Q: I’ve been meditating for many years. I’ve done satsang for a long time, and I always wanted to get enlightened. That was my big aim. I made some experiences, I had some understandings and then this aim vanished more and more. Now I don’t know where I am anymore.

John: Return to what you were quite some time ago when you were really little, what you were, within, when you were a lovely, lovely little boy; how you moved, within, without all of the concern that you came into later, when you were a sweet wonder to others. It’s when you were what you are now looking for.

Q: It’s very, very simple then.

John: If you would have come into a practice when you had it, you would have lost it. Different practices introduce you to different parts of it and has you then dependent on your use of it, and it doesn’t have you being the whole of it. You’ve already been the whole of it. You’re able to be such awareness, with such heart, expressing through your self with such vulnerability. You’re able to be fundamentally, delightfully inexperienced. You’re able to be, directly, inexperienced beingness – a whole heart of that. It naturally comes with the sweet complete letting go of every speck of self-importance, and you’re in again…in and looking outwards. Openness and softness of heart that doesn’t need an idea. Openness and softness of heart that has need of nothing and loves running with an idea.

Q: That sounds like a contradiction to me, love and an idea.

John: When you were delightfully little, you didn’t need an idea. You weren’t stuck to any idea. You were able to be what you were within, without a clue, without an idea. And when you would come to an idea you were delight, running with it. If you would lose your idea, you lost nothing. It’s what you were without an idea and what you were within an idea that had you being what you were.

Q: Do you mean it’s fun having ideas as long as I don’t get attached to them? As long as I don’t identify?

John: The more that you take your self seriously, the more that you lose the fun within ideas. You have hope in ideas instead of pure hope in you. With pure hope, you have need of nothing. You can propel forward without the holding of something, and you can stop without loss.

You don’t love self-importance, but you’ve become convinced in your self that you need a sense of importance, even though when you were delightfully little it isn’t that that you were relating to. It isn’t importance or self-importance that you were first relating to. That enabled you to come from what was different, from what was authentic, within…brimming with beingness. When you did something, you easily filled what you were doing with what you were. That’s what made you love doing.

Q: I can’t remember that it ever was like that. If I feel back into childhood it’s always, just always heaviness.

John: In looking back, you’re relating to what you are now coming from so you’ll be looking back through what you’re coming from. You’ll be remembering everything that you were turning into, instead of remembering what you came from. You can’t really remember what you came from without in some way coming from it again. It’s a different relating, within, that has you remembering.

Q: I have one more practical question. I’m working on a computer all day long, and in the evening I find it very difficult to switch it off because somehow it’s got habits and mind still spinning and spinning…and I find it so difficult to stop.

John: Instead of relating, as awareness, to beingness…relating to beingness and relating to knowing…you relate to your patterns. In relating to your patterns, you make a self of that. You make a self that is of relating to patterns. It’s how you spend your day in whatever it is that you do. When you exist by way of patterns, you need every pattern to hold; every pattern fundamentally needs to continue, even when you’re not actually needing it. So even when you’re done with your day, the pattern of your day will keep cycling in your experience.

If in your day you are enjoying beingness, liking beingness more than what you’re doing, whatever it is that you’re doing, then when the doing stops you’re in what you were in the doing; you’re in the beingness. When you’re not, as awareness, in the enjoyment of beingness, you will be the doing instead of just simply doing the doing. So then, when the doing stops, its pattern continues within, meaning that that pattern is your beingness. It is that beingness that makes what you’re doing fundamentally not satisfying.

In the end of your dying it will be easy for you to come to rest because everything is going. You’re able, as awareness, to come to such rest, within, without everything going, and you’re able to be that in your doing. Without being focused on an idea, without being focused on doing something or not doing something, like being, within. Return to the enjoyment of being, within. You don’t need anything in liking being, within.

In liking being within, you are directly relating to being, within. It’s what you were before you had something. In enjoying being, within, you are fundamentally free of gain and of loss, enabling you to enjoy being, within, even within the forms of gain and of loss; enabling you to have without needing, instead of needing something from what you have. If you’re needing something from what you have, you’re not, as awareness, enjoying being, within.

Q: Thank you.