Q: Hello John. My question is about how to make the appropriate kind of effort. Often I experience meditation as a progression from thinking to gradually feeling more peaceful and silent, and other times something much bigger than that just happens, and I like that place a lot more. From the perspective of letting go into this place that I don’t seem to be able to create, my efforts to meditate seem like a waste of energy.

John: Meditation is a help. It’s a tool. It’s a form, it’s a practice, it’s a technique that offers a space, a held-together space where you can realize something a little deeper within that what you’re accustomed to experiencing. The form, the technique, the practice, the tool is a goodness; it’s able to help you. It also makes things worse, because as soon as you experience dropping deeper within while meditating, you’ll believe that it’s because of the meditation. You’ll believe the technique. You do the technique and you experience something deeper. You attribute the deeper sense of meaning that’s devoid of the levels of meaning of your self, your personality and your life, you attribute that to the meditation, the tool.

The meditation is a help, it isn’t you. To be in meditation correctly, from a deeper level, you very quickly realize what you really are in meditating. As soon as you realize, then you be what you know without the meditation, and you be that within all of your thinking, all of your feeling, all of your mind, your body, your relationships, your personality and your life.

When you meditate and it works – even just once – you know the truth of what you really are. The meditation helped you to see it. For that to occur even once, you know how to be, and you don’t need the tool, the technique, the practice, the form, for you to be.

Q: It feels like I’m constantly putting something in the way or some kind of intention is getting in the way.

John: What gets in the way is you having need of something. You want to have that experience again, and what you really are, that you come to easily in meditation, has need of nothing. When you settle deeply in a meditation, you are letting go of need of all things. You are letting go of the need of your self, the need of your mind, the need of your body, the need of your life. You’re dropping beneath the levels of form that you can see, enabling you to be what is unseen, you dwelling within your being. It’s easily accessible by actually settling into having need of nothing. Once that works in a meditation you want to have that experience again, which opposes and exploits what meditation is. It exploits the tool and it opposes what you realize within the use of the tool. The need of meditating to have that experience and that sense again goes against what you’ve realized in meditation; it goes against what you really are.

What makes meditation work is you. The meditation, on its own, doesn’t work without you, without you being what you really are in that form. Once realized, you don’t need that form and you don’t need to come into the same experience again. What’s fundamentally realized in meditation isn’t an experience. Meditation gives you a different level of experience that you’re not accustomed to. What’s offered within that deeper level of experience is direct knowledge. That direct knowledge is you, and you can be that knowledge, you can move as that knowledge in the midst of your mind, your emotions, your feelings, your will, your personality. But it only works if you are being what you really are, which means that what you are has need of nothing in the midst of all of this form of mind and self and personality, you fundamentally have need of none of it. It’s all there for you to express what you really are. It isn’t there, you don’t have these forms so that you can acquire meaning or have meaning or feel meaningful. It’s for you to be meaning in all of it.

You have form for you, meaning, to assimilate that form, assimilating form that isn’t meaning yet; you, meaning, assimilating form into you, which makes that form the same as you. But as soon as you separate a little bit from what you really are to be that form and its experience, you’re going to register lack because there is a lack of you really being there. If you separate a little bit from what you really are, there is a lack of what you really are in that form which gives you the impetus to do something, to use form to address that lack of what you really are. If you are not all really there, you’ll register lack of you. You’ll project that onto something that you can do. You’ll use thought or feeling, will or emotion to address that lack.

The more that you do to address that lack, the more form you give to that lack. It’s all a trap, but it isn’t all inherently a trap. It isn’t a trap until you turn it into a trap. All it is, is levels and levels of unintegrated form. If you’re being what you really are in those forms, they’re not traps. They are all possible, possibility, potential for what you really are to have that much form. It’s only when you separate a little bit, that instead of being meaning, you are out there in these forms looking for meaning, collecting meaning, acquiring meaning, being dependent on experiences and sense perception for you to have meaning instead of you being meaning.

A small child still in its innocence isn’t in a trap, isn’t in a trap like most others who have in some way left their innocence. With every little touch that you leave your innocence, you turn your own forms into a self-made trap and you start to create forms of illusion, using all of this form that you’re in – your thinking, your feeling, your emotions and your will. All become used to give form to beliefs you have, beliefs that you’ve adopted. All of these beliefs that you give form to are then forms of illusion that register in your mind, your nervous system. These beliefs all form this trap you’ve made. The more that you want something, the more that you’re caught in it. The more that you are at rest in having need of nothing in the midst of your trap, the trap loses its power and what remains is form, not integrated, that you are in. In being awareness rested within, any movement in these forms you have is then a movement of being, which enables you, a being, to assimilate these raw forms of yours, the raw forms of thought and feeling. They all slowly, through movement, are assimilated into you: meaning aware. It’s you as a being processing your self.

As you, as being, process thought and feeling, you, a being, come into the field of mind and it slowly becomes your field instead of it being a field that you have, the field becomes you as you assimilate it. It’s all really perfect. These forms that you can see are perfect raw materials, perfect resources that are not like you yet. The form itself isn’t perfect; the form is so not you. What’s perfect is that they are given to you for you to assimilate, but it’s for you to assimilate as a being. It isn’t for you to assimilate these forms as these forms, in being these forms. As soon as you identify with the forms, you’ll develop as these forms but that development will lack the meaning of what you really are, which drives you to do more. It drives you to move more as form in search of meaning. That drive is illusory. Acquiring meaning is illusory. Doing something with your thinking and your feeling to have meaning is illusory. The only real meaning is you, awareness, absolutely rested, having need of nothing. All there is is you, meaning, able to fill all of this form, and to assimilate these forms, to integrate these forms.

It’s easy to see how all of this works within the innocence of a small child. The movement within the innocence doesn’t do so that it can be; it’s already being. The doing arises out of the richness of being that is already there. So a child, still in its innocence, loves doing because all of that doing expresses what it is wholesomely being that is already complete. The doing doesn’t add to the completeness. The doing makes the completeness seen; it gives it further form. It doesn’t make the completeness of being better; it just makes it solid, identifiable, seeable. It becomes solid in feeling and in thought, within the senses.

As the innocence of a small child moves, beauty is seen.

Q: Thank you very much.