Q: There is again and again the experience of nothingness when I allow myself to fall deep within. Not just the absence of thoughts or feelings or perceptions, it is that there is really nothing and it has the quality of a deep peace and silence. Nothing moves.

John: The stillness isn’t a quality in itself. The stillness is that as awareness you’re not moving your self, so concerning the movement of your self you’re still, but concerning what’s deeper than your self, you’re not still. You’re not able to be still. You move as your being moves. As long as, as awareness, you’re knowing, you’re moving. So when you drop beneath your self, and concerning your self you’re still, you drop into what you can’t recognize from the perspective of your self so it looks like nothing and it looks like the void, or a profound emptiness, or a nothingness. What you’re in is your own being.

It matters that you enter your being, but what matters more is that your being is not your escape from your self. Your being is what you are in your self, while you move your self, so while you are not still. So you are being the same as your own being while you’re in movement of your self, while you’re thinking and feeling, while you’re using your will, while you’re moving your self in life, while you’re interacting with others. There, you are manifesting your being as you live.

Your being is no escape from life or your self. It’s no escape from thinking. Your being is what you are while you think, and your thinking will reflect that. Your thinking becomes the same as what you’re being in it. Your feeling becomes the same as what you’re being in it. Your will becomes the same as what you’re being in it.

As you are being what your being is in the midst of your self, while you’re moving your self, so while you’re engaged in your self, your energy centres open, and through your energy centres your being moves as energy into your self, and the way you move your self will be the same way that your being moves.

When you move by power in your self, the power of closing and hardening, you close your energy centres; you override your own energy centres and you use the powers of your self to move your self. But that kind of movement makes you in your self not like your own being, and in all of your movement you’re separate from your being until you drop your self, escape from your self, escape from all of your thinking, all of your movement, and you are in your being. Then you develop the pattern of using your being as a reprieve from your self, as a holiday away from your self.

A really good example of that is meditation. It doesn’t matter what your self is like. It doesn’t matter what your life is like, what your behaviour is like. At any point, you can stop and you can put to rest your forms and you can access a little bit of your own being, and your ability to do that can be used in your self as a satisfaction – that you’re connected to your being. But you’re only connected to your being when you stop your self. You’re not connected to your being when you move your self unless you’re being as what you have accessed in meditation while you move your self.

Q: So it means it’s for me to integrate these experiences from the being into the self. Is it so?

John: Yes. Initially, yes. It isn’t really the experience of your being. If you integrate the experience of your being into your self, you’ll be dependent on always having to experience your being for you to move as your own being in your self, and you don’t need the experience of your being. The experience is the self aspect. It’s the amount of your self that is already like your being that is the experience of your being. You don’t need that for you to move as your being in your self. If you’re dependent on it, in that way you’re separating from your being for the sake of the experience and you mistake the experience to be your being.

Your being is more what you know than it is the experience. The experience shows you you know. When you experience your being, you’re awakening to the knowledge of your own being. When you realize knowing your being, you don’t need that experience to sustain being what you know in your being. For you to be what you know in your self is for you to be what your being is like, which isn’t based on an experience; it’s based on your direct knowledge of your own being. So what you’re moving in your self is more like the essence of the experience of your being than the experience itself. That enables you to have an evenness of being in your self. The evenness is your own freedom from experience, including the experience of your being.

Q: I understand, and I could not put it in words.

John: You don’t need to. You’re able to be this without any understanding. You’re able to be this without any thought process. You’re able to be this without a mind. If you were to be completely brain-damaged, you would have no disability in being just like your being, in the midst of that damaged self and body, in the midst of all of that disability. You don’t need your self for you to be your being, and you don’t need your being for you to be what you really are. It’s that realization that enables you to move into the deeper levels of your being.

Q: Are nothingness and emptiness somehow connected with this, what precedes the being?

John: No. The emptiness, when you drop beneath your self into your being, the emptiness is the privation of your self. The emptiness means that you are empty of your self when you are in your being. It isn’t that your being is empty. Your being is anything but empty. Your being is all form, and all movement – just not the kind that you recognize in your self. So from the perspective of your self, there is no movement in your being and there’s nothing there. But there’s a quality that you know the truth of, and a depth that you know the truth of that you’re not able to measure with the use of perception in your self. So then you call it nothingness.

Q: It is totally fulfilling.

John: It fulfills you, not your self. It answers you. It answers you because the forms that you’re in, that you’re being and you’re moving as, are forms and movement that is perfect to you. It’s accurate to what you really are, so it answers you. Your self can’t answer you. Your being answers you, because it’s form that is the same as you. What answers you in your self is when you’re being the same as your own being, in the midst of your self. That answers your self. The result of your self being answered is that your self becomes the same as your being.

Q: It’s not possible to imagine something deeper or more. There is nobody there who could wish something.

John: That’s because it’s only a who that is capable of wishing. Who you are is capable of wishing. What you really are can’t even relate. You enter your own being by releasing the who. With the who released, you are a what. There’s no identity to a what. There’s a quality and a depth, but in your self there’s a who.

Q: This happens in this nothingness. There are not two; there is just oneness.

John: Yes. And you’re able to give this oneness form beyond your own being. The forms beyond your being are the forms of your self. You’re able to be this quality and this depth. You’re able to be what you are in the midst of who you are. That makes who you are authentic. If you’re moving who you are without being what you really are in the midst of it, then the movement of who you are is inauthentic.

That you access your own being is not everything. What is everything is for you to be that in the midst of who you are, in the movement of who you are, in the movement of your self. What’s more than your own being is you manifesting your being in your self, because you’re being it there.