Q: Hi, John. My question is about softening and opening. I thought I was making progress because I was identifying why I was closing and I could recognize that I was closing, and I was hoping maybe this was the path to figuring out more how to open and soften. So I was hoping that you would share some of your journey with me, particularly how you came back to that knowing, how you opened and softened.

John: I had no prior understanding, no teaching or any learning, no ideas, not even a clue. It wasn’t even part of my consciousness. At one point, when I was seventeen, I was just standing still, looking outwards, and from way further in than what I’ve ever known, I was wondering if there’s anything other than anything I’ve experienced so far, or anything that I’ve known so far, wondering what is reality beyond everything that we’re used to? And as I that deeply wondered, I that deeply opened and entered. I’d never done such a thing or even heard of such a thing, but once I did it I knew and I saw. It never even occurred to me to tell someone.

Q: I feel like part of the struggle I’m having is trying to understand this intellectually.

John: Understanding is really just a form of something that you already directly know. It isn’t the understanding that does it. If you understand, and with that much form of seeing you don’t be what you know, then having the understanding serves to make you worse.

Q: So you’re saying that having that understanding then not being open and honest, that’s worse?

John: If you really come to understand what it is that you know the truth of and you remain being separate from what you know, you’ll have to put that much together, that much more together in your self and in your person and in your life, to cover what you know. The more that you understand without being it, the more that you’ll need to do to stay separate from it.

Q: I can see that. That does make sense to me, that when I’m of two minds, believing that maybe this is my deep knowing but still not being sure, that’s my self playing tricks and staying separate, and being self-important?

John: Warmly have no loyalty to any of your beliefs. You don’t need any of your beliefs. All you need is to quietly believe what you quietly know. It isn’t a belief. It’s different. It’s you directly believing pure you. As you live, believe only what you actually know the truth of. What you know the truth of isn’t going to be informational. It isn’t going to be an ideology. What you actually know the truth of is beingness. It’s what you naturally know and it doesn’t require a thought. You knew before you could think. You knew before you could speak.

When you hold a baby, and without being a mother or a person, without being a ‘someone’ or a ‘somebody’, without you being any kind of ‘who’ and you simply hold the baby and see, what takes place is that as the baby looks at you and into you, you are being known. The more that you open, the more that that being looking through those eyes knows you all the way through. It isn’t knowing your self or your personality. It’s not knowing everything that you’re familiar with in your life. This baby, this being, is directly accessing you, knowing you and you are able to do the same. In the same way, you, without any prior instruction or learning, are able to directly know you.

Q: Yes. Thank you. That definitely touched something I understand.

John: When you see a small child looking at you and looking into you, and you know that you’re being known directly, and you ask that small child “what is it that you’re doing, right there?” it won’t have a clue of what you’re talking about. It will overlook what it’s being and what it is seeing. It will relate on the level of your question and it will, in doing so, step out of knowing you. So it’ll answer your question in the same way that you asked. It will use its mind to answer and basically, in doing so, it will say that it’s not doing anything.

You’re able to return directly to that same level of knowing directly and seeing directly without a process, without addressing your self, without addressing your past. It’s what you were, first. It hasn’t changed. It’s all there. You’ve just adorned it with layers and layers of what has positively and negatively interested your self.

Every time you lie down to go to sleep, and as you come close to sleep, the closer that you come the more of these layers and layers of adornments relax and come off of you. When you reach that tipping point of sleep, there you are being what you really are. It’s devoid of any past, it’s devoid of your self, it’s devoid of your personality, it’s devoid of your day. There’s just you, open – awareness relaxed and unadorned.