John 10:15 Meaning Even as the Father Knows Me

To know as one is known is to be past the veil where knower and known were split into two. The mind that has remembered its Source no longer looks across a distance at love, guessing at it, hoping for it, but rests inside the same certainty that holds it. From that certainty it can spend itself without loss. Laying down a life for the sheep is not a bargain paid in suffering; it is a mind so sure of its safety that it withholds nothing from the parts of itself still afraid.

What cannot be threatened can be given endlessly. The awakened mind pours itself out toward every thought that still believes it can be harmed, not to buy their safety with its pain, but to show them there was never anything to lose.

Father: the Source the mind never truly left, the unbroken knowing from which its being flows. Sheep: the trusting thoughts within the mind that follow toward safety, the parts still learning they cannot be lost.

The knowing spoken of here is not knowledge held in the mind. It is the recognition of one life knowing itself, the source and its expression aware of each other without separation. To know the Father this way is to feel yourself as an opening through which the deeper being lives, no longer a self set apart and defending its edges.

And from that union comes the laying down of the small self, freely, for the sake of the whole. When you no longer cling to the form you call "me," your life becomes a gift given rather than a possession guarded, and in that giving the deeper life flows through you unobstructed.

The Father and the one who knows him are a single being playing two offices. The Father is the awareness of being, and the one known is that same awareness stepped down into a particular self to live a life. They know each other completely because they are not two. When a person discovers this, he stops looking for God elsewhere and recognizes his own I AM as the Father wearing him.

Laying down the life for the sheep is what that awareness does every time it becomes a definite state. The sheep are the desires and the selves waiting to be lived, and the Father gives his own undefined life into them, taking on limitation so they can be. God dies for man by ceasing to stand apart and thinking from within him instead. This is not sacrifice in blood. It is the boundless awareness laying itself down as a specific person, so that a chosen state may live.