Q: My question is about having children. I feel when I look around the world that the real conflicts come from relationships that have children, and dealing with the difficulties that come with them.
John: There isn’t actually any conflict in that.
Q: If you are where you are! Most people have many conflicts when they have children.
John: They are not in conflict with their children. They are in conflict with what they know, and that’s taken out on the children.
Q: But the more conflicts you have the more possibilities you have to realize that and develop, no?
John: If you’re in the conflict, you’re feeding the conflict so having greater conflict isn’t going to help you. Having greater conflict then helps you be even more separate from what you know and even more separate from what you really are. Whatever your orientation as awareness, conflict of any kind is going to fuel it. When you’re coming from what you really are, in any kind of conflict, what you really are will flourish. If you’re in conflict with what you really are and you’re put into conflict, you’ll increase the separation. You’ll use the conflict you’re in to fuel the conflict you have with what you really are, and with what you know. Conflict is not a problem.
Q: I’m trying to understand whether it’s important to have children in this life.
John: Nothing has true importance anywhere in your life if you’re separate from what you really are. When you’re separate from what you are, everything that you deem important has not half the importance you give to it. The importance you give to it belongs to you being what you really are. It’s all stolen importance.
The answer isn’t to have children or not have children. The answer is for you to return completely to being what you really are. This really different level of you will either have children or not have children. Whatever you do from there will be because of what you know.
Q: I think that my heart totally agrees with you but there’s a fear that ten years from now I’ll look back and say to myself: “What did you do? You had a chance to have a life!”
John: What’s worse than that is you’ll have a full life: you’ll have children, everything flourishes; you’re living your dream in your self and then in the last hours, on your death-bed, you’ll look back and realize that the whole time, in the midst of that fulfillment, you were separate from what you really are. So you missed a life. You missed your whole life. You were not what you really are in all of that life, and on your deathbed you realize it. That’s a tragedy.
Q: It’s painful for the self to separate from the life that everybody has.
John: Yes. As soon as you know that, believe what you know. Believe what you know of what is important and what’s not important, then your measure of importance is no longer going to be adopted from lives around you. Importance will come directly from what you know in your heart and nothing else informs it. Then, as soon as you know, believe what you know.
Q: How do I differentiate between what I think I know and what I really know?
John: Profound honesty. Not the kind of honesty that you’re accustomed to in your person or in your self, but the kind of honesty that goes right to your core. The way to know the difference is that what you are is not thinking. What you are is knowing.
The reason that you’re even able to think is because you know. When you have a thought, you know you have a thought. When your thought changes, you know your thought has changed. When you have a pleasant thought or a difficult thought, you know the difference. Your functionality of knowing within thinking is extremely high. Without knowing you wouldn’t be able to think. When you’re being what knowing is in the midst of your thinking you know the difference between what you know and what you think. Then you can give thought to what you know instead of giving thought to what’s been patterned in your self.
You’re not in control of your thinking, because you’ve left belonging to what you know. You’re not controlled by knowing, but by what you think. That’s because of your relationship with what you know. Shift what you’re coming from as awareness and your thinking will change; both your experience of it and your control of it. Thinking will be a manifestation of knowing, instead of thinking being a manifestation of your past.
You have many, many children. Your children are all of your thoughts, and they’re out of control. It’s not the fault of your children that they are out of control. They’re simply being like you are. When you return to your heart, not just conditionally when it serves a sense of comfort, but when you return to your heart unconditionally and you belong, you know in your heart all of your children will begin to change. They belong to you.
