Q1: Is there anything in particular about being young that people here need to take care of? Or is there anything you would say about being young?
John: When you’re young, the polarity in your self isn’t seasoned.
Q1: Do you mean you’re not further down the road of being in the self?
John: Youth, inherently, is just like nature. As you grow up without integrating your being and integrating your self, real youth fades. It’s like slowly moving into the city and leaving nature behind.
If you stay in your heart unconditionally, as you move through the different developmental stages of your body and your self, then through every stage there’s a particular magicalness of being that stays with you.
All of that has a cumulative effect, so it keeps building as a richness. If you’re not integrating your self and your being, with the experience of getting older, goodness slowly dries up and all that remains are your grooves and your ways, how important your self is and how dense and sophisticated it has become.
Q1: What’s happening in the developmental stage of your twenties?
John: In your twenties you’re transitioning from childhood to becoming an adult and you begin to become settled. If that settledness doesn’t have a richness of being, then you become settled in the conditioning in your self. You begin to harden in your ways.
If you stay in your heart you keep with you the magicalness of what you’ve come through within each developmental stage, and that also includes the magicalness of a baby. When you remain unconditionally in your heart, that magicalness of a baby is alive in you, the magicalness of a toddler and child, the magicalness of transitioning out of childhood development into an adolescent development. All of that magicalness keeps adding and adding.
Q1: So what if you’ve been leading a life of a stereotypical, lazy teenager? For me it wasn’t magicalness at all!
John: Stay in your heart, unconditionally, without any reference to your self and all of that magicalness will come back in, but as it does it’ll also be the undoing of your self. Magicalness undoes identity.
Q2: Well, I’m near the end of my twenties. Does that still apply?
John: When you get to the end of your twenties and you come into your thirties, what you’ve already turned into in your twenties is what you’re going to build. You’ll naturally build what you’ve already become.
Q2: And how is that if you haven’t properly integrated your self and your being?
John: If you look honestly at your past, how you’ve been in it and moved in it, that tells you your future. If there’s a core-splitting honesty in seeing your past for what it is, you’re able to drop beneath it all but that also means that you will completely crack open.
As that happens, you’ll be recovering every developmental stage. It’s able to all come together, but that will be at the expense of how you have come together. So in that way, everyone’s past can be redeemed. There is no actual ‘being stuck’.
Q3: It seems to me that sometimes it can be difficult, especially in your twenties, to bring that magicalness with you when you try to be taken seriously at your job. Sometimes work is based on a seriousness that’s also kind of identity-based. How can we move in that? I know that I’ve had a lot of difficulty.
John: Don’t buy into it. Even if there’s a cost to that, don’t sell out. If you do sell out and you move in that, you will turn into what this whole world says matters and you’ll become lost.
As soon as you’re achievement-oriented, you’re really in danger of becoming lost.
If you achieve everything that you set out to but lose touch with your being, you will come to the end of your life, on your deathbed, and if you’re really honest, you’ll just be dumbfounded. You’ll wonder what that was all about: your relationships and your career and everything that you achieved.
When you’re really honest on your deathbed you know that that wasn’t it, and somehow you missed it.
The way that this whole world has developed makes something like a career, in some way, everything. Yet without this world, a career means nothing. It’s the development of this world that has given meaning to what we call a career, but a career has no inherent meaning. Its meaning comes from how this world has developed so far.
What does have inherent meaning is your heart, your being, your interior. It matters less what you do in this world.
Q3: So, career goals can still be good as long as you stay clear and come from the being and the heart?
John: Yes, as long as your career goals are not hooked in your self. If there’s anything disturbing to you in letting your career go, it means you’re hooked. You’re hooked in what the self of this world says matters.
This whole world, the self of this world, is not going to represent to you your heart and your being. All it can represent to you are artificial ideas of meaning, and without you moving and incorporating those ideas, you can’t really move within the developed system. Incorporate and move with the ideas, but don’t hook into them.
If you lose perspective, your whole sense of meaning is going to be directly connected to what this world says matters. The planet is real. This world as it’s developed so far is artificial, so the meaning that it provides is artificial.
Moving in this world is similar to playing a board game. At first it starts out as an idea. “Do you want to play this particular board game?” and then a number of you say “Sure!” So you start to play the game and get into it. Once you’re into the game, the game becomes everything! That’s what happens when you choose a particular career. None of it really matters until you get into it.
Your career and how you move in this world need to be just like a board game, so that at any point, if you were to take the game and close it, everything would be fine.
Q4: I’m just wondering what would be a good reason to choose a full-on, successful career in terms of this world that’s going to use a lot of time and energy?
John: So that your being can be in a career instead of your self. What your being does with that will be completely different from what any kind of self would do with that. For your being, it’s rich.
Whatever career you choose is like going into the Matrix and taking on a particular character or job. Being in the Matrix, for you, has nothing to do with anything that’s going on into the Matrix. You know and you can see, and you’re there for reasons that have nothing to do with how and why everyone else is in the Matrix.
Q4: I can see that up until now that wouldn’t have been possible because I’ve had all of these hooks.
John: With those hooks you lose perspective and become blind. Go into the Matrix, but don’t get lost. Know why you’re there.
Q5: There’s a sense that I have with all of us young people here, that whenever we get together there’s a warmth and I’m wondering if you could talk about what that serves, or how we can be in that together?
John: Feed it by moving in it. When you’re in that, you’re in a deeper level. When you move in that, you’re moving in your deeper levels. What you’re able to do is not just move in your deeper levels in relating to that, you’re able to move your deeper levels which means that you are engaging your deeper levels with someone else’s. That’s what being together is really about. To discern that, you need to be really listening to your deeper levels while you’re in all of your thinking and feeling.
Q8: So it’s not to drop out of thinking and feeling? Moving isn’t just a vague sense.
John: It’s very concrete. It’s with and through thought and feeling, but it’s what’s moving through thought and feeling that matters.
Q6: John, I have a question about what sex is for. When I was growing up there was a focus on the importance of waiting until I’m married. It became something that was almost put on a pedestal. I didn’t understand why, and it’s left me wondering what the waiting and importance was all about.
John: The waiting isn’t because of any kind of right or wrong. The waiting has to do with a deeper level of sense. It isn’t really about the waiting. It’s about building a base that can support it. It’s a really powerful energy and it needs a proper base. If you don’t have a deeper base for that kind of power, then it goes right into your self. It won’t highlight your being. It will highlight the appetites in your self.
Q6: What’s the difference between not having that base then and not having it now? I’m thinking that maybe we shouldn’t make love until that’s sorted. It’s almost like before we were married. What is the purpose of making love?
John: It’s a vehicle of expression for your being. In a way that makes sense on a heart level, it’s a vehicle of expression for dearness. If dearness for you is what you are and how you move, in every kind of movement you’re making your way.
Q6: Is there a way for us to come together as if we were still both virgins?
John: Don’t import your past into each other and into your relationship. The more that you relate to your past, the more you empower your past. Without a past, you can’t relate to attraction or aversion so what remains is not your self and how you’ve experienced it. What remains is your heart. Without your past you’re all heart.
Q6: Sometimes it seems as if only our selves are involved, yet I have a sense that something else is going on that’s deeper.
John: Stay there. Find even one subtlety of what’s taking place on a deeper level. Look for that despite your selves, and if you find even one subtlety then, like a magnet, go right into it and stay there.
