Q: John, I’m curious about how you were awakened. How did you remember who you are?
John: When I was seventeen, outside of my room at home, I deeply, deeply wondered. I wondered: what is it that is so much more than anything I’ve realized before? What is the deep, deep more? And in deeply wondering, I also simply, deeply, deeply opened, and as I opened I knew. I didn’t understand what I knew, but I really experienced what I knew. I experienced a most nurturing, profound sense of reality as much on the inside as on the outside, it all being, within multiple levels at the same time, all connected.
Q: So did you just choose or did you set an intention?
John: I didn’t choose as a person. I wasn’t standing outside of my room, standing there as a person choosing to open. I realize now that would have been much too small. I also didn’t stand there in my self and choose to open. That, I realize now, would also have been too small. As awareness, I opened.
Now I understand that if I would have used my person or my self, my thinking or my feeling, my emotions or my beliefs to open, I wouldn’t have had that profound awakening experience. I would have just moved in something that I was already accustomed to. It would have taken me deeper into something that I already had, whereas the profound awakening was my entrance, as awareness, into something that I’ve never known before and didn’t have before.
Q: So how do we get to what we don’t know?
John: By relating directly to the very deepest within that you do know. That takes you deeper than your person and your self. It takes you deeper within than all of your beliefs. It takes you deeper within than anything of your past, anything of your conditioning. That deepest knowing within won’t give you an understanding. It does give you a door, the door of what you most deeply know within – a door to more.
Whatever it is that you use, you increase. If you use your thinking, you increase your thinking; use feeling and you increase feeling. Anything that you’ve used that hasn’t brought you into the deepest within tells you what doesn’t work. The only thing that works to bring you to the deepest within is the deepest within. It isn’t going to be something that you can think or that you can feel, that you can understand. It isn’t something that you can look at from the perspective of your past and experience. When you are most deeply quieted within, you’re able to come to it by being it. It’s a profound opening within that’s beyond all experience.
Q: Is it immediate or is it a process?
John: It involves no process. As soon as you engage a process you make it difficult. There is a code to it. It’s something like a combination on a lock: trying really hard to make a combination work without knowing the combination doesn’t help you. You can get the combination right without even trying, without knowing the number, but then you’re just happening upon it and you likely won’t be able to do it again. There is something like a combination within, or a code. The deepest within has a code to it, and as soon as you are being that code your deepest interior opens.
The only real way of coming to it is through a fundamental relaxation: not you relaxing as a person, or as a self, but just you, without the use of anything that you’re used to, so it’s really genuinely you relaxing. It’s that essential relaxation that gives you access to your own deepest interior, deeper and beyond anything you’ve experienced before, but when you’re quieted within you know it’s there. As you essentially relax into that direct knowledge that informs you, you turn into that knowledge. As you do, you’ve fulfilled your own code and your own deepest interior is there, one with you: you’ve turned into it. You haven’t done something to turn into it. What enabled you to turn into it is that you are precisely being the same – being the same as that greatest depth within. If you’re not being the same, you can’t reach it.
Q: There’s no match.
John: Yes.
