Q: If I look in my life over the last few years I’ve seen a lack of resonance with teachers, with teaching that I’ve been following. I found myself not interested anymore in any form of ritual or teachers, and here you are, here we are and it feels to me like you are saying exactly that, like there is nothing to do really. And it feels a little unsettling to me even though on a deeper level it resonates so much. I can still sense that there is something in me that wants to have an experience or a final something so I can really be. I’m so used to following a path for the last 40 years whether it’s this one or that one, and fooling myself somehow in experiences. It’s really something that just takes you. But it feels like the moment I start realizing it or feeling it, boom it’s done, it’s gone.

John: In all of your life you’ve given away that much power. You’ve become everyone. It’s become so familiarized with being taken by thought, by feelings, by emotion even though on their own they don’t nurture and they’re not sublime. They are not sublime unless you are sublime in them. If you are sublime in your thinking and your feeling, you’re not being your self; you’re being something that is sublimely lovelier than your self.

Emotion, thought and feeling are not conveyers of meaning. They don’t move meaning, they don’t manifest meaning, they manifest whatever it is that you are being. If you are closing and hardening, that beingness, distorted, corrupted beingness is immediately reflected in your feeling, your thinking, your emotions, and as you move it it takes hold in your nervous system. Once it has form, form holds.

If you build a house on a really poor foundation, if you build in a way that is far from being level or straight, the building, the form is going to reflect it and it won’t be easy to change it. You’d have to tear it all down and start over again. In our selves we don’t want to start all over again. We’ve invested so much energy and building, and we put our name to it all. To start all over is offensive to everything that we’ve put into our selves. To awaken to the deeper truth, within, immediately shows us all of our lack in how we’ve built, in how we’ve been, in how we’ve lived.

To live your awakening means that you would start all over again from a completely different foundation, a different footing, a whole different level of meaning. It’s all meaning known, known directly. It’s no longer meaning that you’ve adopted but don’t really know. It’s not inherited meaning that’s projected through your mind from your genetics. It isn’t learned meaning. It isn’t a loss to start all over, to be able to see clearly and to start all over from the inside out, based just on that clarity, to be able to start all over from what is actually and directly known – before you die.

Q: It’s a moment to moment, split second attention somehow, without the efforting of being true to, to truth. It’s been very important to me to really have total respect and love for whatever was true, whatever the consequences with no arrogance or anything, to hurt anyone or my self. Is that what you mean? Yeah.

John: That doesn’t begin with thought or feeling. It doesn’t begin with a concept or an idea; it begins with a very nurturing, most un-kind-of movement in your body. A movement of deeper levels, a movement of being not at all a conditioned movement. To the sense of identity it’s a foreign movement. Its substance is completely foreign to our sense of individuality, identity. It doesn’t move with an idea, it doesn’t move as any familiar kind of structure, but it is warm, nurturing. If nothing at all is added to it, it is sublime. If we don’t put it into a category, a category of awakening, a category of spirituality, a category of depth, a category of understanding, if we don’t put it in any category, then on its own it completely takes over. It takes over your feelings, your thinking, your emotions. All of your forms start to behave differently. They begin to manifest this nurturing un-understood warmth, this movement inside of your body that’s so difficult to quantify. It isn’t grasped, managed, used or controlled by anything that you’re used to.

It’s a little bit like what you see in the eyes of a newborn baby. It starts to move inside of your body, it starts to take over your eyes, your consciousness, and as it moves in you it converts everything of yours to that. It moves into all of your body, all of your self, it moves into your personality, freely into all of the little things of your life like water. It has no mind as to how that may disturb your nervous system. As it moves through your nervous system, as it’s free to take control of your nervous system it cleans it; it cleans it of every little thing you’ve ever struggled with. It cleans it of all of your ways of pain and suffering. When you look in the eyes of a newborn baby you don’t see familiar feeling. When you look in the eyes of a new born baby you don’t see a person; what you see is meaning, but meaning so foreign. It’s an unidentifiable kind of meaning. You can’t find a beginning to it, you can’t find an end to it, it doesn’t do anything to you, it doesn’t address your life, your personality, your self. It’s like it can’t even see all of that, but it sees you.

It’s a little like letting the universe – all of it – come into your body and take over everything: your thinking, your feeling, your emotions, your whole life. It comes into your personal space and replaces you. If the cosmos isn’t free to come into all of your body and take over, how can what the cosmos and the universe and what you come from, come into your body and take over? The universe in all of its meaning we can see a little bit, but what it all comes from, what you come from, that’s really what your body, your self and your life is for. If you spend your self and your life on thought and feeling, will and emotion and all that you seem to be able to build with that, you become lost in it. You don’t know you anymore; you only know you through your thinking, your feeling, your will, your emotions and everything that you seem to be able to do with that, but to know and be you, not who you really are – it’s much more foreign than that – it’s more like what you really are, and then what all that comes from, what makes it so, all in your body that is able to think and feel.

It would be a little bit like a newborn baby speaking intelligently to you telling you all that it sees, saying everything that’s real, but everything that it speaks and says doesn’t address anything you’re used to. It’s like a completely different language of intelligent love that uses your words to speak. You would quickly be drawn into everything that it is.

If you have any concern for your surface life, your functionality, all of the things that you’ve worked for, then you’ll hesitate and it’ll slow it all down until, on terms of thought and feeling, you feel comfortable. As soon as you’re comfortable, what is in that newborn baby no longer has power with you. It’s no longer free – the most unusual and direct kind of language – it’s no longer free to tell you the truth. It’s no longer free to stream into all of your body, all of you, but as soon as you die there isn’t anything else. You are in all that’s real and true because you’re the same.

To be all that you are after you’ve died while you still live, while you have a body, with all that’s free to think, to feel, to move, to form your life … and then when you die there isn’t really a change. You are all known, lived, known in life as clearly as you are known after you’ve died.