Accessing Your Deeper Awareness - Talk & Meditation

How do we connect to the depth and dimension of our lives and move things towards more meaning for ourselves and the world? In this short talk, given live at London's Alexandra Palace, John discusses the importance and necessity of developing your access to your deeper awareness and shares a meditation method that can directly help you with this on your journey.

Transcript

In our modern time,

Everything has been reduced to information.

I don't know if you feel this,

Like even if you just look on Instagram or TikTok or something like that,

Everything is just like telling you more things.

And I think we think if we just learn one more thing we might get somewhere.

But I don't know about you,

But I don't need any more things.

I'm full already.

In fact,

I need to go the other way and kind of be more empty and actually just be myself a bit more.

And so today is not information.

So if you're thinking,

He's going to give me that one tip that's going to change things,

There's no tips,

I'm afraid.

And it's interesting how we've kind of got here.

You know,

We've got this kind of sort of scientific,

Cultural sort of relativism sort of going on now that we squarely believe in.

But I kind of feel like we've kind of forgotten about life.

And we've kind of forgotten about love.

In fact,

If we try to talk about love,

I was reading Bell Hooks on the train on the way down,

Her book,

Something About Love.

And she talks about how uncomfortable people were around her when she tried to talk about love.

And so I'm not going to talk about love,

So don't worry.

All right.

Well,

I am for a moment.

There are three strands that run through the book signposts.

And I kind of want to introduce the apex of the triangle to you of those things,

Because without this one,

The other two can't exist.

So I want to kind of talk about that just for like five minutes or so.

And then I want to kind of do something with you to kind of,

That's experiential rather than talk at you.

And then if there's any questions or something,

Then we'll kind of do that,

Because I'd much rather answer your questions.

The apex of the triangle is awareness.

Awareness is the first thing.

And awareness is,

Without it,

You don't know where you are.

Without awareness,

You,

I don't know if you've had times in your life where you're just kind of like on the surface of things.

You're kind of caught in reactivity a lot of the time,

Or you're playing with the kind of over oval sides of things on the surface.

So awareness,

Because we're foreign and,

You know,

That there seems that kind of it's just one damn thing after another as Churchill used to say.

It's just history is just one damn thing after another.

So the absence of awareness means that there's literally no depth to our ocean,

You see.

So awareness kind of comes first.

The other two things are love.

And of course if we don't have awareness,

Love can't operate because all we have without awareness,

If we try to love is we have co-dependence or narcissistic relating with each other.

There's some nods going on there,

That's really interesting.

Narcissists or co-dependence stuff or both,

Yeah.

So love can't be real without awareness either.

And the other thing that happens without awareness with love is that we become,

Shouldn't be talking about this,

This is the next book I want to write and my editor is sitting right there.

If we don't have awareness,

Then when we love another person and this can even be our children or our friend,

Instead of actually facing out together into life and kind of having awareness be a kind of guide for us,

What we do is we face each other and we stand looking at each other like this and end up expecting the other person to be the answer for everything and they're expecting the same of us.

And because we have that kind of,

We're operating in the shallows,

Then there's no way for us to kind of know otherwise.

So we're just in kind of reaction with each other the whole time,

That's how you end up with narcissism and that's how you end up with the co-dependence sort of stuff quite easily.

The third element is authenticity and so authenticity is kind of like the compass that can guide you along your path.

And again,

Without awareness,

You don't actually have authenticity.

What you will tend to have instead of being an authentic human being,

Whatever sort of place you're at in your life is you're gonna have a set of ideas that you live through.

You're gonna have trying to add things to yourself and if you can just get the right combination of things,

I don't know if you've ever lived like this,

I did for most of my life until my late 40s.

We're trying to add things to ourselves the whole time.

So the day comes though,

However,

Where you sort of say,

I want to live my own life.

And so that is the dawning of awareness.

That's the day that awareness pops up.

So what signpost is,

And this is not a sales pitch,

But what signpost is,

Is basically all of the steps,

Not the steps,

But the stages that you will move through in your life,

Both the blockages and the problems and the awarenesses that will come.

And then what follows those,

Once you begin asking those questions,

Who am I,

What am I here for,

What's my life really about,

How do I live my own life?

What is love to me for real?

And I don't want to live like this anymore.

Once you say those things to yourself for real,

Then signpost hopefully helps with that.

That's what that book's for.

It's not for people who haven't arrived there yet.

So if you're not asking those questions,

I'm not for you.

And my books aren't for you.

So that narrows the audience down a lot because what you're meant to do is you're meant to kind of chase after everybody saying,

Hey,

I've got a solution for you,

I've got an answer for you.

I haven't.

Unless you are willing to be an answer for yourself,

Then there's nothing for us to talk about because all I'm gonna do is stand here trying to convince you of something.

And the last thing I want to do is to convince you of something.

I want you to say,

I want to live my own life.

And I'm not gonna say,

Hey,

I know how.

I'm gonna say,

Well,

I might have some questions that may help you hold your space for yourself.

Or if you want to walk alongside for a bit,

I'll carry some space for you for a while that you take over when you're ready.

That's it.

That's kind of what that book is for.

What you may not realize,

Coming to the awareness thing,

Is that there are four levels of awareness.

And again,

This is one of the major threads of signposts.

So the first level of awareness we've kind of talked about already,

Which is you don't know who you are.

You're not asking those questions.

You are in reactivity.

One way of kind of knowing that is,

You know,

You might be sitting here and this doesn't make any sense to you whatsoever,

As it were,

What I'm saying.

And I'm not trying to appeal to you as a person.

I don't care whether you like me or not.

That's absolutely irrelevant.

If you are just in the level of reactivity in your life,

Then that's the first level of awareness,

Basically.

And I would say that's 98% of people,

Maybe more.

And you see that.

All you gotta do,

If you want to see the proof of this,

I don't need to prove it to you.

Just turn on the news,

But keep the sound off.

Try this as an experiment.

Put the news on and turn the sound off and watch the faces.

Watch the inauthenticity.

Watch the dualities playing out.

It doesn't matter what the story is.

It operates the same way to try and pull you into duality over and over again,

Us versus them.

Not how do we actually work with what we need to work with as human beings,

Because that needs awareness.

So the day comes when something happens and the depth kind of creeps in,

Some little chink of depth.

And if we don't move towards this willingly and authentically for ourselves,

Life keeps trying to show it to you.

And the way it will do that is through suffering.

You'll think that somebody's death,

Somebody will die or somebody will leave you or something will fall apart or the job will go or something like that.

And you will think that it's personal.

So in the first level of awareness,

It's all personal.

It's all about you and life is against you,

Basically.

In the second stage of awareness,

You've begun to ask the questions,

Basically.

And because of that,

You may be working with yoga or you're working with meditation or you're working with therapy and there's a kind of reflective aspect.

So you are literally moving into your depth a little bit more,

But you still feel like life is pretty much a battle and it's kind of a bit that way.

The third stage of awareness is when you cross a certain point in your sense of beingness or presence.

And it's really funny because I like business.

I kind of run my own business.

And in order to have a controlling stock in a business,

You need to have 51% of the shares in a business.

So what I invite you to do in your life is not try to jump to 100% being an aware,

Yogi,

All sort of kind of person.

Just aim for 51%.

Seriously,

If you can get 51%,

You're always more on the right side than the life being against you sort of side of doing things.

So 51% and above of actual awareness and presence takes you into the third area.

And it's beginning to establish in your life.

And then the fourth aspect of awareness is when it's probably 80,

90%,

Which is actually quite easy.

It's not an achievement that you make.

It's that you have followed the path that your own life is offering you and meeting the things that you have to meet so that your depth naturally grows because you meet the stuff that's turning up instead of being one of those people who either is running away from something or trying to run towards something or both.

And you'll see this a lot within spiritualities and within yogas and within religions that people are either trying to get away from something or move towards something.

If only I can do this,

Then I'll be a good enough person.

And if only I can do that,

That won't get me anymore.

My childhood poverty,

The trauma that I suffered,

The abuse that I suffered from this person or so on and so on,

You know the kind of things.

Or even that feeling of just being absolutely bored in your own life.

Also level one person,

First stage of awareness person tends to be,

They think life is boring and it's got nothing to offer.

So the fact that you're here,

I'm not blowing smoke up your doodas,

But the fact that you're here probably means that you're asking those questions in some way,

Or at least you're interested.

So what I'd like to do with you instead of talking more is I want to give you a tool which is the tool of the here and now,

The tool of your own awareness.

And so what I want to invite you to do is,

I don't want to say the M word,

Meditation,

Right?

Because if I say the meditation word,

What some of you will do because you've read in a book or you've heard it from your teacher or whatever,

Is we've learned that we're meant to achieve a certain kind of feeling.

So we try to move into an attitude that we don't really know what it is.

And because,

So that's a projection from the mind or from the ego,

And then we try to create a sense of self and then we say,

I can't do that,

Or I'm failed or I'm no good at meditation.

So I want to get rid of that.

So I'm going to invite you to do something really quite radical,

Which is,

Even though we're in this space,

We're going to turn this into a palace of presence,

A palace of awareness for the next 10 minutes.

And the way we're going to do it is by,

Can you allow yourself,

Even though all this is going on,

To drop to your heart?

Just not with your mind,

Not trying to bring your mind down to your heart,

But allow yourself through your felt sense,

The feeling of your heart.

And what I want to show you is how to use your five senses in any situation so that you can access greater awareness at any moment of your day.

So as you feel yourself sitting on the chair and allowing yourself to be here,

And that's really important that you allow yourself to be here,

I want you just to listen to the sounds that you can hear.

If the mind is kind of a bit racy,

You might notice that it's naming and labeling things.

So,

Oh,

There's a voice over there.

John sounds like this through this microphone.

My God,

This is boring.

What did I sit down here for now?

I'm absolutely trapped.

How can I get out of this?

The mind might be saying,

I thought he'd be better than this and more entertaining.

Or I wish that sound over there would stop.

If only there wasn't music,

Then I could enjoy this.

So we look,

You know,

We're not looking for those.

So don't try and even stop them.

Don't try and even stop them.

But what I want to invite you to do is not move into them.

So don't pull back,

But just from your,

There's some place inside you where you can allow yourself to be like an open hand rather than a closed fist.

So instead of grasping to the sounds,

Allow yourself to be open and let the sounds be.

Notice that when you do that,

You can actually hear the space between the sounds as well.

And the space around all the sounds.

And we notice that they're not gonna harm us in any way.

We're absolutely safe.

The sounds can continue.

If you can just notice where that meeting of the silences and the sounds registers in your body.

Just if you just follow it into your body,

Notice where it lands.

And this is not a spacing out.

Allow yourself to be physically present and just notice where the sound lands and you can be eating your lunch and drinking your brew,

Or having your juice and still be doing this.

Now I want to invite you to,

Even if your eyes are opened or closed,

Continue with the sound,

But then allow yourself to be aware of the light in the room.

If your eyes are closed,

You're aware of the light.

And if your eyes are open,

You're aware of the objects in front of you.

In the same way,

Allow the seeing to not just be naming.

Drop the naming and just allow the seeing or the feeling of the light.

And again,

Notice that this lands in that central place within you.

So by now you might be noticing that that place that you can actually sense from is before your mind.

The mind moves after that.

See the naming and the latency and the labeling comes afterwards.

The reactions come later.

The feelings come later,

But consciousness comes before.

So through our senses,

We can access consciousness directly.

Through your feeling sense of your body,

You can feel your clothes against your skin.

You can feel the chair beneath you.

You can feel the floor underneath your feet.

Follow that in again.

The taste that's in your mouth,

Follow it in.

The air of the room in your nostrils,

Follow it in.

And the feeling of life in your body,

Just allow that to be there.

And I just would invite you to notice that perhaps your mind has actually gone quiet without you trying to quieten it.

It's like stroking the cat of this.

The mind is like a cat.

And the way to stroke the cat is to come to awareness.

And what happens amazingly is the mind begins to work better and the emotions begin to work better because we're not just riding on the surface.

We're actually in the driving seat.

Awareness is the driving seat of your life.

So not trying to maintain a feeling,

But just following the senses in and just noticing the sense of being.

One last little invitation.

Feeling into that sense of being,

I want to invite you to notice that it feels like you.

Not made up you of all the things you've tried to add to yourself,

Or the things that you've run away from,

Or your things you're trying to head towards.

But perhaps you when you were about 14 or 15 or six or seven,

Or there's a sense of dignity,

Or a sense of luminousness or expansiveness,

And that you're not creating this,

It's actually you.

What's really amazing is we started out by being and what's really amazing is we started out by saying that at the first level of awareness,

We think it's all about us.

But then when we actually move into awareness,

It is actually us.

So the only path that you need to walk,

It's not the ego path of your life,

But it's the path of your own life.

Everything that is offering itself to you in your life,

Both good and bad,

If met with awareness and authenticity and love is actually a curriculum that wants to invite you on your own journey.

We're not a problem to be solved,

A problem to beat.

We are actually the point of the universe itself.

Can use the G word if you like,

Or awareness or whatever.

But the fact is that if you were not an absolute necessity for the universe or God or spirit or source or whatever word you want to use,

You wouldn't be you.

I don't mean the person who struggles and all that ego stuff and all that other thing,

But this awareness of you.

And if you meet,

Even if you do have a hard time,

We all do,

If you will meet your life with awareness,

Real awareness,

Not looking for adding to yourself more or trying to even strip yourself down.

Neither of those things are real,

Those are dualities.

Then you are the gift that the universe wants.

You are the answer to life itself.

Otherwise you would literally be somebody else.

That's my invitation to you,

That's it.

That's the first meditation.

There are only three meditations in signposts.

And the first one is,

This is called gathering awareness.

And that's the first of the practices in the book.

So if you would like to kind of go further with it,

Then the book is there.

But I just wanted to offer you this tool today,

The tool of the awareness that is implicit and inherent and intrinsic within your own life.

It's not,

We're not extrinsic beings.

We are it,

We are the thing itself.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Reviews

The gathering awareness portion of this talk/meditation was an Aha moment for me. I’ve been following (Coach) John now for several years. The biggest thing I feel with him is that he is real with a capital “R”. He is so very good at making concepts, thoughts, etc. attainable to…….everyone.

Great talk it's one of those talks that makes you go hmmm and want to explore more 🙏

Great talk!🙏🏼❤️

Very well put, loved the bit about when we hear the noise, and that the feelings happen first. Thank you, John!

Really wonderful! Lots of background noise in the recording, but no problem. Love this and you!!!