Q: I have a close friend who's very ill with multiple sclerosis. We were talking together today and wondering how it’s possible to trust totally; to accept and be grateful when you’re hoping to heal from a terminal disease, and are afraid of dying.
John: Healing is not ever worth hoping for. Healing is worth being in, if it is there.
Q: What do you mean by ”if it is there?”
John: If it is being healed, that is worth being in. If it is not being healed, that is worth being in. To have a preference between the two only makes it worse. It is the love of being, not the need of healing.
Multiple sclerosis is not worth getting rid of. It is worth being in.
Q: I am very pulled to be with people who are ill because there is so much for me to learn about illness and death.
John: If you wish to learn about illness and death, then let your whole heart be wide open to trade places with anyone that is ill or dying. Not needing to trade places: just wide open. Illness or death can only threaten what you are hanging onto.
Everything is a shortcut to being, including multiple sclerosis, if you unconditionally be in it.
To win the lottery of being it is for you to unconditionally be in absolutely everything as it presently is, without any need of anything changing in order for you to be more okay. Then anything that life could ever give you is always greeted with the sweetest “yes.”
“No” exists only where there is fear. Anywhere that hope exists – hope for anything – is where fear and dread exist. Dread is all of the tight muscles holding together the face of hope.
To be with someone who has multiple sclerosis is to enjoy them as though they have something really special. It is for you to lose your perspective on it. Your perspective on it only feeds sorrow.
It is only innocence and love that can kiss multiple sclerosis. Anything else either fears it or, in a sabotaging way, wants something from it.
Give your friend a kiss for me.
