Q: In speaking with you once, you made reference to universal mind. What is the relationship of subtle mind to universal mind?

John: They move as one. When you are functional in the subtle mind, you are connected to the universal mind.

Q: Would universal mind be the sum total of everything that the source of being knows about itself?

John: When you are functional in the subtle mind you can intimately connect with anything and know its mind, know its movement, without having to think.

Q: At one meeting you said, “within the mind there are nothing but patterns.” Did you mean that to the exclusion of anything else – that the mind is just composed of patterns and nothing else? No subtle mind, ordinary mind, universal mind?

John: The coarse mind is made of coarse patterns. The subtle mind is made of living vibrant patterns or ways of movement that have no lack, that are not incomplete. The mind that we are used to would be like this building, as a structure. On a subtle level everything in this building is alive, but on this level you can’t see it. On this level, this building doesn’t function as a being. This building is put together as a coarse pattern.

Within the subtle mind, patterns that exist would also be like a building but the building, instead of being made of stone, is like living materials and the whole building exists as a functional being. With that kind of building, where you go, it goes.

Your movement of being is what determines its movement, and it never misses.
It is like having a car that is as presently alive as your body and it would interact with you as directly as your body does. You wouldn’t drive it, you would be it. That is what everything is like within the subtle mind.

Within the subtle mind when you touch a rock, it intimately climbs up inside of you – something that the coarse mind cannot comprehend. The coarse mind wouldn’t know how to touch a rock like that.

Q: What determines whether a person has or is within a coarse mind, or whether they have access to a subtle mind?

John: How much you are unconditionally open to fully be something that you are totally unfamiliar with. Would it disturb you that when you shake hands with someone, that that means that you will turn into them and you will never be you again? Would you hesitate in shaking hands with anyone? Your hesitation, within, is what separates you from your subtle mind: a fear of being something that you can’t control. Innocence would have no fear. Innocence isn’t afraid of being lost. It is already wonderfully lost, without having a self reference.

If you value control, then dropping into the subtle mind would blow your mind. For control, there is nothing more terrifying than the subtle mind. The subtle mind is already being what it knows without having to think. The mind that we are used to only works when you think. Mix that with control and you have a mind out of control.

Did you see the movie, Liar, Liar? It’s worth seeing. That would be an example of where someone gets partly stuck in their subtle mind, while still being present in the conscious mind, and how that would ruin his life.

Q: Sometimes, here, people speak of their patterns almost as though they are animated. They attack them or they make them do something. Are our patterns like that or do they more present themselves as a way of getting what that heart wants, or a way of the coarse mind getting what it wants, and that the choosing is done by, initially, the heart? There is no force of power behind patterns: by themselves they have no force or power.

John: They do have power, but it is not ultimate power. It is the power to influence. The energy within that pattern is there because your parents gave that pattern their energy. After your parents are gone, there is enough energy invested in that pattern to last a long time in you, without you giving it any energy. That pattern then has the energy to influence you but not make you do anything.

Q: You once made reference to transformed patterns. What did you mean by patterns being transformed, and what does a transformed pattern look like?

John: It’s the difference between a wild horse and a tame one. A wild horse knows only how to serve itself. A tamed horse is introduced in how to give its heart away.

Q: When you transform that pattern, do you transform it for everyone who’s influenced by that pattern?

John: In a very, very subtle way it is transformed for everyone. It’s like when a wild horse, having only been and seen the same of its own kind, when it sees a tame horse, and the relationship that it has with its rider, that doesn’t tame the wild horse but it touches something inside of it. It awakens something that it never knew before. Something is touched but that wild horse isn’t able to go there. But the touch remains.

Q: I am not sure whether I am just mixing your metaphor, but are you implying some type of consciousness to a pattern?

John: When your mind is not transformed and you are existing in your mind and being your mind, then while you think you are you, you are really everybody at once, but wearing your own identity, thinking that you are someone special when what you are made of within that untransformed mind is everything in everyone that has not yet been transformed. All of that is then you.

Patterns within the mind that are not transformed are not unique. There is nothing special there. Whatever becomes transformed is unique, and there’s really something special there. In becoming transformed you lose your held-onto specialness and you turn into what special is.

Q: That identification with being special, does it arise to justify wants and needs?

John: Wants and needs are used to customize the kind of special you want to be.

Q: Where does the identification with being special come from?

John: Your belief in the first non-transformed suggestion of a pattern – innocence giving itself away to something other than what it knows. It has to then believe something that it knows is not true. Once it begins to believe a lie, then it turns into a lie. Once that starts, there is no end of needing to fix what it knows isn’t working.

When there’s no hanging on, then even everything that hurts your body is, for you, a massive wonderful awakening. You’re discovering a universe that you’ve never seen before. When you’re used to being your coarse mind, then any time that your body gets hurt or shocked you live out that contraction that you’re used to being. Everything within you tightens. Your mind tightens, and because of that your body contracts. When you’re not existing in that coarse mind but you’re existing in a more subtle mind, then when your body gets hurt or shocked instead of there being a restriction and a contraction, there’s the response of what’s like a flower opening and coming out. Your whole system opens up instead of it closing.

Within the coarse mind, when someone tells you that you have cancer, ten other voices clamour at you to tell you what’s happening and you’ll tighten as they do. When you’re existing within that subtle mind and someone tells you that you have cancer, then you’re being told something so large and so new that your whole system opens up to comprehend it. An awakening happens. When you’re within the subtle mind, then everything that you experience is at its highest. Then everything is massively heart and mind-expanding, regardless of how that would appear on the outside to those that exist in a coarse mind. Every little thing that approaches you or happens to you awakens you.