Humanness: Your Real Connectivity to Everything

Quote: The evidence of your humanness present in your self is nurture and the connective substance of love.

Q: I only discovered you and this gathering a few days ago. I’m enjoying the people, the space and your presence. I feel that since childhood I’ve looked for the truth and there’s a deep longing to melt into the infinite. This calling and longing is a mixture of pain and sweetness. I’m not home but I don’t quit … perhaps the pain wouldn’t stop even if I reached home.

John: It would.

Q: Your language is new to me and I’m curious. What’s the difference between awakening and home?

John: When you awaken, it means that you can see into your being. When you awaken, you awaken to what you know from within your being – you’re awakening to your being. It gives you a level of knowledge and seeing that wasn’t available in your self. When you awaken, that means now you know and see the deeper truth, the underlying truth of existence.

Awakening is real but it doesn’t stay real. The truth that you awaken to is real in the moment of awakening. In that moment you are being what you are newly knowing. Within your awakening you’re given to what you’re awakening to. You’re taken by what you’re awakening to. There isn’t a difference between you and where you are newly knowing and seeing. But if you don’t live your awakening that direct knowledge that comes from your awakening turns into information, and in holding that information without living the awakening you will fool your self. You’ll think and believe that you have something. You have this information that originates in direct experience, but the information and your memory of your awakening isn’t the same as what you are as you awaken. You can come to know the truth but that doesn’t mean that you’ll live being what you know. If you don’t live it, you’ll turn your awakening into an informational, useful category in your self. You’ll use your awakening for your self. That makes you, in your self, worse off than if you wouldn’t have awakened.

The moment you awaken you’re home because you are being your awakening. You are being awareness being what it knows. Being it means there isn’t a difference between awareness and knowledge: the two are one. That’s home. If you don’t live your awakening, then as awareness you, in some way, separate from direct knowledge and from within your self you’ll hold to the information that you perceive from within your mind of your awakening, thinking and believing that you really have something. You have the information and you have the memory of awakening but if you’re not being it then you are not your awakening. It doesn’t matter how little or how much you know. What matters is how much you are being what you know. Being home means you, awareness, and direct knowledge are one. It’s one presence. It’s one you. The beingness of the two being one is love.

If all you know is your heart, openness and softness of heart and your humanness, but you are completely given to it, being all you know in that, you are way better off than becoming enlightened and living the much you know and see, almost completely.

Q: The concept of enlightenment has never pulled me, but what resonates a lot is a way to experience my self on this planet, in this realm: to travel as much as I can, love as much as I can, do whatever is possible in this form and then go into other dimensions I feel exist. It’s a longing to depart from this planet. I have an incredible interest in cosmology and suspect it’s a projection of an infinite dimension that’s inside me.

John: Yes. When you look out into the stars, what reaches you in that, like nothing else in your life reaches you, is that you know. What touches you in looking out into the stars is that it brings up the resonance in you that you are inter-dimensional. You are way beyond anything captured in a life. When you look out into the stars you have subtle knowledge of what you’re here for. It isn’t for you to leave this planet. It’s for you to no longer be housed in your self, living experiencing your self. As long as you live experiencing your self, you will be kept to what is like the tip of the iceberg. You’ll be confined to about four per cent of you. The rest you have resonance of but no access to. When you look out into the stars you are touched by what isn’t coming into your life: all of the much, much more of you that is not yet present in your self.

Q: I find, often spontaneously, the capacity to feel. I can feel the space of this room as  I can feel a human being. I can feel the dimension of this ashram and Rishikesh. Sometimes as I glimpse, something opens and I shrink because it’s so immense. There’s a deep longing to feel this existence, to feel this universe, to feel the stars far away, to feel there’s a solar system. I found myself fascinated by all of this and the capacity to feel.

John: All of that is your humanness. When you have an unusual opening it’s from within your humanness that you have an unprecedented seeing, and it takes you immediately into absorption, and from within your self you cut it off because it promises to end the relationship you have with your self. So you live life straddling being in your humanness while also being your self. In that same way, you’ll be hobbling in your humanness instead of thriving in your humanness. When you thrive in your humanness – your real connectivity to everything – your humanness takes your self completely. It will overtake all of the ground of your self.

The pain in your self, here and there as you live, is what you keep for your self in your self. Given to your humanness there isn’t pain. There is the connectivity of nurture and the connectivity of the substance of love. There isn’t pain in nurture and in the substance of love. The pain is based on an illusory sense perception. The pain represents core beliefs that subconsciously operate your self. What is satisfying on a mental, emotional level in pain is that pain gives you an experience of your self so if you feel slightly ungrounded in your self, pain gives you ground. It grounds you. Without the pain you’re nobody. Pain secures an illusory sense of individuality, while your humanness puts you into streams and levels of the sameness with others and with everything.

Your humanness doesn’t appeal to a sense of individuality. There is the truth of individuality but it is only perhaps .001% of your experience of it. The rest is illusory. Real individuality is what enables you, awareness, to consciously move being the same, being sameness with everything that is real. Real individuality is what enables you, awareness, within every level of form, to be one.

Pain is the feeling of a lived-in story, a lived-in narrative. What pain is useful for, if you are really listening within, is to show you that your way in your self isn’t real. You being what isn’t real is painful. The pain is good. It’s telling you something, but as you follow through in the story of pain then you can’t see its usefulness anymore. The pain is really there to help you see. Turn it into a greater story and your pain will help you to not see. There, you are doubly blind. Pain tells you that you’re blind. Re-construct the pain to serve your self and your pain feeds into a self-importance. The pain re-constructs your separation. It gives form to separation and the pain, from there, becomes physical. Through your belief and use you feed it into your nervous system, so even when you are relaxed your nervous system will push you into the stories that created your pain. That makes your own nervous system, in your life, in some way like story-land. Where you are not in your humanness you experience what you perceive to be reality through story-land. Story-land is a hopeless blindness.

It’s only from within your humanness that you see. It’s from within your humanness that you can know everything deeper within that only you, awareness, from within your humanness, are able to see. It’s your humanness that gives you perspective in your life, that tells you the goodness of your self. Your pain tells you that your humanness isn’t enough.

Q: I can relate with what you say about the softness and calmness of the heart. I can sense a struggle in meditation. It helps me when I feel love in what I’m doing. My being seems to float and I have more space. Would you speak more about this?

John: Instead of meditating live what you’ve already realized through meditation. If you don’t live it all in your life, you’ll replace the living of it with meditating. Meditation is a form that helps you realize. It helps you realize what is all there, that, as you are gentled within deeper than your self, you know and you see again. Meditation is like a crutch. If you have a leg that is hurt and isn’t functioning properly a crutch is useful, but as soon as you come into what the crutch helps you with, as soon as you start to heal, you need to not keep the crutch. You need to live what is healing you or in some way you become crisis-oriented: pressure builds and you relieve the pressure by meditating. Something in your life distorts and then you un-distort in meditating, instead of relaxing and undistorting because of meditating, and then living that. From there it is your new seeing from which you think and feel, from which you have a lived-in perspective. Living it makes your mind new. What you come into in meditating offers you newness, but if you don’t live the newness that you come into, you’ll turn the truth within into a category: a room of truth in your self that serves your self. Having that room in your self gives you a sense of deeper safety in your self. Any time you find some lack in your self you can just, right there, anchor into this room of truth in your self. That makes the truth within self-serving. The evidence of that, in your self, is pain. The evidence of your humanness present in your self is nurture and the connective substance of love.

Q: I have a personal question that has to with my relationship with my girlfriend. For years I’ve felt that the relationship is at an end. It doesn’t nourish me, somehow, and it’s breaking my heart to bring it to an end. She is a friend and someone I care for and it feels as if I will be confronting a level of pain in us both that feels impossible to digest.

John: Instead of ending your relationship, end your relationship with pain and you’ll see her differently. Being at the end of a relationship is a really good place to start seeing instead of opening into a newness of seeing in your next relationship. What starved your relationship of its meaning, slowly bringing the relationship to a close, is the same source as the source of your pain: you living in your self moving, in some way, by forms of illusion.

Q: How can I end this illusion, John?

John: Love seeing through your humanness. Love seeing from your heart instead of seeing from what you think and what you feel, which will easily be through forms of illusion. As you trust what you think and feel, what you’re most easily living by are your beliefs instead of the openness and softness of heart – the opening of your humanness. To address your relationship you can tell her that you’re starting to see and, in beginning to see, you really see how blind you are. Being open to see your blindness disempowers your beliefs. When you’re open to see your blindness you begin to really know, within, what you do really see. You begin to know within your seeing. The knowing within your seeing matters more to you than seeing.

You’re not in the wrong relationship. You’re functioning from the inside out incorrectly. Love seeing regardless of what you see. Pain in your self tells you where you don’t want to see. Nurture within your self, because of your openness and softness, shows you where you like to see.

Q: Thank you.

 

Young People (ages 4 – 14) Speak With John …

Quote: You are alive to give space in your heart for the tiniest little sparkle of love to get a little bit bigger.

Q1: What happens when we die?

John: When you die, every moment in your life where you’ve known a touch of magicalness within that you’ve not understood – that made no sense to you from anything outside of your self, but the touch of it was magical and completely nurturing – all of those touches come together and you’ll be all of those touches, all put together … and way, way more of the same. Everything else is gone, which also means that there’s nothing of greater value in you and in your life than what you know within any of those moments. It’s worth holding those moments – the magicalness of them – and how much that moment is really you. It’s worth holding that in your heart, and letting it roll around in your heart while you live.

In that way, you’re already beginning to turn into what you’ll be after you’ve died.

Q2: I often don’t know how to interact and be with people in a real way. Can you help?

John: The simplest is by you sweetly not knowing how, while you’re with people. That lets what is real in you come up and have presence in your face. There, you may not have understanding. You may not have ability. You will have real presence.

Q3: Why are we alive?

John: You are alive for you to be what is most delicately alive in you. You are alive to give space in your heart for the tiniest little sparkle of love to get a little bit bigger. As long as it is always getting a little bit bigger, you are really living.

Q4: What’s it like to have an awakening?

John: It’s a little like having a dream where you can fly, or having a dream where you can breathe underwater, and where you deeply love what you’re in. It’s so clear and strong that when you wake up you’re surprised that it was only a dream.

When you awaken, that means that something you’ve never known before opens up inside of you and is so real. You know something that is so real it changes everything else that you can see.

Q5: I was wondering why we see certain people in our dreams.

John: That can be because of what that person represents to you in your psyche – within all the makeup of what’s inside of you. When you’re in a dream and that make-up stirs, then in your dream you’ll experience what is like that person. That doesn’t mean that it is that person – and it could also be that person. Each time something like that happens, instead of believing what you think about it, that it is just a part of your self, or that it really is that person, believe none of it and just be really quiet within.

Each time you have such a dream where you know someone in your dream, keep doing the same thing and slowly you may start to recognize a difference. It’s like a different sense, and after a period of time you may realize that there’s a different sense that leans into it being different from something in your self. Over that whole period of time, don’t put anything together. It’s easy to make something up. Just be quiet in the difference each time until you know that you’re realizing something, and when you realize, hold that very lightly and let it grow on its own.

Q6: I’ve been trying to remember my dreams and I’ve been having a lot of trouble doing that. Can you help me?

John: When you wake up and you know you’ve been dreaming, go back to sleep … but without reaching that tipping point of falling to sleep. Get close to that tipping point and while you get close to it, be in that space within where you know that you were dreaming. Be in that space of knowing. Sit in that space while you get close to sleep. Being in that space puts you into the substance of the dream that you were in so you’ll then first remember its substance. Stay in that substance and you may come into some of the form of that substance.

How To Belong And Thrive In This World

Quote: As a being, you thrive through your humanness into your self, in person, in the midst of any environment. It doesn’t even need to be a real environment. What’s real is that you are there, thriving from the innermost outwards.

Q: John, you said that the biggest evolution for awareness is to be one with what you know. I don’t know where is the line between craziness and what I know, because in the deepest level, there are so many things which are so unusual to this world. These energies can be very painful for the body. Can you help me clarify what’s my imagination and what’s real?

John: Let the beingness in the deeper levels that you’ve awakened to come into your behavior. It’s the beingness, then, within your behavior that shifts, without your behavior becoming strange. If you let the beingness that you awaken to from within your deeper levels directly transfer to your social behavior, then you might be walking around amongst others like a zombie. Let the beingness of the deeper level move your humanness and it’s this being-filled humanness that moves your self and your personality. It won’t make your personality more strange; it’ll make your personality much more flexible.

Q: Sometimes what I call “forces” come, and the energy of them is very intense and hard for my body to process. Sometimes it means I need to lie down all day. Is it my imagination? What are these “forces”?

John: What’s taking place is you’re fixating on a deeper level of energy and how it affects your body, which focuses that energy on your body. That energy, instead of going straight to your experience physically, needs to come into your humanness. It needs to enter your heart and open up and move your humanness. It won’t make your humanness strange; it expands your humanness. It brings the depth of your humanness way out into your person. If you fixate on your physical experience you focus the energy straight into your body, and then you focus on the unusualness of it, which increases it. In that way, you’re magnifying the physical experience of it.

When that most unusual depth of energy comes into your heart and fills your humanness, it won’t make you strange. It’ll make you unusually, really there. It gives you unusual flow, unusual seeing, unusual love. It gives you a depth of nurturing reach into those who you’re with. It brings a most unusual level of balance into your self and into your personality.

Q: How are these forces connected to beingness? Are those forces a manifestation of the being? Sometimes I feel that they are really deeper than beingness.

John: There are much deeper levels of your being. The deeper the level of your being the more unusual it is and the less you’re able to relate to any of it from your self. The really deep levels of your being, from the perspective of your self, are alien. The deeper levels of your being are alien to your self: completely foreign, incomprehensible. If you bring that energy straight into your mind, your mind can’t hold it. It will make your mind, in your experience, very strange. It’s too much directly for your mind and your nervous system. It needs to come into your heart and your humanness. It’s the openness and softness of heart that brings the deeper energies of your being, instead of directly into your nervous system and your mind, right into your humanness, which turns it into nurture: nurture that relates to your self and brings your self in, bringing your self into balance instead of it pushing your self even more out of balance.

Q: I don’t know if it’s an illusion or not, but I always feel I’m not from this planet. I feel alien to the environment, to people and the earth. This question is always there for me and I’d love you to clarify this for me.

John: What you really are beautifully moves through – and with – the beingness of everything, in anyone. What you really are in reality moves as sameness; it moves as love. It isn’t this planet and its beingness that you’re not of and don’t belong to; it’s this world. What you really are, together with all of your being, isn’t of this world, isn’t like this world. Because your experience on this planet is restricted mostly to this world, you equate the rest of the planet with this world, as this world. It’s by your own belief that you separate from the beingness of this planet, just because you know so deeply that you are not the same as what you see in this world.

Q: John, is this world like a prison? Why are we here?

John: This world is a largely dehumanized existence in form which makes it difficult for you to relate, from within your heart, to this world. When you relate from within your heart, you don’t relate to this world but you are able to find what your humanness directly relates to, in the midst of this world. Whatever you are relating to within, if it’s your dehumanized self, that’s mostly what you’ll see in others. But if it is your heart, your humanness and anything deeper, you’ll find that everywhere. That it is covered in others won’t matter to you. You see it wherever it is, and there you are, relating to it. You can connect to it in someone else without them connecting to the same. You belong here. You belong here as a being: seeing, thinking, feeling and doing, as a being, through what self you have. That makes you pure belonging, here.

You belong in this world even though so much of it is illusory. Its established structures are illusory, but you belong within all of that structuring. It doesn’t inhibit you as a being. As a being, you thrive through your humanness into your self, in person, in the midst of any environment. It doesn’t even need to be a real environment. What’s real is that you are there, thriving from the innermost outwards. Your environment doesn’t need to change; this world doesn’t need to change. Wherever you are, as a being, moving through your self, in person, you are nurturingly, in unseen ways, connecting into your environment and filling it. And anyone else in that environment, where there’s any little bit of openness and softness of heart, will relate to the energy of your being that is infilling that environment. It touches them. It touches the same in them. Their environment doesn’t really matter, but what is touched in them, they nurturingly realize, matters so much.

Love thrives within illusory forms. Love will fill any form. It’s the love that is real, and all of the forms not like your being – all of the forms of this world – are actual. Most of them are not real. Put love within actual forms that are not real, and love will fill those forms. What moves within those forms is then real, even though those forms are still not real – only actual.

Q: Is there such a thing as a soul program, or a mission?

John: Nothing at all to think about. It’ll only have you searching through your past and your mind for something that is incomprehensible to your mind. But as soon as you begin to come into a little bit of it, you will know. As you come into it, it won’t relate to a self-purpose, a personal purpose for you in this world. It’ll relate to a configuration of being that, through your openness, starts to come into your humanness and forms your self differently. It will reconstruct your self.

If that starts to touch into your self, then that inspires your self. You’ll easily move into distraction, using the depth of energy that you’re touching into to inspire you to different and varying directions in your life, that you’ll make all about your self. Then it might be another five years, ten or twenty, before you’re back in the same place, of a configuration of being, again freely coming into your self through your humanness, without you making that about your self and running off with it, using that to give purpose to your self and your life, using that to build a project. You can be involved in projects, but hold them ever so lightly, without you taking them to heart. As you take personal directions in your life and projects to heart, you’ll be in distraction. You won’t be able to read the delicate configurations of your being, how that moves your humanness and how that’s meant to reconstruct your self. You’ll be too busy using that energy as inspiration to make your personal life interesting, to give depth to your personal life.

The center of your existence needs to be not your personality, not your life, not your self, a little bit your heart, not directly your being, but completely your humanness. As you are awareness, fully relaxed into all of your humanness, your being is going to move it; it’s going to stream into it; it’s going to open it, feed it, nurture it, expand it, and this being-filled heart and humanness is going to change all of your self. It will reconstruct your self and your life.

If you mix a self-purpose into that, you’ll bring in some of your humanness into your dehumanized self and you’ll live the mix. You’ll use your humanness; you’ll exploit your humanness to give satisfaction to your sense of self. You’ll live split. There will be some nurture and some emptiness, some real meaning and so much lack of meaning, until you begin to really listen within, which is you unconditionally relaxing, opening and softening in your heart, which opens you up into your humanness.

When you are in your heart and your humanness there’s nothing there that distracts you or separates you from your being. It’s when you take your sense of self and its conditioning to heart that you are living being distracted from your humanness, from your heart, and your being. You’ll live in a frustrating mix. At the end of your life you’ll wonder what that was all about; what did you miss? When you are, at the end of your life, gentled and quieted within, on your deathbed, what will matter to you is not what you’ve done with your life, not what you’ve done with your self, but what you have done with your heart, how you were taken by your humanness and how that moved your self. Nothing else deeply makes sense of your life.

Q: How can I move the self from the heart? Because I feel the split.

John: If you do anything to take your self out of your heart, that brings more of your self into your heart. It’ll increase your self-importance. You can’t take your self out of your heart, but you can let your heart be given to anything deeper than your self. It’s that givenness that enables your humanness to displace your self, to replace your self, in your heart and, with that, your being comes in and fills your heart. Everywhere it fills, your self will no longer be. And it is then that being-filled heart that, if freed by you, will come into all of your self and fill your self.

It’s you existing from the innermost outwards: you existing in balance.

True Relationship and Your Eternal Bonds

Q: I’ve been so touched when you’ve spoken about eternal bonds. Could you could say more about what they are? How can we know them and nurture them?

John: By letting the resonance of a bond be what you’re relating to in meeting anyone, in speaking to anyone, in looking at anyone.

Q: You said if I keep relating to anyone with the past that I have with them, I still can’t see them. I’ve seen how as a child I’ve not trusted someone who hurt me, and created shields that meant I didn’t really trust anybody. As that falls apart, I see that I’m more vulnerable than I was as a child. If I opened in the same way that I was at six years old to someone hurting me now, would it hurt more?

John: Yes. It would hurt more. Your openness would go so much deeper than it did when you were a child.

Q:  Can you speak about receiving pain?  

John: The pain that you would receive doesn’t actually come from what takes place in the present. When someone does something to hurt you, when you are openness within your whole system towards someone as they hurt you, the pain that is there doesn’t come from what they’re doing to you. It’s what is brought up of your past. It’s a past pain that your mind connects to what they are doing. It’s that pain that you feel; it isn’t the pain of what they are doing to you that you are feeling – that’s the illusion. When you are free of your past, free of all beliefs and someone does something to hurt you, what you will feel is not pain; you will feel love.

Q: I can’t imagine how my past can become clean – it seems so sticky!

John: Your past isn’t sticky. As you relax you don’t stick to your past and your past never did stick to you.

Q: You’ve spoken about “relaxing” and I know it makes a difference. Can you expand on that?

John: When you, awareness, are relaxed you know clearly. As you remain relaxed you see clearly. It’s all direct and that knowing and that seeing of someone directly isn’t diminished by their behavior to you. So as you remain awareness relaxed, while someone mistreats you, you keep knowing and seeing clearly. There you are living what’s real regardless of ill-treatment. You are giving to that person what they really are in the midst of their ill-treatment of you. Without effort, you are a goodness to that person. You’re being their goodness to them, even if they are not being that.

Q: So If I’m in that relationship with a person who’s slighting me, I’m just being in what’s real: I’m not trying to be right, to get anything out of it. I’m not trying to win. I’m just being in what’s real. It’s just true.

John: And what’s real is beneath all of the seen forms. It’s a little bit like catching your own child from falling off the edge of a building: you have them in a good grasp on their arm but that grasp hurts them; it really hurts, and for some strange reason they’re not connected to the fact that they’re hanging from a building by you. So while you’re holding onto them, they’re just mad at you for holding so tightly and hurting them. It doesn’t matter how that child is behaving to you: misunderstanding, misreading the entire situation. That’s not going to affect you, because in a situation like that with your own child you easily have real perspective. So all of the child’s mistreatment of you really means nothing to you. What means everything to you is you have him.

That’s what it’s like to know your deeper level connectivity with someone while they can’t see it, while they’re caught in a trap of perception that isn’t real and their behavior is determined by their perception. If you live from within the connectivity of being, what matters to you is that while that person is connecting to you through mistreatment, you have him. It’s real to you. You won’t be reducing the connectivity to your experience of how that person’s behaving. You won’t lose perspective. That’s your mind in the midst of mistreatment, not conditioned by that treatment. Your mind in all of its thinking, feeling, perception and perspective is a reflection of what you are as a being, so you see clearly. There isn’t an effort to it; you’re not efforting perspective in love; you’re not efforting connectivity. You’re being real with real connectivity in the midst of illusory connectivity from the other.

If a loved one is caught in a spell room, while they’re in that room all they recognize coming from you is mistreatment, and it’s clear to you as soon as they’re not in that room they’ll see clearly.  When you step into that room, anything you do to get them out of the room they’re going to treat as your mistreatment of them. They’re going to defend themselves in every way they can and project everything onto you. It’ll be clear to you that when you step into that room, everything that happens to you from that person means nothing to you. You’re there to get your loved one out of that room. It doesn’t matter what happens to you while you’re in that room. You’re not going to take any of it personally. When you’re being real, in real connectivity with anyone, it’s like that.

When you’re with someone, you’re not there to get them out of their room in real life. While you’re with someone, you are just being what you really are. You are in real connectivity. You know and you see and you move in that way whether there are favorable results or not. Your beingness, your movement isn’t conditioned. It isn’t conditioned on the other person. It isn’t conditioned on favorable results. The conditions of your movement are the terms of love. The way that you move from deepest within is determined only by what love is.

As you relax, as awareness relaxes, you know and you see. As you tighten and harden you’re putting together your own spell room and you’ll be projecting it onto the other. When you look at someone – anyone – and what you see is what you don’t like, because you’re not absolutely disconnected from what you really are, even while you look at a distance and you dislike someone who you don’t know at all, there is a real connectivity, even though you can’t register it. But after you’ve died it’s that real connectivity that registers first, so you immediately know that one. And then you also have how you moved in dislike. You’ll be in the converse of everything you’ve lived, all from within being.

As love, you will transparently see every little thing that you’ve done to anyone. As a being, you will process what life you’ve had – not from what that life was like in your self, not by what it felt like, but all from the perspective of where you opened and where you closed, what you did to someone because you opened and what you did to someone because you closed, and love is going to register all of it. Core honesty doesn’t see all of this, but core honesty clearly knows. It doesn’t know with forms of understanding. Core honesty knows in any circumstance, most quietly as almost nothing. Core honesty knows being like this: (John opens his hand). Everything else that’s occurring registers in its nervous system and in its mind, representing everything that is so different from what you know as a being.

Q: Is core honesty part of the body of the being?

John: Core honesty exists from within your self; it doesn’t exist in your being.

Q: So it’s part of the relationship from the being into the self that core honesty can move?

John: Yes.

Q: And separateness would only exist in the self, not the being?

John: Yes.

Q: When you say “eternal bond” and I go into my bond with you, from my self it seems like moving through time, forever, but it’s not that. Eternity is different: you’re just with me. It’s just forever in a way that I can’t imagine, but it’s true. It’s a flow that goes one way.

John: Unless there’s some tiny conscious awareness in the other. Then whatever measure of connectivity that is there in the midst of forms of illusion moving, that real connectivity gets right through into you. You know it, you can see it, you read it, and where your emotional body, in whatever little bit has become the same as your being, you’ll also feel it.

Q: Inside-out is clear now. There’s happiness and joy, but everything comes back to this stillness where, rather than being excited in the connection I’m just very plainly sitting with you, being in the belonging, sitting together …  just being together.

John: Regardless of all those forms that are not like this yet. Your past isn’t like this yet. Your self isn’t like this yet. You’re able to have perspective that comes from this, perspective that is form of this, and it is by that form that, in the rest of your life, you think and you feel; you being form of this within all of the forms of your life, even if none of those forms are like this yet.

Why Does Pleasure Make Me Feel Guilty?

Q: My question is about pleasure, pain and guilt. I’ve recently noticed that I’m experiencing a lot more pleasure running through my body but I seem to believe it’s sinful. I feel guilty and then create physical pain in my body. For example, making love can feel wonderful and fulfilling, but the next day I won’t be able to see properly or I’ll have physical pain. It’s the same if I enjoy dancing. I’d love more understanding around this.

John: For pleasure to become stable requires a stable opening of the heart. When the heart is not stabilized in being open then it can experience pleasure, but after experiencing pleasure you will always want to close. Let your heart remain open – not just during pleasure, but also after. Let the heart glow after pleasure. Letting such a glow be there takes apart the patterns that would have you closing just because there was pleasure.

The glow in the heart after pleasure doesn’t come from the enjoyment of pleasure. It comes from the enjoyment of the goodness of pleasure. It’s the enjoyment of goodness that makes the heart glow. When you’re experiencing pleasure, let your awareness go to the knowing of the goodness in it and remain in the knowing of that goodness even after the pleasure is gone. If you’re not remaining in the knowing of the goodness that’s in it, then after the pleasure is gone you’ll close. When you’re remaining in the knowing of the goodness that was there, that lets your heart not only remain open but it makes it glow; being in touch with the essence of pleasure, not just having pleasure because then you’re missing what pleasure is for.

The essence of pleasure is goodness. If you’re not being in touch with the goodness of the essence of pleasure, you’ll feel guilty in having pleasure. Love the goodness of it and you’ll remain open to pleasure. If you’re not in touch with the goodness of it, it will be easy for you to pursue pleasure and then, when you have it, closing it down: running after and running away from. When you’re in touch with the goodness that is in pleasure, and you’re abiding in such goodness, you won’t be pursuing pleasure or running away from it afterwards.

Pleasure isn’t about the experience of it. Pleasure is about your knowing of the goodness in it. The goodness in it isn’t an experience. It’s a knowing within the experience, you being the knowing of goodness instead of being the experience of pleasure. Love the goodness of it and the heart becomes stable in openness.

Q:  I feel a lot of relief in my body. It makes sense because I’ve been believing that pleasure is bad. Thank you, John.