Month: December 2019

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.

 

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