I remember this morning sitting with one of my teachers once and he said to me,
He said,
You know this spiritual,
This flourishing of these spiritual teachings,
He said,
You know,
It's just a match,
It will blaze brightly for a while.
But if you want to make a fire burn for a long time you need to create the heart to it.
And that heart is not built on knowledge alone.
It's built on conduct,
Choices.
You know this world is such an extraordinary rare occurrence.
Once upon a time beings longed to appear here,
To turn up,
To experience what it is,
To come into being like this.
To enter into the creative process itself was enough to wake up to what it is that you're a part of.
Somehow,
Somewhere along the line we've become so intoxicated with the idea of ourselves as the creator that we've bent this world to our will and lost our connection to the creative principle that is actually governing our lives.
This life is not governed by the will of man.
When you hear a teaching that points to your heart,
Some part of you knows that this life is governed by something far greater than you've yet come to understand.
And I'm sure you can all remember a time when you were so moved by the longing to now be close to that and touched by it.
And you'll probably recognise that you never long for anything more than that.
These teachings,
These practices have always been for the purposes of opening us up so we could connect.
That's how we learn to surrender our personal will to a higher intelligence because we recognise that what is governing this life is infinitely more intelligent than we are.
If it's important to you,
Make it the most important thing in your life to not let it always sit in that place that you'll come round to when you've got time for it.
You can't have everything.
You just can't have it.
And I think maybe it's because we're so used to having everything we want that we've forgotten the idea of giving something up to get something that is really precious to us.
You are those people that have little dust in their eyes.
You know what my teacher said about the match?
Don't let it be a match.
It blazes brightly within you and inspires you and then gradually,
Quite quickly burns out and just sits in the background as something I did once.
You know you need to put fuel on your fire and you need to tend it.
And when it has a heart,
Then it will burn continuously and it will not need to be attended to so much.
You give it a little fuel,
You blow on it occasionally and it will blaze for you.
But you need to put the foundation down that it has a heart.
It's not just about receiving these teachings.
It's about imbibing their essence,
Putting them into practice and living by them.
Whatever it takes,
If it's come to you that it is as valuable as you might have perceived it to be,
If you have come to the shore understanding that what you seek is happiness.
Because you know you've all seen at some point just how extraordinary this life is and that it needs to be honoured.
