Q: John, I wanted to thank you for your response to my question last time you were here; it’s helped me a lot. What I wanted to ask today was for some help. I find that I have a lot of fear and a lot of confusion around relationships. I feel like I’ve been going around and around in circles for years.
John: You could completely leave relationship alone until you become the kind of person you would most want to be in relationship with. It isn’t a goal; it is a reality.
At present you’re able as awareness to be true to knowledge in the midst of any kind of relationship, but being true to knowledge will certainly be painful to your self. It means that you will always be bigger than what your self is, bigger than your own experience, bigger than any of the pining of patterns. When you don’t give your body food there will be physical suffering; if you give your body the incorrect food there will be physical suffering. When you’re not giving the patterns in your self the energy they demand, according to a feeling and an experience, your self will suffer. It isn’t a wrong suffering or a bad suffering. It is your self detoxifying. The patterns will go through withdrawals.
You can stop the suffering in your self by simply giving the pattern in your self the energy that it demands. You’ll feel better in your self in a superficial way, but in a profound way as awareness you will have compromised what you knew the truth of. Being as awareness true to knowledge in the midst of your self is a pain to your self. Oneness, in the midst of what isn’t one, hurts. The patterned self isn’t one; it doesn’t become one without your being oneness in it. Oneness in your self isn’t without development, the development of your self. It doesn’t occur without pain in your self.
You’re able as awareness to sustain being one with knowing in the midst of whatever self you have without having to address something in your self first. There’s always some experience of lack in your self. There isn’t anything wrong with the lack. The lack in your self is an issue of development, not an issue of you. Your self doesn’t need to develop for you to be all of you in it. Being that in your self is nurtureful guidance to your self that won’t necessarily feel good. When you do, as awareness, move past a pattern in your self, in your being more than what that pattern is, you feel the fire within the pattern. It awakens the pattern to everything that that pattern is, enabling you to understand in your heart exactly and deeply what it is in your self that you’re moving past.
For you as awareness to be one, you do not need to change your self for you to be what oneness is within your self. The change of your self is all your responsibility. To resist any knowledge of that is for awareness to resist knowing, awareness being the cause of its own departure from oneness. Within that, the self is innocent; the patterned self is innocent; the patterns are innocent. There is no split because of the self, because of the person, because of another self or another person. There is no split because of a circumstance. There is no split because of anything that happens to you. If there’s a split, it is because of you, you as awareness in some departure from knowing resisting being what you know the truth of, awareness being separate from knowing.
You don’t need to be the kind of self and the kind of person that you would want to be in relationship with. For you to be in your self, and for you to be in your self with another self, and to be so as persons is the bringing eventually of every pattern in your self into its own fire, and it isn’t too much for you. It’s only too much if you do separate from the tiniest little bit of knowing. Then immediately your self will be too much for you. Your patterns will be too much for you. The patterns in the other self, in the other person, will all be too much. If you’re separate from the tiniest little bit of knowing, that will immediately be projected by you onto your innocent self and onto the other person.
Having a self doesn’t confuse you. Being in relationship as a self with another self and within your person with another person doesn’t confuse you. Your being separate from the tiniest little bit of knowing has you needing confusion to cover that the separation is yours. The need for confusion makes you a victim of your own thinking. It projects the problem outwards. Oneness isn’t a release from suffering in your self; it is a release from all suffering that is the result of awareness being separate from knowing.
