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...
Q: Four years ago I retired from work and I felt the need to travel all over the world, thinking that this was to support my spiritual journey. I’ve kept on travelling and sometimes I feel that I’m a bit lost. Can you help me find out if I’m on the right path for what I have to do?
John: When you look into a baby’s eyes you’ll find the qualities that you’re looking for. Identify within your heart what you are seeing from your heart, and exist to embody that. ..
Q: Is it true that there’s no need for us to keep going back into our past experiences, into the emotions that cause us to react?
John: Yes, so in that way you don’t need to address your thinking or your feeling. You don’t need to address your emotions, your will, your self, your personality, your past. You don’t need to focus on others.
What you return to is a most simple okayness within. The okayness isn’t an experience; it’s something that you know...
Q: I want to talk about forgiveness. We’re often told to forgive this and forgive that, but if we’re really coming from our heart there is no need for forgiveness.
John: Yes. When you hold a grudge, or when you’re closing and hardening towards someone because of how they’ve treated you, it doesn’t matter how wrongly you’re treated, you’re not right in closing or hardening. So in that way no one has a good or a real reason to close and harden.
We can close and harden when we’re mistreated, and what we understand in ourselves is that ultimately we need to come to a place of forgiving, forgiving the other...
Q: My question is about family. How can we be with family in our hearts when we feel very different from them?
John: When you’re in your heart, you’ll see in the others what isn’t different. Your whole sense of meaning in being together will be based on what isn’t different, enabling the differences to have a brightness of color without a sense of polarity. When you’re in your heart toward the others, their differences – how their personalities and selves are different from yours – become dear to you, enabling your love for them to not be based on what they are being to you and how they’re behaving...
Q: John, I’m curious about how you were awakened. How did you remember who you are?
John: When I was seventeen, outside of my room at home, I deeply, deeply wondered. I wondered: what is it that is so much more than anything I’ve realized before? What is the deep, deep more? And in deeply wondering, I also simply, deeply, deeply opened, and as I opened I knew. I didn’t understand what I knew, but I really experienced what I knew. I experienced a most nurturing, profound sense of reality as much on the inside as on the outside, it all being, within multiple levels at the same time, all connected...
Q: I don’t see where personal love – the love from one person to another – fits with the love which just is. Are they related, or is personal love between two people more based on wants, needs and desires? It seems to me that to dwell in the truth I know and to be in relationship must exclude each other. I don’t know your situation, but some teachers seem to be in relationship and others are complete renunciants. I’m in a relationship and feel I might have to give it up for truth...
Q1: I come from the States, and my question is about my connection to our society. I’ve never been political but I feel a sense of connection and therefore would like to be part of moving things in a more positive direction than I see happening politically. It feels hard to address without being angry about what’s going on, yet it doesn’t feel right not to address it.
John: In addressing it, by coming from a place within you that doesn’t relate to lack: relating from a fundamental goodness within...
Q: I’ve recently welcomed into my home a family member who is an addict. Normally I’m a fairly balanced person, but now there’s uncertainty about how to manage everything and support her. I feel both resentment and great love. I’m struggling with how to be balanced in my heart amongst all the different responsibilities and give support, without really knowing how. Can you help?
John: Any past investments that you’ve had in hardening or in closing, any excuses that you have for ill-feeling or resentment you don’t need for you to be in your heart toward the other...
Q: If I’m true in what my heart is wanting and desiring, it’s to have a child. It’s probably been six years since I’ve had a partner and I’m forty-four next month. I’m wondering whether to do it on my own, with insemination. I feel this strong desire and it’s been there for years. I would like any advice you have.
John: First, most deeply within, deep within your heart – deeply, gentled and quieted in your heart – there you have need of nothing...