Q: I wanted to ask you if you can teach me about compassion. What is compassion?

John: There’s a true compassion and a false compassion. True compassion is a presence of being within your self which brings you into your deeper self, and you have a flowing response of love from within your deeper self to someone in difficulty. It isn’t self-oriented. It’s being-oriented. The true compassion isn’t about your feelings about someone else, or toward someone else. It’s deeper levels of love that move through your thinking and your feeling, but the thinking and the feeling aren’t about your self.

It’s easy to develop a false compassion by having a story in your self in having compassion toward people. That develops a need for people to be in difficulty so that you can be a compassionate person. That ends up exploiting those in difficulty.

Q: What is the expression of real compassion? How can I understand it, really?

John: In understanding it, first have no personal need to have compassion. If you have the personal want and need to be compassionate, you’ll easily self-create it. It won’t be clean. Real compassion is clean of any kind of self-involvement.

Q: I often feel not compassionate because there is no need, but I’m not sure if it’s real.

John: Where you’re not sure, just be in a depth of quietude within. It’s in that quietude that you are in a deeper level of listening within, not looking for anything, but you’re available to know and to see.

First, on a personal level, you don’t need any of the answers that you’re looking for. It’s the personalized need for answers that has you taking your self to heart. Your heart belongs in your self, but your self doesn’t belong in your heart. The personal need for any kind of answer brings your self into your heart.

Q: I often don’t feel compassionate or in it.

John: That’s fine. You don’t need to be compassionate. You’re open, instead, to have compassion. If you have a need to be compassionate, then you’ll mix in the openness to have compassion and the push to be compassionate. You’ll create a mixture of the two. You’ll have a measure of the real mixed in with a self-created feeling and movement of what behaves like compassion.

Let what compassion is there, even if it begins only with the thought that you could have compassion, or that maybe there needs to be more compassion in you. Just sit in the quietude of that thought without moving into action just because you have the thought that you could be more compassionate. Don’t move quickly into application. When you have such thinking, sit in a depth of quietude within concerning the thought, so what you turn into is openness concerning being compassionate, without you manufacturing the movement, without creating the movement. So it will grow in you. There’s no need to create it or to push it. Let it grow where it grows. You don’t want to turn into a helping person.

Q: Yes.

John: If you create the pattern of being helpful to people, then you are not, from the inside out, in a movement of love that is available to help someone. You’ll be pushing it. It’ll be about how it makes you feel to be able to help people, and that’s not real. A real kind of helping someone isn’t about your self. It isn’t about how that makes you feel. It isn’t about you getting to love someone.

Q: Can love be also just quiet?

John: Yes. Very much so.

Q: Then I will be a quiet lover.

John: The quietude matters much more than the movement. It’s the quietude that gives space for a movement of being in your self. It won’t be pushed by your self. It grows on its own. It moves of its own. The quietude within makes you available – and no more. The love, as it moves, is a natural movement of what you really are. It isn’t self-generated. It doesn’t come from your sense of your self. It doesn’t begin with your thinking and your feeling. It begins with you. It begins in a depth of quietude, and from there it moves.

If anyone wants love from you, don’t move. If anyone tells you that you’re lacking love toward others, don’t move. If anyone tells you anything about love or the lack of it in you, don’t move. Just, right there, open into the quietude within and be listening within, from within that quietude. You’re not listening for results; the listening is your deep, quiet openness concerning the subject in question.

If someone tells you that you can love more or that they want your love, don’t believe what people tell you just because they tell you, just because they’re saying something. It’s important, there, for you, within, to not move. If you move quickly just because someone tells you something, you’re stepping into your self and you’ll move your own conditioning.

If someone telling you something about your lack, or what that person wants from you, if you’re directed in that to move into quietude within, and you won’t move on the surface, you won’t give what that person’s saying or asking for just because of the asking, the asking directs you to your deeper interior for you to know, and you are open to know. You are open to see, but you’re not going to move just because someone says something to you.

When someone wants something from you or says something negative about you, such as that you’re lacking love, where you are seated in your usual self, your usual sense of self, that will bring up emotion in you: not just the feeling of lack but a stronger emotion that you have lack. As soon as you have an emotion concerning what someone is saying to you or about you, you’ll want to move into action to bring closure to that emotion. As soon as you have that emotion, that puts pressure on your self. You’ll want to perform for your sense of self, or you’ll want to perform for that person. Any kind of performance orientation is a corruption in your self. Don’t move to perform for your self or for others.

When it hits your emotional body, what someone says to you of your lack, or asking something from you, it’s most important to be quiet. That makes you available to listen to what you actually know the truth of within. The subject can be opened by the other person, but you don’t move in the way that person wants you to. Your movement is into the quietude within, where there you are listening to what you directly know and see, and if you don’t know or see anything, you just stay quiet.

Emotionally, that’s even more exposing, but as great as you feel that exposure, inside, don’t move away from the quietude. If someone builds a fire around you, inside, you don’t move. You can say such things as you’re open to what they’re saying, you’re open to any kind of change, you’re open to look at anything inside, but you’re waiting to see what you actually know and what you actually see about what the other person’s saying about you. And if they put pressure on you in wanting something from you or not being satisfied in your response because you’re not going into movement, don’t do anything to fix the pressure. Just be quiet, and you could even say that you’re open, but you don’t know. Stay empty rather than move.

If someone tells you that you’re not compassionate, don’t move. Don’t be quick to say something. Let your heart open and let your face open, but don’t move. Don’t go into verbal action. Don’t go into a facial action.

Q: Are there moments where it is good to ask my self if I’m on the right place if somebody tells me that I’m wrong? I often feel like self-sabotage.

John: That’s you moving into emotional action against your self. It’s false. Where you have any kind of emotional pressure, it matters for you, there in your interior, to not move. Don’t move in your interior just because of an emotion, just because of pressure on your self. You can have subtle nurturing movement. It’s a different level of movement. It’s not a mental, emotional movement. It’s you, under pressure, subtly moved within to listen, to listen within, to listen and see. The listening within means you are available within to know and to see. If you just quickly move because of an emotional pressure, you won’t know and you won’t see, and you establish the pattern of performing for others and for your self. Let a deep listening within replace all performance orientation.

When you do say something to someone telling you about a lack in your self, or wanting you to perform in giving them love, if you say something, speak only because there’s real meaning in your words, so your words are carriers of meaning. Don’t let your words be carriers of your emotion – just carriers of meaning. Then, as you speak, it is love that delivers the meaning. Don’t step outside of that.

If you have such a walk as this, others will reject you for it because they’ll speak of your lack, and if that moves you into a deep listening within to what you know and see, and you don’t go quickly into movement, then that exposes the other person so they start to feel their lack and they’ll need to make their lack about your self, so they’ll project it onto you. So they’ll increase the pressure. They’ll increase you needing to move in the way that that person wants you to move.

If you still don’t move but you’re in a depth of listening within, that other person will then form a judgment and wrap you up in that judgment. In you not moving but just listening within, that other person may become really angry with you. It isn’t really about you. Someone’s anger is really just about themselves.

Q: What can I be in that moment?

John: Just quieted within; that all you are in is a depth of listening to whatever it is that you know and you see. And if you seem to not know or see anything, then all you are is quiet within. Just quietly empty, and you won’t move just because you’re empty. You won’t move because you don’t know; you’ll only move because of whatever little bit you do know. That little bit is what your words are for. Your words are not there to express your emotional pressure. Your words are not there so that you can have pressure-relief.

If you live this, your usual sense of self will die and a deep, quiet, nurturing sense of your self will slowly start to live and grow. You’ll live letting love quietly take over your self, but you won’t live using your self to protect your self.

Q: Yes.

John: You won’t do anything to save your self, and in the quietude of that you are open for love to take over your self. Love can have your self and you won’t do anything to save your self. It’s a quiet walk. There’s no story in such a walk. The stories all end. You’ll have no stories about circumstances, no stories about others, and no stories about your self.

Q: That’s so beautiful! Is beauty also a story?

John: No. Just as love is not a story. But you can make a story of beauty and you can make a story of love. You can make a story of compassion, and you’ll perform for those stories. It’s not real. Lovely.