Q: I wondered if you can speak with us about the relationship. I wonder if there is any role for a man, a role for a woman.
John: Where there is a use of personality in relating to each other, there’ll be an emptiness just beneath it. Keeping things active negatively or positively on the level of personality increases the emptiness. Just beneath the emptiness you have your real meeting with each other, where neither personality nor emptiness matters. It is there that quieted vulnerability knows and sees. It is there that knowing and seeing each other means more than even experiencing each other. In the quieted knowing and seeing, you have subtle knowledge of each other. It doesn’t offer very much, but the little that it is, is profound and real. In being satisfied with that little, the two of you have the same ground.
Coming from that little bit is worth the most, and on the level of personality offers the least. It is worth having your relationship from there, quieted within, in meaning that matters. It has no embellishments. It doesn’t satisfy on the level of emotion. It doesn’t move the personalities. It does move the very bottom of your hearts, a little and enough. In being oriented to that, you’ll have in your relationship the resources of the deep, with the riches of real knowledge, real knowledge within, being within subtlety. The more subtle your communication in that, the richer your togetherness.
Your knowledge of what is the more, within, nurtures more than what you experience together. To your accustomed self it offers the least, but to what you know, within, it offers the most.
The very best of your relationship isn’t going to be in what you understand. The very best is in what you know and haven’t yet understood. It’s there that, together, you don’t need your accustomed selves…just quieted vulnerability, knowing and seeing. It is there that the deepest between the two of you moves.
It is there that you see each other as you haven’t seen each other before. It is there that the old between the two of you isn’t a factor and isn’t depended on. In the profoundness of the honesty of that, everything stops and the two of you meet as new. What you’ve experienced before won’t help you in the new. Unassisted knowing does it. What you first are, within, does it.
Everything can continue as it has, but it won’t compare to the more, within, that you know and haven’t been yet: that tiny little bit of real knowledge, within, that you know is worth more than everything that has been so far. Know it in each other, and in being oriented to that, see each other.
In being oriented to that, subtleties of your personalities will be touched and will open that are, within each of you, new. It will help change how you relate through your personalities.
549 – Soul Food: Difficulty and Pressure in a Polarized World
“The food for your soul while you’re in a body is difficulty and pressure.” John explains why this is so, why the soul is so difficult to see until after we die, and what our soul’s evolution is dependent on.
548 – Right Side Up: No Longer Taking Your Stress to Heart
The responsibilities that come with working in the world can feel stressful. Is there a way of moving more lightly in it all? John explains how it’s all dependent on what we belong to, within.
547 – Profound Honesty: Being Okay When You Don’t Feel Okay
Shame, fear, anger … is it really possible to be okay in any circumstance, even when feeling attacked by others? There is transformative potential, and John explains.
546 – Less and Even Less: Why Weakness is Your Way Home, Within
Contrary to worldly conditioning, weakness isn’t something to conceal or avoid; it’s actually key to embodying a full spectrum of awareness. John describes the journey, and what it requires.
545 – From Fighting to Flourishing: A New Way Forward with Your Teenager
For this mother, who is struggling in relation to her teenage daughter, what begins as a hard lesson to learn becomes a beautiful crossroads that will deeply change them both.
544 – Evolving as Pure Awareness in War and Peace
An epic conversation that reveals what we’re here for, how to help people suffering the effects of war, what can change the planet, and why it’s up to us.
“My sole purpose is to be, in life, what we are after we’ve died. Through openness and softness of heart and core-splitting honesty at any personal cost, I live as that while actualizing the same in others I meet. I am available as a resource for anyone who recognizes and values this way of being.”
– John de Ruiter
