Q: I don’t see where personal love – the love from one person to another – fits with the love which just is. Are they related, or is personal love between two people more based on wants, needs and desires? It seems to me that to dwell in the truth I know and to be in relationship must exclude each other. I don’t know your situation, but some teachers seem to be in relationship and others are complete renunciants. I’m in a relationship and feel I might have to give it up for truth. I don’t feel ready to do that.
John: It’s giving up everything for truth itself. That is you returning to the absolute and then being that, letting that express itself through everything including the personality. To be what love is outside of the personality feels safer than being what love is through the personality. It is when it moves through the personality that all the ‘velcro’ shows up. Anything that you’re not actually free of, when love moves through the personality then you get stuck. As soon as you get stuck, the love seems to be gone, so then you fear being in the personality because within it you seem to keep losing your first love. It is not that you lose it; it’s that within the personality, you get bought.
The fineness of love is when it moves through the personality without getting hooked. That is where awareness becomes very fine in knowing what it is and in knowing how to move as love through sensation, without being distracted by sensation.
Q: You’re speaking of surrender to whatever happens through me, that in this way love moves and expresses through me and I don’t get stuck in my ideas of what I am or what needs to be done?
John: When your body opens up because your mind is opening up, because you are opening up, then when you touch someone, what moves through your body is a fullness of love. The sensation of it is entirely complete and connected all the way through to your innermost, so that one touch is like the experience of being, fully in form, connecting with another through even just a touch, connecting with another through form, all the way through into their innermost. The experience of that is so full, so complete, that if there’s anything in you at all that relates to want, at that point you’ll cease being what you know. You’ll walk out of what you know, and you’ll try to do it again just because you liked it. But if you’re remaining true in being what you know, then such an experience is no distraction. It is then everything that it is, without you needing to have it just once more. That is being in the midst of full experience but not being of it; you not turning into that experience and confusing that experience for what you know is true. Can you have such an experience without needing to repeat it?
Q: I don’t know.
John: That is what you’re in a body for. Then you’re always being new.
Q: I’ve had an experience of the fullness of my being, and when it was gone I was desperate to get it back, making it all worse. I saw it wasn’t my doing to begin with and I don’t know what will happen if it opens up again.
John: It is one thing to be what love is without you having a relationship. It’s another thing to be that in a relationship.
Q: That’s my question. I can see that I can use being as an escape to avoid issues, which is a retreat from reality. In close relationship with a lover, I’m going to be dealing with my wants and desires as well as hers, and even if I were fully established in my being, that ‘velcro’ is going to show up, right? Is there more to relationship than having wants and needs met and satisfied?
John: It's not about that at all. When you’re in a relationship and you’re being what you know, the experiential playground is much greater – not the playground for doing, but the playground for being: being in it all regardless of its experience, without you being lost in the experience and identifying with it; you fully being in it without being distracted from what you actually know.
The opportunity to awaken is much greater in a relationship, but the opportunity to close and harden is also much greater. A relationship intensifies everything. Everything happens faster. There is much more pulling on your patterns and there’s much more pulling on what you know. With every pull being so much stronger because of being in a relationship, in the midst of that, you be what you know instead of you being all of the other pulls.
Once you get past dealing with wants and needs so that they are no longer any issue, there are many rooms in this mansion of relationship, where the awareness of the two can be one, within the awareness of the one or the other. It is want and need that keep the two experientially separate. It is when wants and needs are no longer of any issue that the two can be experientially one. As soon as there is something there within that would take – even just to repeat something because it was so awesome – then that takes of the one and it experientially makes of you two. Then you’re back to dealing with wants and needs instead of moving as one.
In a relationship that is free of its self, then the one awareness can travel through the awareness of the other. Then the awareness of the one can discover itself in the awareness of the other. It is heart and mind and body expanding, without a hook. The difference would be likened to existing on this earth plane or you no longer being confined to the earth plane, being able to travel elsewhere, be elsewhere, live elsewhere. That is what a relationship does.
A relationship isn’t at all about wants and needs. It’s about truth fulfilling itself in love – not just within one, but within two.
