Q: Hi, John I’m just back from a Zen retreat. I was there sitting for five hours a day looking at a wall, questioning myself: ‘who am I?’ What I found was that I don’t know. I don’t know who is sitting here. I don’t know who is speaking, who is walking, who is moving. The only thing I know is that I’m here.
John: You are meaning. There you are, and there is no ‘who.’ You are meaning moving as intimacy of being. By that we meet, meaning that has a being by which to move, that has a self enabling structured function of meaning moving as a being that has a person in a richness of life. Your best form is your heart, a heart that is like a well-worked, cultivated ground. It is display of how you have been in your self. It is what makes you a good man.
Your experience of what you are is from the outermost inwards, enabling you to sit still before a wall for hours asking of that which looks, ‘who are you?’ What you are is the inverse of your experience. Because of all the levels of your form, you naturally relate to the forms you have. You relate to their function, distracting you from what you are in all of that, not a ‘who’ as you do experience it. It’s not who you are. Who you are can be answered in your self and in your person.
But you weren’t sitting there to discover your person or your self. You wanted to know what you are, not a person, not a self, not even a being, but much better: Meaning. It is because of what you are, meaning, that you relate to it in everything by the fullness of it or the lack of it. Everything that you do in your self as a person in your life is because of what you are. Every movement of yours reveals that what you are is meaning, all the way to your outermost, a full development of form and function with wondrous complexity. So beautiful is the complexity that you overlook your own simplicity.
You don’t see what you are because you’re accustomed to being within all your forms who you are. Who you are asks. Who you are doesn’t know. What you are does know. What you are is manifest. It’s manifest in how you relate to meaning in every moment, whether it is the lack of it or the fullness of it. Your connection to what you are is unbroken.
Your heart reveals what the who has done with what you are, what you as awareness as a person and as a self have done with meaning, have done with what you are. You are from the innermost outwards. You are, from the very innermost outwards through form after form after form, you in form, experiencing that you are that form, that you are in life a person with a self and a heart whose entire relationship with everything within and without is by meaning.
And you know that there is more and more and more to your innermost, more to your innermost than there is to your outermost. Your outermost isn’t able to access your own innermost. You can’t access your own innermost without as awareness matching what it is and being what it is. For that, as awareness, you don’t need your forms, your person and your self. For you to access your own innermost as awareness is for you to surrender form after form after form, enabling you as awareness to recede to what you first are, for you to be meaning — meaning not needing a being, meaning not needing to even move. Pure meaning without manifestation, the supply and the source to every little bit throughout all of your forms, enabling you to be in them. It is what gives you cohesion in everything.
You’re able as awareness to be the inverse of your own experience knowing. It is a shift of awareness directed by knowledge, by awareness knowing, not informed by form, not informed by your form, but informed by you, meaning, knowing. You were so accustomed as meaning to your own forms that you asked for you, but you asked as form. If you would have, as meaning aware, gone through total inversion you would have, as meaning aware, been meeting with innermost of wall. Having that, having such unstopped entrance to meaning, realizing the ease and naturalness of it would have, before that wall, broken your heart.
If you would like to experience what you are in front of a wall, meet, as meaning moving as intimacy of being. Enter Meaning and meet. Meaning with all innermost meets meaning with all innermost. Someone looks at what’s occurring and you are seen sitting before a wall. Amazing.
The deeper that you go, the more form that there is of yours that you’re no longer using or relating to, with the ability of being all of that form and relating to it at the same time.
Only meaning, all the way out into form is able to relate to meaning.
Listen to John de Ruiter Audio Podcast 28 – Knowing: the Universe of Your Own Experience or visit the John de Ruiter YouTube Channel
