Q: Hi John.

John: Hello.

Q: I wanted to ask about awareness. In previous talks you referred to a split that can happen in awareness and sometimes I don’t know if awareness is shifted inwards or it’s split and it’s looking in and out at the same time. So I wonder if there is a way for me to be more clear about it and to direct the awareness inside?

John: You can direct awareness inside, but if the orientation of that direction is your self instead of what’s deeper than your self, that furthers the split. Going within for self reasons is a split, but going within because that’s what you know the truth of, aside from anything in your self, is not a split. The split has to do with orientation, not subject matter, not content.

Q: But the beginning of it is from the self, because in the beginning something needs to awake or to use the mind to look inwards?

John: You can use your mind to move inwards, but if the movement inwards is for your mind or for your self, that’s a split. If the movement inwards is a response to what you directly know, so it has no self agenda, then there’s no split. For example, when you close or harden you directly know as awareness to open and soften. It requires no learning, no teaching, it’s a universal truth. As you, awareness, relax, you open and soften. That openness and softness takes you within, but if you have an agenda to engage your deeper interior for interest in your self, then the going within is going to be split, such as being on a spiritual path.

Q: Because awareness has its own will that can be separate from the self?

John: Awareness can separate from real beingness. It can separate from the truth within by believing something that it doesn’t know the truth of, such as awareness taking to heart a sense of self, a sense of identity. Awareness relaxed has no identity. Awareness relaxed moves as beingness, it doesn’t move as a self. It’ll move as a self if it adopts a sense of self. Awareness relaxed naturally drops out of any identity and comes to rest in the heart. In that, there’s no split. As soon as you take your self to heart, that creates a split.

Q: So when you speak, you speak to the level of the awareness?

John: Yes.

Q: And there is no practice I can do to increase it because the practice is related to self?

John: Yes. A practice is based on the truth within, so there’s truth in every practice. But engaging a practice isn’t for the truth within; it’s for one’s sense of self. The path is made all about one’s self. When you were in your innocence you were not engaging any kind of spiritual understanding or spiritual teaching or a path. When you were in your innocence, it wasn’t because of how you engaged your thinking and your feeling. You were in your innocence because as awareness you were relaxed. So you naturally, without a thought, moved from your innermost outwards. A path can point you in the direction of your innermost. No path takes you to your innermost.

When you lie down to go to sleep, as you near sleep all familiarity passes away: your past, your beliefs, your self, your day, and all that remains is you. As you near the tipping point of sleep, you’ve returned to being what you really are. You are not consciously letting go of your past, of your day, of your self, of your beliefs. You, at a fundamental level, relaxed, and that’s how you fall asleep, that’s how all that you’re used to is laid to rest because you are entering a fundamental rest within. That’s real.

Q: Which part in me makes the decision to go deeper or to believe the self and then to be drawn into a story or into a feeling that overtakes the reality?

John: Awareness, but not awareness as a self or awareness as a personality. In the same way, awareness as a self or a personality isn’t able to shift to the heart. Awareness on its own without the use of the personality or the self, that relaxes, naturally returns to the heart.

Q: So the self, as long as this is the choice that I make, uses the awareness as a tool basically to exercise its will and needs?

John: A self level of awareness that moves to go within is going to use awareness as a tool. That’s awareness on a self level using the concept of awareness to go within. That’s a self identity that’s trying to go within for self identity reasons. It’s not real.

When awareness relaxes, awareness becomes honest, honest to what it really is. It isn’t a thought process. It isn’t a mental honesty. It isn’t a personal level of honesty. Just like when you lie down to go to sleep, as you, awareness, relax, you are becoming honest to what you really are but you have no such thinking in the concept of that. The honesty that’s there in relaxing, in falling asleep, is inherent to what you really are. It requires no self awareness, no mental awareness. You come to it naturally; it isn’t learned.

Q: It seems that the self is also enjoying from this process so it wants more of it, so..

John: Yes.

Q: How to bypass it, how to bypass and to be real, not do it for the self?

John: By you not taking seriously, you not believing what you think and what you feel to tell you the deeper truth within. That cleans you of seeking for the truth, and as you relax within, you turn into the truth. The path dissolves and you naturally turn into what you have been looking for. You can’t acquire it. You can only turn into it, and it’s only authenticity of awareness that can turn into the truth within.

Q: Thank you.