Q: You talk a lot about knowing, knowing what you know the truth of, and I don’t think I know what that means. I don’t know that I have the experience of it. Would you help me know the experience of it or know what knowing is?

John: You’re not able to be aware without knowing. To be aware is to know. Everything that you’re aware of you know. You know you’re sitting there. In the physical, you know where your body is, you know what you’re doing with your body. When you think, you know you’re thinking. When you feel, you know you’re feeling. Everywhere your awareness is, you know and you know what you’re aware of.

This is all integrated for you on the surface. In your physical reality it’s all integrated. In your interior it is much integrated. When you are in your person, when you’re in your personality, you’re aware that you’re more on the surface than when you’re in your heart, and you’re aware of how your body is different to you in your experience when you’re in your person or when you’re in your heart. When you’re in your heart, your body feels different. With each shift of awareness, your body is in some way different to you in your experience. You’re practised in physical reality, being aware in physical reality. Without that you couldn’t survive.

You’re able to be that aware within your interior, where you’re reliant on more of a sense of things, and not what you see with your eyes outside of you and what you feel with your body. When you’re quieted in your heart, you know what is more meaningful to you in your heart and what is less meaningful to you in your heart. You’re able to identify various levels of meaning, what has a deeper meaning or more of a superficial meaning.
You’re able to identify meaning in your heart. Whatever you identify, you know you’re aware of. Some of what you’re aware of in your heart you know the truth of. Other things that you’re aware of in your heart you might not know the truth of. To know is, with awareness, to identify what’s real.

When your body is tired, you know that it is more meaningful to you to sit than to stand. In your heart you also know such things, not so much concerning the physical but concerning what is of real meaning to you. When you close your heart and you have awareness in your heart, you know your heart is closing. When you open your heart, you’re aware that your heart is opening. You know the difference in your heart between opening and closing.

Wherever your awareness is, you have knowing. You may not know what you’re aware of, but when you are aware, you know that you are aware and, if you’re aware of something, you’re able to move with your inner sense toward what that something is. You’re able to stay close to it and you’re able to stay in relationship with it until you know more about it.
When your eyes are closed and someone puts something that they know is familiar to you in one of your hands and you need to identify what is put in your hand, when it’s first laid in your hand, you know something is in your hand. As soon as you begin to hold it differently, you may know immediately what is in your hand. If it’s more difficult, then the more you move it around in your hand, you slowly become acquainted with what you know it is.

In your heart it’s the same. You can know something in your heart without understanding what you’re knowing. As you give it time and you move it around in your heart, you roll it around in your heart, you ponder it on the level of your heart, and eventually you’ll have a much clearer sense of what you’re knowing instead of just knowing that you are knowing something.

For awareness, on every single level, knowing is critical. Without knowing, you would have no sense of anything. As you move around in physical reality, there are endless points of knowing that you’ve already come into. Without that, you couldn’t even move in physical reality.

The tendency for awareness is to be absorbed in what it experiences the most. The fastest learning is in the physical, and then it is with your interior senses – your exterior senses and then your inward senses. As soon as you move to the deeper levels, deeper levels than what your self is, it’s more difficult to comprehend what you know. If you don’t give your attention to what you know on unseen levels within, you’ll stay within what you are familiar with. You’ll remain in your self and in your person. You’ll relate to meaning as meaning affects your body, your thinking, your emotions and your feeling. The levels of your being you know are there but you may not see them. You may hardly even feel them, and you may not understand them.

To have deeper levels of meaning in your experience and in your life, it’s necessary to become aware of deeper meaning within. Having deeper meaning in your life, to know that deeper meaning in your life, you’re dependent on knowing the truth within, not just knowing the truth of what affects your body, your mind, your emotions and your feeling, but the truth of what moves deeper levels of meaning. It’s more difficult for awareness to give attention to unseen levels of meaning within, known but unseen, because it doesn’t have the level of form that you’re immediately aware of on the upper levels, on the more plain and mundane levels of existence.

For you to be certain of anything on the surface, you’re dependent on realizing the truth of how surface realty functions and operates. For you to move, within, it isn’t different; it’s just not easily seen. You’re still completely dependent on knowing how your inner levels function, how they move, how you move in them. It takes time to realize what you know, within. It requires your awareness to adhere and stay with what you know, within, to be able to move in some of what you know, within, while you’re on the surface.

As you stay with it, you’re aware that you know more and more. You’re aware when you know that you can see what you couldn’t see before, what you knew and couldn’t see and then being able to see it. You know when you understand what you know and when you merely just know what you know. Knowing is what meaningfully connects awareness to reality on the seen levels and on the unseen levels.

Q: Knowing is the meaning I give toward what I experience or to what I’m aware of, but sometimes the meaning I give to things is not the truth.

John: You know the difference between giving meaning to something you know is there, or knowing the meaning to what you know is there. In the same way, someone can put something in your hand that is yours and that you are familiar with, and while your eyes are closed you can give a meaning to what is in your hand. So you’ll say what is in your hand is such and such. The person says no. You guess again. If you move too quickly, you’ll keep attributing meaning to what is in your hand. When you slow down and you become more aware, then you’re using your knowing to feel, to physically feel, and then you begin to identify qualities of what is in your hand. You put together the identification of those qualities until finally you brighten inside and you realize you know what is in your hand. You smile and you say such and such is in your hand. The other person says yes.

In your heart it’s the same. You can be aware of something in your heart and give it an immediate meaning. That doesn’t mean that you know it is that, but you know that you’re giving it meaning. You know when you give something meaning and you know the truth of it, or when you give something meaning and you’re not sure of the truth of it.

You know that you’re able to be honest with what you know and you’re able to be dishonest with what you know. You’re able to attribute meaning, putting you in relationship with what you wish to be true, or what you hope is true, what you want to be true. Or you can use and direct your knowing clearly and not attribute anything to what you’re knowing. In that way, you come into what you clearly know.

You’re able to create an experience around what you know. In that way you’re capable of, in your experience, bending the truth. You’re able to move your feeling and your senses, configure them around what you know to influence what you know, but as soon as you relax as awareness, the effect you’ve created falls away and you’re left with what you clearly know.

Q: So in order to be more in the truth is to relax as awareness?

John: Yes, and to be honest to what you know.

There are various levels of honesty. You can be honest to what you actually know the truth of when you look at something, when you look at something outside of your self. Or you could look at the same thing and you can be honest to what you wish to be true about what you see. You’re able to be honest to what you wish to be true in what you see, or to what you actually know to be true in what you see. In that way, you’re able to influence your perception.

What you want to see, you’ll tend to see. If you really want to see what you know the truth of in what you see, you’ll not do anything to influence your perception. You’ll be completely dependent on just simply what you clearly know you see. That works with your physical senses, awareness within the physical senses. It works the same with awareness in the inward senses. You know that if you’re not completely honest to what you know on any level of sense perception, it’s easy to distort what you perceive and in that way it’s easy to distort your reality.

Q: It’s like I know that I’m not fully aware to what I am feeling because it’s not comfortable to feel it. So it’s like being aware is the step before knowing.

John: If you use your experience to influence your experience, then you separate your awareness from what is actually there because of wishing that what is there would be in some way different from what you honestly know that you sense and perceive. You’re able to play games with what you know. People are able to play mind games. When you ask a really clever child what is in its hand, it can say to you that he doesn’t know. And if you say “look at what is in your hand,” he closes his eyes, faces his hand and says he can’t see anything, and you say “open your eyes” and he says he’s not able to. And the game can go on and on. If he’s honest, everything is clear.

We’re also able to be that way, honest or not honest, within the hidden parts of our heart. If we really want to know the truth of something for the sake of the truth, we’re able to know and we’re able to see. We know when we don’t see and when we do see. You know how to remove your awareness from what you know, and you know how to give your awareness to what you know. Your awareness is subject to the manner of how you choose as awareness, and your awareness is subject to what you choose as awareness.

Q: What keeps me from being fully honest?

John: If it costs you something to be fully honest and there’s a part of your awareness that doesn’t like that cost, then it’s easy to not see it by not looking at it, and trying to be honest doesn’t mean that you’re being honest. That’s like the difference between trying to see and simply seeing. You’re able to look at something quickly, knowing that if you look too quickly you won’t see, and if you don’t want to see what you’re looking at you can look too quickly to be able to really see, and thereby convince your self that you looked and you didn’t see anything.

When you really want to see, you know how to take the time to carefully look and carefully see and identify what you know you’re seeing. You’re able to do that in physical reality and you’re able to do that, as well, in unseen reality. You know how to be dishonestly honest, you know how to be sort of honest, you know how to be mostly honest, and you know how to be completely honest.

When it comes to knowing the truth within, knowing what you’re able to know in your heart, being only honest and completely honest to knowing and to what you’re able to know are you able to connect with depth of knowing. To awaken to more reality, within, means to know more reality, within. To know more, your capacity as awareness needs to open more. As awareness opens, it knows more, it sees more. As awareness softens, awareness knows that it is more. When awareness hardens, awareness knows that it is less.

The basic sense within the heart that you know the truth of is opening or closing, softening or hardening. And in your heart what you know, as awareness, to be … when you’re honest in your heart, when you’re honest to what you know in your heart … you know that it is true for you to open and to soften, and you know that it’s not true for you to close your heart or to harden your heart. Without you opening your heart and softening your heart, you’re not able to be in all of your heart. You’re able to close or to harden to regions of your heart, such as what is deeper in your heart.

When you are as awareness loyal to what you know the truth of in your heart, then you know it’s true for you to unconditionally open your heart and soften your heart. The more you open and soften within, the more delicate your movement as awareness is, within. You begin to come into your more subtle senses, your subtle inward senses. The finer you open to your actual senses as awareness within, the deeper the access that you have into your own being. The more honest you are as awareness to the subtleties of knowing, the more that you’re able to navigate in your own heart, and the more you’re able to recognize deeper and deeper levels within.

As you open and develop in this, you begin to realize that there is as much to know, within, as there is to know within physical reality, and that reality is no longer seen to be all outside of you, outside of your self, and in what you experience in your self. You begin to realize that there are unseen levels, within, that are knowable and that you’re able as awareness to awaken to more, you are what you’re able to awaken to know more, and that you’re able to navigate within the deeper levels with that knowing.