Prior to his meetings in The Netherlands, John was interviewed by Ojas de Ronde on the Ridder Radio web broadcast show The New Human. The broadcast included a live chat room where those tuning in could submit questions for John. We’ve included both the audio and transcript of the interview below.
Ojas: Good evening, friends all over the world. Welcome to the web radiocast “The New Human”, 24th April 2012. This evening will be in English. This broadcast will be a special event because our guest is John de Ruiter, teacher of profound principles, philosopher and author from Canada. Before I welcome him I’d like to give you some information. The music is from Dan Gibson’s Angels of the Sea: an exploration of the ocean with music. I did it because you can hear the ocean and in a lot of cultures this is a symbol of profound reality. This will match perfectly with John. On different websites in Holland we gave the following information about him and I will read it to you so that we have a short introduction.
John de Ruiter is a teacher of the most profound principles of human existence. He conducts seminars worldwide: inspiring, uplifting and opening new doors for his audiences. In deep and gentle dialogues, John responds to the fundamental need for meaning and purpose in life. John, son of Dutch immigrants grew up far from typical spiritual centers in rural Canada where he experienced supreme awakening. In pure accordance with this realization John was transformed, and since then John’s life has been determined only by direct knowledge: his every decision a response to deeper calling, regardless of personal cost. John’s meetings are deep and delightful: an unbound reservoir of meaning into which we all are invited… and John is visiting The Netherlands to hold a meeting in De Roos tomorrow night, and a retreat in Venwoude from April 26 – 30th.
And now, John, it’s up to you! Welcome – most welcome in “The New Man”. We are very happy to meet you here and have a dialogue about what is the real you, what is profound reality and what is integrated philosophy. You touched me a few times very deep in a direct meeting with you. So my first question will be about what you can convey to people, and it must be something that comes from very deep in you because I hear that all the people who meet you have a lot of times the same experience. You look, and then people go deep in their heart and discover something that they know and they cannot touch so easily. You say “as a young man of seventeen I was unexpectedly gifted with a knowing and an experience of oneness with the source, an intimate universe on the inside, and at the same time an equally intimate universe on the outside. I was conscious and clear between the two, yet I was being in oneness and both at the same time. My awareness of reality expanded in ways that I could never have imagined: a spontaneous awakening” And later you tell about this awakening and awakening as such “waking up is not necessarily pleasant. You get to see why all this time you chose to sleep”. It happened with you, John. Can you tell something about it?
John: When I grew up I had no concept of reality being anything other than what is understood and recognized through the senses, and physical reality that was limited to the obvious.
Ojas: Yes.
John: Then, one day I was upstairs in my parents’ home and living at home, and everything opened up within and without so there was an instant recognition of, and coming from and being in, and integrating a profound reality, much greater reality than perceivable through the five senses: unexpected and completely amazing, and yet so very natural.
Ojas: At the same time? How could you recognize this because it was something new in you. You didn’t get fear?
John: No
Ojas: Yesterday in the email somebody emailed me and said ‘tell him that I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of this unknowable space because perhaps I die. Can you answer that person?
John: In one way, everyone goes through it every time you go to sleep. You lie down and the first thing… there can be a lot of thinking, a lot of things taking place of your life and about your person and what affects you on mental and emotional levels and as you approach falling asleep, then all of that starts to fall away. Your life, right almost at the moment of falling asleep, your life disappears. Your person disappears. Your self disappears and you are profoundly comfortable, in a sense, turning into nothing or turning into something that has nothing to do with anything in your waking life. You enjoy that every day. You have no fear in that.
Ojas: Yes, but then you go unconscious.
John: To your experience you go unconscious but you’re really just leaving all of your forms behind.
Ojas: Right, but here it happened, you say, ‘I was conscious inward and outward, there was no limitation any more’. It looks a little bit like falling asleep in a certain way: you lose your normal consciousness.
John: The part that’s similar is that there is no fear in falling asleep. You’re not concerned about dying, you’re not concerned about your self disappearing and not being able to find it back again, and yet every day you wake up and everything is fine again. You did come back.
Ojas: Right.
John: There isn’t a fear in that.
Ojas: I remember for myself when I was on this moment it felt like an abyss where you jump in. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been reading here your biography that you were in the Christian environment and that Christian environment is very deep. It is full of guilt, full of shame. There is a God that watches, and when I hear you talking about your experience, it is totally out of this Christian environment. There are no words that even look Christian. So it must have been a shock in a certain way because you touched reality, you said, it looks very normal, and at the same time you fell out of a system that has brought you up from your birth. Was it not a shock for you to experience this?
John: There was no shock.
Ojas: No shock! Great. (Laughter) For me it was shock.
John: There was profound comfort.
Ojas: Profound comfort …
John: Profound comfort, profound realization, and that reality was instantly not recognized through my senses as I was used to, previously, in my life. So dimensions opened up, other dimensions other levels of reality. I had no understanding of what I was seeing and moving through, but the way of being and the way of moving wasn’t by thinking and feeling and seeing and… it was by knowing. Everything I was in I knew to my core the truth of and I was able to move in that within, and find the same thing outside of myself and not being separate from that. So being able to move within and without, just by way of knowing, everything was known.
Ojas: So I guess a lot of people get fear because they start thinking about it and then it is real frightening because you lose suddenly everything that you can hold on and thinking then helps you to stay away from this abyss.
John: This isn’t losing everything you can hold on. This is finding everything that is so real that you don’t need to hold on, so everything relaxes. Everything wakes up, and I realized that this is everything.
Ojas: It’s very wonderful, actually, that it happens for you somewhere in a rural country, out of the blue. Still, I hear at the moment more people learn this what other traditions only can give to you after long being with a master and being with a teacher, but it looks like at this moment of our evolution in different places people have this spontaneous awakening where you stop actively holding on to what you think and you just feel the truth as it is, like Byron Katie, suddenly it happened with her in Halfway House, Eckhart Tolle tells about it. Osho – they didn’t have teachers. Is there something going on on the planet that more and more people suddenly have the gift of this spontaneous awakening which I see as a beautiful gift, that you suddenly hold on the truth and drop all the illusions. It’s beautiful!
John: It may be that this has been taking place always: it’s only now that we have the means of communication and where such an experience is, in a sense, allowable. Whereas in previous generations many people may have experienced something like this and never dared to talk about it or mention of it because they would be ostracized and judged for it – maybe even thought to be crazy.
Ojas: Yeah, perhaps that is it, yeah. Able to talk about it, and people recognize it. You are talking now about this all over the world. You go to Israel, you go to India, you go to Australia. Now you are in Holland. Isn’t it wonderful that all the people in so different cultures and traditions suddenly recognize this message as the real truth? Or do you say this is normal?
John: As soon as someone hears something that they know the truth of, everything within responds, so it’s a beautiful thing to see. It’s like watching springtime in people. Everything wakes up, starts to blossom, starts to respond and everything has a dimension to it of colour and more than what is experienced in the winter time. So it is like watching people coming out of winter into spring.
Ojas: (Laughter) Your language is now so different from Christian language because they talk about you have to suffer first long and you have to do this, and you have to be dead, and then perhaps at the end God will give you the gift after you’re dead. To talk like you talk now – so it doesn’t have any connection with any Christian tradition, what you say now. Nor with an Islamic tradition or whatever, so it comes from truth.
John: What you don’t have by direct knowledge isn’t worth believing. With Christianity, or other religions and other systems, there’s a dependency on having to believe something that you don’t actually know the truth of. When you believe something you don’t know the truth of, you’re giving away all of your power to something you don’t even know.
Ojas: That’s true, that’s belief.
John: It’s belief in something you don’t know. Belief is fundamental in reality, but in reality it’s belief in what you do know. So the belief goes to direct knowledge, instead of belief going to an adopted truth, an adopted system, or something you’ve been told. When you believe something you don’t know the truth of, that removes your feet, as it were – your feet as awareness – away from what you really are and it puts your feet into something that isn’t real. So then, understandably, you’ll be moved by fear because you are, at the core, ungrounded.
Ojas: And always in doubt.
John: You’re standing necessarily in doubt because deep down you know you’re not knowing the truth of what you’re believing, and yet you’ve convinced your self that this is the truth worth believing … Christianity or God or different religions.
Ojas: Right.
John: So then, at the core, you’re not rooted in reality.
Ojas: Right. That is where belief never can come.
John: If you believe what you know the truth of, it may be almost nothing that you have as direct knowledge. Perhaps all that some have of direct knowledge is a knowing that there is more within, and that more is somehow worth everything and is really it, without any understanding of what that is. To believe what you have of direct knowledge, leaves you on the level of your self and the level of your thinking, leaves you with almost nothing because there’s nothing to hold on to, there’s nothing to understand at first, there’s nothing to identify with, but in believing that direct knowledge it has you being one with what you actually do have. It’s not an understanding, it’s a realization of something you know.
Ojas: Yeah, that is – how to say that – you hold the belief against a light of truth and then the belief shrinks because it doesn’t have the light of truth in it. Yeah. Why didn’t we meet earlier! (Laughter). It would have been for a lot of people who strongly believe and give their life for a belief such a good light to see it suddenly like this.
John: It’s understandable that it is for many with much difficulty to believe what they actually know the truth of in their hearts because to do so you lose everything that you relate to as a self as being most real, so you can’t have everything you’re holding on to within for you be coming from most profound reality, coming from your own core, within which there isn’t a difference within and without. As a self you have no experience in that.
Ojas: No, it’s true.
John: So it’s easier, on the surface, to remain with your fears, your beliefs, your ideas, struggle with it, try as hard as you can, don’t really get anywhere concerning the profound, but at least the discomfort, the great discomfort you experience in your interior is familiar.
Ojas: Yeah, that’s what I experienced in a monastery. They struggle, they are not satisfied, they look ongoing for new things and always is there that fearful doubt and then, suddenly, the truth comes. Yeah, that’s really beautiful, yeah. May I ask you a little bit more about it? Because the first moment that we met, I guess everybody was gone and I was still sitting there and pondering about what you say, and feeling you look at me, and it was a long look, and suddenly my heart opened to this what you explained to me now a few minutes ago so clearly. It’s a kind of totally openness, knowing that it is true, totally true, and knowing that everything compared with this is illusory, it took 15 minutes. You did it by looking, watching. You do that more in a few meeting with you, and it is – in the east they call it ‘darshan’, seeing. What powerful tool did you evolve actually to convey this message that cannot be understood by the mind? Is it true that by looking to somebody, this can be conveyed actively? It is true, that is what I discovered, but can you tell from your side what happens when you see people? I told now from my side; can you tell from your side?
John: On the outside it has the appearance of looking at people, or having an eye connection. Really, it is just simply while looking at someone, I’m coming from, within, what is first available and reachable in them. There are different levels of reality, different levels of heart, different levels of being, and I just move toward the one in the other that is sort of like the first door that is able to open. When I see that level within someone else, I’ll just simply come from what that level is within, and in coming from that, their awareness is recognizing what I’m coming from because they know the truth of it whether they understand it or not. Because what they are as awareness knows what I am actually doing within, their awareness does the same thing.
Ojas: Right.
John: In their awareness doing the same thing, what makes it real for them is that they are from their own core knowing the truth of what they are coming from. So it is really, the principle by way it works is by example, as it is in physical reality. It’s easier to learn something or so see how to do something, or to accomplish something when it’s done in front of you. On the level of awareness, it’s the same thing.
Ojas: I remember in the beginning, the first minute, I had the feeling, well, it’s rather impersonal what you are doing. There is no person involved in it. At first it felt a bit negative. And then suddenly I said ‘oh, impersonal, yes!’
John: It’s impersonal in the sense that the person is left out of it. One’s self is left out of it. What there’s immediately room for, the first that opens up within the heart is the level of being. The level of being is impersonal and it is profoundly intimate. Because of the intimacy there is real meeting. That real meeting is what everyone hungers for. In a world of physical reality where everything is determined through the five senses, there isn’t necessarily a meeting. Everyone is looking for meeting, and looking for meaning, and that’s projected outwardly in a way that’s physical, instead of realizing it from within, and from within it isn’t personal; it is profoundly intimate, and it is you as awareness being and moving as what meaning is: the very thing everyone is looking for.
Ojas: But there’s the feeling of tenderness, and that is a personal term, actually. It is very soft and it is still impersonal. I know that my person sometimes tries to be soft but this is a kind of softness from inside. I don’t know how to explain that. There’s a kind of wisdom – a kind of science of the heart. Is it so that you have that same feeling in you then, on the moment that you come to the same vibration? Or how to say that. I try to find words for it.
John: Yes. Tenderness is a beingness. Love is a beingness. There are deeper levels of reality than what beingness is, but on the level of the heart it’s an immediate introduction of deeper reality. That beingness is palpable. Tenderness is palpable. So when you experience tenderness that isn’t generated by something of a physical nature, then on a heart level, as awareness, you are profoundly moved. When you see something taking place that, for you, is a tender thing to witness or a tender thing to see, it doesn’t necessarily have the same kind of profound impact within because it’s something that you are understanding. It’s making sense to you that this, what you are observing, is of a tender nature, but when tenderness moves from within not generated by anything within physical reality, then your core is moved.
Ojas: Does it mean that in every being this tenderness is available?
John: Yes.
Ojas: In this critical world with all this dramatic changes and wars and lies and everything, there is a kind of layer or you call it core that is tender – wow, that would be great if it would be true! (Laughter) I understand it from trees, but in people it is very difficult.
John: If you understand it from trees, then you know it. If you can understand it from trees and you see it in trees, and you see it in nature, you can see it in everyone. You can see it within someone who is malicious and unkind. It’s not within their malice or their unkindness, but there is a level within them where this tenderness is. They may not be consciously aware of it or connected to it. If they were it would be very difficult for them to be malicious and unkind while experiencing a core of tenderness. But that level, that core of tenderness, is still there.
Ojas: And you awake that with eye contact, you awake that with silence. Yeah, we cannot give this here in this webcam radio…
John: I’m not awakening it with silence, or not doing something. I’m awakening it by simply coming from what that is without using anything else. What I’m coming from moves the same.
Ojas: Right. Now we have this silence. I like to give to the people some music – I check some chat and then I like to continue with this. It’s such a beautiful space, actually, that I’ve forgotten I’m on web radio. So dear friends, for the people who just join in now, on the web radio is John de Ruiter and we are talking about what reality is. There are some questions, John. Shall I read a few. One?
John: Yes.
Ojas: One is from Eowyn, another is from Brahmani. One is from Denmark, the other is from Corsica. Brahmani asks truth that not need belief, (…)and why even call it truth because this is where we do not need anything any more at all.
John: Calling it truth – truth is a highly abstract word but also a fundamental word. You rely on it all the time. It works in the physical and it works in the unseen. In the physical there’s the truth of a chair. You know the truth of what a chair is. That enables you to walk up to it and, without hesitation, have an intrinsic understanding of what it is that you are approaching, and you move your body in such a way as to sit down, and it works, and you recognize when something is a little bit strange or off about the chair, that if you sit in that chair it may not hold, so you may sit in in a completely different way. You’ll be more careful. You’re able to recognize a good, strong, sturdy chair and there’d be no hesitation. You’d just put your body in the chair.
On a deeper, inner level, it’s the same, but because it doesn’t have a physical reality, then we have been conditioned, by physical reality, to expect reality to be as we perceive it through our senses and through our body. On a deeper level, though, we still do recognize, in a sense, the truth of something, and we have that by way of knowing. We don’t need to call it truth but you still know, you know how to sit in a chair. In deeper reality within, through direct knowledge, you know that there is something more than what you perceive through your experience. That truth, recognized within; that knowing of something that is more does require belief, but then you’re believing something that you’re actually knowing the truth of, even though you may not have an understanding of what that ‘more’ is, or what that reality is.
As awareness, we can’t not believe. We’re always believing. We’re either believing something we actually know, or we’re believing something that we wish to be true, or say we know, or believe we know when we don’t honestly know. So then we have belief systems, techniques, dogmas supporting a level of reality that we believe and we have no evidence of, and the worst of it is not knowing the truth of it. But when you know something within, even if all you know is that there’s more to reality than what you’ve experienced before, and you as awareness, in your heart, are believing what you’re knowing, that has you connected to what you’re knowing the truth of. So then you’re coming from it.
Ojas: Right. I guess this will be a good answer for Brahmani. One more, from Eowyn: how can we respond to the patterns of our body taking form as experienced reality at the moments when they test us or make demands from us as a person?
John: Your body makes demands of you from your person, as a person. It has you needing to move in the way that you’ve already experienced in your past. When you go by a direct knowledge within as awareness, when you know that there’s more within than what you experience in physical reality, and you believe that, then that places you as awareness in a level within that’s deeper than what physical reality is. When you do that within physical sensation or within the patterns in your body, or the patterns in your self, then that puts you at a deeper level of what patterns are, it puts you beneath what the patterns are without eliminating the pattern or convincing your self that the pattern doesn’t exist.
Ojas: Right. I guess that is fundamental for the people who are awakening now, because they live in the society, they live with everything, and you say, as I understand it, within the senses, not beyond, but within the senses and within the body. There’s no need to suppress it. It is just opening up the physical level and it blows, like you said before, like spring.
John: Basically, it’s going into a different level of what your body is instead of trying to push the patterns away or push the body away, or in some way try to convince your self that it’s not even real. When you move deeper within, s awareness, then a deeper level of the physical opens up in you so you experience your body differently than when you do, when you are believing through your senses.
Ojas: Can you tell something more about it?
John: A subtlety opens. There’s a subtlety of awareness that opens up when in sensation in your body. Whenever it takes place, the deeper that you’re moving from, within, of your own core, also the deeper your body awakens. So there’s a level of your body that corresponds to that, a level of physical reality that corresponds to that, but that you would not have experienced before. It’s a level of physical reality that is unseen and yet still palpable. When you enter profound reality, you also experience that in your body. Your body is, for you, all of a sudden different.
Ojas: It’s a kind of awakening of the body.
John: Yes.
Ojas: And not awakening beyond the body. An awakening of the mind, of the person, and not beyond. That’s amazing. Yeah. With that, we can live in the society and do our things and still grow. Awareness grows in the physical level and awakens it.
John: It quickens it and it gives it depth of reality. So it makes the mundane profound.
Ojas: So no need to wake up, the awakening of the body after the Last Judgment like in a lot of religions is, but awakening of the body is possible here and now.
John: It needs to be. That’s what we’re here for.
Ojas: I would nearly say ‘hallelujah!’ but that’s (laughter) something from an old tradition that comes up in me when I hear really good message. Hallelujah! This awakening of the body, that’s great, John, that you say it like this. Nothing beyond. Awakening of relating, awakening of the whole physical level of us. You are aware of it. And everybody can be aware of it. There’s no need to work hard on it.
John: Everyone can have it, anyone can have it, but it is at the same time conditional. It’s conditional on your not using what you’re familiar with to be able to perceive what is unseen within and without. What is deeper than your self, you then, of course, cannot use your self to enter. You can’t use your self to have it. For you to enter what is deeper than what your self is, you need to be using what is deeper within than what your self is.
Ojas: Right.
John: For the thinking mind that sounds like something that’s terribly difficult. How do you do something in a way that you’ve never done before? Instead of trying to think about it, which is trying to enter something that is not subject to thought, you then can’t use thought to enter it. When you access a direct knowledge within, you know there’s more within, so instead of thinking about it, relate to what that more is. Relate to it directly. As soon as you relate to it directly, then you are now coming from that level of reality within and everything changes.
Ojas: Yes. I guess that’s the answer to the person who emailed me a few days ago, that the fear is there on the moment that she comes near to this truth. It is just the fear of the person.. You wrote once: “reality is not a safe place for you”. Now I understand it. That you that you have created, it is only a place where you will die, where there is no room for you, your hopes, your dreams. That’s the only thing you lose, then.
John: You only really lose what you’re holding on to that you believe within that you cannot live without.
Ojas: That’s in a nutshell where the fear comes from.
John: If you don’t have the holding you have no reason for fear because there’s nothing to fear. You have only to fear losing what you’re already holding on to. The holding creates the fear. The fear isn’t a part of your core.
Ojas: It is only you as a person who get the feeling ‘I die’, or you as a Christian, or you as everything you identify.
John: When you are not just honest within but profoundly honest within, there isn’t a fear of dying. People who are dying fear dying. Someone who is almost dead, they’re not fearing dying. When they’re almost dead, they’re not able to fear dying because they are right there, and when they are right there, they’re knowing the truth of something. Because they’re knowing the truth of it, everything on a heart level relaxes and as, when you go to sleep, everything goes away. There is no fear of going to sleep. There is no fear of dying. There is fear of dying when you’re removed from what the dying is, when you’re removed from what you’re knowing the truth of concerning dying. When you’re right there, there’s no fear.
Ojas: Yeah, that fits. That matches with what I have experienced when I was with dying people. At a certain moment, they are beyond fear and there is total surrender. In what kind of pain they are, suddenly it is like they come in bliss.
John: And it isn’t because they have no choice because they’re at the door, so to speak. It’s because they are actually, from their own core, knowing the truth of something, and it’s that knowledge of the truth, that direct knowledge, that has them on a heart level, and within themselves, completely relaxing. There’s no fear.
Ojas: That’s true, and there is total surrender. Immense surrender. Bliss.
John: And there is that immediate access for anyone at any time. The difficulty is within physical reality, you don’t have to do that. So instead of…so then you’re able to hold on to what you perceive you must have and you must keep, so then you’re controlled by your past, and your past determines your future. So you’re as much controlled by this future that you perceive you need or must have or must hold on to, that is all determined by your past, and in the present you’re not in anything profound. So then there’s fear.
Ojas: So the person who’s dying, just before dying, comes…
John: They’re within what direct knowledge is. So they’re not knowing because they can think. They’re not knowing because they can feel. They’re knowing because knowing is what they are.
Ojas: And you say that is possible at any moment.
John: That is what is first there. Because it is first there, it’s possible. Basically when you, as awareness, within your self, completely relax, you end up accomplishing the same thing that you accomplish when you go to sleep. When you relax you’re able to relax out of what your person is, out of what your life is, out of what your self is, all of your feeling and your thinking in the way that you’ve constructed in your living, and you end up relaxing into, from the perspective of your self, something that seems as nothing. When you go to sleep you disappear, but there is no fear in going to sleep.
Ojas: No, the opposite! And that feeling you give this whole hour, actually, there’s a kind of spring feeling that comes in this hour to me. It’s not the end of a lot of suffering. It is the beginning of the beauty of truth…
May I read one text from you and you give a comment.
“All there is that counts for anything at all is what honestly knows is true and it lives for that and it dies for that. It is everything for that. It is just one way flow. Everything that you are, for what you know is true.”
It sinks deep in my heart now. It’s like I’m giving up something.
John: What’s taking place is that you are letting what you are as awareness be dependent on knowing, instead of being dependent on what you’re experiencing. As soon as you are dependent on what knowing is then you are being what knowing is. You’re being what you first are. There isn’t an effort in that. You don’t have to think to know, whereas knowing actually enables you to think. The more profound you will relax into what knowing is, the more capable you are of profound thought and realization. As soon as you have profound thought then you’re able to make profound sense of the physical reality that you’re in because of the source of that which you’re coming from.
Ojas: Thank you, John.
Dear friends, we have to finish, and for the people who just came in, in the last hour, here was John de Ruiter. He is somebody who speaks from truth and we have tried to convey this via the webcam, but if you like to meet him then you can meet him tomorrow night in De Roos, and there you can find information on De Roos on www.deroos.nl, or if you’d like to go for a longer period with him you can go from April 26 – 30th in Venwoude, Laage Vuursche. You can find more information on www.venwoude.nl.
Thank you for listening. Thank you for all your questions and I see the people here coming with thanks for you, John, just in the last minutes. So I hope to see you next week and if it touched your heart this hour, then we can be only happy. And I go in silence. I feel it is difficult for me to talk at the moment. Thank you all that you were here from all over the world that I saw. I hope I see and hear you next week.
