Q: Hi. You talked about parents seeing their children. My parents weren’t there to see me and so I don’t feel seen. And when I do, it’s very frightening.

John: Most deeply within you, warmly, do not need to be seen.

Q: Then what do I need?

John: To be warmed within.

Q: How?

John: By not needing, by warmly not needing anything you think you need concerning anything to do with internal well-being. If you need to be loved, you separate from your own being. When you become gentled and quieted in your heart concerning the need to be loved, what you come into, in your own heart, is that you begin to be warmed in most quietly realizing that you don’t need to be loved, which ends your personal issue with love. In being warmed in not needing to be loved, that warmth is your own being. That’s you being love.

When you are warmed within, in most deeply and quietly having no need of being seen, you’re warmed within. You’re warmed without a connection to anything on the surface having to be a certain way. No one needs to see you. No one needs to love you, and it’s not a separation from your self; it’s the quietness and the depth of the realization that enables you to warmly loosen on what you’ve been holding, what you’ve made your self dependent on.

Q: Would meditation help?

John: When you’re honest in it, yes. But as soon as the meditation works, what really worked was not the practice, not the form of making your body and mind and everything else that you’re able to make still. When meditation seems to work, what worked is you were honest to what you knew even though you’re not realizing that. What worked is that you opened while you meditated and it’s your own opening that answered you. Meditation only appears to answer you.

Q: Thank you.

John: Meditation on its own doesn’t give it to you, just as clearly as a child who’s in its innocence and it’s happy without a reason. If you were to tell that child of its innocence and what it’s in, and all it needs to do is meditate so it doesn’t lose its innocence, what you would say just wouldn’t make any sense, and if a child tries to make sense of it, it’s only confusing. Meditation doesn’t get you there and when you’re there it doesn’t keep you there. The honesty to knowing, the honesty to your own being is what gets you there, and it’s the honesty to your own being that keeps you there. You need no practice. Honesty in any practice can get you there. Once you’re there, if you keep the practice, you’re not being honest to what you know; you’re not being honest to your own being, you’re being honest to the practice.

Q: That makes sense.

John: When a child is seen, that enables the innocence that’s there to flourish within itself and within its personality. If a child is not being seen and if, on the contrary, a child is being abused – any kind of abuse – that abuse does not take away the child’s innocence. It takes away the opportunity for that child’s innocence to flourish on the level of the self and on the level of the personality.

Q: So the innocence is always there?

John: If the awareness that’s in it doesn’t leave it, yes. There isn’t anything or anyone that can take away a child’s innocence, and a child is able to exploit anyone and anything to leave its own innocence.

When a child leaves its own innocence because of abuse, it induces a deeper level of trauma than what’s there initially. The level of trauma with abuse affects the self, the body and the personality. It doesn’t affect the heart unless awareness within the heart, because of the abuse, closes.

When awareness is relaxed, which cannot be taken away by anything outside, when awareness is relaxed, awareness opens. It is openness regardless of ill treatment. Its self, in the midst of that kind of treatment and not being seen and not being loved, not being directly communed with, that awareness won’t flourish on the level of its self and its personality. It will suffer a developmental loss but not a loss of innocence. The heart, where there’s innocence, is pure regardless of the condition of its self. Regardless of what is occurring to its self or its body. No one and nothing can make a little child close.

Q: Only the child itself?

John: Awareness within the heart of a little child is what is all-powerful. It’s able to open in the midst of anything. And it’s able to close over any little thing.

Q: So it can always open again?

John: Yes. Openness is what we know when we listen. When we listen within, openness is what we know. Response to that, despite our past is what makes us one: awareness one with what it knows; awareness returned to innocence, awareness open.