doesn't want to approach something because it always wants to keep things the way that it was. Or war is what I should say. But here's what I want you to get this the pleaser and the avoider protect against the fear. Notice that belovedness is conditional. See, it see the distortion because our belovedness is not conditional. And when it thinks about belovedness as being conditional, it's actually saying that love must be secured through effort or appeasement or the absence of conflict. Do you catch that? Now, hyper-rational and the hyper-achiever. They're kind of what I would call their cousins, right? And the stickular protects through control of thought and order, mistaking precision for peace. And here's the last one. And I know you'll see this one. I know you've seen it. The victim. The victim protects through emotional withdrawal into suffering, using pain itself as an identity when belovedness feels unreachable. You heard me say this. If you've been following this podcast long enough, you've heard me say this that we are living in a time where we are worshiping wounds versus living from our belovedness. I just want you to grab a hold of that. I want to make sure you got enough here, and I'm going to get ready to go to the beloved self. So each saboteur seen through the lens of agape or seen through the rooted lens is not merely a cognitive distortion to be corrected. I want to make sure it's not really a cognitive distortion to be corrected. It is a protective liturgy or protective practice, a repeated practice the soul performs to survive a moment when belovedness felt unsafe, unavailable, or unearned. I just want you to get that. We'll talk more about it a little bit later. And here's some key distinctions, right? The protective self is not the enemy to be destroyed, but the younger self to be met with compassion. It builds its walls when no better shelter is offered. I just want you to do the connection here. It's not an enemy to be destroyed, but the younger self or our younger self to be met with compassion. Jesus said, suffer not the little children to come unto me. The protective self operates primarily through the soul and not the heart, not the very core and the essence of who we are. It is the soul's attempt to do the heart's work to secure through striving what can only be received through stillness. Now, another point here. Naming a saboteur is diagnostic. Only the tamion is curative. Only the inner room is curative. PQ can interrupt the pattern. Only sustain dwelling in the inner room in the presence of God dissolves the patterns need to exist. You got it? All right. Now that's enough on the protective self. Now I want to spend the rest of our time here in the beloved self because the goal of us is to live from our beloved self in Christ. So here now, the beloved self is the true identity given to every person by God. I want you to catch this now.

The Beloved Self Received Not Earned

Donald E Coleman 32:29

Notice what was said. Every human being is and can operate from the beloved self. This has nothing to do with being a believer. A believer comes after understanding your identity as the beloved. And I've said this enough, and I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole, but more, I will be talking more about this. As a church, we have been focusing, we've put too much emphasis on believing before belovedness. And I believe God, in the tsunami of agape that is being poured out as I'm speaking to you in the world today, God is repairing and restoring belovedness to its proper place and believing to its proper place. So the beloved self is the true identity given to every person by God, not earned, not performed, not constructed, but received. I need to read that again. I want you to hear that. And in agapitos, in your belovedness, receiving your belovedness from God, every person has already received that. It's already been given, y'all. This is where we've been lied to. And I will actually say we've been lied to by the enemy because once you know this, then you won't fall for the other stuff. Now, let me break more down. So the beloved self is not a psychological construct or a self-esteem project. It is a theological reality rooted in our heart, in the core essence of every person, where the Imago day dwells deeper than thought, than memory or emotions. It is the yes spoken over a person at their origin, echoing the words spoken over Christ at the Jordan. You are my son, whom I love, and with you I am well pleased. Y'all, I want y'all to get this. I want you to get this that God has already declared that you are my son or my daughter, and whom I love, I agape, and with you I am well pleased. You don't have to perform for God. He's already declared that you are beloved. But here's the thing everything that God has already stated who we are comes by receiving, which means it has to be activated by faith. That's the key. We receive it, and sometimes you're not gonna feel it. And sometimes it's not gonna, you're not going to, it's not gonna be visibly present, but it's going to, you have to get it down deep in. And this is what the practice of stillness

Stillness The Inner Room And Trust

Donald E Coleman 37:16

does. God goes in and he cleans out everything that's blocking it, and then he begins to fill us with agape that begins to overflow and saturate who we are and what we uh and what we do and how we show up. And before you know it, those six empty ceremonial jugs that was at the wedding that Jesus performed is filled with the water to the brim. And then, filling over the brim, that water begins to flow out and meet the needs of others. Oh, I want you to get this. This is it, y'all. We've come this far. Stay the course. So the beloved self corresponds to agapitos. I've said this multiple times in the four movements of divine love, the fixed, unshakable identity received from God, the eternal father. It does not fluctuate with performance, with circumstances, or the soul's shifting affections. I said all this. I want you to get this now. This is it. It is settled before it is realized. Woo! It's like it's like saying, Amen. God said, Amen, you are my beloved. I want you to get that. Most people spend a lifetime seeking to become what they have already been given. I was there. And I want you to understand, I want nobody to suffer what I did, suffer how I did or what I did in order to get to this place. God is pouring out his agape in the earth. He is restoring us back to the place of our true identity. And here's the key. Genesis 3 9. I want you to go back and read it. The first question God ever asked was this where are you? It is the first and founding womb against the beloved self. See, the womb came. Where are you? When you really start to think about it, is the first and the founding wound against the beloved self. It is the moment humanity's default identity shifted from received belovedness to self-protection hiding. You get it? Now you get to see where the protective self shows up. It's right there at the very beginning, and it's in our very beginning as we come through the moon, through the womb. Every subsequent movement of formation is, in some sense, God calling the beloved self out of hiding. And here's what I want you to grab a hold to God was not calling for Adam and Eve outside of the place where they were hiding. He was right there. God was in the same place where they were hiding because agape is always pursuing. Agape is always searching for us. Agape, God's love, will never ever stop searching for us. So whoever has told you that lie that you are unlovable of God, no, it's not true. Now, key distinctions, let me break this down and then I'm gonna move on. Key distinctions. The beloved self is not the same as the soul, the natural man, imaginations, conscious, intellect, memory, reason, affections, or emotion. The soul can carry, express, and obscure the beloved self, but it is not its source. The source of our belovedness is the heart where God's imprint already exists. I want y'all to get that. The heart, the core of man, the imagal day of man is where God's imprint already exists. I said this, man, for a long time, like the last 20, 30 years of my walk of faith, I've always had this distinction inside of me, and I call it a divine dissatisfaction, that there was a part of me that was never satisfied and it was always searching, knowing that there was more. And that to me, that place is my Imago day calling out for the God who it was reserved for. And it at the same time, it's God calling out for me who it was reserved for. Did you catch that? And I think it was Augustine, St. Augustine that said, our hearts are restless until we rest in you, Lord. Come on, man. Are you getting this? I want to make sure you get an understanding of this because once you grab a hold of this, everything is gonna change. Everything changes. And here, daily living for Christ, we've been on this journey for six years, not trying to tell you how to live, but to be a companion with you on your journey. So I want to encourage you to stay the course and focus your attention on what is present, not to the left, not to the right, or what's behind or what's ahead. Just stay the course. Now, two more things before I end this. The beloved self is not achieved through spiritual disciplines. I want to make sure you get that because I know many people think the spiritual disciplines are gonna bring on the presence and the power of God. That's not the key. We can't, we don't control God. The creature doesn't control the creator. Here's the key contemplative practices does not create belovedness, it uncovers what is already been true. It clears space, it's the clearing away. Contemporative practices clears away and it loosens the grip and it clears away the noise of the protective self, it loosens the grip of the protective self so that the heart can hear what God has already spoken. I like I liken it to this way, guys, or ladies. I liken it to the fact when Elijah Was having that moment, right? And God showed up, and He he was listening for God, and there was an earthquake that came and God wasn't in it. There was thunder, there was all these different things, and God wasn't in it. And then it says, in that still, small voice, God's voice was heard. So one of the things that we learn as we start living from the beloved self is to start living from a place of being in expectation versus living from expectation. And the difference is when you are living from a place of expectation, you already have in your mind's eye what the result should look like and how it's going to happen. And that's why we miss it. We miss God because we don't, we're so busy looking at how we want it, we miss the answer or we miss the invitation. Being in expectation means that we are living from a place of trusting God and knowing that no matter how we get there, we know that God is already directing it. And when we and the move, the movement is going to make us better or fulfill in us what God desires for us, because God knows what's best for us. And here's the last thing I want to I want to say to you really quick about the key distinctions. The beloved self is not static passivity, it's living. Living from belovedness is the ground from which all authentic doing flows. The being doing diagnostic is my doing coming from my being or from my wound. And here's where I'll end you with this. And this is the last thing: the posture. To live from the beloved self is to rest in the Tamion or the inner room of Matthew 6, 6, the architectural ground where identity is not achieved, but received again and again in the stillness

Stay The Course And Closing Prayer

Donald E Coleman 46:55

of God. So I hope that this episode sets everything straight for you because when I go into the next episode, how the protective self operates in human love, you'll be able to understand that. But I want you guys to know listen, I love you. I can picture all of your faces in the multiple different languages and the multiple different regions and countries. I mean the 180 some odd countries that we've actually touched in this podcast by the grace of God. And I want to make sure that you know that you got a brother, a fair, a fellow believer and brother in Christ that is praying for you, that is holding space for you in unconditional love at all times. So I love you. And here again, stay the course and keep living daily for Christ until next time.