Q: I wanted to ask you about intimacy, because there’d maybe been a small shift, but what I found was this emptiness. I saw it as a lack of warmth and when you were talking about intimacy that really struck me that that was it. And it would be lovely to hear more on that.

John: When you are in intimacy you are fundamentally connective with everyone and everything. It’s a connectivity of being and it has no filters to it. As soon as you go up into your self you bring filters in, which separates you from the intimacy, which means from others, and it separates you from everything. When you are in the intimacy you have no protection in all of your interior, and you’ll feel that in your self. The lack of protection is in your self; it isn’t in your being. In your being you need no defence, no protection.

When you are in your being in the intimacy, everything is free to go right into you – no filters. That includes offence and injury. As soon as you bring in the filters to defend your self from the feelings of offence and injury, you separate from the intimacy. You’re no longer being love.

Q: I love the way you described it as a small child, when you see how they are in doing up a button, that complete immersion and there’s nothing else there. That’s when the stories probably kick in, when you’re in a connective moment with a person which I guess are what you’re calling the filters, the things that then skew your moment of being.

John: When you’re in your heart, you are in the intimacy. It’s an intimacy of being; it’s a connectivity of being. You are in a hue of in-love-ness. It doesn’t have an object; it isn’t toward anything. That hue of in-love-ness infuses all of your self. It infuses all of your feeling, all of your thinking, your will, your emotions, toward everyone, with everyone and with everything. And it shows in the little things. It’s not less toward your buttons, your socks, than it is toward someone really close to you. It’s not less toward a stranger than someone really close to you. With the filters removed the intimacy moves indiscriminately, like what you see with a small child still in its innocence.

Q: Which all makes complete sense. Yeah.

John: As soon as you relate to your self and believe what you think and what you feel in your self, you are filtering out the intimacy, the connectivity of being. Then you begin relating to what you like and what you don’t like, and it has nothing to do with the connective intimacy. The hue of in-love-ness within that moves indiscriminately into everything becomes marginalized, diminished. The lack of the intimacy exposes the lack in your self. Your self doesn’t have that intimacy. So then you’ll resort to your powers in your self: thought, feeling, will and emotion, to bring up a sense of excitement, which is a counterfeit for intimacy. So you’ll smile when it’s not real instead of smiling because of the intimacy that’s there. Your facial expression is limited to that of emotion instead of delicacy of feeling, which comes from within the interior of the face into the exterior of the face very subtly, but it’s what makes all of the difference. It’s communicative, whereas the emotion shows the differences in people. The delicacy of feeling within that comes from the interior of the face because intimacy is present makes much of sameness in everyone. Everyone registers it; few understand it.

Q: Sometimes when you’re there all of the sudden automatic behaviour takes over, probably because it’s an unknown.

John: The automatic is your mind, your self – your self both conscious and subconscious. When you believe anything that you don’t actually know the truth of, you’re giving your power away to your genetics, to your self, to your sense of self and the intimacy is being factored out; it’s being filtered out. You’re leaving what you really are. It all becomes covered up through you habituating your self. So you will automatically be your self in circumstances. As soon as you feel a certain way, you like something or you don’t like something, there’s going to be an emotional response to that. The emotional response doesn’t have the intimacy. Without the intimacy you’ll be compensating in your self, subconsciously, in having to keep the energy up because if you don’t you’ll feel empty. The intimacy isn’t there. You’ll compensate for the lack of intimacy and connectedness by raising your level of emotion positively and negatively, which further separates you from everything. And as soon as you start to slow down inside you feel lack, so you’ll have to bring up your emotional body again, and give your emotional body presence and authority in your life.

Q: I understand that there is that space and then there is that tininess of knowing and being able to stay with that, but…

John: What that means is you know. It doesn’t matter what your reasons are for not being what you know, you know the truth within. As soon as you’re quiet inside you know, but that knowledge will offend your emotional sense of stability, self-esteem, and control. So you’ll veer away from what you know because it’s destabilizing to your experience. But you still know. So if you really want the answers within you’ll be going right into what you know and you’ll turn into it, regardless of what that does to your self, your life and your experience. You’ll come back into balance. It’s the movement of intimacy within that brings you to balance. It brings you back into connectivity.

Q: It’s so small, but I lose it, or other things somehow…

John: Those other things matter more to you.

Q: Yeah, I get it. And I’ve heard you say this to lots of people and I get it, but I still don’t get it.

John: You get it, but you won’t live it.

Q: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

John: You live what you have made matter to you in the past. You keep living that, which means you keep living your past. As soon as you judge something to be true that you don’t actually know the truth of, you give away your power consciously to what you think and to what you feel, and the next day that is already becoming a mechanism in your subconscious self. And that mechanism will control you, control your experience in your self for the rest of your life. And you have myriad mechanisms. All of them serve to keep you automated in your self. It doesn’t require your thought, your feeling for you to be automated. All it requires is that you want to survive in any situation. You want to feel good. You don’t want to feel destabilized. You don’t want to suffer from a lack of self-esteem.

It’s the want and the need that you’re being in your self that separates you from the connective intimacy. Intimacy can’t relate to want or need. It can’t relate to lack. But, when you’re being that intimacy, everything goes into you because you’re that connected into everything, and you’ll feel everything in your self. Everything goes in. You’ll have no more defence to your interior. Anything can come in; anyone can come in.

You can’t have the protection of your self and be intimately connective. As soon as your value shifts to your sense of self you will abandon the intimacy. You’ll turn intimacy into emotional expression, and there’s no connectivity of being in that. So, you’ll act loving; you’ll act smiley and happy. You’ll act excited toward someone because of the need for connectivity. The need is there in your self because there is no connectivity in your self, so you’ll always be compensating.

There’s no end to it. All of it is false. It’s not real, it’s illusory, and as you are relating that way to your self, in your self, to others, with others, you’re developing your self that way. Your self turns into a mass of form of illusion. The more you use it the worse you get. There’s only one answer and that is in you being still within, regardless of how the feelings of your self will collapse. You’ll experience the actual condition of your self; you’ll experience all of the lack. You’ll go through heavy withdrawal symptoms.

When you are just still, within, in the midst of your addiction to your self, your self is going to come back at you. It’ll behave toward you in the way that you’ve trained it for decades. It’s not a pleasant experience. You become subject to all of your judgments in all of your past toward your self, toward everyone, toward everything. It’ll all come back at you, rescuing you, promising you recovery. If you remain still, all of that will eventually be quieted because you are remaining gentled and quieted within in the midst of such awful feeling and thinking condition. Your self will be cleaned of all that you’ve put into it and all of how you’ve trained it if you just remain quieted within, gentled within. Because of the intimacy, you will most delicately feel everything without the filters of control that are there in your self. You’ll feel out of control. You’ll feel like everyone and everything controls you, but if you are gentled and quieted within in the midst of that, regardless of feeling like everything controls you, you are home.

In all that intimacy, all of that real connectivity, you’ll feel, in your self, exceedingly vulnerable. You are present, in the midst of your self, in this world, and your filters are gone. Your coping mechanisms, your systems of control and defence – it’s all gone. You are feeling, quietly feeling, everything in your self in the midst of every environment, just as it is. It’s the end of your held-together, controlled life, and intimacy, real connectivity, is free.

Q: It feels so strange, because you don’t behave the way people expect you to behave, and you don’t behave the way you’re used to behaving. It’s like you’ll feel, yeah, just uncertain of anything beyond that immediate…

John: Worse. You’ll be intimately in all of the world and you’re not the world anymore. It is no longer your system by which you relate to people, to matter, to value, to meaning. All of that for you is gone. You’re in all of this world and you are no longer the world you’re in. You’ll be judged for that. You’re out of sync with everyone’s expectations of you. You are out of performance. You’re no longer performing like everyone else is. You’re no longer falling in line. You’ve stepped out of the artificial sameness.

Q: And it feels peculiar. Yeah.

John: In this world it’s very peculiar. You’re going to be judged for that. It’s a kind of peculiarity that doesn’t fit in this world. It isn’t controlled by performance. What makes you appear peculiar in this world, the substance of that is controlled by love, and you’re intimately given to it in everything, while you’re with anyone. It puts you outside of the system’s control that’s everywhere and in everything in this world. It’s what makes this world this world. None of it is real.

Q: I sometimes wonder whether my self then, quickly, sneakily, comes in and then uses that, and turns it into abstraction?

John: Your self doesn’t do that. In all of your experience, in all of your life, your self is innocent. It’s only behaving in the way that you’re training it to be, training it to behave. You condition it and it will work for you. Your self will do whatever it is you are actually saying to it. Your self is like a perfect servant. Your self, on its own, isn’t going to relate to right or wrong. Your self doesn’t know the truth. It just perfectly serves you. So whatever you are being in your self, your self reflects back to you and your self becomes, whether that is real and true or illusory and false. The one who’s actually responsible all the time is not your self; it’s you.

Q: I like that.