Q: Hello, John.

John: Hello.

Q: How can I allow and invite this change into me when I don’t feel it happening, but so badly want it to?

John: In all of the quietude within, there is so much nurture. So like a tree that flourishes, it’ll produce all of its fruit: you’ll have peace, you’ll have happiness, you’ll have joy. None of that is for your self, you don’t need. As it develops and as it grows, it’s going to be like the fruit of a tree. It’s for others. It isn’t about your self, it isn’t for your self. You don’t need it.

Q: I don’t know how to find the quiet when I go within my self, even for hours. It’s just so much pain in there.

John: Not for hours. Don’t be quiet for hours. You be nurturing, tiny little touches within of quietude, regardless of what pain is there. That’s you touching into and remembering and being the real. The pain is actual but it isn’t real. It’s just an old habit in your nervous system.

Q: Is there anything I can do to make it less painful?

John: Genuinely no longer need it to be less painful. When you’re genuine in that, the quietude of your own genuineness, the quietude of your own sincerity nurtures you, and it has nothing to do with the pain. The pain can then increase or decrease, and that makes no real difference to you.

What is nurtureful and real to you is deeper than all of your experiences. It’s deeper than your self. It doesn’t come from your nervous system and as you are being the simplicity of that, your nervous system and your self will change.

It will become like you, that authentic simplicity of you that first has nothing to do with your experience, your self, your life; that you have returned to being this nurturing simplicity of you in the midst of whatever your experience is, whatever your self is like, whatever your circumstances are.

You are living again from within your home. You are at home within, and you’re no longer living from within your sense of self, your self, your experiences, your life, your circumstances. You are living from within being at home, and your being at home doesn’t come from your experiences, your self, your life or your circumstances.

In the midst of unhappiness and happiness, in the midst of delicacies of pleasure or in the midst of the sharpness of pain, you are always the same. You are at home within.

Q: Are we all supposed to be here, or can some of us go?

John: What do you mean?

Q: I find it so hard to be here, but I feel like maybe I have to be since I am here. I’m not sure.

John: You have to be here until you die. When you are at home within, regardless of what here is like, then you get to be at home within, here, for as long as you live. And then this at-homeness that you are, everywhere here, is going to go on to what is next after you’ve died. That at-homeness, the quietude of it, the nurture of it, the goodness of it, is your life. This is your real life.

Q: So I just keep trying to find the at-homeness?

John: Make it as easy as you can and as simple as you can. If you’re trying to find it, you are looking instead of seeing. The looking is too much effort, the looking is all self-involved. The looking is all about results, whereas the seeing comes from you being at home within. It’s always there, but that doesn’t mean that you are always there. But as soon as you are gentled and quieted within, you are quickly there.

You are there without any process, without effort, without doing. It doesn’t require anything of your self because it is already there, and it doesn’t come from your self or your life. It’s you. As soon as you are gentled and quieted within, without any reason, there you are. And there is an eternal quality of life again. It’s just quietly aglow in you. It isn’t there to give you a good life; it isn’t there to fix your problems.

Bye for now.