Q: I grew up during the Second World War, and we had a philosophy that it’s safest to be quiet and not ask too many questions. Very late in life I realized that I’m really part of an interaction with everything in this world and the universe, and that I have an interactive function. Catching up with this late in life is both a shocking realization and an education. I realize I have a contribution to make and at the same time the world is creating new forms of interaction and communication I find it almost impossible to keep pace with. If I pick up the newspaper and look at what is happening I find it deeply moving and in some ways satisfying, however horrible the events, but it takes me all morning on one article of real value! My question, John, is how do you cope with your interactive self in this world?
John: I have no orientation to coping, so I’m not relating to coping. I am relating to being deeply interactive, not limited to my experience of my self but even deeper.
When you open and soften in your heart, you’re at a deeper level of interactivity than when you’re in your self. When you’re opening and softening within, your whole sense of what you read in an article is from a different perspective than when you’re simply open in your self, your thinking and your feeling. When you’re being openness and softness, not dependent on thought and feeling, then you perceive directly. You perceive from what you really are, before you think and feel, which then puts you into a deeper level of thought and feeling.
Present within the newspaper article there’s even a deeper level of interactivity. When you go even deeper within than your own heart, you enter your being. Then you’re interacting with the same level, a level of being that’s outside of your self, a level of being that is present within everything else that’s taking place. You perceive not just as openness and softness but as a being, into the beingness outside of your self, within the circumstance that you’re reading about. It’s a much more profound level of interactivity that brings you into an even deeper level of thought and feeling. It puts you into your subtle mind, and most subtle feeling. You’re perceiving life as a being while you’re in your heart, in your self and in person, reading an article.
In that way you’re coming from the deeper levels of reality within, and seeing and knowing them outside of your self. Then, in everything that you experience in your life, you have profound perspective. You’re present within your life not just from within your heart, but as a being.
Q: Yes. Thank you. This leaves me with the feeling that everything matters because deep down, in some way, it has influence.
