Q: I find happiness very rare, even though I find a lot of satisfaction with what I do. I’m not happy, really happy. I’m happy for a moment, but I don’t really find a way to maintain those happiness moments which I like, and therefore I don’t find that feeling of belonging to some place.

John: The kind of happiness that you’re looking for is a deep result, all the way through to the surface of your life, of you being at home in what you really are that is far deeper than anything to do with your life or your self.

For you to realize it, all of your attention, your awareness, needs to be so quieted from the surface so that it can all relax deeper and deeper beyond the surface of your life, beyond your experience of your self, into your heart and deeper. What you’ll need to go through is similar to what occurs with a tree as it comes into autumn and enters winter.

If you’ve never consciously moved this way as a tree does, it’s fundamentally shocking to your life and to your self because it will feel, in your experience, devastating that all of the leaves on your tree are drying up and falling off, and the very sap of your life, the sap of meaning in your life, completely recedes. It all goes down into the depths, and in your experience you have no more reason for living. It can feel like you’re dying.

What you’re awakening to when you’re still, in that, when you are gentled and quieted in that, is your source. It’s not an understood source. Any concept that you may have of your source isn’t going to help you. To the tree that seems to be dying, as it passes through autumn into the winter, no concepts help. There is no consolation that at the other end of this occurrence you’ll come into some kind of new and beautiful spring. All that will matter in your experience is that it completely seems like you’re dying; that all sense of meaning is draining away and you’re following it. You’re following it down deep within, where you have no understanding. All of your understanding exists above the surface where all meaning is seeming to pass away.

As you follow this through, as you surrender to entering autumn and winter, the key is that you, as awareness, enter a fundamental okayness, an okayness not derived from anything above the surface that is in your life and in your self, an okayness that isn’t based on anything in your past. It’s deeper, within, than existence, where you are, way within, okay as is, until all that remains is the most quiet, still essence of okayness. And there, despite anything occurring on the surface, you are rested okayness in need of nothing.

Then you are home. Then you are being what you’ve been looking for, and what you are being, within, doesn’t yet offer anything to your self or your life. All that there is, is that you’re home.

Q: Do you feel happy at home?

John: The happiness is later, and you don’t need it. You don’t need happiness. You need to be home, you being what you really are, which is at the expense of not only who you thought you were, but is also at the expense of who you really are.

As all meaning drains back into its source, there is no more ‘who’. All that remains is ‘what’ you really are. That ‘what’ is okayness, still, that has need of nothing. It’s quietly complete. There’s no kind of movement that can add to it.

When you are being that, there will be movement. The movement of what you really are is love. That movement of you, of what you really are, comes up into your heart, fills your heart, and your being-filled heart comes into all of your self and manifests through the forms of your life. What that feels like in your life, within your self, is pure happiness. It’s pure because its origination isn’t in your life. It isn’t because of what you do or have in your self or in your life. It’s pure because it comes from pure you.

Then you’re able, as awareness, to move into autumn and fully into winter, where everything seems to pass away, and in that movement you lack nothing. You are being what you really are. When you’re able to be what you really are through autumn and winter, you’re able to come into the deeper levels of what produces springtime, where everything that grows is new.

The concept is simple, but there are not many who will surrender to its movement because it does seemingly cost everything. Profound realization and its follow-through cost everything that you wanted to be true, everything that in your life and in your self you need to be true.

All that remains with your follow-through is what is most deeply true.