Marriage And The Soup Bone

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.

The Opportunity In Sickness And Depression

Q: In the last six months I’ve struggled with lots of physical difficulties: pneumonia, a frozen shoulder, and a heavy depression I couldn’t get up from. I want to know what it’s all about.

John: Opportunities for you to be what is just beneath the surface instead of you being the surface: quiet okayness in a frozen shoulder; warmth quietly seeping in, in the midst of depression.

Q: Why do so many people have depression?

John: It doesn’t matter if you’re depressed. It matters if you are nurturefully depressed. A depression offers you a change of space, a different kind of opportunity. Without the depression you might just get on with your life. The depression slows you down and invites you to listen more deeply. 

Q: Yes! I thought I lost my way and I want to find it again. 

John: You felt like you lost your way. Your way has nothing to do with your usual self. Your real way has to do with your quieted heart. 

Q: So I’m changing? Is that the reason I have been through all that?

John: Deep, subtle, nurturing change within. It isn’t about the change of your self. It’s about you being gentled within in the midst of the disturbances in your self. 

Q: I had the feeling of a burden on my shoulder. It seemed all the trauma, frustration and burdens I’ve had my whole life suddenly showed up and pressed me down. There was a lot going on in my brain. I felt all these burdens once again and they were there all the time. 

John: It’s a little like being really sick, strongly disturbed, and you have a little baby. In the midst of that sickness and the disturbance, you still bring the baby to the breast and you feed it. And you’re giving something more than just milk.

Q: That makes sense. So can you help me let go of of all these worries and burdens?

John: Drink from your heart, regardless of anything that’s going on in your self.

Q: Thank you.

 

Beyond Patterns and Habits: Being Real In Relationship

Q: I’m so grateful to have met you in Rishikesh. I felt some healing had happened when I stopped my practice of self-enquiry, but now I feel as if my self has come back stronger than before!

John: It’s not stronger; you just didn’t realize how strong it was. When you’re busy with a practice, the strength of your self goes into that practice. 

As you profoundly open, that opens you up to experience your self as it actually is – not as you believed it to be and not as you’ve made it to be. As you profoundly open, that inadvertently gives permission for your subconsciousness to heave up into your conscious self, which brings up everything that you’ve stuffed into your basement: everything for decades that you didn’t want to deal with that was easier to just suppress and walk away from.

As you profoundly open, all of that is finally free to come up into your home. Everything that you’ve thrown into your basement comes up into your living quarters, giving you a more accurate experience of the whole of your self, not your partitioned self. It can make it seem as if you profoundly open and everything goes backwards. 

Q: Yes. It feels as if my behaviour is led by habits and patterns, especially in relationships. I still find that really hard.

John: For you to be what you really are in all of your self, the first that you’ll be coming into in a relationship is how to receive injury and offense instead of taking injury and offense. 

Q: Can you say more about this? 

John: Receiving injury without trying to balance the injury: receiving the injury without reaction; receiving the injury in a way that gives space for what you really are to move instead of moving in your self, and as your self balancing the injury, which puts you further out of balance.  

Q: I feel I have a pattern of avoidance of conflict.

John: Hardness in your heart will deflect, where openness and softness in your heart lets in and receives everything. 

Openness and softness of heart doesn’t stop letting in. It doesn’t take it in but lets it in. An unkindness to you is free to go everywhere inside of you. You won’t harden to protect anything of you. You won’t harden so that you don’t feel the pain of it or don’t want to deal with it. You won’t deflect. You won’t react. 

As openness of softness of heart you will feel everything, including what you really are in the midst of that.

In hardening to what occurs in your self in your environment and from others, the first feeling you lose is that of what you really are. You lose most delicate feeling. In being what you really are, you won’t feel hurt by others. You’ll feel all that it does to your self: you’ll feel the hurt, you’ll feel the injury. It’s what you really are that feels it, which opens up the depth of what you really are. 

In that way, the greater the difficulty that you are in, the more deeply you come to know you, the more deeply you’ll realize what you really are. When it is your only resource in difficulty, that is what comes up in all of your difficulty. 

When you are real in a relationship, that the other is dear to you will mean more to you than how you feel in the relationship, which turns you into flow. It turns you into what you would like to have from the other; most delicate meaning that remains connected way into the other. 

Q: Are you telling me to connect more?

John: As this, to any tiny little bit in him that is also this – regardless of how covered up it is.

You can imagine the other in a traumatic accident, barely conscious in a hospital. It doesn’t matter what difficulty you were in, what will come naturally to you if you’re at all quieted inside is that, as dearness, you’ll be reaching to him. You’ll be able to feel the other instead of feeling how your self is affected by the other. 

Q: Is this some work I need to do specifically on relationships? 

John: It’s not a work but it is a surrender to beingness that you know the truth of within, you surrendering to opening and softening in your heart unconditionally and at any personal expense. 

You existing with your heart opened and not closing it for any reason will put you right into what you really are. 

 

 

The Real Purpose Of Your Life

Q: I’m longing to know the purpose of my life.

John: You don’t need one. It’s only in your self that you’re able to even comprehend a sense of purpose. When you can be happy without any reason at all, you’re just beginning to fulfill your life’s purpose.

Anything that you do with the use of your self that gives you a sense of purpose isn’t telling you the truth.

When you can be deeply happy without any reason at all then you also realize that it doesn’t matter very much what you do in this life. It doesn’t matter much what your career is. It doesn’t matter much what job you have. It doesn’t really matter much what you do, because everything that most deeply matters to you is already fulfilled by you simply being pure you, and it’s your own real and deep beingness that is the source of your happiness. Then, in anything that you do on the surface of your life you’ll thrive, and that thriving won’t make you happier because deep within you already have it all.

Your real purpose in being born, in having a body, in being in this life, is for you to manifest your being within all of the levels of form that you’re already familiar with. 

If you fulfill a sense of purpose that you have in your self throughout your whole life, at the end of your life, when you’re on your deathbed you’ll look back and you’ll wonder: “what did all that really mean, anyway?” You’ll look back and you’ll wonder if you haven’t just missed it all.

It isn’t what you do with your life. It’s a little deeper than that: it’s what you do with your heart in all of your life … and that’s just the doorway. 

Once you’re through that door, then it’s you manifesting the reaches of your own being into all of your life.