Q: I am in this retreat and I’m surrounded by all these beautiful women and I’m wanting, wanting, wanting. Whether I want it to or not, it’s there.
John: You cannot act on it. Just because you want something, that doesn’t mean you have to do something about it. Patterns continue while you are still.
Q: It seems like it’s a narrow space between either acting something out or suppressing it or somehow getting tense inside and being not ok with it. A feeling of conflict inside myself.
John: Letting the effect that women have on you, while you are still within, perfectly crack you open. Your mind vibrates while you don’t. And they are not beautiful women, they’re people. There is a difference between what you want and what you know. To find what you know concerning being around a lot of women you would have to drop beneath what you want. It’s fine for hormones to move through your body. It’s not fine for hormones to lead you.
Q: Right now I’m feeling a sort of sadness and longing in my heart you know and there’s also this just simple desire to connect and a feeling of sadness at feeling separate.
John: Your sexuality won’t connect you. Even though it can give you the feelings of it, such feelings have no roots. You cannot connect with others unless you’re genuinely connecting with what you know. From within-out instead of without-in. But that requires a settledness of heart or you will only see what is without.
Q: What do you mean by a settledness of heart?
John: Letting your heart be gentled and quieted and stilled.
Q: And if that’s not the way my heart is, then what then?
John: Letting it be. You can with your thinking stir your self up, or you can without your thinking settle. As you let your self be quieted within, then you’ll see not what you think, but what you know.
If you act on your sexuality, then you’d be going by something that you think and that would clearly not be something that you know. There wouldn’t be care of women; there would be use of women. If you were to care for women then you would be very quieted in the midst of your sexuality and not use it. Then your sexuality, instead of acting on them, would act only on you. Something would be happening within your self that is big and to your mind it wouldn’t be making sense why all of that is there. The understanding of it doesn’t come until such a knife moves straight through you. Sexuality is very coarse energy. It considers nothing other than itself. When you dissolve in the midst of such energy, then so does it. Then there is a very fine capacity to merge without power being out of control. Your relationship with your sexuality is your relationship with power.
Q: My experience is feeling like I lack power in the world.
John: And whatever power you have, you use. Any time that you can get rid of a disadvantage, whatever power you have to do so, you do. Anything in which you can gain an advantage, whatever power you have to do that, you do so. That would be reflected in your sexuality.
Q: In other words, what you’re saying is, I use what I got to get what I can.
John: And that doesn’t go away until you stop. And while you stop, it keeps acting on you. It does follow you in the stopping but very slowly. While your power is in your hands and you’re not using that power for your self, then you are more deeply realizing your real power. Having it and not needing to use it. That makes you very gentle with power.
Q: I feel like whatever amount of power or sex I have in my life, it’s not enough. You’re talking about having power and not using it. I guess my mind turns that into feeling powerful and not expressing it.
John: You have much power. How often do you get obstinate, or angry, or resentful, or bitter?
Q: Ok, ok, ok. You can stop now. I get it. (Laughter)
John: That is you having power and using it.
Q: Ok, yeah.
John: Having the power to do or be all that and not use it.
Q: Which is different from holding it. I mean, I feel all those things, but mostly I keep them to my… well not all the time, but mostly they’re struggles within me as opposed to me doing something in the world. So again there isn’t a feeling of power in those things for me.
John: When you feel annoyed, or even just frustrated, that is the feeling of power unmanaged. As soon as you begin to get annoyed, instead of believing what you think, when you let everything be gentled and quieted and stilled within, then you’re actually integrating your power. Coarse power is not real power. Power that is gentled is most powerful. Then it can as equally be very delicate or very strong depending only on what is true. Having nothing to do anymore with anything that you want. When it is only truth that determines the direction of power, then that power is real. But when power is directed by want or by need, then it’s always out of control.
It’s not suppressing your sexuality, it’s not turning away from it, it’s you letting it be everything that it is without you using it. When you do nothing with it, then you realize how powerful it is. When you do whatever it tells you to do then you’re not realizing its actual power because you’re being moved by it all the time. It is only when you are still that you can see what’s there. When you remain still in the midst of it, then you realize something much more powerful. And that is a power of being. The power that you’re used to is a power of doing. But the doing is based only on what you want.
It’s not about containing or repressing, it’s about being completely still while everything else is moving. Then it is the stillness that sorts out all the movement. The stillness integrates the movement. Then all of the movement is determined, no longer by want or need, but the movement is determined by something that you actually know.
Q: I guess having tasted in love-making where this sort of space of just complete, you know, total relaxation. No more interest in performance or orgasm or any of that stuff. Just complete sense of being merged with another human being. And there’s a tremendous sadness of that not being.
John: As soon as there’s a little difficulty, as soon as the patterns start coming up in a relationship, the first thing that’s affected is the love-making which will then leave your wanting frustrated. It is want that will always make sure that nothing goes well. The harder that want tries, the worse it gets because want is purely coarse.
Q: I feel sad, just sitting with that. Don’t even know why exactly.
John: It’s because you realize that you’ve been going the wrong way. Instead of thinking about that energy that was there, be in it. Enjoy it and let it touch you. Let it do whatever it does without you assessing it or turning it into a need.
Q: The feeling is that it’s missing you know, I tasted something, glimpsed something with her or in her.
John: You can still taste it. As you keep tasting it, it connects the same thing within your self. As long as you’re not needing to have that from without. If you remain in the taste that you had from without, without needing to go outwards, then that takes you within, connects you to the very same within.
Q: Wow, ok. maybe this is my thinking getting in the way, but I don’t think I can do that. I mean somehow it’s a nice idea and ultimately it must come from within me and on and on but…
John: The only reason it touched you was it was already within. You will continue wandering until there is a profound honesty within and a clear readiness to surrender to whatever it is that you actually know, regardless of everything that you think. Then the wandering stops. You begin to know your self. Knowing your self introduces much pain. Without the readiness to surrender, you will always avoid such pain. A readiness to live being true, not to what you think, not to what you feel, not to what you believe is true, but only to what you know is true. It is only in letting your self be quieted within that such depth begins to open up, giving you something very different from what you thought. That is also the very undoing of the way that you’ve put together your surface existence.
Q: You know I’ve seen so much fall apart I wonder sometimes what’s left, but I’m sure there’s lots left to fall apart.
John: What’s fallen apart in you is only the inexpensive stuff. What is of real value is beneath all of that. Your awareness has to go there. Your awareness cannot even get there unless your awareness is letting go of all of your stuff. It is only when it lets go that it is free to pass through to see what it knows is real. No longer living for comfort but, in the midst of comfort and discomfort, living only for what is true to the core.
Q: Takes a lot of trust.
John: In what you know is true to the core. You have that much trust but you’ve invested it in what you want. It’s letting all of that trust return to where it came from. It all used to exist in only what you know. It is you that has sold out your trust elsewhere. It is that that makes you suffer, while your trust has been sold elsewhere, into many different wants and thoughts, and then you are existing within split. Being in search of oneness without and having no oneness within. Letting everything that you’ve invested without, letting that return within. It is only honesty to the core that can see through this clearly. And it is only surrender that will ever follow through. Without honesty and surrender to the core, you will always wander.
