Q: My question is based around reality in relation to personal responsibility. I feel enormous responsibility for my children, for my wife, for the earth, for the pain that’s happening all around the world, for the wars, the hunger, the greed that continues to go on. Where do I sit between that responsibility and my personal responsibility to be ‘true to thy self?’

John: You’re not responsible for everything you perceive. You are responsible for every little bit that you know in your heart. If you go beyond that, you’ll be removed from what you know in your heart and you’ll make practical what isn’t yet practical for you. 

Q: It’s painful to watch others suffer. If we don’t feel that, does that not make us human? What is the essence of to be truly human?  Because you said openness and softness is more important than life itself, but without life, at least in this manifestation, what is there?

John: Without life you wouldn’t know this manifestation, and without you opening and softening in your heart, this manifestation has little value. The value of it all comes from what you are being in your heart. 

Q: And yet when I feel pain and hurt as I open and soften, I have a great experience of self?

John: Pain puts you against what you know in your heart, or it puts you completely into what you know in your heart. When you are honest in the midst of pain, pain puts you into what you know. It puts you into a real knowledge that’s in your heart. That real knowledge has to do with real beingness. It isn’t going to be abstract. 

You can’t reach your child if you are not opening and softening in your heart. It doesn’t matter what you say or what you do. If you’re not opening and softening in your heart toward your child, you don’t see your child and you’re not letting your child see you. There’s no real connection.

Q: So total vulnerability and total surrender in all moments is the path.

John: Total surrender to open and soften in your heart in the midst of anything. It’s what real parenting is. Without that your parenting isn’t real. Without it, you are to your own children a false example.  When you are opening and softening in your heart toward your children, you have their attention. It’s what they respond to. It’s what they’re looking for.

Q: My first two children had very difficult transitions into this life, I would say, and I did my best at that time to hold my centre, and yet there’s times when I do not.

John: You can go way deeper than holding your centre. Your centre is much deeper than what you’ve held in it. 

Q: What is the resistance that I hold to finding a deeper sense of centredness?

John: It’s inconvenient to your comfort. It will cost you your comfort.

Q: Do I have to be uncomfortable to find that depth?

John: No. If you have any attraction to comfort or discomfort, if you have any aversion to comfort or discomfort, you will remain separate from the deepest in you. You going straight within cannot be moderated by comfort or discomfort. It cannot be moderated by pain or pleasure. It cannot be moderated by gain or loss. If all of that is good with you, there’s nothing in the way. 

Q: I’ll continue to seek centre and find the depth of that centre. It’s a beautiful life.

John: When you’re in it, your children will read the beingness of it in your face, and they’ll read your knowing in it in your eyes. It’s the only two things that they have real recognition of. They know it when you have it. They know it when you don’t have it. When you have it, they believe you. When you don’t have it, they want to believe you.

Q: Thank you.