John de Ruiter is a Canadian philosopher and author whose thoughts have reached and influenced thousands of people. He teaches through public question-and-answer meetings held at his College in Edmonton, Canada, and in city and university lecture halls in many countries around the world.
(For information on attending a meeting with John click here)
John de Ruiter was born on November 11th 1959, one of two boys and two girls raised by Dutch immigrant parents in the town of Stettler, Alberta, Canada. While still a boy he was taught shoe repair by his father, who was one of a long line of fine shoemakers from De Bildt in the Netherlands. The shoe repair was done after school, mainly on Saturday mornings, by John from the age of twelve. His work was good and his father paid him fairly, earning the boy more than usual pocket money for a child of his age. John was a generous boy, though thrifty by nature and upbringing, his parents having endured frugal times during the German wartime occupation of the Netherlands. At Christmas time in the family home it was customary for each of the children to write their name on a folded piece of paper later to be drawn blind from a bowl, by way of deciding who would be giving whom a present on Christmas Day. John’s open-handedness was such that each child round the table wanted to be the one that drew his name.
“He was a restless boy” said his mother “with always something on the go.”(10)
His inborn drive to find things out for himself initially attracted John to practical activities, which, combined with a capacity for making useful and interesting contrivances – go-carts, homing-cages for his beloved pigeons – and the fixing-up of lights in unusual places around the house, led him to acquire other linked skills, like carpentry and building, and gained him the nick-name of John ‘Golden-Hands’, affectionately recalled by his parents to this day(10). A fascination with dismantling intricate devices, from clocks to car engines, facilitated an understanding of mechanics, enabling him to service and repair his own vehicles, and move on to a wider practical engineering know-how that would serve in good stead his interest in wild-terrain 4×4 exploration in the deep wilderness, forests and foothills of Alberta, where breakdown could bring disaster.
John was not an easy child to bring up: in trouble frequently, not because he was bad or deliberately mischievous, but because his unceasing curiosity dissolved boundaries: open doors beckoned the stand-alone child out to wonder-worlds under a wider sky, toddling with unspecific purpose down the lane, time and again. Truly a trial-child of his mother’s vigilance and care. But at home and right through school, his father said and his teachers too – there was the fire alarm incident – that “John was always truthful, owned up, no question.” (10)
During his last years at school, de Ruiter was found part-time after-school employment in a small workshop making custom-built kitchen cabinets. This establishment was chosen in particular by John’s father because the business was known to be worked in and owned by a Christian man of good influence: it was to have been the first step in securing for John a well-founded trade. In the school workshop, twelfth grade, John had been encouraged by his teacher, Ignace Miazga, renowned in Stettler as a superb craftsman in wood and stone, to take on an exacting carpentry project by making a full suite of bedroom furniture worked in walnut. To focus the skill needed, and obviate wastage of a costly hardwood, Mr Miazga had required from his pupil meticulous scale drawings before any wood was taken out to be measured or cut. For the admired finished work, John received from the school an award for carpentry. Seeing John’s sedulous concentration in the shaping of this work, his parents and teachers grasped at the opportunity to settle such an aptitude in an apprenticeship, calculating that perhaps by this means a direction might be secured for an otherwise quite restive boy, about to leave school, whose intelligence had not responded tellingly to his classroom studies. In his early years the practical skills that attracted John were the first clear manifestation of a propensity to push boundaries. This pertinacity became a characteristic of focus on all levels of his interests – spiritual, psychological, academic and physical, as instanced in his progress from shoe repair to the making of shoes, refining this still further when, under the employ of Salamander Shoes (1981) , he became accomplished in the craft of orthopaedic shoe-making, described by John as “the learning of a beautiful trade”; a skill that would support his young family and himself for many years ahead in Edmonton, Alberta.
Other Worlds Open 1971-1978
John de Ruiter’s boyhood oriented more away and out of school than towards in-school activities, more out of the house than in the house, wandering with flash-light, pocket knife all weathers the woods, the fields, lanes, alleys and byways of the small town of Stettler. Not bookish then but recalcitrant, drawn by risk but not reckless, taking in the world from practical experience and his own observations, John’s life in those days was often solitary, with visionary other-world occurrences breaking through, causing astonishment to the unready boy. The earliest vividly remembered documented happening of this kind occurred in his seventeenth year.
“When I was seventeen I just stumbled on to being awakened to something that was profoundly amazing, wonderfully life-giving, without understanding the source of it. I wasn’t looking for it, I never related to anything like that being in existence, then all of a sudden there was a flowering inside, that made everything in this existence pale in comparison. That flowering, that awakening inside, opened up my awareness to everything in existence to be something more beautiful than I had ever seen before… And that lasted about a year, then all of a sudden, it was gone… …In the same way as I couldn’t comprehend how it started, I also couldn’t comprehend how it ended, or why. Once awakened, it seemed to me inconceivable that it should ever go away. Once it left, I was profoundly disturbed because I knew I had been connected to something that made the whole universe live, and that without being connected to that, I knew nothing was worth living for. It was alive on its own, I didn’t do anything for it, it wasn’t there because of me, and yet it happened to me, in me, and around me, for no apparent reason… …I then committed myself to spending my existence in looking for that reality, not knowing what to look for, although I knew the flavor of it, knew what it was like when alive.” (7)
Holding course through years of anguish, no back-down considered, de Ruiter drew upon all his inner resources, to bring to light what had so inexplicably appeared and gone, accepting spells of despondency, brushed by hazards of lostness, and overwhelming darkness and pain, yet throughout those experiences he recalls -
“though I had got myself in so deep, moved so far away from the familiar, there was no thought that I might be unable to get out of this, not be able to repair myself and sort of live normal again.” (7)
Leaving Stettler, Searching 1978
His everyday life at this time became troubled. He was difficult to live with, a disturbance to his parents, inner rilings and torment manifesting in hardness of heart; matters only improving when he left home to stay in a nearby small city, Red Deer, Alberta, soon moving on to the provincial capital, Edmonton. Here many miles from home he was freer to practice a rigorous idealism, living strictly according to a self-imposed Biblical ethic, making fiercely righteous demands upon himself and others. At one period allowing himself just a few hours sleep, eating only a bare sufficiency, sharing what he had – his clothes, his shoes – with social derelicts, the homeless, buying them food, coffee, giving them lifts, living rough himself in the back seat of his car and keeping clean in the washrooms of gas stations. During this time he attended eclectic meetings, spiritual communes, talked with any he thought might reflect even a flicker of that light he knew he would recognise, and hungered to find. There were so many job changes, so many reasons for losing those jobs, most of them unmerited, down to antagonism towards his outspokenness and fair- return work ethic.
Then “after about two years, when there was nothing more that I could turn inside out, there was nothing else to peel and make raw, nothing left but a state of what seemed to me to be never-ending pain; when I had reached this point where there was nothing more I could do with everything I had, then, what I did, without fatalism, without any edge of hardness or bitterness or resentment or any seeming wastage or regret, was to surrender in a very sweet way to be in that deep, in that darkness, in that pain, with an absolute letting-go of ever needing to find that reality I had so wonderfully tasted and lost. There wasn’t any thought that maybe this will do it, there was just a very tender acceptance of my state as is. Then, to my total surprise, I was astonished when that same reality that I had once tasted, flowered again in the midst of the rawness and the pain, in the darkness where I had unconditionally made my home. The flowering again inside of that reality came through, simply emerged in response to the shift I had made, and I had no awareness that this could be possible, could be the outcome. I surrendered to it unconditionally, understanding that it does not need to bless me, that I’ll give my life to it and it doesn’t have to give anything back. I would exist for that reality.”(7)
Books and a Bookshop Meeting
Even though now grounded in a sure direction, de Ruiter’s day to day worldly life was not straightaway improved. Extreme reactions were still to work through.
“I sold everything I had, I sold my tools. I sold all my furniture, I gave my car away… I’d sit through some movies and just groan inside because it was such an incredible false reality, this movie, this entertainment….everybody around me was living in worlds that couldn’t see eternity and I was watching all this in eternity, but from the negative side of it, Hell not Heaven.” (8)
In all this desperation, a better job came about, from “Corona Shoe Renew”, and then one day, on impulse, he went round to the Canadian Bible Institute Bookshop where -
“I thought I’d just hunt through the authors and bookshelves a bit, and I saw a book there and I thought, what of all things are you going to read a Christian book for?” (8)
But in fact his reading intensified. “All I did was work and read books. I’d go from restaurant to restaurant and order coffee and read those books. All truth and everything I read just entered right into my being and took hold. It was like everything was a revelation.”(8)
But there was a difference now in his approach. “I allowed honesty to look at each doctrine, each teacher, each technique I encountered, only to discover that they were all less than absolutely truthful.” (1)
He affirmed that though truth can be found in most religions and philosophies “this truth tends to be lost, or obscured, in sophist complexities, ritual and dogma.”(1)
His visit to the Canadian Bible Institute was to yield more than books. It was there that John de Ruiter and Joyce Witten first noticed each other, though it would take five months longer till, just before Christmas of 1981, when over coffees at the Fireside Restaurant at this their first meeting together alone, they resolved to get married, confiding that they had both known at first sight they were destined to marry each other; and this they did in June 1982.
Christian Academia 1983
Charged with the immutable origins of his calling, John de Ruiter was bound to find a way to be effective in this world. Through these early years the salience of Christianity attracted de Ruiter and in him awoke an affinity with Biblical revelation, offering thus a foothold in life through the Church for the advancement of his life’s purpose, for which a mirroring outer structure of an academic qualification such as a degree in Theology, was a favoured support. Before they were married, Joyce’s plan had been to pursue a career in special education; after their marriage they agreed that togetherness and household economy would benefit, if both were to follow the same path of study.
Before applying to universities, de Ruiter was advised to wait a year, and take a course in New Testament Greek language, by way of demonstrating that he did have a scholar’s potential. A prospect that seemed daunting, considering his school record where his “greatest fear of learning was memorisation”(8). He took the course over two semesters, and passed, averaging marks of 93%. “I couldn’t believe it; I was able to memorise. I was in awe of what I was able to do.”(8)
Both resolved to continue in full-time employment. John would remain at Salamander Shoes, re-named European Shoe Comfort, leaving weekends and evenings for study, while Joyce would stay on at the Canadian Bible Institute bookshop. There was a determination too to live frugally, saving “every penny we could” to pay their way through school; this they did.
In 1983 they enrolled for the Bachelor of Theology four-year degree course in the Toronto Baptist Seminary. However, soon in that city, several encounters to which de Ruiter gave ear and significance, made him aware of a widening between his present direction and the true purpose it was intended to serve. He felt he was being called back and reminded of his original vision.
“I was still inside all of that – that was real to me. Once you’re brought into an experience, then it’s yours. I mean, when you have a loved one that dies, then you experience grief, then you learn something and you enter into something you didn’t have before. And you’ll always have that.” (8)
In that reminding he felt he was “opening up one thing after another in terms of capacity, like my inner capacity to recognise the coming together of reality, to grasp and live in it, to communicate these things, and in an instancy of knowing, weigh one thing with another, in a seamless flow of understanding that opened worlds within worlds”(8)
including, yet going beyond academia.
Church Involvement Ends 1987
Synchronous with the Christian way, de Ruiter communicated in the language and terminology of the Church: but this too would become subject to his unsparing “capacity to weigh one thing with another”, though not before his association with the Christian faith had taken him through one year of a four year course in Toronto, followed by a year at the Three Hills Prairie Bible Institute, Alberta, which for de Ruiter was a time of contentment and the writing of sermons acceptable to him then. “Prairie to me was as good as Toronto was bad” (8)
Following this quest through avenues of Christendom, de Ruiter returned to the Bethlehem Lutheran church in Edmonton. There he placed himself under the tutelage of an understanding man, the resident Pastor, who provided him with an office and an informal dispensation to preach: but despite his intense application to study, and his dedication and devotion in preaching, it was here that his final break with established Christianity happened in 1987.
Finding Voice
John de Ruiter preached first in 1979, aged nineteen, in the Shiloh Baptist Church, Edmonton. This prevenient occurrence made known a rhetorical gift which de Ruiter developed, hearkening to the voice of Early Church origins, finally elevating the delivery of his sermons with full commitment to revelation in the latter half of 1986, while at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Edmonton. In the very act of his preaching, de Ruiter recognised the purity and the strength of meaning carried by words flowing in moments of inspiration. This practice of delivery was uncommon and not easy to introduce from a pulpit in front of congregations inured to anticipate sermons on familiar themes. De Ruiter’s resolve to preach from the heart sometimes brought awkward and embarrassing moments to others and some torment to himself.
“In that service I just died inside. I knew I could have used a sermon of mine from the Three Hills Institute; all my notes were there with great clarity. I could have just walked through, preached a sermon, no-one would have known. I knew. I just had to be faithful to that one voice.” (8)
To strengthen inner mastery of this, he required of himself “to be much more pin-pointed and exacting inside”. (8)
An aspiration that would not in its forming stand aside from possible distress, as occurred in the delivery of his sermon “Set my People Free”, where “as soon as I started to talk, I would end up weeping. You know I just couldn’t hold it, all I could do was just weep.” (8)
And still moving forward, certain of his way, he determined not to preach “anything that doesn’t happen fully to me first, because if it doesn’t happen, I can’t preach it. It can’t flow through me, because it’s not in me. I’d always try to figure out, how am I able to preach with revelation and not be breaking down all the time.” (8)
He learned to abide in discomfort, and bear apparent humiliation in silence rather than speak an empty thought, not needing to depart from the flow of revelation, letting his words in themselves be “a river of direct knowledge”. The rigor of responding only to his heart, his inner voice, was strengthened as his teaching evolved, by the development of a clear, unadorned eloquence, for which his public speaking is known today.
Births and Beginnings of Meetings
There were divisions in the Lutheran Church hierarchy over acceptance of de Ruiter’s return to the mystic practice of the Apostles, of preaching only with revelation, by aspiring to deliver his sermons in a continuous stream of spiritual insight. These divisions were exacerbated when de Ruiter questioned the protocols for election of church Elders. Directing their attention to an apostolic precedence in this regard, where elders were appointed, not elected, a return to appointments made in recognition of a transcendency of spirituality, allowing due place for inner gifts, natural talents and abilities, but irrespective of age, popularity, or academic qualifications. On these issues and their implications a schism among Lutheran Church Elders was averted by the intense opposition of one faction, leaving de Ruiter no choice but unacceptable compromise, and so finally bringing to a close his involvement with the Bethlehem Lutheran Church, and formal Christianity as a whole.
The years of College and pastoral experience involved considerable reading, resulting in the accumulation of a library of a thousand or so books most of which John gradually sold during the next three years (1987-89).
John’s break with the Church, though not unforeseen, placed a strain on his marriage. In June 1986 Naomi was born, followed by Nicolas in 1988 and Nathaniel in 1990; all were born during a time of reorientation in their parents’ lives. De Ruiter had been contending with obstacles in his outer life, while of his inner life he records “there was a continuum of awakenings that followed over the years. I remained in constant unequivocal honesty and surrender to what I knew was true, allowing my own unassayed external constructs of mind and emotion to die”. (1)
On leaving the Church, with prospects of moving forward in that outward life ended, John de Ruiter, and a following of eighteen people mainly from a group within the church, began holding regular Sunday meetings in his home, with further gatherings arranged on other days in the houses of friends. On through the 1990’s many more people attended, until in 1996 the first public, non-residential venue was opened at the Akashik book store in Edmonton, replacing and ending the years of Sunday morning meetings in de Ruiter’s home.
A Decade of Growth and Change
While numbers doubled year on year in Canada, there was a will among Canadian followers to take the teaching abroad to the lands of their origins. So began John de Ruiter’s international presence, travelling to meetings arranged overseas. Word spread from talks given in the USA, England, Germany, India and Australia that there was a man from Canada with an original teaching worth hearing. Many came to hear him. On the eve of the millennium, John de Ruiter’s first book “Unveiling Reality” was published.
During the year 2000, the de Ruiters’ marriage came to an end. A formal divorce was granted on 20th December 2002. The settlement provided that custody of their children was awarded jointly to John de Ruiter and Joyce de Ruiter. Joyce remarried and accompanied her new husband to the Netherlands, living under the name Joyce de Ruiter-Kremers. John de Ruiter continued living in Canada, sharing his domestic life equally between the separate homes of two sisters. The personal aspect of these relationships has now come to an end.
John de Ruiter re-married in July 2009 and lives in Edmonton with his wife and elder son, who returned from the Netherlands and is studying at the University of Alberta. Later this year de Ruiter’s younger son will be travelling from the Netherlands to begin studies, also at the University of Alberta. Their sister, de Ruiter’s eldest child was re-united with her father in the fall of 2009 attending at the bedside of Cornelius de Ruiter, John’s father who passed away on January eighteenth 2010.
In 2003, de Ruiter began to look for a long-term meeting hall in Edmonton large enough to accommodate those already attending regular meetings and increased numbers in the years ahead.
Establishing the College
The Oasis Edmonton College of Integrated Philosophy is now the centre for John de Ruiter’s teaching. Here regular weekly meetings are held and international seminars organised four times a year, drawing many visitors to Edmonton from around the world. The growth in de Ruiter’s following during the years 1996-2007 was also reflected in increasing numbers of meetings held in Canadian cities and many other countries. The advent of the College has brought about a reorganisation of de Ruiter’s itinerary for meetings at home and abroad. Because of time constraints and the organisation of seminars for foreign visitors, fewer meetings are now held overseas. Many of those now attending the College seminars have travelled from places where de Ruiter has given meetings, and in many cases still does. A list follows as a part of this history. The College website (www.johnderuiter.com) gives details of cities and countries which de Ruiter continues to visit each year, taken from the comprehensive list that follows.
In Canada: Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Nelson, Stony Plain, Toronto, and Vancouver
In USA: Boulder (Colorado), Maui and Big Island (Hawaii), Michigan, New York, Phoenix (Arizona), San Francisco and Seattle. In England: Brighton, Bristol Glastonbury, Hastings, London, and Totnes. In Germany: Berlin, Hamburg and Munich
In Holland: Amsterdam In Denmark: Copenhagen In Austria: Vienna. In Israel: Tel Aviv. In India: Delhi, Poona, Tiruvannamalai. In Australia: Byron Bay, Perth, Sydney. In New Zealand: Auckland (7)
Going Forward
Interest in de Ruiter’s teaching increases; its unassuming soundness and practicality is unique. De Ruiter speaks from his own experience and knowledge, not reported, derived or dogmatic. He never speaks from notes. All his meetings are first times and he is open to receive any questions from anyone, there and then.
Here he is recorded live, “On being in the moment”:-
“Consciousness can be very cunning, a very genius at creating the moment that it wants it to be. It can take the moment and contort it, but whatever it does with the moment, it has to continue to give the energy to sustain that convolution. But the moment there’s a letting be, a letting go anywhere in consciousness, there starts to be a release of that contortion. The release of that contortion may cost you your whole existence if your whole existence is based on contorting and convoluting yourself. The moment you realise the implications of when those coils start to come undone and you see that it begins to affect your illusions, then you may draw back and quickly retreat into that distortion, telling yourself, don’t undo that again. But then you will always have to maintain the energy that goes into staying that way, maintaining the distortion. And there are all kinds of energy that have to be applied in a new and constant way, rationalising and justifying the convolutions that you are holding yourself in. So your belief system will grow and grow and never stop growing, you’ll develop structure upon structure upon structure. – But the moment that you stop, the resonance of that contortion moves all the way through the structure and says – it’s not true. So you end up burning out your whole life maintaining that distortion inside, of making the moment to be what you wanted it to be. So being in the moment can be done in a way that’s true. Or being in the moment can be done in a way manipulated, and not true. – But … we know which one we’re doing.”(7)
Meetings at the College are held on Mondays and Fridays, at the beginning and end of the working week, with an afternoon and evening meeting on Sundays throughout the year, except during a five-week break in the Summer, when John de Ruiter takes a vacation. The College also holds International Seminars four times annually which many travel regularly to attend from overseas. The College website provides details of John de Ruiter’s seminars abroad, together with details of attendance fees for regular College meetings, Seminars there, and those abroad, held principally in European Union and Australian cities. A recent seminar (February 2009), held for the first time in Tel Aviv, Israel, was transmitted live by video-link to the College in Edmonton. This event was so enthusiastically received and attended that simultaneous video-linking is under consideration as an additional future way for the College communication of John de Ruiter’s teachings. (Information, de Ruiter’s book “Unveiling Reality”, tapes, videos, CDs and DVDs can be accessed from the online store)
The designed high-ceilinged spaciousness of the College’s balconied auditorium in Edmonton, with finely balanced acoustics, marble entrance hall and deep blue patterned carpeting, creates an environment where people are disposed to relax, think more freely and make far-reaching connections of thought. In natural harmony with this the procedures in meetings have been developed over several years in a refining quest to encourage a way of being in the audience where the formation, expression, and exchange of deepest thought flourishes.
There have been unfavourable commentaries on John de Ruiter and his teaching, arising from misunderstandings or antipathy towards his unorthodox methods and philosophy, principally centring upon the long silences and mutual eye contact. One critic, an Edmonton sociologist, recorded his view;
“This is the beginning of a new religion. This is how they start.” (16)
On reading which de Ruiter commented “Reality does not ever originate from religion, rather religion can arise from reality, and on its own, falls.” (7)
John de Ruiter practises and recommends inner quiet and integrity on all profound and surface levels of life. Known to be an accessible philosopher-teacher, John de Ruiter speaks from the heart, weighing his words, directing them to the point for each questioner and for his audience, in that moment, with effect to open up an awareness to what is real, that once awoken remains awake.
