Q: Hello. Last night you spoke of vulnerability, and what’s here is a desire to open or to meet, and yet what also is here is a response of heart pounding and things. Could you say something about vulnerability?

John: When you are quietly being in your heart and there’s any measure of being gentled and quieted, just simply softening, your heart is then already more than what your self is. When you are more than what your self is in the midst of your self, you experience how it is that your self is less. You experience its lack simply for what it is. When you experience its lack you see the vulnerability within your self and, because you are in your self, you experience it directly.

There are multiple levels of awareness. The deeper that awareness is awakened doesn’t take away from awareness still being within the surface levels. As it is, you, awareness, experience what it is to be on that surface level within the vulnerability, while simultaneously you’re being what you really are in your heart, being the more that is in your heart than what there is in your self.

When you’re quieted in your heart and you are warmed within your heart, and that’s simply enough for you, your own being has already come into you, come into your heart, and you’ve already accessed your own being. As you go deeper and deeper into your being, the lack that you feel in your self is going to become greater and greater.

Entering depths of your own being also means that you are entering depths of meaning, meaning that doesn’t exist in your self. For this meaning to come into your self, into a self that isn’t like this yet, is for you to be that meaning. When you’re being these levels within your own being in the midst of your self, your self is exposed for its own lack and the innocence of that lack, while you are being that greater meaning within your self.

Whatever you are being within your self, whatever you come from, any little bit of your own being that you come from, being that within your self is what your self eventually becomes. What beingness you sustain, your self turns into. Your self responds to you.

When you close and harden in your heart in the midst of your self, that calls upon the conditioning in your self, fortifying that conditioning, making your self in a very surface way much stronger; not of an inward kind of strength but an outward kind of strength, a kind of strength that’s dependent on will, thought and emotion.

When you’re being what’s most delicate, within, in the midst of your self, those delicacies of being move through your self and your self responds. Your self becomes that delicacy of being. While it is becoming that, you still experience its lack. Your self will be sweetly vulnerable, sweetly vulnerable to what you’re being in it.

The self is like a child, a child of yours. When you are being delicate awareness in the midst of it, your own self opens and responds to you. A most delicate listening within your self occurs. When you are being what you really are in the midst of your self, you are as a parent to your self.

When you succumb to what isn’t integrated yet in your self, you make your self more than you. When you give your self that much power, you’re giving power to what isn’t integrated in your self. That power given to your self empowers the conditioning in your self, so when you are under pressure you experience that direct influence of conditioning and you’ll be that conditioning.

It’s only when you’re being a delicate awareness, a rested, relaxed awareness in the midst of what self you have, that your self also then relaxes and responds to you, becomes just like you. In this way, by being like what your own being is, being what you really are, in the midst of your self, you are raising your self up. What you really are enters all of your self. The perspective that you have in your self opens and becomes much greater because of what you’re being.

The opening of your perspective is because of the transformation in your self. As you are being in your self what is deeper than your self, your thinking and your feeling deepens. You come into a deeper level of mind, a level of mind that isn’t like the conditioning in your self, a level of mind that is more like you, a level of mind that begins to accurately represent what you are being.

When you are opening within your heart, you are meeting your own being. That openness is your beingness. The softness within your own heart is your own beingness. As you are being within that beingness and you see someone else, you naturally, without effort, meet. That meeting with someone else is an extension of your own being, recognizing and meeting the same in the other.

The less that you rely on your self, the less that you rely on your thinking, your emotions, and your will, the less that you rely on anything of your past when you’re with someone, the more that you are naturally resourcing your own being. When you’re not using your self to meet with someone, you naturally meet as a being. It’s effortless because you’re not using your self. You’re not using your past in what you’re familiar with. It’s your enjoyment of that that gives you beautiful ease.

When you try to meet with someone, any amount of strength or effort that you use, you engage the conditioning in your self. You engage parts of your self that are not yet like you are. The harder that you try, the less you’re able to meet. When you are delicately quieted within in not seeming to be able to meet, what you are is delicate availability. The meeting doesn’t need to come into your own experience. If it needs to come into your experience, it’s your self that you’re engaging and it isn’t your own being that you’re dwelling in. You won’t find that sense of need in your being. The sense of need is only in your self. There’s lack, innocent lack, in your self. There is no lack in your own being.

Adhere to what you think in your self, in your own experience, and you won’t be coming from your heart and your own being. If you are even just a little bit open and soft in your heart in the midst of whatever it is you’re experiencing in your self, you are to some degree coming from your heart and your own being, and you’re being that in your self.

Enjoy being more honest to what you realize in your heart than being honest to what you think and what you feel to tell you what is deeper than your self. What you realize within your own heart is your own being. Your being matters more than your self. When that’s foundational to you, coming from your heart and your own being is without effort.

When you are disquieted in your self and dispirited in your self, enjoy returning to your heart. The quieter that is, the deeper it goes.