Q: The question that has been forming is about awareness, supreme awareness or choiceless awareness, and how that relates to the heart. My earlier interpretation of the heart was of love, love for somebody else, then love for a teacher, then after a while that I had spent with you, I became more aware of the space and the openness in the heart, not void of awareness. How does that openness in the heart and awareness relate? How are they interrelated?

John: The heart reflects what awareness is being. It’s the form that reflects directly what awareness is being. When awareness is open, the heart is open. When awareness is open to what it knows, the heart is open. When awareness is closing or closed to what it knows, the heart is closing and closed. When awareness hardens to what it knows, the heart hardens. Everything that awareness is being, the heart is a direct reflection of it.

When awareness is pure, the heart is pure. When awareness distorts into what it wishes to be true while closing and hardening to what it knows is true, the heart is then not pure and the heart is unclean, as awareness is unclean. The cleanness or the purity of awareness has to do with the relationship at present that awareness has with what it knows. Awareness can separate from what it knows and it can respond to what it knows.

Where there is oneness of awareness, it is where there is no disparity, no separation between awareness and what awareness knows, what it knows the truth of. Where there is oneness, awareness and knowing are the same. As soon as there is any separation between awareness and what awareness knows the truth of, there is a separation in the heart. In the forms that we have, when there is a separation in the heart reflecting the separation of awareness, then there is a split, a division, where part of the heart is filled with beingness and part of the heart is filled with one self. In the forms that we have, when we separate from anything that we know the truth of, we hold to our selves. To the degree that we hold to our selves, we are not of our own being. The manifestation of that is clearly in the heart. The heart reflects the purity or the mixture. When awareness is pure and therefore the heart is pure, the heart is filled with the being. The being comes into manifestation within the heart. The being-filled heart is the manifestation of what awareness is being. The depth of awareness, in its relationship with knowing when it is pure, manifests as the being-filled heart filling the self.

Whatever awareness is being in the heart is what the self becomes. When the heart is divided, split, and in some way separate because of what awareness is being in its relationship with knowing, that separation becomes manifest in the self. When it is the being-filled heart that fills and occupies the self, the self becomes like its own being.
In the forms that we have, our being is a direct manifestation of what we really are. The being is pure. The heart can be pure and the self isn’t yet a manifestation of what we are. The self doesn’t become a manifestation of what we really are without awareness being pure, enabling the being-filled heart to fill the self. Then the self becomes what fills it.

Q: I know, really do know, that being soft and open is much more valuable than what I am in my self.

John: In the heart there is no greater value. And in the heart there is no greater loss than the heart being closed and hard. The heart, in simplicity, directly manifests what awareness is being in relationship to what it knows. The self doesn’t belong in the heart. The being belongs in the heart and the being-filled heart belongs in all of the self.

The truth of how we function is highly directional. It is from the innermost outwards, and it is only that which is the same in the outer as what the inward parts are like that is able to move from the outside in. Awareness is not able to take its own self into its own being unless its own self is the same as its own being.

That which is integrated of the self has no lack or inability. That which is integrated of the self is able to move in the same way as the being moves. That which is integrated of the self is able to manifest the being. Without that integration, the self is possibility, possibility not yet actualized.

Every little bit of openness and softness of heart or the closing or the hardening of the heart that is actualized in the self is painful. It is painful because it is change. When the heart opens and softens, the self changes.

The opening and the softening manifested into the self is experienced and felt within the nervous system. Any little change in the self is felt in the nervous system. Any change within the nervous system hurts, whether that is the change of opening or the change of closing. The quality of pain in the nervous system when it is opening is exquisite. It is, within the nervous system, a sublime quality. When the nervous system closes because the self is closing, because the heart is closing, because awareness is closing, the pain of that in the nervous system is a little bit like that of dying. It is a pain full of lack. It’s a shutting down of goodness in the nervous system.

Q: I feel like I’m being carried.

John: Loved. When you are loved, your self is being uplifted.

Q: It appears that that love is not only coming through you, but it’s coming from back of me, somehow. I’m in it, rather than having it…or I could say I’m being had by it.

John: When your self is being uplifted, what you first are is being drawn in, drawn in from within your being, through your heart and into your self. When your self is being uplifted, it is being in-filled from outside of you and from within you.