Responding To Goodness

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Q: Thank you for coming to New York. Would you speak about responding to goodness?

John: You love it when you do and you miss it when you don’t. When you respond to it, it hurts so good. When you’re not responding to goodness, it hurts so bad. 

The response to goodness puts you directly into what you really are. It wouldn’t matter what kind of distortion you’re present in; when you relax, you respond to goodness. When you relax as awareness, you’re being what goodness is. 

Any kind of awareness, in any distorted state, when it relaxes it turns directly into goodness – goodness that has no opposite. It’s real and direct source of you.

Q: You just answered about ten of my questions!

John: You just loved.

Q: If I am pierced by something and I turn away from it, is that the same as moving toward it?

John: Instead of moving away or turning away from something, be a direct, most delicate “yes” toward a deeper level of anything that, on the surface, you would have turned away from.  Then you are “yes” to what you most deeply know, even within those things that you don’t like to see. It’s the openness to see more deeply than what initially affects your self. 

Then, as you live, you live walking in. You live entering deeper and deeper levels within, and they’re connected to what you’re experiencing within your self and outside your self. So you have real connectivity, despite what you might be experiencing on the surface. 

Then, when someone who’s close to you is angry with you, what you really begin to see most quietly within is that they miss you. Instead of turning away from an angry person, you’re facing what is dearly just beneath the surface.

 

The Way Of Your Evolution As Awareness

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Q: Hi, John. Yesterday I heard you say that being alive in this body is the biggest opportunity to grow in awareness. I would like to know what would be helpful for me to grow in that way.

John: By you letting your evolution as awareness matter more than everything that you have: for it to matter more than your being, more than your heart, more than your self; for it to matter more than your person and your life. That opens everything you have to what you are, as awareness, and to its evolution. 

The evolution of what you have does matter. The evolution of what you have is completely dependent on the evolution of the level that just precedes it. The evolution of your self is completely dependent on the evolution of your heart. The evolution of your heart is completely dependent on the evolution of your being, and the evolution of your being is completely dependent on your evolution as awareness.

Any little bit of sense that you have of that gives you perspective. It gives you perspective concerning your life, your self and your heart, and with that you gain access into your own being. 

You being that in your heart, in your self and in your living puts you into the quickest way possible for you as awareness to evolve, but it is also with the greatest difficulty and the most discomfort. The way of your evolution as awareness is going to put your self into a constant self of change, a life of profound difficulty.

Awareness that is evolving and moving forward is awareness that increases in its capacity. It increases in form in its ability. What it is able to be and able to do is continually more. That will always make difficulty as close to you in your life as it’s able to be. 

It isn’t ease which makes you happy. It is you, as awareness, being what you know from the innermost outwards which makes you happy. In that, difficulty doesn’t make you unhappy. Difficulty is what you are simply in. Real opportunity for what you really are isn’t separate from difficulty.

There isn’t virtue in adversity. There is virtue in you evolving, as awareness, in the midst of adversity. What you are being in the midst of what you suffer doesn’t make the suffering good or right; it makes what you are being in it true to what you know, true to your own innermost. It has you in the midst of pain or suffering, adversity or difficulty, reaching into your deepest resources. It has you really needing everything you first really are, and being that in your forms.    

That reach stretches you as awareness into what you’re capable of. That stretch in form is painful. Growth is painful. In evolving as awareness in your forms, you will suffer growing pains.

 

 

The Healing Power Of Tenderness

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Q: My daughter is seventeen years old and I’m wondering what I can do for the best to heal the ways she may have been hurt by us whilst growing up. How can we parents become truly one with our children for everyone’s sake?

John: By letting tenderness replace worry, letting tenderness replace concern. Your concern doesn’t touch her heart; your tenderness does. Your concern separates you from her. Your concern for her is truly more about you than her, whereas your tenderness for her is genuinely for her.

Q: If the concern is generally for me, what must I do to relieve that concern?

John: By being tender with you. When you’re gentle with your self, then that gentleness will extend toward her. If you’re concerned for her, you’re not being gentle with your self.

Love includes another; it doesn’t look at another, which is what concern is. Concern is letting what you are looking at in her reflect what you are uncomfortable with, instead of just simply living with your whole heart including her. Then you’re never looking at her, and you can always see her.

When you really see her, then there’s nothing that you see that needs to change. Then worry, concern and judgment are gone. When all that there is within you towards her is clean tenderness, she hears that, and when she does, any kind of holding within her automatically lets go.

Q: I can hear that and feel it.

John: Your tenderness is her tension relief. Your concern only increases her tension. Then she not only has to deal with her self but she also has to deal with you.

If she knows she doesn’t have to deal with you, that invites her to not have to deal with her self, which allows her to open up. Then the opening just happens.

Q: Thank you for helping me to see this.

 

 

The End Of All Your Problems

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Q: I have difficulty with difficulty! I seem to perceive life as difficult, with everything becoming a mission to be overcome, successfully. I keep thinking I’m doing things wrong and it prevents me from really enjoying life.

John: Any time that you have a problem with something it is because you, within, are out of alignment with what you truly are. As soon as you have a problem, within, then you have taken control when you don’t need it.

Q: Is there ever a time for control?

John: Control is totally misunderstood. Control is not to be gained: it’s to be let go of. As long as you have a problem, you are still trying to gain control because your own survival and your own safety are still worth more than anything else. To value control by way of keeping it, wanting it or needing it is you putting your own way at a premium. 

Q: I did a course recently where ‘responsibility’ was a big word.

John: There are not any problems outside of you. Someone cannot be your problem, regardless of what they are doing to you. A circumstance cannot be your problem, regardless of what it seems to be doing to you. 

The only problem that can possibly exist is just you. When you are a problem, then you find problems all around you. When all problems are finally realized to be just you, then your final problem can very gently pass away. Then there is not an issue that exists in you anymore. 

Any time that you experience a problem, you’re experiencing your judgment of yourself outside of your self. Any problem outside of your self reveals only what you are running away from within you. It reveals the patterns within you and the patterns within your mind that you refuse to face. 

Problems cannot be solved until they are all first, very gently, reduced to being just you. When you are very gentle with that last problem, then that gentleness replaces the problem. Gentleness replaces you. It replaces the you that you are used to being in this world. 

Q: I think it is a scary thing to just be me.

John: It’s only scary to be what is really you as long as your value of control is that of keeping it. When your value of control is that of letting go of it, then being what is really you is pure goodness. It has in it absolutely no fear.

Q: Well, I have fear of losing control – big time!

John: Very gently let go of your need to control, and love replaces fear. 

 

What Is Genuine Self-Acceptance?

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Q: If love is the answer, we are here to love and that’s what gives us pleasure …

John: Whoops! You were driving along and then you just hit the ditch. Love is the answer, but it isn’t to give you pleasure. It isn’t to make you feel good; it isn’t to give you a nice life, a good life. 

Love is the answer because there isn’t really anything else. As soon as you make love of use, that’s not love. Then you’re connecting into a feeling of love, an idea of love. That sets you up for a lot of pain. 

Q: If the most logical thing to do is to accept your self fully, why is it that it’s so easy for me, even though I’m doing so much inner work, to forget my self-worth?

John: Because you’re not genuinely accepting your self. If you’re genuinely accepting your self, you won’t be accepting your self for any results. You won’t be accepting your self because that will heal something, fix something, make your self better, make you happier, get rid of the weight of some of your problems. 

Genuine self-acceptance isn’t hinged on anything. As soon as you connect it to a reason, a result, a return, it won’t be genuine, so it will complicate your self. 

The truth of self-acceptance is that regardless of the condition of your self and your life, you are first nurturingly okay with everything as it is; that there’s nothing that needs to change in your self and in your life for you to be okay. That means, then, that your okayness within is deep and real.

If you have a wonderful day, that’s okay. If you have an awful day, that’s okay. If you’re told you have cancer, that’s okay. What that means is that regardless of what comes and goes in your self and in your life, you are nurturingly okay. That’s you. Nothing can make it worse and nothing can make it better.

If things can make you okay, then there are so many other things that will make you not okay. As soon as you move in that direction, you live to escape not okayness, or to fight it. You live looking for things that will make you more okay. There’s no end to that. It isn’t real. 

All of the things that you believe would make you okay, really won’t. As soon as you have one of them, you’ll want the next one. As soon as you get that one too, you’ll want the next one. If you don’t need any of them, and all that remains is that regardless of any of them you are deeply, quietly, nurturingly okay and there’s nothing around it, that’s real. It frees you to be genuine in whatever you do because you’re not doing things on the outside for inside results. When you are already happy without any reason, nothing can make you happier.

Try it out for one morning – just half a day – without connecting you being okay to anything outside of your self. It’s not connected to anything you can do, and you be that inside, in the midst of whatever you do and see.

 

Real Listening Within: The Beginning Of Love

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Q: You recently said that eternity was a being. What is love?

John: Expression of eternity.

Q: What is that in relation to truth?

John: Truth is the stillness of it and love is the movement of that.

Q: How do they become one?

John: They are one.

Q: How can movement and stillness be one?

John: Stillness moving. Stillness moving is true movement, quality movement. That’s what makes a tree so lovely: the stillness that is in its movement, its quality of movement; the stillness that is in its embrace.

Q: I wanted to ask you about listening.

John: You are more used to seeing than listening. When you have more seeing than listening, it makes you experience-oriented. That opens up the loveliness of experience with a lack of stillness. It is listening within that is at the leading edge of stillness within. With seeing there is already a coming out. In listening within, everything stops. With real listening within you can’t be coming from anything that you can already see. In listening within you are able to know something that you cannot yet see. There is not yet an understanding of what you know. It is the listening within that connects you with such knowing, even though you cannot understand or see.

With listening, real listening within, all seeing becomes still. As all the seeing becomes still and the attention of awareness is on something that it knows, in the hearing of what it knows, the knowing fills the heart. It is after the knowing filling the heart that awareness is able to look at what it knows. Then the looking is from the stillness, the kind of stillness that awareness was listening with. That enables the eyes of the heart to see what they have never seen before. Such nourishing seeing fills and heals the mind, which gives understanding.

The quality of seeing within is determined by the degree of listening within. Listeners will be able to see better than seers. Listeners can see, but seers don’t necessarily listen. If there is an inclination of awareness to see rather than to listen, then awareness becomes experience-oriented. Seeing becomes limited by experience.

For the finest listening there is a release of all that one sees. It is such listening that improves seeing. With such seeing, there is then an authoritative knowing within every experience that comes from seeing. There is a seeing that is no longer guided or limited by an experience, but a seeing that is guided by real listening within.

Stillness in seeing comes from listening within. Let awareness distinguish itself from seeing so that it can listen. Real listening within precedes real seeing. It is the listening within that purifies the seeing. Love listening within and you’ll enjoy seeing more clearly. There is surrender in listening. There isn’t necessarily surrender in seeing. It doesn’t matter how much one can see. It doesn’t matter if there is a vastness of seeing if there is not the most delicate listening.

Seeing means that there has been virtue living in the heart. When awareness is really listening within, that means that there presently is virtue living in the heart. Without virtue living in the heart, all value is an assumed value. When virtue is living in the heart because awareness is really listening, living value permeates everything. Eternity is present, which isn’t necessarily so with seeing. With seeing there is past credit. With real listening within, there is present credit. Seeing shows you the truth of what was. Real listening within shows you what newly, presently, is.

A seer can still be a taker, whereas a true listener within is an authentic receiver, an authentic receiver of newness. It is that which makes for such clear seeing. It doesn’t matter how much you can see. It does really matter how dearly you listen within. Then it matters how much you let yourself see, and most importantly how much you’ll do what you can see. You can get away with having excitement in seeing, but in real listening within there is only stillness, being able to hear something within that you have never heard before.

Love listening within more than even seeing, and more than any kind of doing. Love listening within more than living. It is really listening within that lets eternity come into form, virtue. Virtue in the heart is eternity in form. Without that, everything that you think you have, including the seeing, is perishable. Real listening allows for an infilling that is imperishable. That enables you to see what is imperishable, to live what is imperishable. When you are living what is imperishable, then you have an eternal life: a real life that isn’t perishable.

A heart that can see but that isn’t really listening is a heart that is shortsighted. The seeing is only as reliable as one is really listening within.

Love really listening, more than seeing or doing or living. It is that which lets you really see and live, and live the eternal. You can see without having love. You cannot really listen within, without having love. 

Really listening within is the beginning of love. Quieted willingness.

 

Finding Real Togetherness In Relationship

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Q: I’ve been in relationship for almost twenty years, and in all these years of living next to each other we don’t have togetherness; we can’t connect and communicate. It’s as if we speak different languages. Something in me says this part of my life is over, but I also wonder if I’m creating the problem and don’t give him a chance to understand me.

John: He doesn’t need to understand you. To be in a real relationship the two of you only need to be together.

Q: Why hasn’t it ever happened?

John: Because you’re looking for more than that. You’re looking for too much.

Q: Why too much?

John: You’re looking for the bakery, so then you can’t see the bread that’s there. Or you’re looking for the bread but you can’t see all of the crumbs that are there. Any time you’re looking for more than what is there, you’ll be blind to what is really there.

When you’re just delicately being there with him, or even just delicately being toward him, as you are settled in that you start to see differently. You start to see in him what is so touching for you to see in him, and then when you come into little bits of that, don’t make any of that about your self: how to have more of that, or how to communicate to him what you see.

Q: I listen to you but don’t understand anything. Why does nothing touch me? Even you don’t understand me!

John: That’s how projection works.

The way that projection works is that whatever it is that you’re coming from, what you at present are relating from is what you’ll see through. When you’re coming from the belief that nobody really sees you and understands you, then that’s what you’ll find and that’s what you’ll see. 

If that core belief wouldn’t be there, you would see the subtleties in people’s faces and in their eyes of where you can see that they understand you.

Q: Maybe it’s not that you don’t understand me. It’s with all people. I’m not feeling that I have a real connection with people. 

John: Then you’re also not giving to others, not freely giving to others what you’re looking for from others.

If you find that you’re not really connecting to anyone, then, without looking for results, start giving tiny little things to people: a look without needing anything back, a word without needing anything back. 

Enjoy the connectivity and the goodness, the flow of giving tiny little things to people – so little that most won’t notice.

Q: I think that I do that a lot with people. 

John: If it’s genuine, a garden in you will grow.

 

Warmly At Home In Darkness

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Q: About seventeen years ago I was in an accident and I was hospitalized for two years. Two years later I was in another accident and hospitalized for three more years. My mind, body – everything – collapsed and it took me a long time to recover. Three years ago my body collapsed again and I went into a coma. That was the worst: everything went totally black and all the fears and darkness from childhood came up. So much darkness! Why is this process so hard? I don’t understand.

John: You don’t need to understand. What you can be is in deep, deep, quiet response in the midst of these powerful invitations. You keep being invited and you keep thinking that something is wrong. You’re interpreting what is happening to you from the perspective of your self, conditioned by this world, instead of reading all of it from within your heart, all gentled. 

Instead of struggling with the darkness, let your deepest warmth fill all of that darkness. It doesn’t need to change your experience of it. What this means is that you are really there in all of that darkness, instead of wishing to not be there. 

You being warmly okay in all of that darkness is your deep, deep uncovering. You don’t need the light where there is no light. You can be absolutely at home in the dark. That makes you the same as light even though you can’t see it. The light of you being that deeply at home in the dark: that light is for others. It isn’t light that you need. 

You deeply opened in the dark. As you relax, as you are so at home in the dark, you will come into your night vision. It is a very different kind of seeing. It’s a kind of seeing that only love has. Instead of struggling to breathe, hear the invitation. From a deep listening within, hear the invitation. 

Your real seeing comes from what you’re listening to. Your real seeing doesn’t come from understanding or trying to understand. It comes from your depth of listening within. 

Q: Thank you.  

 

Do I Need A Spiritual Teacher?

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Q: My question is about the role of a spiritual teacher in spiritual development. I’ve been studying with a teacher for a few years and benefiting from the practice and study of Tibetan Buddhism. Then there was a breakup of the sangha because of the misconduct of the teacher, and I lost motivation. Now I’m looking for new hope and maybe a new path. Do you think it’s important to have a teacher for spiritual development?

John: Don’t neglect the baby just because the parent has disappointed you. If you know a teacher that is able to reach right into what you really are and bring that right up into your self, then you need that teacher because you know. You know real help. If you don’t have that, if you don’t know or have such a one, you don’t need one.

Q: I did feel that it was beneficial for me, and my life changed for the better. But how do you know if the teacher is helping you do that?

John: Your core honesty within has a sense – directly knows a little bit of it. Your sincerity in that is your way. If you use anything else, you lose your way. 

What really matters in your relationship with a teacher is your core honesty within, because without that you won’t know the truth. And then what matters is your core sincerity, because without that you won’t respond to the truth within that you know. 

Core honesty knows, and core sincerity moves in what it knows.

 

Marriage And The Soup Bone

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Q: We’d like to get married soon. Can you speak to us about marriage? 

John: Marriage is like a soup bone. 

Q: Is like a what?

John: A soup bone. When you’re completely still in it and not making it about your self, you get thoroughly cooked. Every little thing comes out to be cooked. 

If you’re not open to have everything within yourself get completely cooked, then marriage won’t work. If you’re not open to go through what a soup bone would go through, then it won’t work. 

It’s not about having great soup. It is really about the openness to go through what a soup bone would go through. If the two of you are remaining in that, that makes great soup, but by the time the soup is ready neither one of you will be there anymore. 

Q: Are you saying that it’s not for us, but it’s for it to take us? 

John: It’s about something much higher than either one of you – or even the two of you. If in any way you make it about either one of you, or about the two of you, then you’ll preserve yourself from getting cooked. Just like the movie Field of Dreams wasn’t about baseball, even though they said it was. It was all about the space in the cornfield.

Q: Can you say something about a husband and a wife being in truth together in the marriage? 

John: Each being separately rooted in truth, together; each returning to and coming back out of the source, together. 

Q: Thank you, John.

John: Every moment that you lose sight of that space in the cornfield, then you’re fooled into thinking that it’s all about farming and baseball.

It is all about the space that is in the cornfield – in farming and in baseball.

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