Q: It’s a rare opportunity to sit with someone like you and I’m trying to think of the best question. Is there a benefit in verbally asking a question and being answered?
John: Anything that is real is worth it.
Q: I’ve read your book ‘Unveiling Reality’ in which you speak of your awakening and later enlightenment. I think I’ve had awakening experiences, but I’d love to know the hallmarks of awakening and enlightenment.
John: Awakening is being able to see beingness, being able to drink in beingness, being able to distinguish between beingness and everything else. You can be awakened to see, and that doesn’t mean that there is a surrender to be what you see. Awakening isn’t it. There is only one it, and that is the jewel of purity of heart.
The real gem of consciousness is purity of heart. Awakening is merely the glistening of that, but it is not yet that. It makes no difference how awakened you are; it makes no difference how much your eyes have been opened to see reality. All that makes any difference is how surrendered are you to whatever it is that you genuinely see, within, that you know is real. If you’re massively awakened then you would be able to speak of much, but that doesn’t mean at all that you are being much. Or you could be not awakened at all – completely blind within – and be wonderfully surrendered within, completely at rest in not being able to see; being the jewel that cannot yet see. That is worth more than any awakening. When there’s purity of heart, whatever little bit you come to see that is real within, without resistance you become one with it.
Purity of heart is where surrender always matches seeing, where there’s no split between surrender and seeing. Then, regardless of how much you see, and regardless of how awakened you might not be, what you are being within is simple, unencumbered response to truth. Many are awakened. Many are awakened much. There are not many that are clean. Clean is worth more than seeing. Beauty in consciousness and cleanness in consciousness are inseparable. You can be clean and not awakened. You can be awakened and not clean. Wherever cleanness is, there is loveliness. Awakening without cleanness is serious trouble.
Q: How so?
John: Awakening without cleanness causes the most sophisticated and complex distortion within consciousness. It is seeing without completely surrendering. It is that that causes distortion within. Being able to see even more doesn’t make one clean. If there is not total surrender in seeing more, then one becomes more distorted in trying to keep what one sees, while not turning into what one sees.
Q: Is this why now I feel much more tension than I did previously? Life events have brought my awareness to a deep core pattern that I may not have seen had I not had an awakening and seen something of my true self, giving me the courage to go to the bottom and experience this pain.
John: One is better off not to become awakened than to become awakened, see what’s real, and not completely surrender to that. It is the absence of surrender, or the lack of surrender that creates distortion. When you become awakened and there’s not an absolute surrender to what is seen within in that awakening, then one actually believes that what is seen is yours, even though it’s not surrendered to. Then one can speak of what is real without being real. One can think about what is real without being real – being able to think that one actually has something when it is only surrender that is something. Awakening means that there is now a change of possibility. It is only total surrender that is an actual realization of that possibility. You are not what you see. You are what you surrender to. You can be greatly awakened and yet still surrendered to want. Then what one is is not an awakening, but a much more refined and sophisticated want.
Awakening is being able to see beingness, being able to distinguish beingness from everything else. Purity of heart is being one with that. Purity of heart means that one is home, having no split within. When there is purity of heart and awakening, then one is home within and can see. Enlightenment is after one is home, and seeing beingness, distinguishing it from everything else, and growing as a being. Then, in time, within such growing as a being, within the human consciousness, beingness becomes of age. Then it can begin to learn how to do beingness, without doing something. That’s enlightenment. Awakening doesn’t make you complete. It is only purity of heart that makes you complete. Enlightenment doesn’t make purity of heart more complete.
Q: What does?
John: Nothing. Awakening enables purity of heart to fill out the human consciousness. Enlightenment enables that to be usable.
Q: Where am I in this? Am I in pure egoic distortion or is there any measure of purity of heart here?
John: How much are you being surrender? Not just when the sun shines in consciousness, but also when there is a storm, and even more particularly when there’s fire.
Q: I don’t know if I can measure myself. A great deal of anger, hurt and fear came up for me in the last few weeks and rather than react to it I decided to feel it as much as I could, let it go wherever it wanted to within. It showed me the root fear that was driving everything. I don’t know if this means surrender or trying to fix it. I felt that I was honest with looking but I can’t measure myself.
John: Be open to see, and adore cleanness. Then surrender turns you into the beloved.
