Q: A question came to me that’s been with me for some time and has helped me along the path. I’ve chosen to follow a forgiveness practice – a releasing of past hurts and conditioning – and the question is: how can I be truly free? I heard you say that all we really need to do is shift our orientation, so my question is what methods can I use?

John: There are many methods that can offer something of a better direction and there are some methods that do point directly, within. There are no methods that can actually help you fundamentally shift your orientation, within, from believing your self to believing what you know the truth of, within. The most profound shift that you’re capable of making is a shift that you cannot use something to help. You cannot use absolutely anything to help. As soon as something helps, it’s too much. You’ll be relying on something that you don’t need. The most profound shift of orientation within, as awareness, requires only a shift of relating.

Many things can help you to the door. You can even be walked to the door. You can be shown the door. Methods can be used to focus your thinking and your feeling on doing away with what you don’t need, bringing you closer to the door. The closer you get to the door, within, the fewer methods that work. To be brought right to the door, within, very little works. For you to enter that door, there isn’t anything that helps to work. As soon as you rely on anything to help you enter that door, within, you’ll be relating to the help; you’ll be relating to something, a subtlety of something, that is just a little bit different than what entrance is, disabling you from entering. As awareness, make it perfectly easy and direct or you are forbidden entrance. If you make it even a tiny little bit difficult, you will use that part, that subtlety of difficulty, to make it even more difficult, proving to your self what is not possible.

Concerning this most profound shift of orientation, what does make a great difference, a great difference of resonance, is for you to be in proximity to one within whom this shift is lived from. That won’t accomplish your own shift. What it does accomplish is you keep knowing it and seeing it; you keep hearing it. It keeps radiating. Other than the shift itself, there isn’t anything more powerful than what you know to be a real example. If you’re not knowing that, then that is not available to you. If you are knowing it, it is available to you.

The disadvantage with methods that bring you closer to the door, or even methods that bring you right to the door, is that the methods work. Because they work, you identify with them. They give you something that you can hold, something that you can relate to, so in that way the method deceives you. It has you relying on what you absolutely don’t need and cannot have and cannot use to enter the very door that you’re led to. The method that you use to get closer to the door, or to get right to the door, forbids your entrance. The method that is used to bring you closer, or to bring you to, creates loss for you. Your relating to the method strengthens your own orientation for you, as awareness, to be something because you’re dependent on using something.

In that way what helps you to get closer imprisons you. When you are right at the door with the use of methods, you are well shackled and chained, facing right at the door without an inch to spare for you to enter. As you relate to any subtlety of your training or of your learning, relate to the use of any information, and your entrance is not possible because you cannot take anything with you – not one tiny shred of information. You can’t take it with you because you don’t need it. If you have one tiny little bit of something that you’re relating to in your heart that is short of pure knowing, then it is that relating that you use to forbid your own entrance. You make it not possible. All that can enter is pure you. Anything that helps alloys you.

Meditation is a most beautiful help. It’s a method that focuses your awareness out of everything else you’re accustomed to. As soon as it works, what you have is the part within it that actually works and that is ‘now you know’. As soon as you know through the use of a method, you mustn’t continue with the method. A method such as meditation is like the building of scaffolding around a building that really helps, but as soon as you have accomplished what the method helps you in, the scaffolding doesn’t belong with the building any more. It must come off. If you don’t take it off, you’ll incorporate the scaffolding into what the building is, depending on something that doesn’t actually belong. It will contribute to a much greater distortion than what you had before the use of the method.

You are able as awareness to be pure, clean you without the use of something. To stop short of that for any reason is to fool yourself. The method, the technique, or the process that introduces you to spirituality, also, just as much, makes spiritual what isn’t, having you holding something that you then believe is real and true that isn’t.

Inspiration works because you experience what you most deeply know the truth of from outside of your self. It has you directly resonating with what you most deeply know. If you are close to another being that keeps moving and travelling in and out of the entrance as though it’s nothing, as though it is perfectly easy and natural, you are inspired to what you are knowing. It has you resonating knowing, and seeing knowing, and seeing knowing, and seeing. And it won’t make you enter.

As soon as you are purely being what you are most deeply knowing, you are being pure you, making not entering impossible. When you’re not using anything at all to help in your relating to deepest knowing within, you are incapable of not entering. You’re not able to be anything else.

In the same way that when you’re relating to something that isn’t actually a part of pure you, pure awareness, then you are not able to enter. The extra relating absolutely forbids you. Your own holding in the extra relating absolutely stops you. In that way, what you hold that you’re not actually needing teaches you what you don’t need.

If you’re not learning from that, realizing from that, then you’re not actually wanting to learn or realize. You’re not actually wanting to enter. If it is really, purely, only about entrance to authenticity as awareness, the moment you know it and see it, you’re gone. You’re gone in. Nothing can stop you. You’re not interested in anything else. Nothing else has you but what you purely, really are.

To stop short of that, even the tiniest little bit, you’re not only holding something you don’t need and fooling your self, but you’re also making your self, the self you’re holding, making your self a victim of knowing; making your self a victim of what is pure in you. It is what separation is, right at the door.

Q: Thank you.