Q: Is it that I’m able to pay attention to awareness, so that there is awareness able to pay attention to awareness?

John: You can do that, and you’re able to do that from within any orientation. A self-orientation is able to do that. You’re able to belong to your self instead of your own being and do that. Wherever awareness is, awareness is able to do that. Being able to do that doesn’t bring you home. It just reveals an intrinsic ability.

Q: I’m asking because I realize that there is a difference to me if I’m aware and some emotions or feelings coming up, unpleasant feelings, that there is a choice to be staying aware in the awareness or staying aware in the feeling. What’s the advice for that?

John: Awareness, separate from what it really is, is able to do what you’re saying. It helps. It helps because it points to a deeper direction. It does point you within, and you’re able to move deeper and deeper, within, without going home; without you, awareness belonging to what you really are.

A self-oriented awareness, awareness that is separate from what it really is is able to have presence. It’s able to be in the now. It can also become enlightened and all of that doesn’t make awareness what it really is and home.

Q: So are you saying that staying with the unpleasant feeling is self-oriented?

John: Easily. A self-orientation, a self-oriented awareness is able to stay with the feeling, to be in the pain of something, to be in an experience. That enables a self-oriented awareness to relax its self.

For a self-oriented awareness there’s much to gain in relaxing its self. With that, it’s able to gain an equanimity of self, but that doesn’t bring awareness into an equanimity of being. For that, awareness needs to return fully to what it really is. It cannot have investments in itself. It cannot be for the sake of any results. It cannot be for the sake of itself. Awareness being for the sake of its own self is self-oriented awareness.

Awakening doesn’t bring you home. Awakening shows you the truth you know. Knowing it doesn’t mean that you’re being it. Oneness is when you’re being all of it, all you know. Enlightenment means that you have awakened. You have awakened to direct knowledge that is far beyond your self, but knowing so much doesn’t mean that you’re being that much.

With enlightenment, spirituality remains. When you’re being what you really are, there is no spirituality. There’s just pure you, and all of its beingness, in all of its forms. It’s as natural as innocence and joy in a small child. It’s full of love and has no fear. The having no fear isn’t a strength. It’s far removed from any kind of courage. The having no fear is weakness, all of your weakness, unveiled and at rest; at rest because there are no investments in it. There’s nothing there to protect. Love has its home in it.

A self-oriented awareness, when it discovers the value for itself in being in its feelings and being in its thoughts without engaging them, makes awareness anchored in itself feel better and think more clearly. Being that doesn’t turn awareness into what it is. It only refines its self-orientation. It helps – it helps because it points the direction to within, but inasmuch as it helps, a more sophisticated investment is made and kept and defended, so when you finally arrive right at the door of being what you really are, you cannot enter because it will cost you all of your investments, all of your investments in your self, all of the power that you’ve put into your self to refine your self and to make your self a better home for you, when your self isn’t your home. What you really are is your home. Love cannot relate to investments. It cannot relate to an investment in your self. It cannot relate to even the most refined self-orientation. Love can relate only to pure you, unalloyed by any kind of separation.

For a fragmented awareness, a fragmented you, awareness separate and you in some way separate, being what you really are is beautifully and perfectly impossible. You can only get closer and closer and closer, but always separate. The return to you being what you really are is without the investment of awareness in itself. It’s that investment of awareness in itself that makes it separate. It is only lovely that you cannot get around that. To be engaged in spirituality means that you are trying to get around that, that you’re trying to be what you really are, while in some sophisticated and refined way keeping an investment in your self.

But all is not lost. When you die, you’re home, perfectly. When you die you will beautifully be what you could have been in all your life, which is what your life was for. You are incapable of perfectly and permanently being separate. It’s all going to end and you don’t need to fight it. You don’t need to struggle, you don’t need to try, you don’t need to be spiritual. All you really need is full response, as awareness, to all you know.

Lovely. It’s the only perfection in anything.