John 16:24 Meaning Until Now

Until now the mind has asked from fear, seeking small securities and defenses, and has therefore asked for nothing that could truly satisfy it. To ask in love's name is to ask from a wholly different place, wanting only what love wants, and such a request is already halfway to its answer because it seeks nothing that is withheld.

What is received in this way fills the mind completely, for it is not another passing comfort but the recognition of what was always there. Joy becomes full not when the mind finally gets what it lacked but when it stops asking amiss and opens to the love that was only ever waiting to be received.

How much of your asking has really been the mind bargaining with the future, certain that fullness lies in something not yet obtained. You ask and ask, and even when it arrives the satisfaction is thin and brief, because you were asking from lack, and lack is a bottomless place. Nothing poured into it ever fills it, so the asking never stops.

There is a deeper way to ask, and it begins by becoming still and present, asking not from the anxious wanting but from the aware fullness already here beneath it. Asked from there, your request is no longer a demand for the future to rescue you. It is an openness, and openness receives what grasping never could. The joy this brings does not depend on the answer arriving, because the fullness was uncovered the moment you grew quiet enough to ask cleanly. Ask from presence, and you find you are already receiving, already full, the getting a mere outward echo of a completeness you had all along.

To ask in the name is not to attach a word to a plea sent to a distant God. The name is I AM, the awareness of being that you are, and asking in it means claiming the wish as already fulfilled in that awareness. Until now people have asked while feeling the lack, and to ask from lack is to ask nothing, because the state felt is the state received. Lack asks for lack.

Asking rightly is assuming the feeling of the thing already had, resting in it as accomplished. That is why the joy is full and not partial: the fullness is the satisfaction of the answered state felt now, before a single fact confirms it. A person receives what he dares to appropriate as his own being. The wish felt as done is the only prayer that comes back to you as fact.