Q: Yesterday I heard you say that being alive in this body is the biggest opportunity to grow in awareness. I’d like to know what would be helpful for me in growing in awareness.

John: By you letting your evolution as awareness matter more than everything that you have: for it to matter more than your being, your heart, your self; to matter more than your person and your life; for your evolution as awareness to matter more than everything that you have. That opens everything you have to what you are as awareness and to its evolution. 

The evolution of what you have does matter. The evolution of what you have is completely dependent on the evolution of the level that just precedes it. The evolution of your self is completely dependent on the evolution of your heart. The evolution of your heart is completely dependent on the evolution of your being, and the evolution of your being is completely dependent on your evolution as awareness. Any little bit of sense you have of that gives you perspective. It gives you perspective concerning your life, your self, and your heart … and with that you gain access into your own being. 

You being that in your heart, your self and your living puts you into the quickest way possible for you, as awareness, to evolve. It is also with the greatest difficulty and the most discomfort. The way of your evolution, as awareness, is going to put your self into a constant self of change, a life of profound difficulty.

Awareness that is evolving and moving forward is awareness that increases in its capacity. It increases in form in its ability. What it is able to be and able to do is continually more. That will always make difficulty as close to you in your life as it’s able to be. 

It isn’t ease which makes you happy. It is you, as awareness, being what you know from the innermost outwards which makes you happy. In that, difficulty doesn’t make you unhappy. Difficulty is what you are simply in. Real opportunity for what you really are isn’t separate from difficulty.

There isn’t virtue in adversity. There is virtue in you evolving, as awareness, in the midst of adversity. What you are being in the midst of what you suffer doesn’t make the suffering good or right. It makes what you are being in it true to what you know, true to your own innermost. It has you in the midst of pain or suffering, adversity or difficulty, reaching into your deepest resources. It has you really needing everything you first really are, and being that in your forms. 

That reach stretches you, as awareness, into what you’re capable of. That stretch in form is painful. Growth is painful. In evolving as awareness in your forms, you will suffer growing pains.