Q: There’s a lot of turmoil in our selves at the moment. Hans’s father just passed away and my mom is a few days away from passing away as well, and though it was very hard for the self, I also strongly sense the beauty of it all, especially with my mom. I know, even more than before, the value of staying open and soft no matter what. I only know to sit here and ask you to help me to be as open and soft as I can possibly be.

John: Their dying is a kind directive to you. Keep that you are going to die in your heart. Live with your death as a sweet presence in your heart. We are all here only for a time and we are all leaving. If we lose sight of that, we also lose sight of what we’re here for. Our death, held as a sweetness in our heart, gives us a depth of perspective in our living; that we don’t become lost in our selves and in the busyness of our lives, that our life isn’t about our self. It’s all about the constancy that’s just beneath our selves. It begins in the heart and follows through into all of the levels of our being. That’s our life that doesn’t end with our death.

Each day is like a page that turns in our book – our book of life. When our book is finished, we are gone to the next. It’s only how we’ve moved as beings within our book of life that really counts. All of our troubles in our selves – the difficulties and the troubles that we experience as selves in this life – are there to help us draw from what is deeper, within, than any of our troubles. When we are oriented to the heart and deeper, every difficulty draws up the heart and the being, up into our life. To see it any other way is to lose sight of what we really are. To move in the midst of pain and difficulty in a way that only love can: that’s your life – for you to be and move in the midst of anything as only love can.

Q: When you are love, is there still pain?

John: In the stretch of your self, because of love living your self, yes. Love knows no pain, and love moves everywhere that it can. Any condition of your self, when you, awareness, are open, you flood in as love that knows no pain. Love doesn’t remove the pain that it enters. It does quietly fill it. Love filling pain turns pain into compassion. Love opens levels of pain and difficulty into what is deeper and higher.

Q: And I, as love, do nothing. I, as self, do nothing. I’ve been trying to take the pain, do something with it, take it away, open in it, but then I’m still working with pain.

John: As love, you do nothing while you, in your self as love, do so much. You’re both. You are, in what is a little bit deeper, love without a face. As that comes into the surface of your life, comprehended in your self, you are then love with a face. That’s the gift of your self to love. The face that is offered through your self to love, love fills. Love fills the face of pain. It brings a sweet depth of understanding into your face. It brings your heart up into your face.

There is no pain, no difficulty too much for love to fill. Any love embodied in your self and in your person leaves you quietly, sweetly, deeply indebted to what difficulties you’ve had.

Q: I’ve been in touch with my mum’s being while she’s still in her body. It’s been such a gift and then at the same time I’m dealing with her person part that’s still in her body and that is confronting me with my oldest and my most painful pattern. I want to be love in there, as well.

John: Within the wilting that comes with dying, like the wilting of a flower. The wilting is such a loveliness. The wilting is real. When there’s a holding in it, that brings out into form what’s been hidden in the person. When there’s a softening in the wilting, that brings out the sweetest and the best.

Q: I told her that she has the chance to let go of that holding now, and of the wanting and the will. She said she understood. I realized it’s up to her.

John: With the wilting that comes with dying, the veils within the self pass away so there isn’t the capacity for control that there used to be. So when there’s a hardening, a closing, the form and manifestation of that is stronger because of the need to maintain a sense of control.

It also follows through with the opening and the softening. As the veils pass away, love moves more like it does in a small child and in a baby, bringing the whole cycle to a completion that only moves with the opening.

Q: And the opening will come anyway, in any person dying.

John: The opening only comes when you, awareness, open. Nothing makes you open: nothing in life and nothing in death. You are more than both. Neither one can control you unless you give it your power. Any power contained within your self, without it being leaked through your self, takes place because of you being what you really are in your self. The power stays; your real power, the power of what you really are, stays with you in all of your self.

As soon as you give your power to what you think and feel, to your emotions and your will, you separate from what you really are and your self becomes all leaky; power being moved in a way of separation; power being leaked through thinking and feeling, emotion and will, which cuts off the being from moving through these forms. When the power of what you really are is kept in what you really are and not given to your self, that frees you as a being to move through and manifest in thinking and feeling, emotion and will; a completely different manifestation of life than what self-orientation can realize.

There, love comes into form, filling and transforming all of the forms of your self in a way that only love can. There is no other way that’s real. It’s the only way, the one way that’s true to you.

Q: Can you show me how to not give away the power at moments when it’s hard, when it’s going towards the self?

John: By not attempting to have clarity. When you attempt to be clear while under pressure, you’ll give your power to your will and you’ll use unintegrated effort
that manifests as emotion, which begins to separate you from a depth and delicacies of feeling, putting you into conditioned thinking instead of free, clear, open thinking.

First, find your clarity in the midst of what you feel as being clear, where you’re honest not to the feeling but to your clarity, enabling you to distinguish the clarity within the feeling from the feeling itself, and then you be that clarity without the feeling, so you’re no longer dependent on feeling for you to be clear. When you are free from feeling, you open into feeling, giving you a depth and a capacity of feeing that you haven’t known in your self before. In becoming free of feeling, you don’t lose feeling; you come into much more. The negative emotion that you move in, if you could see, shows you the delicacies of feeling that you haven’t awakened to yet.

All you really need, if it’s there, is your response to the resonance that’s in it. You don’t need to feel it or see it. You don’t need to understand it. You either know a resonance in it or you don’t. If it ever-so-slightly touches something known, within, without that touching any form, there you go, straight in.

Any kind of negativity is a closed door to the exquisite. When you see that, it isn’t to be hard on your self. When you see it, it’s an invitation. It’s an invitation to open and come in, open into your heart and come in to your being, and it’s through that pathway that love moves.

Love doesn’t move without it being empowered. All of the power that you experience in resistance and in negativity is the power of love separate from love, moved as hardness. When you open in it, the hardness cracks open and all of the power that was held in it is released to where it belongs. It’s given through your heart to your being. Love is empowered and love moves.

The power that’s there in resistance and negativity is power concentrate. When it’s released into your heart through openness and from there into what’s deeper, the deeper that it goes the more it expands. As much as negativity and resistance, closing and hardening, can feel so powerful, that is nothing to its potential. It is a power that is distorted away from love. Its real potential is only in love.

Q: I see that it makes negativity beautiful. And it makes me look differently at my mom, and at my self, and everywhere and everyone.

John: You might have seen those really hard, strange-looking paper cubes in some restaurants. That’s like negativity or resistance: it’s all closed and hard. You can be creative and use it for some things, but that’s not its real purpose. Put it in some water and it quickly unfolds and expands into a useful serviette.

Where there’s openness, that’s what love does to your self. When you have one of those little paper cubes, add water. When you have negativity and resistance, add warmth. The innocence of a small child loves adding water and loves adding warmth.

Q: It reminds me of a dream I had of you in which I had a bottle of coffee creamer with me and you started pouring the coffee creamer all over me I thought, “this is fun”, so I did the same thing. Your talking about warmth and water makes me think of the coffee creamer.

John: It just really depends on how it touched you and what your deeper sense was in it.

Q: My deeper sense was that it’s okay to take heavy things in life lightly.

John: Unconditionally open into your sexuality. When it is openness and unconditioned, that pours you into your deeper womanness, the deeper levels of your womanness. That’s the deeper level of your dream. It’s what you need for what is next of you in your self.

Q: Has ‘next’ to do with greater reality?

John: Not greater reality, but the deeper levels of reality opened and fulfilled prepare you for what is greater than reality.

Sexuality in any way at all given to your self awakens appetite within attraction and aversion. Your sexuality unconditionally returned to your heart and from there poured into your being enables love to expand and completely infill your humanness, your womanness: a being-woman in contrast to a self-woman.

Q: And bringing the sexuality completely back to your heart, can you do that by your self or do you need your partner to do the same thing?

John: You fully need both for you to embody your sexuality as a being. You don’t need to have a concept and an understanding of how it all moves, what it will look like, what it will change. As openness and softness, you simply pour all of your sexuality into your heart and you let that move into all of your awakening, and you’ll see what comes back up into your self.

Through the pathway of giving it all back, it awakens love. Love becomes one with your sexuality and streams into your self and into your body. What returns as your sexuality is, there, so different from what was given.

Sexuality is the final frontier within humanness that attraction and aversion cannot open.

Q: I don’t really understand that sentence.

John: The sentence is like a seed planted in your garden. Because of your openness it will grow. It’s the love in the words that gives you the resonance.