Responding To Goodness

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

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

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

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.