Q: Over the last year I’ve felt a lot of my old priorities and values drop away and be replaced with things that I felt to be true. Over time and in day to day life I’ve felt myself lose touch with those things and go back into old patterns of thought and feeling. Yesterday you spoke of the river of life, and I felt perhaps it’s that river of life that is pulling me away from my being and back to those things I thought I’d let go of. Would you speak more about that?
John: The river of life is based on the artificial meaning and flow of this world, and because you’re born into this world you’re conditioned by it, which creates levels of expectation in your self to move in the ways of this world, to have a life in this world. Because of the conditioning and also coming into unintegrated selves, the tendency of having a life in this world is that your whole life then is also of what this world is like.
When you move in the way that this world is, your beingness will be such that it is different from what you really are, different from the beingness of your being. So then in having a life in this world, your river of life is a life of artificial meaning. And it isn’t that you couldn’t have a life in the midst of this world but the greatest tendency of that is that you’ll move the same in your self as what this world is like.
Q: How do I tell the difference between what I believe to be true according to my experience and what is really true?
John: Anything that appeals to openness and softness of heart has to do with you. Anything that appeals to the slightest little bit of closing and hardening appeals to ways in your self that are the same as this world.
This world is based on acquisition, self importance and unintegrated power all of which, if you subscribe to these ways, you will be in your life not at all like your heart and your being. You’ll live a life of performance-blindness, a life of performing for what you think and feel in a conditioned way, what you think and feel is important and matters and nothing of that which you think and feel matters, really matters to you, to what you really are.
Q: Even though those things I’ve seen to be true recently bring me so much more joy than anything before, it has so easily slipped away. How do I best not slip back into the river of life and stay connected on a daily basis with those things I’ve known to be true?
John: By being most delicately disloyal to your self and in supreme response to openness and softness of heart. That takes you right out of the river of life. It makes what you are, in this world, not at all like this world. And it isn’t that there’s any intention to be different from this world; it’s that this world and your self is simply not your frame of reference. As awareness, your frame of reference has to do with your heart, what you know the truth of in your heart, and what you know the truth of within any little touch or movement of your being.
And this is your way. It’s your only way. So this is your life, while you’re in this world, while you move in this world.
Q: Thank you.
