Q: How do we break through our patterns and our conditioning?

John: Why do you believe that you need to, and why would you wish to? What would you gain if you were to break through all of your conditioning and your patterning?

Q. Hopefully, enlightenment.

John: If you were enlightened, you would be unconditionally okay with all of your conditioning and all of your patterning. (Laughter) You wouldn’t have a problem with it. It would most wonderfully mean nothing to you. If you were to become truly enlightened, you would just give it away because you wouldn’t need it.

Q: So do we just click our fingers and it’s there ?

John: Just being genuinely okay in the midst of your mind, so okay with your mind that there is no longer any need to work on it. In looking for enlightenment you are looking for power. Enlightenment is then promising to give you something whereby you can have power over all those things that are having power over you. Enlightenment is where you have no more need of power, when you are free of power. If you have any issue with power – fearing power or wanting power – then enlightenment will promise you something that it will never give.

You don’t need more power. You are to give away all of your power: not to an idea such as enlightenment, not to anything that you have learned; not giving away all of your power to anything that you want, but giving all of your power away to that tiny bit within you that you always knew, but judged that that was not enough. While you’re looking for something big, you are standing on top of the most precious little bit.

Your first love is not that of power; your first love is that you need no power. It is that that gives you power. The more power you need, the less power you have. The less power you need, the more power you have. When you were very tiny you had no concept of enlightenment, and yet what you were being was real. What you were was free. Receive what you were instead of trying to get what you want. It’s recorded within you what you came out of. That’s why you are looking for something.

Q: So how do you go back into that?

John: By seeing it instead of looking for it. As soon as you are looking for it, you will look in your mind. You’ll look through your mind and all that you’ll find is ideas, and none of those ideas match what you know. So everything that you find in your mind, you look at it and you know that that’s not it, so you throw that out and you reach for something else. And it’s endless. What you are looking for didn’t come from your mind, so you can’t find it there. You can find what you are looking for only in what you already know.

Instead of looking for much, be very gently okay with seeing just a tiny little bit, and what you’ll see then matches everything that you always knew, and then you’ll be surprised that it was always there. It never left: you did. You left it. It is still there. Let your whole heart be quieted and gentled and stilled in what little bit you know. That’s home.

Q: Thank you.

John: Enlightenment is an unfulfillable idea that falls short of what you know. What little bit that you actually know in your heart is worth more than all of your ideas. You can be closed and tight and hard in endless different ways, but it is all the same. Or you can be openness and softness without a cause, without a purpose, because that openness and that softness is all that you know. There isn’t anything else that touches you, because there is nothing else other than that that your being answers to. It only answers to what it is.

Let your heart open up like a flower, not because that would give you something, not because that would help you, but because that is all that you know is true. Look at a flower and it shows you how to be. Think about enlightenment when you’re looking at a flower and it won’t understand you. Let your heart open when you are looking at a flower and it gives itself away to you.

Everything that you think you need, you don’t. Let your eyes open to see what little bit already nourishes you. The nectar that you are looking for is already there. It’s not there in the quantity and the packaging that you are looking for. That’s why you can’t see it. You are looking for something big and powerful, and it is before you as being extremely delicate and fine.

Let your sensitivity, within, open up to what is already like nectar and then give your self away to it.