Q: I have this question about innocence. All those things that we do to our selves and to other people … do they leave marks? Do they go away?
John: Never. Did you see the movie ‘The Gladiator’? What he said is true: that everything that you do now echoes through eternity.
Q: So you just let it echo?
John: That’s acceptance. When you, in tenderness, let what you’ve done to your self, to your being, to others … when you let that, in tenderness, echo through eternity then it is that tenderness that echoes around that for eternity. It will take all of eternity for you to realize.
Q: Can you say more?
John: It will take all of eternity for you to realize how pregnant every little action of yours is. We make it all so small by justifying what we do, rationalizing things. Then we take something that is so endlessly huge, such as a single action in one moment, and we manage to reduce it to nothing, and in that we become calloused. We lose our innocence. Innocence feels and is in touch with, in largeness, the smallness of every little thing.
It’s only innocence that knows the echo of things.
Q: Did I know that echo when I was running around like a bull in a china shop?
John: Way deep down, but not on the surface. It was so deep down because it was that far away that you needed to push it. If it would get any closer it would interfere with your life. It would interfere with what you wanted. Desperation to control pushes the knowing of the echo away.
While you’re still on the earth plane you can push such echoes away with more action: awareness invested in action, making yourself busy about nothing. Then we manage to do much talking that has no meaning. That is awareness invested in action, just to keep the echo away. When we let the echo in that is when the old begins to die. When you let the echo in, all that remains is what is new and then even old echoes will touch only what is new, which again creates a very different echo – one that is not coarse.
Once you leave the earth plane you can no longer delude yourself and then the echo pierces you. All that it will touch within you is tenderness. The echo of meaningless words, meaningless action; the echo from that will forever, in tenderness, pierce your heart because you’ll see it for what it really is instead of how you may have wanted to see it.
Q: Are they meaningless because they are empty?
John: They’re meaningless because they were used to cover something. That makes them empty, then we use words to accomplish something other than their actual meaning. Then our energy and our words don’t match.
Any action that arises out of openness or softness also echoes throughout eternity, and after you leave this earth plane such echoes will always, in tenderness, pierce you as well, because then you’ll see your own heart. You’ll see the movement of gold in it. You’ll be moved by the meaning of what you were being.
When a bug crawls across the ground, its every step affects in fineness the entire universe. The actions of a consciousness such as we are affects the whole universe in a way that is so much larger, you could never measure it. Innocence can feel that. It’s only innocence that can let that in.
