Q: In your book ‘The Intelligence of Love' you say enlightenment isn’t everything, purity of heart is. Can you explain that?
John: You can be enlightened and that doesn’t mean that you’ll be all that you’ve awakened to, all that you’ve come into. It doesn’t really matter how much you directly know, how much you’ve awakened, how much you’ve come into. What really matters is to be what you directly know the truth of within.
The amount anyone knows is of little consequence. How much you are being what you do know is everything.
Purity of heart means that you are gentled and quieted in your heart because you are gentled and quieted in what you know in your heart. Gentled in what you know, your heart fills with the quietude of what you know and its beingness, which is love.
With your heart in that way already filled, you won’t take your self to heart. Your heart with your self not in it is clean. Bring your self into your heart and it’s no longer clean. To bring your self into your heart, for you to take your self to heart, requires a tightening, a closing, a holding.
When you, despite how much your self is mixed into your heart, relax, just by virtue of you, relaxed, your heart opens, softens and becomes cleaned of your self. Your heart opened and softened is already filling with the same as your being.
The openness and the softness is the first little bit of your being. Then it is your being-filled heart that naturally, on its own, moves. As it moves, moving as love, your being-filled heart fills your self, which makes your self the same as your being and what has filled your heart.
Purity of heart isn’t a work; it is the quieted absence of it. All there is, then, in a pure heart is you, at rest – you rested in it. With nothing else there, nothing of your self, nothing of your life, your heart is clean.
Take your self seriously and your heart is closing. The more that you are about your self and its sense of importance, the more closed your heart.
