Q: All that started around the virus has made me really look at the choices I’ve been making in my life. Just as lockdown began, I knew I needed to get back to the country where my partner lives, get back to our bond and be in the stream with you. I just made it back and since then, in this love, I’ve been horrible! I’ve been having nightmares, too. It was so much easier to be separate than together. Do you know what I mean?
John: As you come a little bit more into what you really are, you are relaxing in a way that’s fundamental to you. It is nothing to do with your self, so this frees you somewhat of how you’ve been holding your self together. It brings you into a truer sense of your self; it gives you a truer reflection of what your self is actually like.
What this means is that the condition of your self is worse than how you’ve held your sense of self together – that your way of seeing your self wasn’t in line with the actual condition of your self. So as you relax it will give you the experience that your self is worse, that you’re getting worse.
Q: Sometimes it has felt like I can’t reorient my self. It seems so real.
John: Yes. It feels so actual. It’s so there in your experience, in your body, in your nervous system: so actual. It’s not real. If you’re hoping for it to get better, that is a holding of your self together.
Q: This feels like the perfect time to just be in it, and be small.
John: Without need of your self healing or changing. What matters is for you to be what you really are in the midst of your self as it is, and not with any result in mind: not with the slightest hope or desire, without the slightest orientation that references your experience and your self, without the slightest hope that your self will change. So you really are then being unconditionally you in the midst of your self that isn’t like you, and you’re not being that for your self. You’re being that because that’s what’s real and true.
You have had your fingers crossed. You’ve been in the hope that your self will change, that your experience will change. Your fingers being crossed is a holding together of your self. Your two fingers need to uncross and relax. You need to be without hope for your self, so you are just you without any reference to your self. Your experience of your self from that may get better. It may also get worse.
The stronger your self-image has been – a self-image isn’t the same as the actual condition of your self – the stronger the self-image, the more you relax, the worse your experience of your self because the better image of your self is washing away, letting you see your self as it actually is, in the condition that it is that you didn’t want to see. And in the seeing, which isn’t very nice, you stay being you.
You don’t cross your fingers in hope of a change, and you also don’t hold your two fingers together because of how you’re disturbed in your self in what you see. The crossing of your fingers, for any reason at all, relaxes. That’s you, at home in you, regardless of your self.
Q: It’s like being in heaven even if you’re in hell.
John: It’s like you being the quietude of heaven while you are in your terribly noisy hell. Hell abounds and you are, in your quietude, unchanged.
Hell isn’t original. It will pass away. If you don’t like it, what that really means is you are still in relationship to it. Through your dislike of it, you still need it. You are using it. You’re using the disfavour of it to give you a sense of self, regardless of how unpleasant that is; that you would rather have an unpleasant sense of self than be quieted within, without result and without return.
It means that you would actually rather be in hell than for you to be nothing.
Q: Why does it seem so much more appealing to be in hell than to be nothing?
John: It gives you a sense of self. This “oh, so terrible” thing that you’re in makes you someone. It makes you somebody. It makes you something. What would you be if you’re no longer disturbed by difficulty, if you’re no longer affected by any kind of hell, if hell doesn’t matter to you anymore, and that it no longer makes a difference to you?
Q: I’d be free.
John: Being free means that you are no longer the addiction to the feelings of your self. You are fundamentally no longer tied to your self. If your self gets better, that doesn’t make you better. If your self worsens, that doesn’t take anything away from you.
Regardless of your experience of your self, you are being the same: gentled and quieted within.
If your self is pained or blessed, you are not different. Your beingness doesn’t change because of any change in your self. If your experience in your self because of you being gentled and quieted within is fiery selfishness, then you are stillness in the fire, not connected to the fire, not to change the fire. You are just stillness in the fire.
Q: Thank you.
