Free Of Fear: Quietly Okay In The Midst Of Life

Q: We’ve been talking a lot about fear, and you said it’s about separation inside. All my life I’ve felt separated from my self, that I should fit in and couldn’t be my self. I feared others, feared that I was not good enough and that I wouldn’t survive. I’ve felt sadness from the beginning. I’ve struggled a lot to find my self and really be me, but fear can still disturb me and take my energy. I want to be free of it and go deeper. 

John: Wherever you have hope or fear, you’re giving your power away. You’re giving your power away to your self instead of to what you really are. When you are being what you really are, you are happy without a reason.

What you are is rested okayness. In being what you really are, you are deeply okay despite your relationships, your circumstances, your self, your life.

Enjoy being that quiet okayness without that okayness coming from something: not from your self, not from others, not from your life – just you.

You are free to enjoy being that without results. Without results, without return, means that it really is you. It’s quiet, it’s subtle and it’s nurturing. All within, you don’t need anything else.

Q: I need to let go of my past but it comes up, takes my energy, and it’s a while before I can be present again.

John: You’re blaming what you are giving your power to. Your past and your patterns don’t take you away; you use them to get away.

When you are being what you really are, you are unconditioned intimacy that is just there. If you’re being that, it freely moves toward everything. 

Q: It’s good to hear. What can I do to keep my strength and use my power in the right way? 

John: Like relaxing in all of your weaknesses.

Your strengths don’t need you. Your weaknesses need you – just your presence in them; your quieted presence there in your weaknesses. 

 

A Deeper Perspective On COVID-19: From Fear To Inner Wellbeing

Three questioners speak with John on a new online platform:

Q1: I just really wanted to ask you, John, if you would take us into, through you, what’s happening around the world. You said “truth is going viral” and I would just love to hear anything that you could say about the times that we find our selves in.

John: Well, there’s the horizontal level of this worldwide shock event of the COVID-19 virus, all that that is affecting on so many different levels, and then there is the vertical level. It intersects with the horizontal, but it isn’t about the horizontal. The vertical level has a groundedness, a stability, a constancy that has nothing to do with any event, and it’s staying connected where the two meet, so that it’s the vertical knowledge of a depth knowledge, within, that governs our sense of wellbeing and stability concerning anything horizontal – whether it’s positive or negative.

Q1: When a shock happens like this, does that activate something at the points where the horizontal and the vertical connect?

John: If you’re conscious at that particular point where the two meet then the vertical radiates through the horizontal, which brings you from a depth within to do whatever you need to do. 

Q1: So for us in our knowledge of you and our response to what you mean to us, how does that move in what you’re saying of the horizontal and the vertical? Because I couldn’t say that I’m conscious of that point of intersection but I feel like I have consciousness moving somehow, or something like that.

John: The simplicity of that is in a depth okayness, an inner quietude concerning anything within the horizontal. As soon as you’re removed from the vertical then you’ll be subject to emotional stability or lack of emotional stability.

Q1: When there is some measure of restedness does the horizontal have layers or levels to it?

John: Yes, immediately all of the levels of the self: the mind, the emotions, the will, feeling. 

Q1: Is there more for us to do than be in that depth okayness? Is there more, or does that depend on each one?

John: It’s important to not use that okayness to balance any feeling or thought concerning what’s taking place in this whole worldwide event of the virus. As soon as the vertical is being used to stabilize the horizontal, then that’s a use of the horizontal accessing the vertical for the sake of the horizontal, whereas the vertical is first completely on its own. 

So if you’re affected by something in the horizontal, that would be your cue to be vertical: not for the sake of the horizontal, but because it reminds you what matters more than your experience, what matters more than your life, what goes deeper than everything, and then being that depth of verticality, coming from what’s deeper than your self and being that in all of the horizontal, which is a perspective shift.

Q1: A few days ago I had this sense – it was like a seeing – I felt like it was the virus. I felt like I was seeing that over the whole planet. I don’t know if that’s what it was, but it was one of those kind of drop-in glimpses that doesn’t seem like it’s connected to anything familiar in my self.  I have no real understanding about this but it was such a surprise and had so much form to it within my own body. Can you say something to that?

John: Everything in the horizontal is dependent on the vertical. The horizontal doesn’t exist on its own. The deep does exist on its own. To be in real relationship with anything such as the virus is to be in connection to that through the deep, within, deeper than thought and feeling, deeper than will or emotion. In that way our selves are first factored out of what’s going on, whereas our tendency is to bring our selves in first in what’s going on, because it’s in our selves that we’re affected

Where you’re connected to a shock event such as what the world is in right now from what is deeper than thought or feeling, will or emotion, it puts you on a level of experience in what’s going on that’s overlaying this whole world and affecting everyone, but from a perspective and a direct experience that has nothing to do with our selves. So it puts us in a much deeper level of what the virus is, which first, then, in that level, really has nothing to do with the virus or us.

On a level of all things being connected and everything affecting everything, a virus can’t even be understood as a virus. We have that understanding, our understanding of a virus based on our experience of it, how it affects our selves, how it affects our bodies. But without that effect, what’s taking place in deeper levels within a virus is completely different from anything that we can even relate to in our selves, just like the deeper levels of time change so much that time isn’t even recognizable as time.

Q1: When something is so shared like this and has so much attention around it all across the world, does that change the form of the thing, in this case the virus? Does that actually interact with the deeper levels of that form?

John: Yes. Consciousness is connected on every level, so yes, there’s a surface effect and there’s also a deeper level effect that has first nothing to do with the surface effect.

Q1: As this moves through, is it that we do the things like you’re saying in the horizontal that make sense to do, and then we open in the vertical? That opportunity, how is that more? 

John: Everything that takes place in your experience is going to feed your orientation as awareness, so if you’re oriented to the horizontal, it’s the horizontal in your experience that is going to flare up. If you’re oriented to the vertical, anything that takes place in the horizontal opens you up immediately into the deep. It’s the deep in you that radiates instead of an emotional, mental experience. 

It isn’t going to be the same for everyone: it’s all dependent on what each is oriented to regardless of what they think, what they believe. If you’re oriented to the truth within, then immediately there’s going to be an opening, an opening deeper within that moves up into your experience that may not affect you in your experience in a way that makes sense to you, because it’s the deep within that’s radiating in your surface experience. So you can have experiences that don’t make sense, or having a deeper sense that doesn’t have a practical application.

What this does offer is that there is a depth perspective that’s emerging in your self that isn’t first measured in an intellectual way or in a cognitive way. It measures in a depth radiation that’s present in your experience. So it’s openness going out into your experience, into the horizontal, affecting your seeing in your life even though that may not first, directly, have practical results. So what it first reveals to you is a depth knowledge that is what you are instead of your experience being what you are.

Q1: As I’m resonating with what you’re saying, it feels like it’s touching a part of my mind, like deep mind. I don’t have any awareness really, there, but it feels that there is maybe something like warmth or some kind of life in the deep mind, like if the deep mind was like deep space, and there was like a glimmering of …

John: It is like that. It’s like deep space having presence in your mind and then, because it settles in your mind and you’re not going to thought, emotion or feeling, then deep space – which has nothing to do with our experience on this planet with our selves – has presence, slowly, that comes into thought and feeling, will and emotion, which is a complete shift of seeing. The seeing doesn’t need to first make sense. It’s first known.

If you’re not drawing conclusions from knowing something so profoundly different that doesn’t yet have a practical application, then it continues to build in your experience. As soon as you draw a conclusion, you end that depth infusion because you’re moving into a practical application. It will become practical without you making it practical. As soon as it becomes practical, you know and then you conclude.

What this shock event really offers is either a strengthening of a self-orientation, because that’s what’s affected, or if you’re gentled and quieted within, this shock event opens up the deep. So what it really addresses, as you’ve remained gentled and quieted in the midst of anything that brings your attention to your self, what this does is it brings up the level of you way, way within that is like deep space being you, that gets to have presence in the midst of this circumstance because that’s how deeply you’re starting to relate within.

The greater the cost, in your experience, of being gentled and quieted, the greater the depth within that you’re relating to. So really, in this kind of event, this kind of shock event, the opportunity for you to realize a depth of being is enormous.

It’s a worldwide opportunity to realize something a little bit more that’s really difficult to come by: to realize the truth, within, because of the invitation that’s present within this extreme worldwide event to relate to something that’s other than what affects our selves, other than fear, other than hope, other than survival. There’s the invitation to quietly realize, within, in a way that’s new, and it stands on its own. 

Q1: When I touch into that kind of relating, it feels like it’s happening intermittently in the background in me, and that I’m more and more helpless in doing anything to bring it into the foreground.

John: Warmly helpless. It’s the warmth, the quietude in the warmth that shifts the orientation.

Q1: Thank you so much, John.

***

Q2: Hello. I would like to continue a bit about this situation in the world right now, and here in Denmark we’re not allowed to go out. If I understand what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter if I go out or if I stay at home, or if I grab a lot of food or if I don’t. That’s just secondary, right?

John: Secondary to what you really are: yes. Living, survival on every level, is secondary to what you really are.

Q2: I had a dream about this virus, someone wanting to show me – it was like a cell, there were two parts in it – and told me that there was someone evil that wanted to spread it around through the water. I knew that if I just would stay in the heart then nothing could happen to me. Is it like that?

John: There are no evil viruses. Viruses on their own, regardless of how they perform on the surface, are not bad. They are really all right. They can affect your body in a way that’s bad for your physical circumstances. That doesn’t make the virus bad.

On a different level, the virus making it difficult for your body or your whole relationship to survival can seem bad, but as you drop deeper within and you start to realize what you’re not used to realizing normally in your life, because you’re not so strongly affected as you are in the circumstance, then this goodness arises.

We are capable of depth perspective, which means that our perspective isn’t governed by our experience, what we feel, what we think. So we are present within thought and feeling, but present in a way that is deeper within than anything to do with our experience. That makes us beingness of depth knowledge in the midst of a worldwide virus takeover.

Q2: But before the virus it was also like that, right? People were also living in fear, or living in this contraction, and now they are shaken because of the shock.

John: It presents everyone with a different kind of opportunity. There’s the invitation to feel differently, to think differently, to open in a way that we’re not familiar with. That’s there for everyone, so regardless of how we’re affected on the surface in our lives, there’s an unusual opportunity that the whole world is in to see differently, a little differently, instead of being oriented to what we’re used to of gain and loss.

Q2: Thank you.

***

Q3: I’m calling from Denmark. This is also about the world situation and what I experience is happening in the collective consciousness. My question is, is it part of this shock event that there’s some sort of a balance in facing the facts, facing what is actually going on, seeing reality as it is on the actual level while, in the midst of that, standing in the vertical? There can be a tendency to not want to see what is actually going on or what it’s about – what is rolling towards us in the actual level.

John: What’s rolling towards you is that you’re going to die.

Q3: What is that?

John: What is rolling toward you is that you are going to die, eventually.

Q3: Yes.

John: And this event just brings up how much you haven’t been in touch with that.

Q3: Yes.

John: Without this event your death is so far removed from you that it doesn’t have your thoughts. When has your thoughts, what comes up in your experience is fear and concern.

Q3: Exactly. It’s moving closer very, very fast, so it’s the realization that a lot of people are going to die.

John: Then this can be the beginning, for you, of you living with your death, whenever it’s going to be, but the subject of your death, the reality of your death, that it has a warm presence in your heart. It really is a warm and a dear part of your whole existence and your whole life, because your existence isn’t going to continue here in physicality. So if you’re living with your death warmly in your heart, your whole seeing, as you live, changes. You’ll think differently, you’ll feel differently. You won’t have a perspective with the underlying belief that your existence is going to continue in physicality. You won’t have the underlying belief that everything needs to go well for you in this life.

 You’re grounded in a depth perspective that your death isn’t going to affect, and it’s that level of seeing that becomes freed in your life.

Q3: Are you describing to me now what is actually happening or going to happen?

John: What’s able to happen within you on a heart level.

Q3: I know the truth of that. I know that in a situation like this it’s the only way forward because things are going to happen, no matter what.

John: And then a little deeper than that is that it first, first, deeply, warmly, doesn’t matter to you what does or doesn’t happen, just in terms of a profound sense of wellbeing, that that sense of wellbeing in you doesn’t come from your self, doesn’t come from your experiences. It doesn’t come from your physical existence here in this world; it comes from what’s deeper within than your self and you’re consciously, then, being that.

Q3: What I wanted to get clear is whether this virus is actually here or not. A lot of people think it’s not here, and a lot of people think it is here, so the question is around seeing the actual reality as it is.

John: The actual reality isn’t first the surface occurrence. The actual reality has to include every level of what there is. Most of the levels are all unseen.

Q3: So when I refer to actual reality I mean the surface level. I mean people dying and the virus and everything that’s happening with the world, our society breaking down.

John: Most of society is artificial. It isn’t based in the real; it’s based on that everything is going to continue. It’s based on what we fear could happen and what we hope will happen.

You being what you are after you’ve died while you live, life is good.

Q3: Yes. I really feel the change in perspective. There’s a change also in what actions to take on the surface.

John: Then you’re more of a being taking action rather than a fearful self taking action. The fearful self doesn’t function very well.

See you out there in all of this connectivity!

Q3: Thank you, John.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond Hope, Fear and Dread: The Healing Kiss Of Love

Q: I have a close friend who’s very ill with multiple sclerosis. We were talking together today and wondering how it’s possible to trust totally; to accept and be grateful when you’re hoping to heal from a terminal disease, and are afraid of dying.

John: Healing is not ever worth hoping for. Healing is worth being in, if it is there.

Q: What do you mean by ”if it is there?”

John: If it is being healed, that is worth being in. If it is not being healed, that is worth being in. To have a preference between the two only makes it worse. It is the love of being, not the need of healing.

Multiple sclerosis is not worth getting rid of. It is worth being in.

Q: I am very pulled to be with people who are ill because there is so much for me to learn about illness and death.

John: If you wish to learn about illness and death, then let your whole heart be wide open to trade places with anyone that is ill or dying. Not needing to trade places: just wide open. Illness or death can only threaten what you are hanging onto. 

Everything is a shortcut to being, including multiple sclerosis, if you unconditionally be in it. 

To win the lottery of being it is for you to unconditionally be in absolutely everything as it presently is, without any need of anything changing in order for you to be more okay. Then anything that life could ever give you is always greeted with the sweetest “yes.” 

“No” exists only where there is fear. Anywhere that hope exists – hope for anything –  is where fear and dread exist. Dread is all of the tight muscles holding together the face of hope.

To be with someone who has multiple sclerosis is to enjoy them as though they have something really special. It is for you to lose your perspective on it. Your perspective on it only feeds sorrow. 

It is only innocence and love that can kiss multiple sclerosis. Anything else either fears it or, in a sabotaging way, wants something from it.

Give your friend a kiss for me.

 

True To Your Heart In A World Of Technology

Q: I want to ask about technology in our world and finding one’s self. When I’m using computers or my phone it takes me away from being able to listen to my interior. I get distracted and addicted to doing things I don’t care about. Once I start down that path it’s hard to remember to come back, to stay committed to being my inner truth.

John: Technology is fine. What it will magnify is your orientation. You’re accustomed to technology belonging to your self, so when you engage it, it magnifies your self, separating you from your heart and what’s deeper. 

Give it a little turn, a shift, where you let your computer and your phone belong to your heart.

Q: I like that.

John: In that, you won’t love technology but in using it you’ll love your heart.

Q: I feel like something happens when I use technology. I start out well-intentioned in using it for my heart, and then somehow lose track of my heart or just stop listening.

John: That’s because in your life you easily take your self to heart and you use technology to do that. Live your life with the clear understanding that everything that’s yours belongs to your heart.

As that begins to take form in your self then you can go a little deeper and everything that is yours belongs, through your heart, to your being.

Q: That’s a much more subtle distinction.

John: When you make your heart more real to you in your life than your self, it’ll be easy for you to make your being more real to you in your life than your heart and your self. 

The whole world of the heart is your grade school of being – if you’ll let you and your self be mastered by you in your heart.

The beginning of your being is your heart. Your heart, as you’re being in it, is like the entrance to your being. If you try to understand your heart or your being, you separate from them, but as soon as you like being rested, gentled and quieted in your heart, despite your self, you are into your being. 

As you remain rested in your heart in the midst of any kind of pressure, then pressure opens you more deeply into your being. When you remain unconditionally in your heart in the midst of any kind of pressure, pressure gives you your depth of being. 

Instead of using your self to manage pressure or to escape from pressure, just remain in your heart in the midst of pressure. It so sweetly opens you. It takes you right into the depth of where you left off from your innocence.

Live in that, and you heal your past of separation.

Q: I’d like to ask one more question. I feel my sexual drive brings a lot of pressure when I’m trying to stay true to my self. The drive is good, but at times it feels like it’s running my life. It takes my thoughts and I can’t stay focused under that pressure. How can I transcend that gracefully and maintain the depth?

John: In the midst of that pressure, without changing anything in your self, delicately like giving your sexuality to your heart and anything that’s deeper. Like giving your sexuality to your heart and to your being. 

Surrender your sexuality from within your self to your heart.

Q: Thank you.

 

What Can I Do About My Shyness?

Q: I experience my self as a very shy person. How I can adjust my shyness so that it doesn’t restrict me in certain situations?

John: Don’t adjust it or change it. Don’t cover it. Don’t be ashamed of it, and whatever that restricts in your circumstances, be genuinely okay with. In particular, don’t do anything with your face or your head to cover it, or with how you hold your lips. 

The reason that you have your shyness is that you are sensitive to being seen, and you feel uncomfortable in your self when you’re seen. That isn’t something to get rid of. Make no adjustments for it; just sweetly grow with it. 

When your shyness builds to the point of embarrassment, then for sure don’t do anything with your head or how you move your face – particularly how you slowly tighten your lips as your lips close. Just let the shyness beam, without the need of a defense or any protection. 

Stay with that, unconditionally, and you’ll awaken. Anything you do to compensate for it or to cover it prevents your immediate awakening. 

Q: You mean I’m closing my heart when I do it?

John: A little bit, and in those times when you desperately need to cover it in order to cope in a situation, then yes. If you judge the shyness in the way that some have judged you in it, yes: you’re closing your heart. When you judge it in the same way some have judged it, you shut your heart down. 

Delicately remove all of your ways of dealing with your shyness. 

Your heart needs to stay in your face, and it doesn’t matter how that makes you feel in your self.

Don’t do anything to save your self from your heart showing in your face.

Q: Thank you.