Q: Hi, John. I wanted to ask you two questions. One is about grief. I remember you were telling us about the importance of letting ourselves feel hurt because it lets us into our heart and into our being, keeping open and soft, but what is the effect of grief when we mourn about someone we love and is no longer with us?

John: If you’re opening in the midst of your self while your self has suffered loss, you’ll experience the grief of that. When you’re opening in the midst of that loss, the grief enables you to really deeply feel what you’ve lost, without you closing.

If you close within what you’ve lost, you’ll also have grief and the grief will harden you. There, the grief is all about your self. That kind of grief won’t crack you open. It won’t open your self. It closes and seals your self within the loss. That loss becomes a permanent form in your self and it continues, embedded in your subconsciousness.

Q: So if the memory of the loss keeps bouncing back, it means that I’ve closed something in the process of the grief?

John: If it comes back and each time it comes back it delicately cracks you open in your self, that’s a goodness. But if the grief makes you feel and think that you are hard done by, that something bad has happened to your self, that grief separates you from your heart.

Q: How do I know that it’s a good kind of grief?

John: When you’re being like your own being in the midst of loss in your self, you’ll have grief in your self but it will be a tender and a delicate grief, the kind of grief that cracks your self open. It opens your self. It softens your self. But when you take to heart the loss, you’ll harden in your heart and the grief that you experience in your self will be neither tender nor delicate, and what you’ll experience in your self is that you’ve been hard done by. You’ll experience, in your thinking and in your feeling, that something really bad has happened to your self, that something that belongs to you has been taken away, and you harden within the loss of that.

It’s like the difference between having tears of tenderness within loss and having tears of bitterness within loss. The tears of tenderness within loss soften your self; the tears of bitterness harden your self. To grieve means that you can really feel, within your self, the loss. Softness can feel loss in your self. Hardness can also feel loss.

Q: Thank you. I feel much lighter and all of a sudden it seems all simple. For my second question, does every person have a different being? Are our beings connected in some way? Do we have any effect on each other’s development or can we feel each other’s beings?

John: If your being has your self as a home, you’ll be in touch with other people’s beings because you’re being it. What you’re being you find everywhere. If what you’re being is your self, you’ll find your self everywhere. You’ll see your self in others and you’ll project your self onto others. Your being is almost entirely the same as everyone else’s. You mostly don’t have a special being. That’s what enables you to be one with others without any kind of effort, without any kind of focus.

The more you relax as awareness, the more you enter your own being and the more that you’re one with others, deep within, regardless of what they’re being. There isn’t first your being. When you are profoundly relaxed as awareness, there is first our being. It isn’t yours or mine. It’s ours.

You can’t be in the part of your being that is a tiny little bit different than mine and everyone else’s unless you’re first, within, the most of your being that is the same as mine and others. When you’re being the oneness you can see the difference. When you’re being the difference you can’t see the oneness.

The part of your being that is a tiny little bit different is completely dependent on the rest of your being that is all the same as everyone else’s.