Q: You tend to talk a lot about the heart, and it seems like with too much focus on the heart there’s a tendency to get all wrapped up in all sorts of emotional entanglements and stories and drama. Is this not so?

John: The heart centre.

Q: What is the heart centre? I get a little bit confused about emotions and relationships. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about how the heart centre overlaps with that, or is distinct from that.

John: The heart centre is where you first know, so when you know something, something of a deeper nature, it’s in your heart that you know it. There, the heart doesn’t have to do with emotion and not really even feeling, but a gentled and quieted space where, when you’re really listening, you know the truth.

Q: Is it just another term for it this pure awareness? Just a knowing that knows itself?

John: The heart centre is somewhat of an in-between space. It isn’t your being and it’s also not your self. It’s a space within before you enter your being; a space within where you don’t need your self for you to know the truth.

Q: And also where I don’t need particular types of relationships or a sense of satisfaction from outside?

John: That’s right. Within your heart centre, as awareness, you are either opening or softening or closing and hardening. There, what you are being precedes thought or feeling.

Q: What is it that draws me out of this heart centre? My experience is that I have just tastes of that or I have a juicy, wonderful expansion but is it that I experience something I interpret as pain?

John: And then, in your heart, you close and harden until your experience in your self changes. As the experience is favourable in your self, then within your heart you open and you soften.

The heart centre is the first space that’s outside of your being that enables you, with form, to register what you, awareness, are being: whether what you are being is the same as your own being or if your being reflects a separation. When awareness separates from what it knows, that registers within the heart centre as a closing and a hardening.

Q: How is it I can, in this moment, become more aware of that heart centre and more seated in that?

John: When you’re gentled and quieted within, you naturally reside within your heart centre. Your heart centre is an energy centre. It can be oriented by you, awareness, to your self, or it can be oriented to your being. When it’s oriented to your being, that gives you, awareness, direct access, while you’re in a body, to your being. While you’re in a body, if you, awareness, separate a little bit from what you most deeply know – and what you most deeply know is beingness – when you separate a little bit, that affects the form of your heart centre.

Your heart centre is like an energy gate. When awareness closes, when awareness turns a little bit away from what it really is, the energy gate of the heart centre closes a little, and it registers in your body. It’s the form between your being and your self that reflects back to you, awareness, what you’re being. If you’re sensitive to it, you always know what you’re being, and that knowledge doesn’t come to you from your self; it doesn’t come from measures of thought and emotion, feeling or will. It’s reflected directly to you within your heart centre. The energy gate changes depending on what you, awareness, are being.

Q: Speaking to you, there’s a sense of energetic presence. Is there a way to relate to it that would be more useful?

John: It’s the presence in form of what you, awareness, are being, and you can read it in your body. If you use your self to read it, then you’re using a form of yours that is subsequent to that energy centre, which confuses the reading. If you use your personality or your person to read what’s occurring in your self, you’ll mix up the reading. The personality is a subsequent form to the self. To know your self you don’t need your personality.

Q: Or my body form?

John: That’s complex! Your body form is multi-levelled.

Within your body form, one of its layers, so to speak, is the body of your personality. So when you’re in your personality, you experience your personality physically. When you’re in your self, you experience your self physically. You have a self body, a personality body, you have a deeper self body, and you have a heart-centre potential whole body. As you embody your heart centre by being the same as your own being within that energy gate, that energy gate opens and becomes your whole body instead of, at first, a location in your body.

Each of your energy centres have different locations in your body enabling you to have the contrast, so that depending on what you’re being and how you’re moving, there’s a different location in your body that opens or closes. Each energy centre is able to open into all of your body. When all of your energy centres are your whole body, they’re not just unified, but you then come into your light body. In that way, instead of having what can be perceived as separate energy centres, you are one functional body.

Q: How does sickness and health of the body relate to an opening or closing of energies?

John: When your energy centres are oriented to your self because of you, awareness, being oriented to your self, then whatever occurs in your body, to your body, either closes down an energy centre or opens it. That gives the opening and the closing of your energy centre – the power of that – to what you experience in your body. It’s what generates a polarization of experience.

When you, awareness, are oriented to your being regardless of anything that’s taking place in your self, then you move as a being through your opened energy centres into all of your body and into all of your self. And If something affects your body or your self, that doesn’t close an energy centre, so there’s no fluctuation. There’s just a continual streaming of you, awareness, as a being, in your body and in your self that disease or ill health have no effect on.

When you, awareness, are one with the truth within, the movement of what you really are from the innermost outwards is what opens all of your energy centres. The power of their opening is given to you as a being instead of to you as your self.

There are so many levels of you, of you as awareness: so many levels of the I. There is the I on the level of the personality. Deeper than that, there’s the I within each level of the self. Drop beneath the self, and awareness is there residing within the level of the heart – a different level again of the I. As awareness is being what it knows within the heart, awareness moves into its deeper levels within, the levels of the being; again, all different levels of the I.

When awareness is unconditionally relaxed, being what it knows, all of the levels are seamlessly one. But awareness is able to separate. As soon as it closes a little bit, awareness cuts off from its own deeper levels and giving the power that belongs to the deeper levels to the surface levels. That reduces, greatly reduces what presence and what levels of presence awareness has in reality and as reality. Awareness that is self-oriented is moving about and has its mobility in only a very little bit of reality.

Q: Thank you very much.