Q: It seems that my life currently has become one seemingly ruled by physical pain. From the outside it cannot be seen. From the inside it is extremely noisy, loud, attention-grabbing.

John: That’s your self. It isn’t the pain and it isn’t your body. It’s how you are in your self. Your self is a reflection of you, for you, so that you can see, in form, what you’re being.

Q: Sometimes I feel I can’t go on: it’s unbearable.

John: You are that unbearable in your self, enabling you to experience your self as being that unbearable. For you to see your self won’t be a pleasant sight. The goodness in it is that you can see. You’ve grown accustomed to being miserable in your self and you think it is because of pain in your body. You think it is because of difficulty. Everything that you think it is because of, it isn’t.

Put what love is into a pain body and love will come out of its pores. Love won’t dread being in such a body. Love moves through pain, suffering, and difficulty without a problem. Love won’t heal the pain so that love no longer needs to feel the pain. Love feels the pain and that draws out what love is, without love relating to what the pain is.

When you see an animal in pain, it is just simply that. There isn’t anything extra happening. The animal is in pain. The animal is suffering. It’s in difficulty, and that’s all. That simplicity is its self, unlike your self which doesn’t matter because, despite your self being the way that it is – partly inherited and partly further developed by you in how you have been in it – you are able to return to being the little bit that you know the truth of in your heart without addressing your self first, and without changing your self first.

Your self isn’t the problem. What you have been in it has been the problem. If there is a problem, the problem isn’t something. It isn’t something in you, and it isn’t something outside of your self. It isn’t any circumstance you’re in, however painful the circumstance is. It isn’t somebody else because of what someone else isn’t doing for you, and it isn’t someone else because of what someone else is doing to you. No one and nothing is the problem. If there’s a problem, it’s you. As soon as there is a problem because it’s you, you will naturally, from within that kind of separation, project the problem onto something or someone. You’ll even project it onto your self. You’ll project it onto what you know. Anything but you.

This isn’t particular to you. It is just what this whole world is like. What isn’t like that at all is still in this world and not like that; another cause for pain and suffering and difficulty. That, for what love is, is all right. It isn’t actually a problem because there is heart-understanding for what this world is, for what your self is, regardless of what has made your self the way it is, inherited or made by you.

Look at every little projection you make and you can see your self. It’s that much. Look at everything that you question: every question of why are you not being loved, why do you not have this or that, why can’t you do this or that, why is someone doing such and such to you, why did your past have to be this or that, why is your body not working, why is it hurting, why is it affecting you so much? All of that, and much more, is your self. Your self is being what you are in it.

Your self isn’t the problem. Your self is innocent. Your self is doing what you have trained it to do. If there is a problem with a dog, it isn’t the dog; it’s the owner. If there is a problem with a child, it isn’t the child; it’s the parent. When you take, as awareness, absolute responsibility, then all you have is everything you’re knowing, and there isn’t anything else for you to be and for you to do, regardless of your experience, regardless of your circumstances, regardless of what others are being and doing, or not being and not doing.

The kindness in your being a problem is that all of your forms are serving you, giving you immediate reflection and feedback on what you’re being in them. Without that, you wouldn’t have form with which to see. Every way in which you experience difficulty, you’re actually being endowed with goodness. It’s all showing you; it is all registering in your form, in all of your forms, what you are being and what you are doing. It is all help. If you’re fighting difficulty, if you’re resisting pain, suffering and difficulty, you are at odds with goodness-help. When you take your own pain personally, you’re increasing it. What you do to your form, your form brings back to you so that you can experience what you’re being in it. It is all such beautiful help.

When you are honest to knowing, you don’t want a good life. You don’t want an easy life. You don’t want pain and suffering and difficulty to be gone. All you actually want is to be pure you, in anything. It doesn’t actually make a difference to you, to being pure you in pain or in pleasure, in ease or in difficulty, in abundance or in scarcity. You just love being pure you in anything.

Anything not like that, and you can see your self. If you’re living being pure you in your forms, your self will become the same. Your self will become like that, and then again in everything that’s occurring you’ll be able to see your self. It functions and it looks like you, just a completely different kind than the kind of self that you started with; really different from what you’ve inherited. It makes no difference at all what kind of self you’ve inherited. It doesn’t matter what kind of most difficult patterning it has. It is your wonderful starting-package. What you are being in it determines its future. Its past doesn’t determine its future. Put pure you into a broken heart, a broken body, a broken self, a broken family and broken circumstances, and you thrive. That is really what you are.

All there is for you, as awareness, is to be what pure you is in everything that’s yours, as is, and you thrive. You won’t be asking questions such as: why such a bad package? You love being in form and it doesn’t matter its condition, because love is what you are. What there is for you is simple: absolutely return to what you first are and then absolutely resume everything that’s yours in all of the intricacies of its condition, and you thrive.

Anything else and you are deluding your self. The power of self delusion is that you become lost in it. When you’re lost in it, then it is real to your experience that the problem is something or someone. Everything that you are being, within, of separation is projected onto something or onto someone and you are, in that, poor you instead of love that is thriving.

Nothing prevents you from beingness. Everything that seems to prevent you is what you have made personally convenient. Your pain, your suffering, your difficulties are your conveniences so that you don’t have to thrive; so that you are not responsible for what you are.

There isn’t anything that meets what you really are as much as being what you really are, with beingness that is what love is. Throw anything at what love is and love moves. Love is more. Love doesn’t need pain, suffering or difficulty, and pain, suffering and difficulty bring out and manifest all of the depths and reaches of what love is.

There’s no virtue in suffering. There’s no virtue in pain or in difficulty. There’s virtue in what love is, and everything makes it live.

Q: Thank you.