This dialogue is an exploration of the reasonableness of doing what you know in balance with the perceived cost to the self in letting go of its attachments. John speaks about “a love of reasonableness” and how a wholistic care for what is true will encompass the details.
John: Where there is the love of the cost, there is also, as you say, reasonableness, and a love of reasonableness. Where there is the love of cost, there is the full and conscious relationship with permission, permission to be what you can already see. In profound reality the cost is exquisite. The love of the cost means that you are really in love with its purchase. It is only in coming from the perspective of a blinded self, concerning this, that you’d want a deal. Concerning this in you, full and fair payment reveals you. Everything for everything includes everything.
Q: That means that nothing is left out of me? It shows that all of me gets to be what I know?
John: Yes.
Q: It’s clear to me the goodness of that, here. In the future when I’m not sitting here, is it for me to enjoy knowing that goodness?
John: Enabling you to incorporate what you see as the cost. What you are then incorporating into you is your self. The cost makes real the bringing of your self into you.
Q: If there’s a cost of saving face, I try to save face, and I know there’s more value in paying attention to the subtleties than how I may appear or what others think of me. In coming through this, would this type of pattern be integrated?
John: Enabling you then to integrate saving face.
Q: I’m not sure I actually know what that means. I can’t imagine there’s a true place for saving face.
John: There is meaning in face coming into balance as the whole of you. There is a place in you where that meaning doesn’t belong, and there is a place in you where such meaning does belong. Your good reputation doesn’t have greater meaning than what has greater meaning, and your good reputation does have greater meaning that what is of lesser meaning.
Q: Is there a multi-level-tasking skill where I’d be paying adequate attention to all those levels according to the meaning that they have?
John: In your being meaning, wonderfully so. Being meaning holds the balance of all meaning. Your love of the cost means that, within all of you, you are trustworthy with value and meaning. Any perceived ‘deal’ in you is a wrong cost to something else in you. The love of the cost means that you are right and just, in all of you. It means that you are being and living wholeness.
Q: Is it ok that I spend some time sorting all these things out?
John: If it is core honesty that has the time in all of you, then, as much as is required, making time as much an integral part of you as the cost and every other part of you.
Q: I see how I’ve related to time, but not in every aspect have I found out what that is. I know time has a true place in me, as you said.
John: Like being generous concerning your relationship with fairness and time, enabling time to not be lost in you. Like giving time to fairness and liking giving fairness within your use of time, within how you are in time.
Q: Am I right that there would be an evaluation of how I’m spending time or how I would be in time, like discerning the meaning of the different parts?
John: Yes.
Q: I’d like to be more conscious of how I spend my time.
John: And then you will like the cost of your not being hasty concerning your treatment of meaning.