Q: If I’m true in what my heart is wanting and desiring, it’s to have a child. It’s probably been six years since I’ve had a partner and I’m forty-four next month. I’m wondering whether to do it on my own, with insemination. I feel this strong desire and it’s been there for years. I would like any advice you have.
John: First, most deeply within, deep within your heart – deeply, gentled and quieted in your heart – there you have need of nothing. There isn’t anything that you need in this life for you to be quieted in the depth of your heart, for you to be what you really are. Not in your self, but deep within, you have need of nothing. You don’t need your personality, you don’t need your self. You don’t need anything that you’re accustomed to looking for and wanting to have in your life. As soon as you are unconditionally gentled and quieted in your heart, then your depth of peace is no longer dependent on anything outside of your self. It’s not dependent on the condition of your self. It isn’t dependent on your past. You don’t need to acquire anything and you don’t need to first change anything. You are just deeply okay, as is and there isn’t anything that can make that better.
Once that’s deeply settled in you, then it doesn’t really matter much what you do in your life. Whatever it is that you do will be an expression of what you’re most deeply being within, and you won’t be using what you do with your life and in your life to connect to that beingness; it’s already complete. And you have your whole life and everything that you do to express that completeness. Having a child won’t add anything to it. Losing anything in your life won’t take away from it.
Q: I hear that, and in our society if you don’t have a family you’re just excluded and it’s lonely.
John: Then you’re not gentled and quieted in your heart. When you are unconditionally rested in your heart, you may be alone but you won’t be lonely.
Q: I have a lot of solitude and I enjoy it. It’s a lot of solitude, though, and I guess I don’t want to live my life that way.
John: Live your life from the deepest within, from what isn’t easily seen within, but when you are deeply quieted within, you know. That depth of knowing and being what you know, and being rested in it: that’s you. It’s deeper than your life, it’s deeper than your self, and it’s what you let fill your self and your life. Then you really are existing and living from your innermost outwards instead of grasping at something outside of your self, or grasping at something about your self, or for your self, to have that depth of meaning within. In your thinking this doesn’t really offer you anything, but if you’re not coming from being gentled and quieted within, you’ll be circulating in your self and in your life, trying to satisfy what’s already there. You’ll live grasping, and there isn’t anything that will be enough.
This can be difficult to hear because it involves so much letting go of everything that you’ve invested in: how you’ve invested in what you want, how you’ve invested in the hopes in your self, how you’ve invested in things outside of your self that have a sense of meaning.
Your deepest sense of meaning comes from being meaning without you using anything that is yours to give you a sense of meaning, which only serves to separate you from what you deeply, really are, within.
A second questioner continues the conversation:
Q: Having a partner and a child comes from almost a primal desire to procreate. How does being in your heart align with not having those desires?
John: It’s not that you wouldn’t have those desires; it’s that your deepest sense of well-being isn’t dependent on them.
Q: If everyone were that comfortable with living in their deepest well-being and not procreating, wouldn’t that mean the end of the human race?
John: No. What would take place, then, is that this whole world would be different. Everything would go on, but so differently.
