Quote: The evidence of your humanness present in your self is nurture and the connective substance of love.
Q: I only discovered you and this gathering a few days ago. I’m enjoying the people, the space and your presence. I feel that since childhood I’ve looked for the truth and there’s a deep longing to melt into the infinite. This calling and longing is a mixture of pain and sweetness. I’m not home but I don’t quit … perhaps the pain wouldn’t stop even if I reached home.
John: It would.
Q: Your language is new to me and I’m curious. What’s the difference between awakening and home?
John: When you awaken, it means that you can see into your being. When you awaken, you awaken to what you know from within your being – you’re awakening to your being. It gives you a level of knowledge and seeing that wasn’t available in your self. When you awaken, that means now you know and see the deeper truth, the underlying truth of existence.
Awakening is real but it doesn’t stay real. The truth that you awaken to is real in the moment of awakening. In that moment you are being what you are newly knowing. Within your awakening you’re given to what you’re awakening to. You’re taken by what you’re awakening to. There isn’t a difference between you and where you are newly knowing and seeing. But if you don’t live your awakening that direct knowledge that comes from your awakening turns into information, and in holding that information without living the awakening you will fool your self. You’ll think and believe that you have something. You have this information that originates in direct experience, but the information and your memory of your awakening isn’t the same as what you are as you awaken. You can come to know the truth but that doesn’t mean that you’ll live being what you know. If you don’t live it, you’ll turn your awakening into an informational, useful category in your self. You’ll use your awakening for your self. That makes you, in your self, worse off than if you wouldn’t have awakened.
The moment you awaken you’re home because you are being your awakening. You are being awareness being what it knows. Being it means there isn’t a difference between awareness and knowledge: the two are one. That’s home. If you don’t live your awakening, then as awareness you, in some way, separate from direct knowledge and from within your self you’ll hold to the information that you perceive from within your mind of your awakening, thinking and believing that you really have something. You have the information and you have the memory of awakening but if you’re not being it then you are not your awakening. It doesn’t matter how little or how much you know. What matters is how much you are being what you know. Being home means you, awareness, and direct knowledge are one. It’s one presence. It’s one you. The beingness of the two being one is love.
If all you know is your heart, openness and softness of heart and your humanness, but you are completely given to it, being all you know in that, you are way better off than becoming enlightened and living the much you know and see, almost completely.
Q: The concept of enlightenment has never pulled me, but what resonates a lot is a way to experience my self on this planet, in this realm: to travel as much as I can, love as much as I can, do whatever is possible in this form and then go into other dimensions I feel exist. It’s a longing to depart from this planet. I have an incredible interest in cosmology and suspect it’s a projection of an infinite dimension that’s inside me.
John: Yes. When you look out into the stars, what reaches you in that, like nothing else in your life reaches you, is that you know. What touches you in looking out into the stars is that it brings up the resonance in you that you are inter-dimensional. You are way beyond anything captured in a life. When you look out into the stars you have subtle knowledge of what you’re here for. It isn’t for you to leave this planet. It’s for you to no longer be housed in your self, living experiencing your self. As long as you live experiencing your self, you will be kept to what is like the tip of the iceberg. You’ll be confined to about four per cent of you. The rest you have resonance of but no access to. When you look out into the stars you are touched by what isn’t coming into your life: all of the much, much more of you that is not yet present in your self.
Q: I find, often spontaneously, the capacity to feel. I can feel the space of this room as I can feel a human being. I can feel the dimension of this ashram and Rishikesh. Sometimes as I glimpse, something opens and I shrink because it’s so immense. There’s a deep longing to feel this existence, to feel this universe, to feel the stars far away, to feel there’s a solar system. I found myself fascinated by all of this and the capacity to feel.
John: All of that is your humanness. When you have an unusual opening it’s from within your humanness that you have an unprecedented seeing, and it takes you immediately into absorption, and from within your self you cut it off because it promises to end the relationship you have with your self. So you live life straddling being in your humanness while also being your self. In that same way, you’ll be hobbling in your humanness instead of thriving in your humanness. When you thrive in your humanness – your real connectivity to everything – your humanness takes your self completely. It will overtake all of the ground of your self.
The pain in your self, here and there as you live, is what you keep for your self in your self. Given to your humanness there isn’t pain. There is the connectivity of nurture and the connectivity of the substance of love. There isn’t pain in nurture and in the substance of love. The pain is based on an illusory sense perception. The pain represents core beliefs that subconsciously operate your self. What is satisfying on a mental, emotional level in pain is that pain gives you an experience of your self so if you feel slightly ungrounded in your self, pain gives you ground. It grounds you. Without the pain you’re nobody. Pain secures an illusory sense of individuality, while your humanness puts you into streams and levels of the sameness with others and with everything.
Your humanness doesn’t appeal to a sense of individuality. There is the truth of individuality but it is only perhaps .001% of your experience of it. The rest is illusory. Real individuality is what enables you, awareness, to consciously move being the same, being sameness with everything that is real. Real individuality is what enables you, awareness, within every level of form, to be one.
Pain is the feeling of a lived-in story, a lived-in narrative. What pain is useful for, if you are really listening within, is to show you that your way in your self isn’t real. You being what isn’t real is painful. The pain is good. It’s telling you something, but as you follow through in the story of pain then you can’t see its usefulness anymore. The pain is really there to help you see. Turn it into a greater story and your pain will help you to not see. There, you are doubly blind. Pain tells you that you’re blind. Re-construct the pain to serve your self and your pain feeds into a self-importance. The pain re-constructs your separation. It gives form to separation and the pain, from there, becomes physical. Through your belief and use you feed it into your nervous system, so even when you are relaxed your nervous system will push you into the stories that created your pain. That makes your own nervous system, in your life, in some way like story-land. Where you are not in your humanness you experience what you perceive to be reality through story-land. Story-land is a hopeless blindness.
It’s only from within your humanness that you see. It’s from within your humanness that you can know everything deeper within that only you, awareness, from within your humanness, are able to see. It’s your humanness that gives you perspective in your life, that tells you the goodness of your self. Your pain tells you that your humanness isn’t enough.
Q: I can relate with what you say about the softness and calmness of the heart. I can sense a struggle in meditation. It helps me when I feel love in what I’m doing. My being seems to float and I have more space. Would you speak more about this?
John: Instead of meditating live what you’ve already realized through meditation. If you don’t live it all in your life, you’ll replace the living of it with meditating. Meditation is a form that helps you realize. It helps you realize what is all there, that, as you are gentled within deeper than your self, you know and you see again. Meditation is like a crutch. If you have a leg that is hurt and isn’t functioning properly a crutch is useful, but as soon as you come into what the crutch helps you with, as soon as you start to heal, you need to not keep the crutch. You need to live what is healing you or in some way you become crisis-oriented: pressure builds and you relieve the pressure by meditating. Something in your life distorts and then you un-distort in meditating, instead of relaxing and undistorting because of meditating, and then living that. From there it is your new seeing from which you think and feel, from which you have a lived-in perspective. Living it makes your mind new. What you come into in meditating offers you newness, but if you don’t live the newness that you come into, you’ll turn the truth within into a category: a room of truth in your self that serves your self. Having that room in your self gives you a sense of deeper safety in your self. Any time you find some lack in your self you can just, right there, anchor into this room of truth in your self. That makes the truth within self-serving. The evidence of that, in your self, is pain. The evidence of your humanness present in your self is nurture and the connective substance of love.
Q: I have a personal question that has to with my relationship with my girlfriend. For years I’ve felt that the relationship is at an end. It doesn’t nourish me, somehow, and it’s breaking my heart to bring it to an end. She is a friend and someone I care for and it feels as if I will be confronting a level of pain in us both that feels impossible to digest.
John: Instead of ending your relationship, end your relationship with pain and you’ll see her differently. Being at the end of a relationship is a really good place to start seeing instead of opening into a newness of seeing in your next relationship. What starved your relationship of its meaning, slowly bringing the relationship to a close, is the same source as the source of your pain: you living in your self moving, in some way, by forms of illusion.
Q: How can I end this illusion, John?
John: Love seeing through your humanness. Love seeing from your heart instead of seeing from what you think and what you feel, which will easily be through forms of illusion. As you trust what you think and feel, what you’re most easily living by are your beliefs instead of the openness and softness of heart – the opening of your humanness. To address your relationship you can tell her that you’re starting to see and, in beginning to see, you really see how blind you are. Being open to see your blindness disempowers your beliefs. When you’re open to see your blindness you begin to really know, within, what you do really see. You begin to know within your seeing. The knowing within your seeing matters more to you than seeing.
You’re not in the wrong relationship. You’re functioning from the inside out incorrectly. Love seeing regardless of what you see. Pain in your self tells you where you don’t want to see. Nurture within your self, because of your openness and softness, shows you where you like to see.
Q: Thank you.
