Q: I feel stuck in my patterns. They just keep coming back and back.
John: Your patterns will move because of the energy that’s stored in them. It doesn’t matter what patterns you have. All that matters is that despite anything at all that moves, you open.
Q: Being open is the thing that frightens me most. It’s helpful to hear that it’s not a question of what happened in your childhood, or the relationship you had with your parents; that you have the power to just open and …
John: And that’s it! Not even open and heal – just open. The healing is beautifully incidental.
Your first love isn’t that of healing. Your first love is openness. The happiness of a child still in its innocence isn’t because of what it does. The child is happy because of its openness, manifested in all of the little things that it does.
So this is your real life – your only real life. It’s within your interior. It isn’t dependent on your self, others or anything outside of your self. It’s dependent on you; you, living within, open. It’s your love, your life, because there isn’t anything else that is really you. That’s pure you.
If things go well, you open. If things don’t go well, you open. If things go horribly, you open. It’s what you are. Nothing needs to go your way. No one needs to like you. No one needs to love you. No one needs to treat you well. Despite anything and everything, you open.
Marry openness and remain that way through sickness and through health. Openness, unconditioned, is your beloved. It’s what you give to your wife regardless of what she’s like.
On account of openness alone, you will turn inside out, regardless of what that makes you feel like. You living from your innermost outwards instead of you existing from the outside in … but not too far. All the control is held by the outside.
Instead of living from the outside in, as you unconditionally relax into being what you really are you will turn from the inside out – a whole different movement of form. Instead of a person that has a self that has a heart and has a being, you’ll live as a being that has a heart that has a self that has a person and a life. It’s a most delicate flip.
Q: I think I’d like to stop there. I think that’s the essence of what I need. Other than that I’m just telling a story and I don’t want to tell stories. It doesn’t matter. You know the story!
John: If you continue in this you are going to turn into a delightfully peculiar sweetie-pie!
Q: As my wife would say, it’s better than being an angry so-and-so! I feel bad because nothing I've done has moved me.
John: Feeling bad for what you’ve done is fine as long as, in its depth, it is only momentary. It’s there, you open to its depth, and it’s gone.
In that way, guilt and shame are most delicate messengers. As soon as they appear at your door, you open and then they’re gone. You got the message.
Q: I see what you mean.
