Q: When you say that we need to do inner cleaning, what do you actually mean?
John: When you first recognize the value of cleaning, the tendency is to respond to your self and not what you’re knowing. Then you’ll be a fair-weather cleaner, so you clean your self when your environment is stable, everything feels good, while people are nice to you.
But the cleaning that counts the most is when you’re most under pressure, where the weather is not fair and everything feels terrible. The only way to do that is when the cleaning starts in your heart and not in your self. If you’re not first purifying your heart and you work on purifying your self, you’ll have a self-oriented, self-centred purification. It will be highly conditional.
Purification of the heart means that you’ll always be in your heart with openness and softness, at any cost to your self. Purification of your heart is really simple. If you’ll purify your heart in its simplicity, then you’ll be able to move into purifying your self, which is full of complexity. It’s the simplicity of heart purification brought into your self which enables complex purification.
The way to purify your heart is being what you actually know the truth of in your heart, at any cost.
Q: So there is nothing to clean? Just to be there in the heart?
John: Yes. Being openness and softness in your heart cleans out what is closed and hard in your heart. When you’re being openness and softness in your heart, it cleans your self out of your heart. Anything of your self that you’ve taken to heart, including your conditioning, will be cleaned out. Then your self is being conditioned by an open and a soft heart. It’s being cleaned out and it’s being changed.
When you work on purifying your self but you haven’t purified your heart, that’s like cleaning your house to favour appearances. So when company comes over everything is nice and clean, but they’d better not open a closet!
