Q: I had this really deep, profound experience of love inside me, which was the deepest I ever felt in my life, and you warned me that it was not only an experience but also has to be lived. And you also told me that there was a step involved. I notice that this deepness never returned, so did I take the right step or did I do something wrong?

John: You’re identifying with it as an experience, as an experience in your self and in your person. But what made the experience of such profound value to you, was not really the experience itself, but what you knew in it. Your knowing was so much more. It isn’t for you to walk in the experience of that, but rather in the intimate knowledge within it.

Awareness walking as such knowledge doesn’t require an experience then, even though walking as such knowledge does produce an experience, but not necessarily the one that you are expecting, not necessarily the kind of experience that you had before. Just as the experience that you had was new, the kind of experience that may come from you walking as such intimate knowledge that you had before, would again be new – not necessarily as strong, not necessarily as obvious. Eventually, sooner or later, the experience of walking as such knowledge is most subtle, which is your being weaned from the need of having the kind of experience that you expect.

The whole point of such an experience as what you had is that you are able, as awareness, to know more, and that it is such knowledge that recognizes meaning, and it is such recognized meaning that then becomes an experience, great or small, with that part of it not making a difference to you because what you are being in it is, as awareness, meaning that knows.

Your response to being that within completely changes your orientation as awareness. Instead of your orientation being that of your interaction with form, it is your interaction as meaning, with meaning that you know within form. You become, as awareness, meaning-oriented, meaning that you know before you can even feel it, so that when you can even feel such profound meaning, it is because you knew it first, making you meaning that knows, instead of making you, as awareness, an experience of meaning that would like to have another one; looking for the experience because it had such profound meaning. It’s the meaning that you knew within it that made the experience what it was. Relate then not to the experience, but to what you knew as meaning in it.

What this goes against in you is not even any of your experiences. It doesn’t go against your self or your person or your life. This new orientation of being meaning goes against your present orientation of wanting the experience of meaning. What shifts in this is your orientation as awareness. What is it then that orients you? From where do you come? From where you come is also what you’re being. Such an orientation makes much of your innermost within your outermost, instead of making much of your outermost experience of having been in touch with what you knew was your innermost.

Conceptually, this is all very simple. Once you see it, it’s easy to understand in your mind. Until you walk as that, as simple as it is to walk as that, everything else of you will undergo change just because of your walking as that. When your orientation within shifts to you being what you first are within, to you being meaning, then every other part of you will shift because every other part of you will then have meaning, not because of its experience of itself, but because of your orientation of meaning within that part, enabling that part of you to know itself because you do.

It’s understandable that the greatest part to you in the experience that you had was the experience itself because you are accustomed to relating as awareness first to form, because that is the first part of you that’s affected by meaning.

What was of greatest value in the experience that you had is that you, as awareness, shifted in your orientation.

Q: Thank you, John.