Q: Hello, John. I only just met you yesterday, and I was reading your book. When I was nineteen I also had an awakening that has totally changed my life. Ever since then it seems like an endless struggle to try and regain that sense of unity and awareness that occurred. I know nothing else that would seem to fill me as much as what that awareness did. So, I just feel quite lost and quite confused in my life now. I don’t even feel like I have a question anymore.

John: The value of the experience that you had is in the knowledge that’s embedded in it. The experience highlights the knowledge. Having the knowledge as awareness…having such knowing as awareness…won’t necessarily give you the same experience again. The experience isn’t really inviting you to have your home in the experience. It’s inviting you to have your home in awareness knowing, making your home in knowledge. Not an understood knowledge; a knowledge that does touch your heart and does in ways satisfy your self, but it really draws you to what is deeper than your self or even your knowing in your heart. It draws you into what you are as a being. When you follow the knowledge through into what you are as a being, you realize an inviolable, profound okayness despite whatever experience you’re having.

The invitation within awareness extends even deeper than that. It’s the invitation to be what the knowledge is, what it is as awareness, without that having to give you a satisfaction in your self, a nurture in your heart, or even the profound okayness in what you are as a being. It has you resting in what you first are without any need or orientation of result or reward.

In having your home in knowledge there’s no need of movement in what you first are because you know. Having your home in knowledge does give you your being, it does give you your deeper self and your higher self, accomplishing development and evolution in what you live as a self, with all of that being incidental to your having your home in what you first are. In that, there is no relating to any of your forms – not the highest or even the deepest of your self, not a relating even to your own being. The relating out of what you first are does take place, but it takes place in the same way of what you first are. It takes place out of knowing. Knowing as awareness determines the movement.

If your belief as awareness isn’t one with knowledge then awareness creates its own split right at the very source. The first movement of belief has awareness moving and being something that it isn’t. Every movement of awareness creates an experience. If the awareness moves out of an ill-begotten belief, the experience will also be ill-begotten. It’ll have in it a fundamental separation that doesn’t come from the self. It doesn’t come from any of the forms. It doesn’t come from your own being. It comes from you: you as awareness in what you first are, moving not because of knowing.

Absolute freedom as awareness within all of your forms comes from your being absolutely, beautifully, limited to being only what you know; awareness being and moving not outside of knowledge. What moves awareness is belief; believing in knowing or believing something that is other than knowing. Believing something offered by a form, believing what is offered by an experience that it’s had before, believing something based on the history of its forms – awareness moving by memory instead of by knowledge.

As awareness before all of your forms, you know what you are, not in an understanding; you know because it is what you are. With the ability to be that, the ability to be the oneness of that comes also the ability as awareness to be other than that. It is where the split occurs. Honesty of awareness has you realizing that. You’re able to realize it in the level of your self when you are, as awareness, honest to your self or not honest to your self. The ability holds to levels deeper than your self. You’re able to be honest as awareness to what you are as a being, and you’re able to separate from that, enabling you as awareness to separate on the level of your being, with that immediately manifesting in your experiencing the separation in your self, having you needing from within your self what you separated from within your own being.

As awareness the principle of honesty holds even deeper than the form of your own being. As awareness in being true to what you first are, honest and one with what you first are, you’re able to be otherwise. You’re able to know what you are and move just slightly different than that. That has you moving through the form of your own being, but not to satisfaction. It puts what you are as awareness quickly into the form of your self, instantly manifesting what you are as awareness but no longer what you first are as awareness. There’s been a split from that.

The split, right at the very source, isn’t a bad thing. What it is, is just simply not what you first are. It’s not the oneness of all of you. What the split is, right at the very source, is simply what doesn’t work, with the manifestation of that instantly being registered in your self: awareness in a self not one, awareness that is partial. Not bad and not one. The oneness comes together in the return, the return being deeper than any experience, deeper than your own being, and then awareness within knowing moving as unanimity; awareness not being partial to anything; awareness moving being one with knowing.

The experience of oneness, the awakening to knowledge that moves into all of your self, isn’t for the benefit of your self; it’s for the benefit of you. The experience isn’t there to offer you more of the experience. The experience isn’t there to invite you into sustaining the experience. The experience directs you to what you first are, to what has no lack. The experience sends you as awareness, despite any of your forms, home – home not being an experience. Home is all of you as awareness being all of you. It’s awareness surrendering partiality, enabling unanimity: the oneness of all of you.

To whatever degree and level you are aware, to that exact same degree and level be awareness honest to knowing and not separate in any way because of what an experience or because of what a form offers. If your level of awareness isn’t deeper than all of your forms it doesn’t even matter. Awareness being honest to all knowing has awareness being home. For that to occur within one of your forms, even if it is just simply in your self, if you would have never awakened to any level deeper within than what your self is – awareness being honest to knowledge just simply within all of itself – awareness is home in being knowing.

As soon as there is the response to knowledge and awareness is at rest in knowing instead of reacting to knowing and resisting knowing, there is the natural influx of deeper knowing. Awareness won’t necessarily experience that there’s more. It knows. The surrender is to knowing. When awareness is being knowing it will know more, requiring surrender to more knowing. That movement into knowledge is awareness accomplishing its entire return, moving through every deeper form. Without understanding being a necessity, awareness knows. The result is the return of awareness to oneness and then the movement of that; the movement of oneness back into and up through all of its forms, manifesting the innermost reality of oneness all the way through into the self.

Such oneness and such home returned-to in what is deeper than all of your forms requires no development. It doesn’t require understanding. A new-born baby knows as awareness what you are being and doing as awareness. It doesn’t know with understanding. It does simply, clearly and perfectly know. As you move as awareness throughout any level of your forms in responding to knowing as awareness moving all the way back to what you are without any form, a baby effortlessly does, as awareness, perfectly follow. As soon as that baby begins to develop and as the awareness in it believes that it isn’t able to do that anymore without having an understanding, then it won’t be able to do that anymore – not that it isn’t actually able, but that its ability is now confined to understanding. Its limitation is created by awareness itself. The split is accomplished.

It isn’t actually a problem. It is awareness believing something other than what it honestly knows the truth of. It isn’t the surrender of understanding that accomplishes the return home. The understanding is not a problem. It’s the separation from knowledge that has created the split. It isn’t the surrender from understanding. It’s awareness surrendering to being knowing. And at whatever cost to whatever form, awareness returns home in being one with all knowing.