Sarah

Physical Pain: What Really Helps?

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Q: I’ve had pain in both legs for a year, and in one of my feet every day. I’d like to know what’s happening with my legs.

John: First, you don’t need to know what’s going on with the pain in your legs for you to be at home in your heart. If that’s not clear and settled for you, you will leave your heart because of the pain that’s in your legs. You’ll leave your heart in an effort to address your situation. You’ll leave your heart for pain relief. You don’t first need any pain relief. You can address the pain and you can address your legs. You can even look to know why it’s occurring, but anything that you address, address from within your heart. Address it because you’re in your heart instead of addressing it because the difficulty is there.

When anything that seems bad with your body is occurring, instead of going into what is bad with your body, start with what is good – not good with your body, but goodness in you. Where you find that is not in your self; it’s in your heart. Start with the goodness and from within that goodness address a difficulty that’s outside of that goodness. Then, difficulty doesn’t separate you from goodness.

If you heal your legs, that healing won’t bring you into your goodness. What puts you into your goodness is when that most deep and nurturing goodness within matters more to you than what’s occurring with your legs. That makes any attention that you give to the difficulty with your legs, goodness attention. That goodness attention is you being what you really are in response to your legs, instead of in reaction to your legs.

Failure in your body is integrated not by first addressing the failure, but by letting the failure in your body point to what you really are, so that any difficulty in your body or a difficulty in your life sends you to your heart. From there you address the difficulty. When nothing can separate you from your own heart, when no failure of your body can take you away from what you really are because being what you really are matters more to you than the condition of your body, that frees you from you being the tension in your body.

At some point, we are all going to suffer catastrophic failure in our body and are going to die. What matters most, until then, is what we’re being, within, in the midst of whatever comes along, so that we are the source of goodness within our lives and in our bodies. Then, instead of running after meaning – the meaning of healing or the meaning of acquiring anything – what we’re being is meaning, regardless of the condition of anything else. Then, instead of your legs being a problem, your legs are dear to you. Because they’re dear to you, you’ll naturally do what you can for them and everything that you do will be from your heart.

You are being goodness to your troubled legs.

 

The Way of Delicate Clarity

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Q: I want to ask you about gentleness in the face of injustice or inappropriate behaviour. I’ve been told in the past that I should toughen-up, but I struggle with how to articulate with clarity when I see something that is wrong. How can I discern a true voice in that?

John: Gently go to the clarity you do have and, in the circumstance, kindly give it. While you’re in that, and after the fact from your own increasing clarity, love learning and you’ll make your way. The delicate in you will become strong without losing its delicateness. As you walk in this you’ll be increasingly coming into new ability. As you move that ability, you will be bringing change into your circumstances. You’ll be changing your self.

Q: Could you guide me a bit in discerning that which is clear from that which is muddled?

John: Anything that you’re able to see that is clear – any little bit, even if it is only one subtlety within the muddle – administer that subtlety in the same way that that subtlety is in the situation.

If just one subtlety of clarity is enough for you, you’ll always find it.

How Can I Help Others Heal?

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Q: For some time I’ve been feeling that my purpose on earth is to help people heal, not as much physically as spiritually. What inside of me needs to open or develop to be able to do so?

John: You’re wanting to help people heal because you are open and sensitive to your needing healing. Your own sense in that then naturally moves toward others, but it isn’t that movement that you need to be following. It’s the first, within, that you need to be following.

You don’t need to help others heal. You just need to be rested, within, in your own healing. If you move in that toward others, you’ll be dissipating the deeper value within of healing. Let your own inner reservoir fill and fill and fill. The filling doesn’t belong to others. It belongs to your healing. The overflow belongs to others. When there is the overflow, you won’t be needing for others to heal. That alleviates them of your helpful self. That makes healing in them easier.

If you move in healing toward others without it being only an overflow, then toward others you will be a living confusion of healing and need. You’ll be slowing your own healing and you’ll be helping others heal, while slowing their healing.

The quieter your own overflow, the cleaner it is.

John Speaks Of His Awakening – And The Code To Ours

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Q: John, I’m curious about how you were awakened. How did you remember who you are?

John: When I was seventeen, outside of my room at home, I deeply, deeply wondered. I wondered: what is it that is so much more than anything I’ve realized before? What is the deep, deep more? And in deeply wondering, I also simply, deeply, deeply opened, and as I opened I knew. I didn’t understand what I knew, but I really experienced what I knew. I experienced a most nurturing, profound sense of reality as much on the inside as on the outside, it all being, within multiple levels at the same time, all connected.

Q: So did you just choose or did you set an intention?

John: I didn’t choose as a person. I wasn’t standing outside of my room, standing there as a person choosing to open. I realize now that would have been much too small. I also didn’t stand there in my self and choose to open. That, I realize now, would also have been too small. As awareness, I opened.

Now I understand that if I would have used my person or my self, my thinking or my feeling, my emotions or my beliefs to open, I wouldn’t have had that profound awakening experience. I would have just moved in something that I was already accustomed to. It would have taken me deeper into something that I already had, whereas the profound awakening was my entrance, as awareness, into something that I’ve never known before and didn’t have before.

Q: So how do we get to what we don’t know?

John: By relating directly to the very deepest within that you do know. That takes you deeper than your person and your self. It takes you deeper within than all of your beliefs. It takes you deeper within than anything of your past, anything of your conditioning. That deepest knowing within won’t give you an understanding. It does give you a door, the door of what you most deeply know within – a door to more.

Whatever it is that you use, you increase. If you use your thinking, you increase your thinking; use feeling and you increase feeling. Anything that you’ve used that hasn’t brought you into the deepest within tells you what doesn’t work. The only thing that works to bring you to the deepest within is the deepest within. It isn’t going to be something that you can think or that you can feel, that you can understand. It isn’t something that you can look at from the perspective of your past and experience. When you are most deeply quieted within, you’re able to come to it by being it. It’s a profound opening within that’s beyond all experience.

Q: Is it immediate or is it a process?

John: It involves no process. As soon as you engage a process you make it difficult. There is a code to it. It’s something like a combination on a lock: trying really hard to make a combination work without knowing the combination doesn’t help you. You can get the combination right without even trying, without knowing the number, but then you’re just happening upon it and you likely won’t be able to do it again. There is something like a combination within, or a code. The deepest within has a code to it, and as soon as you are being that code your deepest interior opens.

The only real way of coming to it is through a fundamental relaxation: not you relaxing as a person, or as a self, but just you, without the use of anything that you’re used to, so it’s really genuinely you relaxing. It’s that essential relaxation that gives you access to your own deepest interior, deeper and beyond anything you’ve experienced before, but when you’re quieted within you know it’s there. As you essentially relax into that direct knowledge that informs you, you turn into that knowledge. As you do, you’ve fulfilled your own code and your own deepest interior is there, one with you: you’ve turned into it. You haven’t done something to turn into it. What enabled you to turn into it is that you are precisely being the same – being the same as that greatest depth within. If you’re not being the same, you can’t reach it.

Q: There’s no match.

John: Yes.

 

Beyond Want And Need: The Fineness of Love In Personal Relationship

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Q: I don’t see where personal love – the love from one person to another – fits with the love which just is. Are they related, or is personal love between two people more based on wants, needs and desires? It seems to me that to dwell in the truth I know and to be in relationship must exclude each other. I don’t know your situation, but some teachers seem to be in relationship and others are complete renunciants. I’m in a relationship and feel I might have to give it up for truth. I don’t feel ready to do that.

John: It’s giving up everything for truth itself. That is you returning to the absolute and then being that, letting that express itself through everything including the personality. To be what love is outside of the personality feels safer than being what love is through the personality. It is when it moves through the personality that all the ‘velcro’ shows up. Anything that you’re not actually free of, when love moves through the personality then you get stuck. As soon as you get stuck, the love seems to be gone, so then you fear being in the personality because within it you seem to keep losing your first love. It is not that you lose it; it’s that within the personality, you get bought.

The fineness of love is when it moves through the personality without getting hooked.  That is where awareness becomes very fine in knowing what it is and in knowing how to move as love through sensation, without being distracted by sensation.

Q: You’re speaking of surrender to whatever happens through me, that in this way love moves and expresses through me and I don’t get stuck in my ideas of what I am or what needs to be done?

John: When your body opens up because your mind is opening up, because you are opening up, then when you touch someone, what moves through your body is a fullness of love. The sensation of it is entirely complete and connected all the way through to your innermost, so that one touch is like the experience of being, fully in form, connecting with another through even just a touch, connecting with another through form, all the way through into their innermost. The experience of that is so full, so complete, that if there’s anything in you at all that relates to want, at that point you’ll cease being what you know. You’ll walk out of what you know, and you’ll try to do it again just because you liked it. But if you’re remaining true in being what you know, then such an experience is no distraction. It is then everything that it is, without you needing to have it just once more. That is being in the midst of full experience but not being of it; you not turning into that experience and confusing that experience for what you know is true. Can you have such an experience without needing to repeat it?

Q: I don’t know.

John: That is what you’re in a body for. Then you’re always being new.

Q: I’ve had an experience of the fullness of my being, and when it was gone I was desperate to get it back, making it all worse. I saw it wasn’t my doing to begin with and I don’t know what will happen if it opens up again.

John: It is one thing to be what love is without you having a relationship. It’s another thing to be that in a relationship.

Q: That’s my question. I can see that I can use being as an escape to avoid issues, which is a retreat from reality. In close relationship with a lover, I’m going to be dealing with my wants and desires as well as hers, and even if I were fully established in my being, that ‘velcro’ is going to show up, right? Is there more to relationship than having wants and needs met and satisfied?

John: It’s not about that at all. When you’re in a relationship and you’re being what you know, the experiential playground is much greater – not the playground for doing, but the playground for being: being in it all regardless of its experience, without you being lost in the experience and identifying with it; you fully being in it without being distracted from what you actually know.  

The opportunity to awaken is much greater in a relationship, but the opportunity to close and harden is also much greater. A relationship intensifies everything. Everything happens faster. There is much more pulling on your patterns and there’s much more pulling on what you know. With every pull being so much stronger because of being in a relationship, in the midst of that, you be what you know instead of you being all of the other pulls.

Once you get past dealing with wants and needs so that they are no longer any issue, there are many rooms in this mansion of relationship, where the awareness of the two can be one, within the awareness of the one or the other.  It is want and need that keep the two experientially separate. It is when wants and needs are no longer of any issue that the two can be experientially one. As soon as there is something there within that would take – even just to repeat something because it was so awesome – then that takes of the one and it experientially makes of you two. Then you’re back to dealing with wants and needs instead of moving as one.

In a relationship that is free of its self, then the one awareness can travel through the awareness of the other. Then the awareness of the one can discover itself in the awareness of the other. It is heart and mind and body expanding, without a hook. The difference would be likened to existing on this earth plane or you no longer being confined to the earth plane, being able to travel elsewhere, be elsewhere, live elsewhere. That is what a relationship does.

A relationship isn’t at all about wants and needs. It’s about truth fulfilling itself in love – not just within one, but within two.

 

Living In The Bond Beneath Divorce

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Q: In my last marriage, when I took the decision to divorce my husband I felt it was necessary to do it, but after two years there’s still so much grief and missing of him. It was not a healthy relationship. It was terrible, really – so much anger – but I wonder if the bond was strengthening. Did I give up too early? This comes into my mind again and again, and makes it difficult to be in new relationships.

John: For the next two years, live in your bond with him regardless of the relationship having ended. The bond is real. Any resistance to that is the polarization that you strengthened in your self that is all about likes and dislikes.

When you’re quieted in your heart, free of your self, you only love him. You don’t need a relationship with him to show it. You let it show in your heart. Let your bond with him thrive in your heart. The bond is what’s real. The relationship might not have been real. The bond is what never dies. You can cover it, you can look away from it, or you can let it live in you. The presence of that bond is presence of being. If you start a new relationship, keep living in this other bond.

There’s no bond that interferes with any real relationship.

 

How To Be A Good Influence In A Difficult Situation

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Q1: I come from the States, and my question is about my connection to our society. I’ve never been political but I feel a sense of connection and therefore would like to be part of moving things in a more positive direction than I see happening politically. It feels hard to address without being angry about what’s going on, yet it doesn’t feel right not to address it.

John: In addressing it, by coming from a place within you that doesn’t relate to lack: relating from a fundamental goodness within. Address anything of what you speak without leaving that goodness within, so that you’re not coming from a place of negativity – you’re not coming from a place of dependency within on something on the surface having to change. That then makes you an influence of goodness in a difficult situation. It doesn’t have to bring about change; you have already changed.

If you’re not coming from a place of lack within in addressing something from outside of your self, what you’re offering is some measure of wholeness in the midst of external lack.

Q2: I’ve been thinking about a similar thing but the focus is not political: it’s with those we love. As we’re all on this journey of becoming who we really are, how can we inspire others to find themselves as well?

John: First, by not needing to. If you have personal need to be a goodness influence, it won’t be all that good. If that initiative isn’t based on a personal need of yours, it grows as a natural fruit of what you’re being within. Your own sense of well-being won’t come from being able to help someone: your own inner well being just naturally comes out to others, regardless of what they do with it.

Q2: So when our need or desire to help others is not motivated at all by our own self but just by love, you’re saying it will just come naturally as we live?

John: Yes. Then it’s like a river. It doesn’t stop moving. Essentially, love is what you really are. If you take your self or your personality seriously, then you will use the movement of what you really are, and you’ll use what feels like love to satisfy something in your self, to bring a measure of satisfaction or a sense of well being in your personality. Then you’ll need others so that you can love, instead of you simply being relaxed in what you really are.

And love, when you’re relaxed, naturally moves: it’s what you are.

 

Purity of Heart – The Real Gem of Consciousness

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Q: It’s a rare opportunity to sit with someone like you and I’m trying to think of the best question. Is there a benefit in verbally asking a question and being answered?

John: Anything that is real is worth it.   

Q: I’ve read your book ‘Unveiling Reality’ in which you speak of your awakening and later enlightenment. I think I’ve had awakening experiences, but I’d love to know the hallmarks of awakening and enlightenment.

John: Awakening is being able to see beingness, being able to drink in beingness, being able to distinguish between beingness and everything else. You can be awakened to see, and that doesn’t mean that there is a surrender to be what you see. Awakening isn’t it. There is only one it, and that is the jewel of purity of heart.  

The real gem of consciousness is purity of heart. Awakening is merely the glistening of that, but it is not yet that. It makes no difference how awakened you are; it makes no difference how much your eyes have been opened to see reality. All that makes any difference is how surrendered are you to whatever it is that you genuinely see, within, that you know is real. If you’re massively awakened then you would be able to speak of much, but that doesn’t mean at all that you are being much. Or you could be not awakened at all – completely blind within – and be wonderfully surrendered within, completely at rest in not being able to see; being the jewel that cannot yet see. That is worth more than any awakening. When there’s purity of heart, whatever little bit you come to see that is real within, without resistance you become one with it.

Purity of heart is where surrender always matches seeing, where there’s no split between surrender and seeing. Then, regardless of how much you see, and regardless of how awakened you might not be, what you are being within is simple, unencumbered response to truth. Many are awakened. Many are awakened much.  There are not many that are clean. Clean is worth more than seeing. Beauty in consciousness and cleanness in consciousness are inseparable. You can be clean and not awakened. You can be awakened and not clean. Wherever cleanness is, there is loveliness. Awakening without cleanness is serious trouble.  

Q: How so?  

John: Awakening without cleanness causes the most sophisticated and complex distortion within consciousness. It is seeing without completely surrendering. It is that that causes distortion within. Being able to see even more doesn’t make one clean. If there is not total surrender in seeing more, then one becomes more distorted in trying to keep what one sees, while not turning into what one sees.

Q: Is this why now I feel much more tension than I did previously? Life events have brought my awareness to a deep core pattern that I may not have seen had I not had an awakening and seen something of my true self, giving me the courage to go to the bottom and experience this pain.  

John: One is better off not to become awakened than to become awakened, see what’s real, and not completely surrender to that. It is the absence of surrender, or the lack of surrender that creates distortion. When you become awakened and there’s not an absolute surrender to what is seen within in that awakening, then one actually believes that what is seen is yours, even though it’s not surrendered to. Then one can speak of what is real without being real. One can think about what is real without being real – being able to think that one actually has something when it is only surrender that is something. Awakening means that there is now a change of possibility. It is only total surrender that is an actual realization of that possibility. You are not what you see. You are what you surrender to. You can be greatly awakened and yet still surrendered to want. Then what one is is not an awakening, but a much more refined and sophisticated want. 

Awakening is being able to see beingness, being able to distinguish beingness from everything else. Purity of heart is being one with that. Purity of heart means that one is home, having no split within. When there is purity of heart and awakening, then one is home within and can see. Enlightenment is after one is home, and seeing beingness, distinguishing it from everything else, and growing as a being. Then, in time, within such growing as a being, within the human consciousness, beingness becomes of age. Then it can begin to learn how to do beingness, without doing something. That’s enlightenment. Awakening doesn’t make you complete. It is only purity of heart that makes you complete. Enlightenment doesn’t make purity of heart more complete.    

Q: What does?  

John: Nothing. Awakening enables purity of heart to fill out the human consciousness. Enlightenment enables that to be usable.  

Q: Where am I in this?  Am I in pure egoic distortion or is there any measure of purity of heart here?  

John: How much are you being surrender? Not just when the sun shines in consciousness, but also when there is a storm, and even more particularly when there’s fire.  

Q: I don’t know if I can measure myself. A great deal of anger, hurt and fear came up for me in the last few weeks and rather than react to it I decided to feel it as much as I could, let it go wherever it wanted to within. It showed me the root fear that was driving everything. I don’t know if this means surrender or trying to fix it. I felt that I was honest with looking but I can’t measure myself.  

John: Be open to see, and adore cleanness. Then surrender turns you into the beloved.

 

The Real Purpose of Sexuality

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Q: What is the real purpose of sexual relationship?

John: The perfect communion of you as a being, through all of your heart, including all of your self and all of your body. Sexuality is the engine of humanness. It belongs to your being, and when you move in your sexuality and you orientate to what you think and feel in your self, without any reference to your heart, then your sexuality is turned over to the conditioning in your self.

When your sexuality is returned to your being, by being only in your heart in it, and from there being what you know in your heart in it, then your sexuality and your movement in it has unlimited reach into your being. Through your own sexuality you comprehend your being, and through your sexuality you’re able to perfectly express your being, despite whatever condition your self is in.

Your sexuality is your most powerful means of making your being physical, but it can be used to make your self even more physical. Sexuality is the capacity that you have to commune directly with another from the innermost outwards. It belongs to your being. If you turn it around, then sexuality becomes an experience of attraction and aversion. It gives you your experience – powerful experience – of the unintegrated reach into the want and need of communion.

How Can I Be Of Real Support?

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Q: I’ve recently welcomed into my home a family member who is an addict. Normally I’m a fairly balanced person, but now there’s uncertainty about how to manage everything and support her. I feel both resentment and great love. I’m struggling with how to be balanced in my heart amongst all the different responsibilities and give support, without really knowing how. Can you help?

John: Any past investments that you’ve had in hardening or in closing, any excuses that you have for ill-feeling or resentment you don’t need for you to be in your heart toward the other. When you enjoy and then love that you have no real reason for resentment, that leaves you unconditionally in your heart. So your first relationship with your family member is not by doing anything for her. Your first relationship and your deeper relationship is what you are in your heart toward the other. In the midst of anything that you’ve taken to heart of what the other has been, not been, or done to you, you unconditionally open and soften.

Without that, your past, because of how you relate to it, corrupts what you do for the other. Something of that story is present in your self always influencing, even when you don’t feel it. It’s what you’re being toward the other, and then with the other, that determines all of the greater value of what you do for the other. Without that, in your doing, you fool your self. Then you’ll do something to compensate for a lack in your self, concerning the other. In a really coarse kind of way that could appear as doing something good on the surface for the other because you have a sense of guilt for holding resentment, so instead of releasing the resentment, instead of fundamentally opening and softening, you’ll do good. When that’s there, the doing of the good is other than genuine.

When your real relationship from within your heart toward the other is simply clean, whatever you do will easily also be clean. Concerning the other, once you’ve released something of what you’ve taken to heart of any kind of ill-treatment, or anything where you’ve taken your self to heart – when that’s just simply released, then your relationship with the other from within you is clean and clear. Your movement toward the other on a heart level is no longer conditioned by something in your self or something in the other, so your love is unfettered. It’s unconditioned.

Then, when you bring the other into your household to help them, have really kind conditions so their presence there is conditional, while your deeper relationship towards the other is unconditional. You being both the unconditional and the conditional – but they’re on different levels – will bring up everything in your self that you’ve avoided and haven’t dealt with.

Q: Thank you.

 

 

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