John 14:9 Meaning Jesus Said to Him

Whoever wants to see God has already been shown Him. All that the Father is, the Son is too, except that He is Son and not Father, so looking at Him is the seeing of God people keep asking for.

Years of nearness can pass before recognition comes, and the request gets answered rather than scolded. God turns away no one who wants to see Him.

This is why Orthodox Christians pray before icons, the painted images of Christ and the saints. God took a real human face, and a face can be shown.

The Self that speaks the truth of love has been present in the mind all along, yet the mind, looking for something grander, failed to recognize what stood before it. To see innocence anywhere is already to have seen the Father, for His likeness is nothing other than the sinlessness the mind keeps overlooking.

The gentle question is not rebuke but an invitation to stop searching for a sign. The mind need not be shown what it has already been given. It has only to accept that the love it looks upon and the Source it longs for are the same, and were never hidden.

Father: the Source seen wherever innocence is seen, present in the teacher of love the mind has failed to know.

Philip asks to be shown the Father, as if the source of everything were an object somewhere down the road. The reply comes almost tender: it has been here all along, this whole time, and he kept looking past it.

What a person searches for far away is nearer than searching. The presence that lives and speaks in front of Philip is the very thing he is straining to see elsewhere. Seeking keeps the source at arm's length, because seeking assumes it is missing. When the reaching stops, what was always present becomes plain. You do not travel to it. You quiet down and find it looking back.

Philip wants to be shown the Father, as though the source of everything stood somewhere apart, waiting to be visited. The answer corrects him gently. What he has been looking at all along, the very awareness that says "I am," is the Father wearing a face. Nothing further off remains to see.

People make the same mistake constantly. They treat the creative power as a stranger to be reached, when it has been the closest thing to them their whole lives, nearer than breathing. To see the one is to see the other, because the awareness in a man and the source of his world are not two beings. The Father a person searches the heavens for is the sense of being he has carried since birth.

The source a person keeps searching for outside is already visible in the awakened self standing before them, so the long companionship has been the source itself, unrecognized. To have truly seen the son is to have seen the father, because the deeper power shows its whole face through the one it lives in; there is no separate God waiting behind the curtain to be produced. The seeker asks to be shown what is already in plain view, mistaking nearness for absence. What reads as a gentle rebuke is consciousness pointing out that the depth it longs for has been present the entire time.

The higher source is not hidden elsewhere; it is fully shown in the awakened life that has been near all along.

Father: the higher source a person seeks, shown entire through the awakened self

Philip asks to be shown God, and the gentle sadness in the reply is that God has stood in front of him the whole time. This is a subtler blindness than doubt: looking past the near thing while begging for the far one. The eager eye keeps searching the sky for the sun and never sees the light already pouring through the window glass.

The healing is only to look again at what is right here. The unseen makes itself known through a face, a voice, a person; the One being asked for is answering the question, right there.