Q: I experienced, at some point in a meditation retreat, awareness in sleep state. It’s like I’m asleep and there is a part of me that knows and sees that I am asleep. Could you say something about awareness in a dream state and sleep state?

John: In a dream state, you are certainly aware but your awareness is in the underside of your self. In a sleep state, but not in dreaming – a non-dreaming sleep state – it’s easy to be aware in the unknown and what is beyond all of your self.

In having measures and levels of awareness in the unknown, because it is beyond your self, you’re not going to have cognitive awareness, not awareness from within your mind but just you, aware. It won’t register in your self because your self isn’t a part of it. So you also may not have any memory of it, but there will be the resonance of it. In waking up, your awareness will be washed through with something of the unknown.

In you being open in that resonance, in your day, the unknown starts to take form in your self. It starts to have a presence without you cognitively processing it. Your higher self starts forming without your higher mind forming. It’s the depth and the quality of that resonance that you are being open in that takes form in your self without any process in your self. It isn’t within any control of your thinking. It’s controlled by an unknown level of you, and your permission on an aware level is there just by your openness, your openness to a depth and a quality of resonance that you’re clueless about. You’re given to it just by virtue of your response to the depth and the quality of that resonance.

The reality of that is that you are letting your innermost control you. It’s the fastest development of your self because you are letting unknown levels of you come into your self and change your self, without those changes being subject to your thinking. Just by virtue of that resonance satisfying a depth that you know the truth of and qualities that you know the truth of, is you giving it power without having to understand it first.

Direct knowledge, surrendered to without any supportive form to it, moves form the most. That makes your innermost more home to you than your self or your heart. That comes into you, awareness, being your innermost without that fulfilling any other level of yours, first. It’s the deepest and the fastest form-making of what you really are. It means that you purely trust you, and that you need no evidence first in your self that it is you.

On a soul level that’s a fast track. It leaves your sense of self with no control, and just the resonance of the real in you with all control. It’s you, awareness, being unconditioned response to the first light of direct knowledge, a level of light that has no self appeal.

You would give your life to the unknown just because you know. That’s essentially the highest trust that there is, because it isn’t held together or supported by familiarity. It is a pure, blind trust but it’s not naive. It isn’t ignorant trust: it knows … knows, trusts what it directly knows, even in the absence of seeing. That level of trust can’t be fooled by anything because it isn’t subject to anything, except that you know.

That is love.