Q: Your talk about beauty touched something deep within. My whole childhood I felt ugly. Now I’m beginning to experience more beauty inside and outside. I’ve never felt a victim. I developed certain patterns that helped along the way. Trust is quite a big issue and I’m gradually gaining more trust now. Being in a good relationship has helped a lot. I’d like advice on how not to listen to patterns when they come up.
John: Your patterning is your conditioning, conditioning through inheritance or through choices you’ve made. The patterning, in any case, does always help what you first are. Each time a pattern touches you and provides you with its experience, your own knowing is brought up. The patterned experience in your self brings knowing about. Every time a pattern moves you, every time that you experience a pattern as being your self, you do subtly know something different. The movement of every pattern brings about what’s deeper, but subtly.
It moves your knowing. It moves your knowing what is real. Each time it’s an opportunity for you, as awareness, to identify with the subtle, the subtle that actually deeply means something, instead of identifying with the strength of the experience of a pattern. Even when you get stuck in your patterns because of identifying with them and using your own patterns in favoring those things that you are liking and disfavoring those things you are not liking, and not seeing them any more, you can still see it in others. Your subtle deep knowledge within is touched when you see others in their patterning.
As much as everything can seem to be about patterns in your self and others, within the drama of all that, it’s really all about knowing. Awareness knowing is the constant in it all. While it doesn’t provide you with an experience as a pattern does, it does provide you with a resonance, a resonance of profound value. On a subtle level it is experienced, but compared to your patterned experience it seems as nothing.
Softness of heart delivers you from the reality of your pattern, whatever pattern you are in, softness of heart removes your heart from that pattern. It immediately has your heart being something different. As softness of heart removes you from being the pattern, it also removes you from being a victim of that pattern. In being removed from the pattern, the victim is gone. With softness of heart there is immediately innocence of heart. Innocence of heart doesn’t relate to a patterned self. Innocence of heart is that, within, that just precedes your accustomed self. It is softness of heart that turns you into that. Softness of heart removes every encumbrance of heart. Softness of heart relieves you of being a self that isn’t even like you. Softness of heart afflicted, afflicted by anything, becomes even more softness of heart.
Beauty of heart afflicted with feeling ugly increases beauty. Beauty afflicted opens the deep in beauty. Innocence of heart afflicted manifests innocence. Put the squeeze on hardness of heart and hardness of heart comes out. Put the squeeze on softness of heart and softness of heart comes out. Oppression doesn’t change a heart. It doesn’t change softness of heart. Only choice can do so.
Only fundamental choice can either, be knowing or abandon knowing. It’s the heart that does immediately show it. In that way you cannot trust what you think and what you feel to tell you what’s true. It’s really only knowing that you can trust to tell you anything at all about you. As you begin to realize that, you begin to slowly discern what knowing is, in the midst of a feeling. With such discernment you’ll be able slowly to identify that more quickly so that eventually you can trust what you feel and what you think to tell you what is true, but your own knowing remains essential to that.
Eventually you’ll know what feeling is the form of knowing and what feeling isn’t. As that begins to develop you’ll also be able to trust your self. Until then you cannot trust your self. You cannot even trust the feeling of your heart. What you can trust is your own present knowing of softening in your heart. The softening and the opening of your heart is the most basic, fundamental beingness. It’s the first that you identify in your heart as being true. Softness of heart won’t necessarily make beauty feel like beauty, but it is what makes beauty what it is. Staying with it eventually has you realizing it.
The moment that you get it, the moment that you can really see it, in that moment you have real heart understanding. The moment that you see it, your world changes. Heart understanding doesn’t change your heart. It reveals an understanding of heart within your self. It’s the first of your self becoming like your heart. It’s that that reaches, as a self, to another. As soon as it reaches to another, softness of heart in the other is accomplished. Softness of heart is the response of heart in being reached. With this you can as awareness, be consciously reachable, and consciously reaching. With such a heart you’ll be an entreatable self, a self whose heart is always reached first, instead of a pattern. With hardness of heart the pattern is reached first, creating a response of self that is according to that pattern.
The beauty of softness of heart is its ready capacity to realize. Softness of heart realizes before it thinks. From within softness of heart it is realization that creates newness of thought, that creates an authentic thought. When you have such thought it moves with knowing. With such thought you know the truth of the thought. The thought isn’t on the level of regular perception. It is on the same level as softness of heart, moving a different kind of mind. It moves thinking that is just like you, thinking that, when recognized, is thinking that softness of heart trusts because it’s of the same.
You can’t simply trust any sense of knowing, but you can always trust softness of heart, that has you being innocence of heart, and innocence of heart doesn’t stop reaching, even when it is afflicted or oppressed. Reaching is the goodness of it. As soon as you can see that, then again there is heart understanding, your self again becoming like your heart. Through softness of heart, your own self is so changeable. It’s that changeableness of your self known in your heart that has you reaching into life. It has you absorbing life.
Softness of heart, innocence of heart, reaching and absorbing, is what makes relationship real and wondrous. As soon as you see that then you can give it fire, that makes you the accelerant of such relationship.