Q: John, there’s a supposition that therapy is necessary in order to be free from the stories we use to justify our perceptions and our self-identity. It seems as if you’re saying that merely living by the truth, you see you’ve been dishonest, and that honesty will dissolve all your investments without any need for intense therapy. Is that correct?
John: Yes. Awareness needs no therapy to be what it really is. When awareness won’t be what it really is in context of a self, then therapy will help awareness in that self. Therapy can loosen that self. Everything helps, including therapy, and the only thing that is really, purely it, is you – but it’s pure you. Therapy can move you in that direction, but it will not bring you to pure you. Pure you is something that you, as awareness, naturally intuit. When awareness is being honest, awareness becomes pure. There isn’t anything that’s required of your self for you to be pure you.
No supposition takes you home. A supposition is something other than what you are, so the use of it furthers the separation of you from what you really are. The use of a supposition strengthens supposition. The use of what is pure you strengthens pure you.
Whatever you use is empowered whether it’s real or not real, so take heed what you give your power to. Whatever you give it to is going to work. It may not work in a way that is like pure you, like what you really are, but it’s going to work on the level that you use it.
What you really are is immensely powerful. You’re able to make real what you know the truth of, and you’re also able to make real what you don’t know the truth of. So you’re able to make real something you wish to be true or something that you need to be true.
Q: I see how that applies to my relationship. It feels like a mix of seeing one another’s essence and yet letting self-centred mechanisms and dishonesty still have control.
John: Awareness is able to be a mix of what it knows the truth of together with what it wishes to be true, and sustain both at the same time. The cost to that is that awareness cannot be one with what it knows because it’s being something that it wishes to be true.
Awareness can create a mix and it is also able to un-mix; it’s able to corrupt and it’s able to purify. When awareness surrenders the use of that tension, then awareness, on its own, simply and completely relaxes. It purifies, the mix is un-mixed, and awareness naturally returns to oneness.
Therapy doesn’t bring anyone into oneness. Therapy is able to make less any unnecessary tension within oneself created by awareness drawing conclusions within the experience of its self. When awareness is being purely honest to what it knows, that accomplishes more than all therapies put together can accomplish.
When you love making being what you really are easy, it’s easy. When being that, for whatever reason, needs to be difficult for you, you’ll make it difficult. If it satisfies something in your self for you to make it difficult, then difficulty in being one satisfies you.
Q: I’ve told you about painful experiences of being the child of a mother who would switch between being tyrannical, dismissive and cold to being very warm and loving. You would think the last thing I’d do is to repeat that, yet I find myself in the same situation in my relationship despite all my trying. You seem to be saying I needn’t make it so difficult.
John: Your self being traumatized by a woman cannot take you out of your heart. If there’s something of a convenience in the experience of that trauma, you’ll use the trauma to your self for you to leave your heart. Any loss of innocence when your mother traumatized your self isn’t on her account; it’s on yours.
Q: But how could I have known, as a child, with awareness? I do remember moments where I realized that what I thought was my self was not, but I didn’t know how to stay knowing that I was the awareness.
John: You didn’t understand in your self how, but you knew how. You knew directly. If knowing isn’t convenient for you in your self, you’ll abandon what you know for what you’re experiencing in your self. What you experience in your self becomes a convenience to you, even if it’s a painful one.
Therapy can help what only honesty can really do. When you’re not honest in therapy, therapy won’t help you. As soon as you realize that honesty works in therapy then, as awareness, go directly into honesty and it’ll work without any therapy.
