John 16:7 Meaning Nevertheless I Tell You the Truth

As long as the mind clings to love in a single outward form, it looks for rescue in what the eyes can see and misses the Teacher who lives within. The form must recede so that the mind stops reaching outside itself and turns to the gentle Presence that was placed inside it all along, closer than any figure and impossible to lose.

What seems like a departure is really an invitation to find comfort where it can never be taken away. The mind is not being left; it is being led past its dependence on the seen toward the loving Voice that answers from within, so that help is no longer somewhere to travel to but something already at home in the mind.

Comforter: the loving Voice set within the mind beside the ego, the gentle Teacher that remembers the truth and never leaves

It is good for them that he goes, because while he stands before them their attention rests on a form outside themselves. They lean on his presence the way people lean on any object of hope, and so they never turn inward to find the same presence living in them. As long as the teacher fills their sight, the deeper thing he came to awaken stays asleep.

When the outer form is gone, the seeking has nowhere left to go but in. Only then does the still awareness he called the Comforter make itself known from within. He departs so that what he was pointing to can become what you are, no longer borrowed but your own.

Going away describes the letting go of the old self a person has clung to, the concept he keeps rehearsing about himself. While he holds tight to that familiar identity, nothing new can enter, and the state he longs for stays out of reach. The departure of the old is the price of the arrival of the new. What leaves is the self he knows.

The Comforter is the inner remembrancer, the settled feeling of the wish fulfilled, which rises only once the former self-image is released. Assumption and abandonment are one motion: as the old is dropped, the new is sent in its place, and it comes to abide. A person cannot occupy the fulfilled state while still standing in the empty one. He releases what he was, and the thing he wanted comes to stay.

The visible teacher must dissolve so that the inner one can rise, because a presence leaned on outside a person keeps that same presence asleep within. As long as awareness clings to a form it can see and follow, it stays a follower and never becomes the thing it follows; the going away is the withdrawal of the outward image so the identical power can wake inside the body as the Comforter, the breath of guidance that no longer stands across from a person but breathes as the person.

Departure is not loss here but relocation: the light moves from in front of the eyes to behind them. What was walked beside becomes what quietly counsels from within, so the one who seemed to leave is felt again as one's own deepest knowing.

Comforter: the inner breath of guidance and consolation that rises within the body once no outer teacher is leaned upon.