Q: John, after we spoke at the coffee machine the other day, I had a real reaction to that in my self.
John: You’re still in it.
Q: In the reaction?
John: Yes.
Q: I really don’t know what to do with that.
John: A really good place to start is that your problem isn’t about anything outside of your self.
Q: I really get that now.
John: That’s big. That’s a really big one for anyone to come to, that your problem is not about anything outside of your self, and that your problem is not even your self. When everything is distilled, everything comes down to your being able to be and do what you know. Nothing slows you down. Nothing hinders you. Nothing stops you, not your self, not circumstances, not your past. When that becomes clear, then you can flow through any difficulty.
Q: I know that and I really couldn’t see that before.
John: The way that you function is that you think because you feel. You feel and therefore you think. Then your thinking is going to be in support of feeling and that works really well in a positive and it also works strongly in a negative. It will send you up and down.
Q: I don’t feel I do that all the time. I feel that since being here and with all the additional pressure I go back to that.
John: You are in it all the time. You just don’t realize it. Where it’s going to really show for you is when it comes up in the negative, when it throws you into a pattern. When it doesn’t throw you into a pattern, you’re not going to see how you function that way.
Q: So you’re saying that I’m not in what I know. I’m in my feeling all the time.
John: First, there isn’t anything wrong with feeling. When you’re feeling what you know, you’re in feeling. When you’re feeling your clarity, you’re in feeling, and it’s a very fine line to be in what you know, being what you know in being in clarity, and feeling all of that without being the feeling of that. At first, it’s barely discernible. At first, when you’re feeling what you know, your experience is you’re being what you know. What you don’t realize is how much you’re being the feeling of what you know, and if the feeling of what you know were removed, you would still be what you know. It doesn’t show up until there is the privation of a nurturing level of feeling that is replaced by negative feeling. This is not peculiar to you. It’s how selves function. Feeling is the number one modality within a self.
Where you differentiate between being the feeling of knowing and being knowing is when the feeling of it ends. So if you come into a great deal of awakening, you’re moving in all of that awakening. You’re feeling much. If all that were suddenly to end, would you continue as clearly in what you knew without all of that feeling? Imagine you’re living in this lush valley of awakening and experiencing what you’re knowing, and then all of a sudden you’re landed in a desert and there’s nothing there. You still know, but all of your experience has gone. Would you be what you know in the desert as clearly as you were being what you were knowing in this rich valley? When you’re rooted in knowing then you will sustain moving in knowing whether or not you have feeling in that.
Q: You’ve told me this for years! It’s not new, being rooted as awareness in knowing.
John: People know what they know. They feel so rooted in what they know and they believe that they’re living being rooted in what they know because they feel it so well, not realizing that they’re rooted in the feeling of what they know. So it’s still intimately connected to knowing but their real rootedness is indirectly in knowing, but not directly.
Q: How do you shift that orientation? Using the mechanism of opening and softening?
John: Yes.
Q: I know that.
John: By not being taken by any negativity. When you’re no longer taken by negativity, you won’t be projecting your problems outside of your self. As long as you can be taken by negativity, it reveals that you project your self onto what is outside of your self. You will project it onto your circumstance. You will project it onto someone else. You will be putting your subconscious self onto everything outside of you and that affects you in a negative way. It’s what people do. Until you’ve built a bigger self by being rooted in knowing, this mechanism within the self exists and thrives. There isn’t anything wrong with that. It’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. What it does mean is that your struggle with yourself goes much deeper than you thought. What it means to be rooted in what you know the truth of also goes a lot deeper than you thought.
Q: Are you saying that what feels like desert is actually a necessary part of integration and going deeper, and the more that you can stay in the stillness, you’re actually going deeper and deeper?
John: Yes. You’re not experiencing it. When you’ve gone through a desert time and you’re settled in the desert, and not frantic, depressed, or reactive in the desert, you’re growing and developing. You may not experience, or see your growth, but when you come out of the desert and you’re back into more of a fullness in your self, you realize all of this newly acquired depth you’ve never had before. Contrary to your experience, you were developing the whole time that you were in the desert.
