Q: Hello, I’m very glad to be able to meet you and ask you a question. What led you to choose this format of answering questions rather than talking to people about your knowledge and experience?

John: It’s because of what I’m relating to, and that’s not so much the giving of information – even the giving of expected or valued information – but that of actually meeting, which begs the question of what it is that’s meeting, who it is that’s meeting. We’re accustomed to relating as persons, wanting something, needing something, underlying everything, searching for meaning, and the resource that is most used and most available is that of relating to our past, past experiences of meaning. We have, from that, favourable and unfavourable experiences: that of having meaning and that of lacking meaning.

From that alone we begin to develop patterns, simple patterns of aversion to our experiences of negative meaning, and we have attraction to meaning – wanting to have again an experience of meaning that has, in our experience, already proven itself. What we understand within in looking for meaning is that we have ability, the ability to do something, the ability to create as a person, interacting with our external environment, the ability as a self to recognize a little bit of what does underlie everything in our environment. We effort in every way that we can to identify that meaning that we’re looking for, because we have such ability on so many levels to be able to do something. We use that as our first strength. We naturally use what we experience ourselves as being best at, so we try to do much in order to have much meaning, and then to do as much again to secure that meaning, making meaning that we can find and hold a personal acquisition.

The more that we work with our ability and what power we experience ourselves to have in securing meaning for ourselves, the closer we come to what it is that we’re wanting, to what it is that we are fundamentally needing within: meaning, much meaning, more than much meaning, and desperately all meaning. When we come to the point of wanting all meaning, we’ve already been realizing that what meaning we’ve come to with all of our doing isn’t able to be kept, requiring again the doing of much to keep what we’re not able to, then transferring meaning to something physical, with all such meaning still not ultimately satisfying. We go deeper within, naturally using what resources we have – resources of the deep within – using them to identify outside of ourselves deeper meaning. As much as we can ultimately come to of deeper meaning within and deeper meaning without, it is still, in some way, fleeting.

We begin to identify with concepts, within, profound concepts of meaning because it is meaning that we’re needing. We know what we want. We desperately want meaning. We’re so accustomed to relating to what we want because it’s by that that we’re able to fashion and create our experiences, or at least guide them.

What really begs the question is what are we? When we are profoundly desperate to know something that satisfies, we don’t even stop on the question of “Who are we?” “Who am I?” but most desperately “What am I? What is it that we are?” It is really the same as “What are we looking for? What are we desperately wanting? What do we want to have?” It isn’t even, really, meaning. Most profoundly, what we are wanting to have in everything within and everything without is what we are. Looking within, then, to know what we are is as promising as it is fundamentally threatening.

When honesty begins to look within to know what we are, everything that we honestly know that we are not is, in terms of what we’re looking for, gone. Such direction of looking within for what we are promises much and offers nothing. When there is a profound receiving that nothing within is offered, what occurs within is rest: most profound rest from needing something, wanting something, doing something to satisfy what we are.

When our entire interior comes to rest, what is easy to know is that we are, most simply, being. Within such restedness within, we know that beingness. Such beingness nurtures and satisfies what we are as awareness. Arriving at that, we know that there’s deeper. What is it that is being? What it is that is being is meaning: not a person of meaning, not a self of meaning, not even a being of meaning. All that remains is meaning. Meaning able to do. The first doing is meaning, moving as that. When meaning moves, love is. Such beingness of meaning, such as love, is ultimately satisfying on the level of being but what remains is that we have other forms. Meaning has subsequent forms, not just a being, but with us a self and a person.

When we’re not being what we first are, just simply meaning that has need of nothing because it already is everything, as soon as we’re not as awareness first being that then we will register lack, and then as meaning, meaning looks for something that it already is but believes that there is more that is yet to be meaning, using its ability and using its forms to then acquire meaning, at first acquire the beingness that it knows – its own movement, love – and then wanting love, needing love instead of such beingness being the result of its own movement: meaning moving as awareness.

It is able to move further out into its own forms, out of the level of beingness and into the level of the self, where meaning is able within the self to capture an experience, to register an experience, where there is a feeling and thought to do what is experienced of its own beingness – love. On the level of the self it’s able to reproduce love, to create it, to hold it as an experience. As a person it’s able to do even more. It’s able to speak it, to show it, to relate it to another and with another.

The further out we go in our forms the more possibility and opportunity we encounter to acquire what it is that we’re wanting. Because it is all so immediate, so possible, so palpable, we begin to believe as awareness that that which is most outward, while still having an interior, is most meaningful, and in our relating forgetting what we first are: meaning that has need of nothing and that is all ability to be what it is and do what it is through all of our forms.