Q: You’ve recently spoken about what being woman is and I’ve been wondering whether it’s really the same to be a man.
John: At the very base of it, yes. When awareness integrates consciousness, it doesn’t just enter into being both man and woman; it enters into being everything.
Q: That seems very easy.
John: The only thing in the universe that does not cooperate with what is natural and easy is want and need.
Q: It’s not easy going past those two when out in the world!
John: For okayness it’s easy. Okayness within finds it effortless.
Okayness cannot comprehend the energy of want. Okayness can be curious, okayness can desire. Okayness cannot comprehend want. Want is created when you mix personal insistence with desire. When you’re not using your power, then desire is clean.
When you use your power in needing to have what it is that you cleanly desire, then what you have is want. Desire all on its own, without being mixed with personal insistence, is entirely clean. It has no hook in it, because okayness is this way (John opens and extends his hand) with desire. Desire is the new awakenings that come from within, in okayness. When that awakening is mixed with the need to have – that it must have – then it’s no longer desire. It’s want and need.
What turns a physical boy into a physical man is the physical integration of hormones. Your body may be integrating those hormones but that doesn’t mean that what you are as awareness is integrating the energy of those hormones. Just because there is a man’s body it doesn’t mean there is a man there. It’s the same with a woman.
When you integrate as awareness the sexual energy that comes from your body, that takes you apart – as long as you’re not doing something with that energy. Just being in it, as is, takes you apart and reveals the deep in you. Being in that without needing to do something with it turns a boy into a man. That opens up the deep in you, and when you’re just being in it, as is, then your own deep seasons you.
As you are integrating your innermost because you are being settled in the deep without needing to do something, such integration of the deep manifests itself in breadth. You grow up to be a wide, high, strong tree that isn’t pretending anything. It’s all real.
Using sexual energy for one's self, being in sexual energy with self-interest, turns one’s self into being a counterfeit man: a taker and a user. Using sexual energy makes one the centre of the universe and no longer part of it. Being in such energy without needing to do something with it takes all of the patterns apart that you received from your ancestors, those patterns that need to be the centre of things. The experience of it is that it is taking you apart, and you are very gently being in that, letting it do whatever it does without doing something with it.
Then your real power reveals itself as being natural gentleness that is rooted deep. It is that that knows what a man is: strength letting itself be gentle, instead of strength being strong in order to have or get something. To the depth that you integrate your sexual energy by being in it without needing to do something as it takes you apart, as it cooks you, it is to that same degree that you have integrated being deeply in your body.
A counterfeit man uses power and takes power, and that is how he loses it all. A real man very gently gives power. He can give it because he’s integrated it. It’s only what is integrated that can be given, and everything that is integrated naturally extends itself. It naturally gives itself away. You realize your real power when you become aware of it without needing to do something with it, without using it.
Integrated power moves as deeply rooted love. Non-integrated power, when it is being open and soft, when it is relaxed, is love, but it is not yet rooted in what it really is, so then it is fragile love.
Want and need in the context of feminine energy manifests itself as genius being manipulative. It knows how to use softness and openness to get exactly what it wants, using the very essence of what it is to gain an advantage, to have something. Want and need in the context of masculine energy uses its genius outright to push and take what it wants.
Both energies within one's self are to be integrated by this: being in all of the energies present without want or need, being in them as is without needing to do something for one’s self, within, with that energy – just being one’s self within in the midst of every kind of energy.
Q: It’s so challenging to remain in that when there are all sorts of energies coming at you, when there’s no focal point to guide and keep you there.
John: It’s being in every kind of energy with your feet deeply in what you are as a being, while the rest of your body of awareness is receiving all of that energy in whichever way it affects you, without ever taking a step out of what you are as a being, or using that energy to create an advantage to get something just because you want something.
When your feet are deeply inside what you are as a being, then without effort you’ll be and do only what you know, right from your feet in the deep. Then it is what your feet are in that is nourishing your head. Then your thinking matches where your feet are. If your feet are planted in want or need then that is what fills your head.
