Talk & Meditation - Return To Love

The word 'love' rings like a temple bell in all sacred traditions, yet the reality of love is rarely brought into our daily practice in a real and meaningful way. Love often remains an ideal, while duality and fear continue to be our modus operandi. In this talk, we explore how the path of love is available to us at this very moment in our ordinary lives. Contained within this talk are simple practices to take you into a place of greater authenticity, meaning, and truth.

Transcript

Return to Love by John Sadiq.

Exploring how the path of love is available to us at this very moment in each of our ordinary lives.

Hello there,

I'm John Sadiq.

It's a real pleasure to speak with you and to be a guest of the Theosophical Society in America for this talk.

It's an organization that I share many values with,

Particularly the looking for what is common in our kind of sacred experience and our expressions of our experience and the kind of the truths that hold us together within that.

And so it's really kind of them to have invited me and to John and the rest of the team.

And it's a real pleasure to be with you as an individual and as a part of a greater community of people who are hopefully asking themselves the deeper questions of life.

I'd like to begin by reading you a poem called Give Everything to Love from a book that I had out recently called Signposts of the Spiritual Journey,

Which this talk tonight is kind of based on.

Love is one of the underlying themes in the book.

And we talk a lot about love in terms of God is love,

All you need is love,

You know,

Just love yourself.

But in my own journey,

And I'll talk about this more as we get on,

I found that nobody really showed me how to love and what it really was and what was getting in the way.

One of the ideas behind Signposts,

The book,

And my current teachings is not to be the person who shows you how,

But through sharing the teachings and the practices that kind of help at each stage of our kind of movement in awareness,

We find out for ourselves what love is rather than thinking of an idea of it and then trying to move into that,

Which of course is a false place.

Give everything to love,

All your doubts and all your desires,

All your fears and all that you hold on to,

Give your very name and all that you are into the arms of love.

There is no thing about you that love cannot hold.

Love is your action and your voice.

Just as silence holds you,

You give everything to love.

And love gives everything to you.

You are seen and you are known.

Nothing of you is unacceptable.

There is no thing about you that love cannot hold.

Let love open you to yourself.

Let it make you congruent with its force,

Its vastness,

Its specifics,

Its now and always nature.

The end is love.

The beginning is love.

The choice in this moment is love.

You know now that it's not even a choice.

There is no thing about you that love does not already hold.

It is as it is.

So I just want to say that even though this is billed as a talk,

I'm not really a talker.

Talk,

When we hear the word talk,

We tend to think that it's the passing of information,

That it's something you can make notes about,

That you can then remember and maybe somehow incarnate into.

For me,

This doesn't work because when we meet things with our mind,

The mind meets things with what it knows already.

And when we meet things with our heart or our emotions,

We tend to meet things with our emotionality.

And so we're seeking agreement.

We're seeking for our words to match up,

To kind of recognize each other within agreements.

And searching for agreement only leads us to be with people who are just like us and leaves everybody else out.

But when we listen from spirit,

When we listen from our heart within our hearts,

Then we are sitting with each other.

So I'd like for this talk,

This holding of space with you,

To be an invitation for you to practice in presence at this time.

I would invite you to come with an attitude of being teachable,

Not by me,

But from the love within yourself,

From the awareness within yourself.

And for this just to be a holding of space together.

Sure,

I'm gonna talk about three questions today,

But those three questions are only a way of looking at the same thing over and over again.

That's all that this is.

In many ways,

I prefer the word satsang to talk.

And satsang used to mean,

In the old days,

A kind of a guru and people listening to the guru.

But it had a secondary meaning,

Which often wasn't talked about enough,

Which is coming together in the spirit of sacredness,

Coming together in the spirit of truth.

And sure,

There's a person who holds that space because somebody has to hold the space.

And today it's me,

But tomorrow you might be holding space and I might be with you.

Let's let go of ideas of information and let it just be me and you,

Human and flawed and very often wrong,

Sometimes right.

Not seeking agreement with each other,

But actually just being in our hearts with each other.

That's the invitation I would like to extend to you.

While I also sip on my peppermint tea.

So why not just say love?

Why is that not going to work for us?

And why is this called a return to love rather than how to find love in your life?

So that's my first question.

The reason that I'm not just saying love,

Love,

Love is because we will have a particular model of love that has been taught to us.

In our conditioning,

In our societalization,

In our growing and being told what it is to be a member of the human race within our family,

Within our schooling and so on,

We will have been given a particular set of models.

We will have seen our mom and dad love each other in a certain way or not love each other in a certain way.

We will have soaked up like a sponge,

The good stuff and the bad stuff,

The projections,

The conditioning,

The pain body,

The beliefs.

And these things bind to us.

And we believe that's who we are.

And we believe we are the kind of legacy of our inheritance of conditioning of what we've been moved into.

And on one level,

We are that because you can see where the world is at this point today.

If you want to see how the world is,

Just turn the sound off and switch the news on and just look for a minute and watch the faces and you'll know how the world is.

Love doesn't mean that.

Ha,

Love does not mean our model of love,

Our personal model of love.

It's something more than that.

It is innate.

It is within us.

The return to love is by us.

We cannot throw our conditioning away.

We cannot just reject it.

But the return to love is a beginning to meet something truer,

Something that comes just before that conditioning within ourselves because we can feel that conditioning and then allowing for ourselves to come from this place rather than the same old,

Same old.

And you know the same old,

Same old because it tells the same stories over and over again or it reacts in a certain way when it meets this kind of person.

Around this kind of person,

You're like this and around that kind of person,

You're like that.

With some people,

You are high status.

With some people,

You are low status.

You feel like this and your politics are that and so on and so on.

So we make a kind of game of chance out of love when we go this way and we mistake it for the conditioning and the models that we have learned.

So that's why it can't just be love each other.

That's why that doesn't work.

But the smallest step,

The smallest step into awareness is the return to love.

I was having coffee with two friends the other day.

One friend said to me,

I can't get my head around love.

This person is going through a very kind of difficult time in their lives at the moment.

And I was trying to,

I was actually talking about today's talk and what I was going to be sharing.

And they said,

Well,

I just can't get my head around love.

And I don't know if you feel into that.

I just want to invite you for a minute to feel into that.

You can't,

Can you?

You just cannot get your head around love.

You can imagine love and you can remember times where you felt love and maybe even that can get a bit of a flame going.

So memory can help us.

But what love is,

And if you've witnessed love in action that the head really doesn't know what this is.

And this is because of the conditioning that we talk about.

Nisargadatta,

Sri Nisargadatta,

Wonderful Indian teacher used to say that the mind creates the abyss but only the heart can cross it.

And think about times where you,

Or reflect on times where you have felt,

You know,

So messed up or excluded,

Or there's been a difficulty,

Or you've been in one of those arguments with somebody.

And then at some point within the argument,

You kind of know that you're in an argument or you know you're in a disagreement and you can almost sort of say,

Hey,

Hey,

Hey,

Should we stop now?

We don't need to do this.

I don't know if you've ever had that experience but it seems to happen a lot in my life.

So that bit of you that knows that this is not real really,

That it's just stuff that we're kind of getting caught up in and so egoically and righteously believing in it.

That's always the way to tell actually.

Righteousness is the absolute key of conditionality.

But there's that bit of you that goes,

Hang on,

Hang on,

We don't need to.

And if you were to just stop for a moment,

Then what could happen?

I have an image in my head that's been in my head for my entire life that might even be useful today actually with the way the world is right now.

I think I first considered this when I was 14 years old and I had an image in my head of two soldiers with guns,

Whatever guns they use.

I don't know what rifles armies use.

And they meet each other and they're pointing their guns at each other.

What if they both went,

Hang on and put the guns down?

What if?

Now,

I know if you're a bit of a naysay mind,

You might say,

Well,

Somebody else will shoot them.

You know,

They need to get back to it anyway.

Who do these people think they are?

Terrible peaceniks,

All that sort of thing.

But I'm talking about the energy of that.

What if they just said no,

Not that they don't say no,

But they just drop it.

What comes next?

What do you feel would come next?

And I just want to leave you with that rather than saying anything.

What comes next?

And I don't know if you can feel that possibility within yourself because it is possibility and presence.

And the mind cannot,

The mind will take us into the war.

The mind will take us into righteousness.

The mind can't get its way around love.

But the minute awareness kicks in,

We can put the gun down.

But the mind will say,

No,

No,

You've got to shoot him.

He'll shoot you if you put your gun down.

Or we can't let this person win this argument about eggs in the fridge.

Or whatever,

It's ridiculous.

Being a human being is utterly insane at times,

Especially at the conditioned edge of things.

And yet within that,

The putting down of things,

Non-egoically just saying,

Whoa,

Whoa,

Whoa,

You can feel there's an answer there.

What if we began to make our world from that putting down of things instead of the moving into things?

What if we brought this into our action?

It's not an inaction to put the gun down,

It's an action.

It's not an idea of peace,

An idea of love.

It's an actuality of awareness.

And I think this is where we fail.

And I'm using the word fail,

Supposed to be nicey-nicey in spiritual talks,

But we fail because unfortunately love is also a sword.

It's a sword of wisdom.

And we fail to action our love very often.

And we fail to action our awareness,

Actually move it through out into the world.

And it gets kind of held back.

I'll talk about this a little bit more later on because I want to look at how we have limited the spheres in which love is allowed.

And yet we have opened the spheres in which everything other than love is allowed and made that our normality.

One thing that comes to me sometimes is that the mind,

I'm still talking about this can't get our mind around it,

That the mind doesn't know how to do that.

One thing I've noticed that we can do with awareness is we can allow,

And maybe try this with me now.

You can allow the awareness of the heart to be in the mind.

We can take our heart into our mind and we can take our mind into our heart.

And we can do that not by an act of sort of pulling within ourselves,

But within this allowance of putting things down,

Waiting a moment,

Allowing for awareness.

Just notice how the mind can be in the heart,

How there is like a heart light and we can allow this to illuminate the mind.

And of course the heart is illuminated from spirit or from life or from awareness or from God,

Whichever word you would choose.

And so we have this not hiding from the world,

But actually a movement out into it if we will allow for the mind to be in the heart and the heart to be in the mind.

I've got to say some words I don't like.

I've got to say some words I don't like now and without telling you my life story because that's not my intention here at all.

But until a few years ago,

I was a completely different person.

Because of the things I've described,

I grew up with a particular model.

I grew up in a house of great violence.

And then because within the modeling that I grew up in,

There was no model of healing,

I took that into me and tried my best to be a good person and to be loved and to find somebody to love.

And around about 2012,

My form,

My mind,

My emotional form and my body could no longer find a way.

It's like all the space had been removed from me because I was living through what I might call object consciousness.

Object consciousness is those objects of consciousness,

Those,

The conditioning from the parents,

The schooling,

The,

This is how you make a living.

This is what love is,

Et cetera.

And we try to move these things around to try and find some outcomes that will fit us.

And that's what we do.

And we're not bad people for that because that's what we know.

But I got to the end.

My human form was literally no,

You know,

Literally at its edge.

I was pushing against the inside of my own face in such suffering and pain that it collapsed.

Now I've heard this happen with others and usually it's taken as a kind of psychosis.

Oh,

That's how,

You know,

The modern world would meet it.

This person has fallen down,

Depressed and ill.

So let's scoot them off and medicate them and things.

But thankfully I'd read a lot of spiritual books up to this point and studied and practiced and had been a meditator since I was 13 or 14 years old.

And something in me knew,

I mean,

It was terrible this day when things fell down.

I literally collapsed onto the bed and just did not know how to live another moment.

Another second of that pressure would have led towards suicide.

That's why,

You know,

We move,

The conditioning is so tight on us and we've been trying to find our way out through what we know.

This is the mechanism of suicide.

And the soul or the spirit of us tries to jump into space.

And if we jump this way,

It's death.

And if we jump this way,

We put the gun down.

There's a possibility of something.

And thank God,

And I don't know who else to thank quite honestly,

In that collapsing and the hours of tears that day of just not knowing who I was,

It was like the entire person broke and fell apart.

And I was left with,

I don't know.

I was left with the words,

I don't know,

Screaming out of me as I wept.

I don't know how to live,

I said,

And I don't know how to love.

And I knew that every love that I had had up to that point that I tried to live in the world and the love that I tried to give had been conditional,

Had been codependent,

Had been trying to get something from the other person,

Egoic recognition or something.

And I was trying to,

I had to recognize them.

That's what a lot of our relating is.

It's,

I will recognize your egoic self if you recognize my egoic self and we don't hurt each other too much.

And that we might call that a good marriage,

Or a good relationship.

And yet that's still,

That's the best we can do.

There's no blame on us.

That's the best we can do.

But we all have been in relationships where we know it's not enough.

We've all been in situations where it's not enough.

And some of us have actually come to the end of that and not made the leap to death.

And there was no choice in this.

There was literally nowhere else to go.

My heart said,

I don't know.

But then something shocking happened.

Something truly shocking happened.

I remember the poem by D.

H.

Lawrence,

Which I don't have to hand now and I should.

It's called,

Flowers and Men,

If you want to look it up.

In fact,

There's probably a reading of it on streaming services of me reading it.

I'm sure you'll find it if you look it up.

And I remembered this poem.

And I also remembered my shrine downstairs.

On my shrine downstairs,

There's a plastic Jesus that was my mother's and he's pointing to his heart.

There's a small St.

Anthony that was my mother's,

Plastic again,

That was in her bedroom.

And he's pointing to his heart.

There's a Vajrasattva Rupa who is a Buddha figure that I absolutely adore,

That I've been given many,

Many years before.

And what's he doing?

He's holding a Vajra at his heart.

Everybody is pointing to their heart.

And then I remembered this poem,

Which has this line in it.

All I want of you,

Men and women,

All I want of you is that you shall remember your own beauty as the flowers do.

And the next word out of my mouth to myself in this room was,

But I can find out.

I don't know,

Unlocks the door,

But I can find out,

Spoken from the heart,

The true heart within the soul.

Because there is literally nowhere else to go.

You can try climbing back in,

And I did.

You can try climbing back into conditionality and it will,

It's ashes.

You know,

You'll taste the ashes.

And over the next few days,

Weeks,

Months,

It took,

Took me a couple of years.

I discovered something.

I discovered that whenever I felt the old hook of attraction towards conditionality and the old form of love,

Because I was an addict of trying to find myself in others and things,

I would just put my hand on my heart instead.

And so I want to invite you right now to put your hand on your heart.

Even if you're watching this on a bus or on a train,

Just put your hand on your heart and allow for yourself to just feel that kind contact of your own hand on your heart.

It's almost like you're saying to yourself,

I'm here for you.

Now there's a beautiful Tibetan practice that the wonderful Pema Chodron teaches called the Shenpa practice.

And we're not going to go into a full blown meditation here,

But with our hand on our heart,

We can notice what's arising in us in this moment.

The heart allows us that movement back into awareness,

That physicalization of,

Oh crikey,

I'm a bit out of it here,

Or I'm caught up in things.

And that assurance of the hand on the heart allows us that step back into space.

And in this moment,

You're going to notice whatever is arising for you in this moment,

Be it joyful or painful.

And of course,

If something is happening in the present,

Then it has a past.

It has a past.

And what we often do,

And psychology can be really wonderful for this,

Is we can try to drill down into the past.

But I want to invite you to not go with the story,

But instead,

Just feel the energy.

There's like a surface emotion.

And then you may find that it kind of trails back in the past in you.

So this is Shenpa practice,

Noticing what is arising in the moment.

And in that older place,

There's like a kind of point of origin within yourself.

You can allow a feeling or words to come down inside yourself,

Which is soften.

You can say soften.

Soften doesn't mean go away.

So I can be my idea of myself.

Soften means I'm here.

I'm here.

We may not like the word love,

But here we are loving ourselves.

We're being aware.

We're not making a complex out of it.

We're not building a house of pain body out of it.

We're actually meeting it.

We're not anesthetizing ourselves.

We're not hiding in our phones or running away into the TV or the bar.

We're just here with ourselves.

And what's amazing is each day as I did this,

It was like I was trying to be a cherry tree,

But the seed of my soul was an acorn.

In the past,

I was trying to be something other than I was.

But I discovered my oak nature and allowed it to start coming out.

And so we find that love crosses the duality of things,

The duality of who we are,

Of things that we think are right and wrong.

If we believe in the lands of right and wrong,

We don't meet.

If we seek agreements in the land of you believe this and I believe that,

What can we do here?

But something I found to be absolutely true because I'm not putting us down,

Being a human being is the greatest opportunity there is.

And it's just sad that we don't take it often.

But between the land of right and wrong,

There's something else,

There's awareness.

And when this and that are met with awareness,

You find there's love quite naturally.

You find that there's a deeper voice within you.

You find that there are answers where before there were only fights.

So love is entirely practical.

Awareness is entirely practical.

It would be no use whatsoever,

All this spiritual stuff is of no use whatsoever unless it has actual meaning in our lives.

It is not some airy fairy nonsense.

It is who we are.

It is the stuff of us.

And you don't need to believe a word of it,

Believe in a religion of it or any expression of it to know it because you are it.

And you don't need to dig anywhere to find it.

You're right here,

Right now.

And the heart is the way in,

Love is the way in.

But it has to be real.

It has to be authentic.

And this gives us a way of knowing because if it's not congruent,

Then we feel that.

But when it is congruent and we listen and allow ourselves to be teachable,

Then it swings and it shows us this is the North Star.

This is possibly a step forward.

And tremblingly,

We make that step.

And yet it's a real step.

It's not just another off to the side step.

It's actually a step.

Even if it's the wrong step,

When awareness is applied to it,

It's not a wrong step.

It's a teaching.

It's a learning.

It's a way forward.

So the heart of congruence,

Congruence with love,

Congruence with awareness allows us to cross duality because the opposite of duality is not one.

It's wholeness.

And you can feel that.

It's not one or the other.

It's not if this side wins,

Then there can be peace.

If this part of me wins and I destroy that part of myself,

There can be peace.

Or I'll come into some ineffectual agreement and pretend impartiality with this situation in which everybody is still dying.

That's BS,

Total BS.

But the wholeness,

The wholeness of awareness,

The wholeness of the heart.

So I just want to tell you a little story.

I was walking across Manchester the other night.

I'd been down in London for a meeting.

Because I do some literary editing.

And I couldn't pre-book a parking space that day.

So I had to sort of travel back on the local train.

So I had sort of after I got off the main train back from London,

I had to kind of travel another hour and a half to get home because I live in the countryside.

It was Friday night and I arrived at Piccadilly station in Manchester.

And there's this ramp that comes down.

And it was about 10.

30.

And everybody,

I'm not joking,

Everybody was drunk.

And there were small groups of guys mostly,

But some groups of women as well,

All trying to start fights with each other.

Now,

I'm not going to say these are bad people or anything like that.

Their conditioning leads them to believe that seeking solace in this way,

They will somehow find some camaraderie,

Some friendship,

Some love.

And it's a miracle to me because even within our own unconsciousness,

Love tries to find its way.

We know to seek for love.

It's just we don't,

We're not being taught where to look.

We look into our conditionality instead of looking into truth.

And so we're seeking completion in some way,

Even if it's through annihilation or being drunk out of your head.

So on a human level,

I'm being a brown person.

My body doesn't feel safe within these situations.

And I pull my baseball cap down and I put my mask on and I turn my collar up and I think,

Right,

Hunker down.

Just don't want to get into anything.

Just don't want to get into anything.

I just want to get home.

And in the hour and a half that I traveled home,

Not one person was sober.

Not one person was peaceful.

Not one person was just there.

And this is how we travel through the world.

We're not here.

Very few of us are here.

When we talk about the word presence,

You hear the word presence a lot these days.

It doesn't mean some far out spiritual thing,

Man.

It means you're here.

It's how you can tell.

You're just here on the earth in the here and now.

And you know it rather than thinking about it and projecting into it.

You're just here.

This is what awareness does.

It makes us present in the here and now.

But what I noticed amongst all these beautiful people who were looking for something through Friday night in the city and on the train,

The local train,

Which was so noisy,

I tell you,

Was that when we move out into things in this way,

We're basically self-abandoning.

We're abandoning ourselves.

We're trying to abandon ourselves to kind of find ourselves somewhere else.

And when we feel that kind of hollowness within ourselves that I know so,

So well,

I'm not immune to it.

But after the healing of 2014 and so on,

Something changed.

I stood on the ground in my own being.

And this is the word that I don't like that I said I was going to say,

But I hate it.

They call it awakening or something like that.

But actually that just goes on and on and on.

So it kind of never ends.

So there's not a kind of thing and you're done.

It just kind of continues.

But if I had a wish that I could bring true,

It would be that we stop self-abandoning.

That you,

I don't know if you do,

But that we stop self-abandoning.

Not that you have to give up your drink.

Not that you have to turn off your TV.

Not that you're not allowed to watch your basketball game.

But that you're just here and that you and I are here together.

That's my wish.

That we don't abandon ourselves or that we don't believe in the pain story that we tell each other.

Yes,

This terrible thing happened to me and this terrible thing happened to you.

But telling that story over and over again isn't going to lead us anywhere.

But the return to the heart might.

It might give us our wholeness back.

It might give us our true sovereignty back.

It might show us,

What did they call it in Zen?

Your true faith.

It might give us your true,

Imagine if we spoke to each other with our true faces.

At least it would give us some authenticity with each other.

I'm not after big spiritual things.

Just win-win would do.

Or I see you and you see me.

Not just the story.

Imagine the joy.

How does it feel when somebody sees you?

That's love.

Being seen is love.

And this is why I say awareness is love because from awareness we see.

From conditioning,

We don't see.

I wrote a line down that I posted on social media the other day.

I said,

We will continue to be defeated until we surrender to love.

And this is how I felt on Friday night.

It felt like we were defeated.

That we were living in a world that believes it is defeated and there's no answer.

So that we turn towards temporary things that just make us feel a little bit better for a while because that's the best I can do.

That's the best I'm gonna do.

So I may as well sleep with this person and I may as well drink and feel okay a bit.

And we may as well eat that pizza and things.

And as I say,

Nothing wrong with pizza or anything else.

But what about if we sit at that pizza in presence with each other?

You know,

What about if we had intimacy instead of shagging each other?

What if we are just looking for blanking out in giving of our bodies to each other and through smaller sex?

What if we brought awareness into our physicality and we're intimate with each other?

So love,

The way that we're talking about love today,

I find that it does several things.

It instantly,

Even this,

Even the hand on the heart,

Instantly moves us towards wholeness a little bit more.

So you are the answer,

Not your thoughts and not your fears,

But your own movement towards yourself with an authentic hand on the heart or an authentic I'm here is all that it takes.

You know,

I know I'm supposed to propose all sorts of meditation,

You know,

I know I'm supposed to propose all sorts of meditations and teachings and this and that and the other sort of thing,

But this is enough.

The meditation actually really helps and we can do something about that.

You know,

If you come and join us for a meditation or a workshop or something,

We'll work on that.

And something else that I found to be probably one of the few things I would use the word miracle for in this life and we are,

It is possible.

To achieve a miracle here with love is that love at any real level that you will meet it.

It doesn't take courage to meet love.

It takes an opening from a closedness to an openness causes you to remember yourself,

All those things that you wanted to do that you never done,

All those dreams that we have,

All that love that we want to make,

All that just being that we so desire,

All that peace that we talk about over a bottle of wine and so on.

It's there when you remember yourself,

But we constantly are abandoning ourselves and forgetting ourselves,

Not through the alcohol and things like that.

That's a symptom,

The drugs,

The alcohol,

And so on and so on.

You don't need to stop that and be monkish.

That's transcended immediately.

It begins being transcended immediately when you self-remember.

So we follow this path of self-remembrance.

You can start in tiny ways.

It's not conjure up an idea of yourself and move into it in a belief,

You know,

Trying to manifest your best self or anything like that.

Find your sole purpose.

It's not that,

It's knowing,

Allowing yourself to be revealed to yourself.

And that's an act of love.

And when you do that,

Then you will allow others to exist.

You will allow for other people to be people and they will also begin to self-remember.

It's contagious.

Not that we can wish it.

We can't kind of get on,

Can't walk down the ramp of Piccadilly Station in Manchester on a Friday night and beam them,

Self-remembrance,

Shooting out of our eyes.

There's a film actually called The Bell There,

The beautiful green,

Where somebody actually can do that.

It's really worth watching.

This woman arrives from a planet of awakened people,

Enlightened people to see how earth is getting along.

It's a French movie from 1996,

Which is completely banned in Europe.

So you'll have to find it by nefarious means.

And she causes people to self-remember.

And they're so shocked when they remember themselves at how they've been living.

That's how I felt.

I was so shocked at the person that I used to try to be,

Who was never really me.

We can follow self-remembrance.

We can follow the heart of congruence just a little bit each day.

And it will begin to take us,

Forget enlightenment,

Forget awakening,

Forget anything spiritual as a goal.

Forget all that.

And just this,

Just that.

That's all that we need each day.

And it's enough because we will meet each other.

You will meet yourself.

Because of our conditioning,

We have only allowed for limited expressions of love.

Again,

I ask you just to reflect on this for yourself rather than,

I'm not telling you anything you don't know here.

Who am I to tell you anything?

I'm nobody.

Some guy who wrote a book and is on a screen and is talking at the Theosophical Society today.

That doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't give you any status,

Any credits,

Mean anything.

But we only allow for love within couples or variances of.

We only allow for love within families.

We only allow for love with our pets.

And then outside of that,

We think we can treat each other like dirt mostly.

Or we don't really have any regard outside of that.

And what we can do is we can kind of,

We can ride the news and we can kind of hook our pain body emotion into certain causes and feel like we are really feeling about certain things.

And so this is the palette of love that we have created at this present time.

But as I say,

Real love challenges those limits.

And this is really interesting on your journey.

Because it's going to ask you and tap you on the shoulder.

And you're going to find yourself,

If you do this congruence of love in yourself each day,

You're going to find self-loving people or having regard for people and seeing people that you would never have looked at before.

That you wouldn't have given the time of day to.

You don't have answers.

But somebody who believes things politically different to you,

You might see them more as a person.

You might see the heart of that person on the TV when the exterior is saying everything should be away from that person.

You might see somebody who you think is lowly.

Just find yourself loving that person even though you don't know them.

You just feel brotherliness or sisterliness to that person.

And it's not that we turn ourselves into a hippie.

It's not that we are suddenly all,

Hey man,

Or anything like that.

But we start to see the wholeness.

You start to see that life is.

But one of the challenges along the way,

And this is what I talk about so much.

The way that signposts work,

It looks at different levels of awareness.

Then it looks at the blockages in place at that level.

Then we look at how we can really go beyond that.

And as you can see,

That's all we've done in this presentation,

This talk.

Here's a blockage.

How do we move beyond it?

Meet what's real.

This is the awareness that we need at this point.

And then we move into the next bit.

And then we think we're done because we feel a little bit better.

And then we think we're done because we feel a little bit better.

But with my hand on my heart,

Quite honestly,

We're never done.

You know,

It just,

There's more.

There's always more.

And so signpost just kind of tries to move through as much of that material as possible,

Going as far ahead as possible.

And we find this within ourselves.

We'll find ourselves coming up against our limits again and again and again.

And so this limited expression of love,

You're going to find yourself coming up against that.

And it might not be limited by you.

It might be limited by the people around you.

Because suddenly you feel like cooking a meal for the homeless person who lives in the church foyer across the road,

Who you turn your head every time you walk past them.

And suddenly you think,

Why don't I just make some extra food tonight?

And it's not even coming from a worthy place.

You just,

That's your family there.

They're no different to your father and mother,

Your brother,

Your sister,

Your dog,

Or whatever.

You feel the oneness.

It comes to you from time to time.

And it will invite you to rewrite your life.

And then your mind's going to say,

Yeah,

But if I feed him once,

Then I'm going to have to feed him every day.

And then do I have to let this person move in?

And so the ego mind will try to stop us loving.

Whereas you could just make the food,

Take it across the road and just give it there and not wait for thank you,

Not wait for appreciation.

Just out of the kindness of your heart,

Just put some food in front of this person and leave or stay and talk to them.

But then we have to watch out for the pain body stories,

You know?

But anyway,

What I'm trying to say is it moves us out of our small prescribed units.

And right now,

The world needs us to do this.

It doesn't because if we don't,

It would just carry on in the way that it's carrying on.

And the inevitability of conditionality will lead us forward in its way.

But every day when I teach,

I hear people say to me,

If only our politicians would do this,

And if only this person would do that,

And if only these people would do that,

And I say,

Hang on a minute,

You're the society,

I'm the society.

What are you waiting on other people for?

Don't be a do-gooder,

Don't be a goody-goody.

But this is your world.

You've got life,

You've got a hand.

And if you move from awareness,

This is your world.

This is your world.

So why not?

Why not actually bring our awareness,

Not as a belief system or trying to convince others.

Why not bring this into the world?

Why not move,

As Thich Nhat Hanh used to call it,

With enlightened action?

Because that's what this is.

This is awareness in action.

This is spirit in action.

If you don't know where to begin,

And I'm going to close with this,

Think about or reflect on,

You know,

Whether you believe that God is real or not,

Or you know that God is real or not,

Or that there is this thing called life.

Think about the qualities that sacredness would have,

Or reflect on the qualities that sacredness has.

A sense of belonging would likely be one of them.

A sense of acceptance.

And being acceptable.

A sense of being loved.

A sense of friendliness.

A sense of being held.

A sense of possibility.

Of kind of flowering.

If you look for the smallest edge,

The smallest real leading edge of that in your life,

In your relationship,

In the world around you,

In whatever you're with,

Even when you're with yourself,

You look for the smallest real leading edge of that,

Surely that is the sacred in this world.

Because what else could it be?

When we say God is love and love is God,

We don't believe it.

We don't actually do it.

But if those are the qualities of the sacred,

When you reflect on them,

Then surely if you allow yourself to live any of those in the smallest real way,

Then that is the path.

That is the path.

The smallest real way is always more than anything that is dreamt or believed.

I'd like to close with a very beautiful poem called heal yourself by the Mexican shaman Maria Sabina.

This is absolutely beautiful.

Cure yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon.

With the sound of the river and the waterfall.

With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.

Heal yourself with mint,

With neem and eucalyptus.

Sweeten yourself with lavender,

Rosemary and chamomile.

Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon.

Put love in your tea instead of sugar.

And take it looking at the stars.

Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain.

Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it.

Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition.

Looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.

Jump,

Dance,

Sing so that you live happier.

Heal yourself with beautiful love.

And always remember,

You are the medicine.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me.

Reviews

Amazing moment Thank you for sharing this meditation 🧘🏽

Lovely, simplicity, wholeheARTfullness=presence! www.gratefulness.org, ahimsa, www.compassioncourse.org

So beautifully woven together… thank you for this wonderful teaching 🙏

Intuitive, real, authentic experience. Thank you for sharing, this talk gives me hope in abundance. 🙏❤️

Beautiful. Thank you🙏💜🙏

So beautiful, John
Thank you❤️

So beautiful I am without words.

Thank you, John. Truly appreciate you and your sincerity. 🙏

Wonderful talk! So glad I decided to look on your page and find you put this up , John! Congruent is my new favorite word! I needed to remember to align with the love that’s always within . Lots of love to you 💜💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫

John walks and talks a path of deep awareness and awakening. Finding the courage to join him on that path is a challenge. I recognize the truth in these words. Now to awaken this in my own heart. ❤️

Sitting with myself this morning in Colorado... your words reached me, hand on my heart.
Thank you John for reminding
me this joyful study is never ending.

Thank you!🙏 Life-learning by "crash-and-rise upp again".... and it's not just one time it's something that happens over and over again and to be thankfull about (after!🙃) it is painfull but kind of necessary i guess, to become authentic and stay at home within me- my self- because it's there God lives. In my heart and spirit. I just have to Come home 🛑⛽️🕰🔥❤
Blessings🕊

Inspiring!! Thank you 🙏🏼

Very nice, thank you John. Love ya :)

❤️ Thankyou John ❤️🙏🏻