Talk: The Awakened Heart

John shares the story of his awakening and his near-death​​ experience while discussing the need to move our practice into the living space of ​our hearts. Recorded live in the UK, John's loving, humourous, rock 'n' roll style is evident as he delivers a message of uncompromising hope and meaning on how we might meet and support ourselves and the world we live in, with a manner of integrity and sacredness.

Transcript

Well,

It's lovely to be here.

It's just a really nice opportunity always when we can get together in a way that's kind of about something deeper,

About something real.

I think sometimes we think that spiritual life is an add-on.

You do spiritual bits,

You've got your work,

You've got your spiritual bit,

You've got your whatever,

Whatever.

But actually,

It's all the spiritual bit,

Isn't it really,

Kind of saying,

Oh,

We can apply ourselves in that way.

But we tend to compartmentalize our lives.

And then that's when the kind of the stress gets in and the kind of craziness that happens.

I thought I'd kind of talk to you a little bit.

I kind of,

I have this terrible habit of kind of writing notes to give talks and then absolutely completely ignoring what's on the piece of paper.

So we'll see if that happens tonight.

I don't think I've ever given a talk where that hasn't happened.

So at some point it will just,

I'll just go like that.

What's really important to say is whenever I do some kind of public event of any kind is that I'm not trying to convince you of anything.

It's really important that I double,

Triple underline that.

I'm not asking you to believe in anything,

Nor am I trying to sell you anything or convince you that my idea should supersede something of yours.

That would be insane,

Really.

All I've ever really been interested in is what's real.

How do we live?

And how do we live to the absolute best of our potential as human beings?

And of course,

If you ask questions like that,

So I'm already going to veer off the piece of paper now,

You know,

You ask questions like,

Who am I and what am I here for?

Those sound like simple questions,

But if you ask those with true sincerity,

Very quickly it sets you apart from the rest of the world.

Very quickly you see that we're living in crazy,

Crazy ways.

And it can be hard to know what to do about it.

And as I've kind of,

This is my 40th year of being a meditator.

I was just saying before things have changed,

I think since I last spoke here,

But if not,

Then maybe I just didn't say anything last time because it had only just happened.

I run a little thing called Authentic Living,

Which is exactly about what those words describe.

I'm just interested in meeting people who want to live their lives authentically and to really try to understand what that means.

As I said,

People tend to live compartmentalized lives that we also try to live when we don't know any better.

We try to live through identities.

We try to live through,

Well,

We are programmed as children by our family values and so on.

This is what you do to get fed.

This is what you do to get love from the first minute you come out of the womb that you are in contract.

And so that sets itself at a cellular level into the body.

And then further conditioning is added to that,

School and so on and so on.

And it's not that there's anything wrong with that,

But we come to believe that that's who we are.

At some point we say,

This is me.

This is who I am.

But actually we're a product of that collection of things at that point.

And the journey is to lose our innocence and then regain it.

That's the story of Parsifal.

That's the sacred story,

The world over.

We just forget to do the refining our innocence part that comes next because it's not threaded through our society.

There's no clues to point us.

That has gone now.

We used to search for it in the religious.

But of course that had such limitations.

That's why it's so gratifying to talk to a group of people like you.

Because while religion may offer maps and doorways to something more truthful,

They tend to be somebody else's maps.

And the only map that we really can live by is our own.

We have to kind of find the map of our own life.

And that's what my work's about really is how we do that.

Not I figure it out and tell you how to do it because that would be me trying to impose something on you.

But walking alongside people as best I can to kind of hopefully offer support and space and love along the way and maybe some of the things that one has encountered oneself can actually help with that.

So the change that happened actually because we do need to go there don't we,

Was is that since I last spoke here I think I did that thing of dying and then coming back.

And I mean it absolutely literally in that I got really ill.

I was traveling.

We live half the time in India and half the time in England.

And I just arrived to go and see Abba,

My wife here,

And got off the plane.

And unbeknownst to me for years in my gall bladder was this abscess.

And it burst that night.

And it burst and it destroyed most of my liver,

Poisoned my entire system and we didn't know what it was for days.

And by the time I finally got to hospital we found this amazing doctor,

Dr.

Trahan,

And then he got me into intensive care.

He basically said to Abba,

Don't go because he's not going to make it through the night.

That was it.

And somehow I remembered my training which was to be present.

That if I went into the fear of death,

Oh my god I've wasted my life,

Oh how terrible this is for me right now.

If I went into those stories I would actually miss the last minutes of my life.

You could actually miss the last minutes of your life by getting caught in a story.

So I decided to kind of come out of that and to kind of allow myself to kind of almost like kind of sink into meditation.

But at the same time the body was so weakened that there was nothing left of me quite honestly.

And I went.

And it was,

I mean I'm sure you've come across these stories.

It was the love.

It was the light.

And it was like the friend that I had always wanted to meet my entire life.

And I didn't have to do anything to earn that.

I was sufficient and I was complete.

And yet I knew I was still needed by one person at least.

And in that place of completion,

I don't know what else to call it,

Because it's not death,

It's life itself,

I was spoken to,

Really clearly spoken to.

And I can't tell you whether it was a male voice or a female voice.

Certainly wasn't a doctor or a nurse.

And I was just basically told to leave my old work and then to just spend my time talking to people now.

And before I knew it I was awake.

And quite amazingly I got out of bed the next day and the infection was gone.

Not completely gone,

But at a manageable level.

And then I had to come back to England and have surgery and things like that.

Well there wasn't a journey,

There was just pure love and pure light basically.

So it wasn't a going through,

It was a kind of almost like an opening into,

I suppose for me.

Yeah,

And so that's why I do this work.

But I don't expect anybody to believe that.

It's not actually that interesting in a way.

It is,

But it's not because it doesn't do anything apart from I know something that somebody will go,

Oh well it's just chemicals in your brain,

It's just your brain closing down or whatever.

You will get that.

And I'm not going to argue with somebody who comes at me in that way.

I'll just go,

Okay whatever.

As I was saying it's quite odd to kind of know what it is that you're meant to do because most people are like,

Well what's my purpose in life?

And I've just been told what to do so here I am as it were.

But before that it was interesting because life had taken a terrible turn around about 2012.

And even though I was a meditator and I was very successful in my old work writing books and doing radio and stuff like that,

I was still living through this conditioning that I was talking about.

Still living through identity and believing that if only I tried harder,

If only I pushed more,

If only I could do one more meditation intensive and face the wall kind of 11 hours a day I'll break through something and then I'll become a better person.

And I don't have to be me anymore.

I don't have to be this or I'll add that right thing to myself and then maybe somebody would love me.

Maybe I could find love.

That's what I was really looking for.

I was looking for love.

I wasn't looking for spiritual truth.

I just wanted my mom to love me actually.

I just wanted mother love.

And it got to such a point that there was nowhere else to go.

I mean it was just utter… I mean if you know when you've been pushing up against something it feels so tight.

It's quite easy to tell the difference between kind of what I call pain body and kind of living in presence because the pain body side of it or the kind of the condition side is so tight and then we push even harder and it gets even tighter and we can't find a way through.

And we just try moving these blocks of identity around or maybe if I change my partner,

Maybe if I get another job,

Maybe if I had more money and we try to seek completion through those things if I had more power,

If I had more something.

And I just couldn't support that anymore and I decided to actually let go of it all and see if sort of meditation and what was actually written in spiritual books was not just a pile of spiritual do-do but actually could lead me somewhere proper if I committed to it.

And things began to change.

It's quite interesting.

It feels like the near-death experience was a kind of completion of that process that took place over a couple of years.

And first of all I had to kind of clean up my psychology.

So I started doing lots of inner child work and then a technique called focusing which allows you to directly experience your emotions because most people don't experience their emotions at all.

Particularly in our Western society we don't.

We don't actually experience our emotions.

What we tend to do is walk around with our arms out like this armored in case we should ever feel our emotions because we think they're going to destroy us.

And so what we live in fear of is the story of our emotion which is invented in our head rather than actually meeting our natural biofeedback system which shows us what's going on in the world.

And that kind of almost brings us back around to what's supposed to be on this piece of paper in a way.

No,

Not quite honestly now honestly I'm sorry for that detour.

You know the thing is is that we've elevated the limited mind,

The frontal lobe in our culture to such an extent that we think it can do everything.

We think it's the frontal lobe that's going to get us awakened.

We think if we just learn enough things that we'll kind of find all the things that we want.

But we're much more than that.

The frontal lobe or what we call the ordinary mind is a collection of things but it only exists because we have consciousness.

There can be no mind if there's no consciousness.

And consciousness only exists because of life force.

So you know straight away you can see that the mind is a tertiary thing.

It's not first but we put it first.

So much so that we don't actually access our faculties at all.

You know I was reading something today.

There's been some real kind of interest in the heart recently.

And you know that the brain and the head produces an electrical field.

The field around the heart is 60 times larger than the field around the head.

You know our heart is 60 times bigger than our head quite honestly in its electromagnetic field which means right now you are all,

We are all completely intermingled in this room.

Absolutely that's why you can kind of know something's up.

You know you might call it your intuition or your kind of your greater intelligence but we don't really access that.

And also it's been found that in the heart and in the stomach there are actually brain cells.

And you know people say oh that's just redundant old stuff that we don't use anymore.

And it's a different intelligence which we just don't access.

So just imagine you know if you could actually kind of you know allow that to sort of take place you know but we're scared of being seen as being kooks.

We're scared of being seen as being kind of you know crazy whatever people.

And we just have to let that be I think.

I think we're all old enough now to not really care too much what people think so maybe we should just let ourselves feel things and you know wear more purple.

And when I am old I shall wear purple.

You know.

But the thing with learning to access the heart which was quite honestly the thing that changed everything for me when things just couldn't move anymore you know.

Like I say anybody looking from outside would think oh there's a successful person.

And yet I was so lonely and so unhappy and so cut off from everything.

And I didn't love life in any way.

And it was only when I began to you know there's this kind of nonsense phrase that we have which is all you've got to do is love yourself.

I mean it's just utter bullshit.

Utter and complete.

Because no one tells you how to.

No one says this is how you love yourself.

All they say is all you've got to do is love yourself.

And then the mind kicks in and goes uh.

That's it.

And you feel a bit like when you're a child in school and the teacher math teacher is looking over you and you do that thing of rolling your eyes up pretending to think.

And that's it.

We don't go anywhere.

Or we put on a spiritual guise and to look like we're doing something.

You know I'm into crystals and I'm into this and I'm into that.

And there's nothing wrong with those things.

But if we're just trying on another identity we're not really going anywhere.

We're not doing anything for anybody else.

It's about our most treasured thing that we have.

Our life itself.

And so I had to turn back and actually meet my heart.

You know Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is within.

And there's a picture of him.

I used to joke because my mum was an Irish Catholic.

So we had this kind of really chocolate boxy picture of Jesus holding his secret,

A sacred heart.

I think it was out of a magazine.

And my mum got it when she was 17.

It was on our wall at home.

And it looked like something off a chocolate box.

And I used to call it the sacred strawberry of Jesus.

And then she'd like that and slapped me on the head.

You know.

But there he is holding his heart.

And he's literally going,

For God's sake there it is.

You know.

Kind of thing.

All you've got to do is get in touch with this thing.

And we're just like,

Yeah well.

So it is the sacred heart.

Yeah.

Not the sacred strawberry.

But ours looked like a sacred strawberry you see.

But I know.

But it was that turn.

There was nowhere else to go.

And actually you know when you're backed into a corner there was only two directions.

And what we often do,

Not often,

But we're seeing a lot of it at the moment.

If you can't live through your form anymore we try to leap into space.

And that's why we have this massive upturn in suicide at the moment.

I don't know if you've noticed.

And self-harm.

And I work a lot with schools and there's such an elevation in kids kind of harming themselves at the moment.

And mental health difficulties for kids.

I was in a school this afternoon.

I kind of do bits of kind of consultancy work with schools using the stuff we're talking about.

And now one in every two medical appointments for kids is mental health related.

Honestly.

And one in every four for adults is mental health related.

And there's half a million children awaiting psychiatric care at the moment or mental health support and not getting it right now.

So we can carry on doing what we do.

But look where it's leading us.

And so when we reach the end of our form there's nowhere to go.

We try to leap.

We either try to leap into something and if it doesn't pick us up,

If that won't support us anymore then we just kind of either stagger on till we actually just die.

Or leap into a death of a kind.

Or hopelessness or absolute malaise in our lives.

And as Oscar Wilde said,

We take up collecting things.

Or we can leap in the other direction and turn within.

Actually go back into the inner space.

And an Indian teacher that I really loved said Nisagdatt,

I don't know if you've heard of Nisagdatt,

But he wrote an incredible book of his teachings.

He didn't write it.

He was kind of just a speaker.

And he said the mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.

And this is true.

This is true.

The heart can cross any abyss.

You must know what it's like you're in an argument with your partner or a friend and there seems to be almost no resolution to it at all.

And then somehow your heart just opens a bit towards each other and the whole thing just kind of falls away.

Just like that.

And then you're just laughing.

One minute you're about to kill each other.

It's divorce.

It's all over.

It's the end.

Never again you absolute sod.

And then you're laughing.

I mean it just shows that all this stuff we take so seriously means absolutely nothing once the heart kicks in.

And yet we can actually choose that rather than waiting till we're kind of,

Well I'll take the dog,

You take the kids.

And it's been my experience.

And again I'm not trying to convince you of anything but it's just with kind of learning to live this way more heartfully shall we say.

I've learned that the heart sees better than the eye.

Because if we look with our eye,

And by eye I mean our conditioned eye,

Then what we're actually doing is we think we're seeing the truth.

We don't even know what we're seeing quite honestly.

Like right now for example we think we can see each other.

We can't see each other at all.

What we're actually seeing is light reflecting off a surface.

We will never see each other.

It's insane.

We see light reflected.

And it's all dependent on the little bits in the eye what we see.

And that may be different for all of us.

But on a condition level,

If I'm conditioned one way and you're conditioned another,

Then everything I'm saying right now goes into the filter of your conditioning and will be translated into what you think I mean.

And if it was the other way it would be that.

And that's why people kind of form into tribes of like egoic tribes of you know well these are our politics.

This is our religion.

This is our this.

We kind of seek kind of company in those value systems that seem to kind of resonate with us.

But it's built out of garbage.

It's built out of nothing.

It's not built out of being or spirit or love or heart.

It's built out of you know this stuff in the head.

And and everything that we look at also is filtered through that.

So we just look and and we will separate from things.

Oh that's not for me.

You know that's not for me.

Oh no you don't like football.

Therefore I can't be your friend.

You know ridiculous things ridiculous things.

We divide the world up according to our conditioning.

But when we begin to move down into our bodies then we access the greater intelligence of life because life is is within us.

And if we begin to kind of meet our feelings with kind of kindness and even just a simple thing like just putting your hand on your heart.

This is something I do with kids in school just getting to put their hands on their hearts brings you out of your head almost straight away.

I invite you to just have a see what that does for you.

You know you don't have to of course.

There's no having to anything.

You see and even just that bit of intimacy with yourself is quite an incredible thing.

And I've been known to do it you know I do it when I'm out shopping and you know you can do this at any moment and it can help you just kind of ground yourself.

And of course we have to watch out because you know our emotions or what we think is our emotions can also be product of our conditioning.

So we might think we feel certain things and of course that fits with the story of kind of like this little me voice in our head.

Oh well you know my story it's always been so sad and it's been like this.

I certainly had a very strong me me me story.

This is who I am sort of story and most people do.

And so we have to kind of notice that it's there.

You can't get rid of that but you kind of notice that it's there and just by kind of connecting to the heart we can begin to see that it's not us.

That there's a space between us that we can you know we don't have to move into that dualistic state as it were our programming.

We start to kind of get ourselves back and I don't know if you've thought about this because we talked about the sacred heart Jesus but in Sanskrit there's a beautiful word the Hridayam which means the sacred heart or the spiritual heart.

And because this has been my work for as long as the other stuff I was doing I started meditating when I was 14.

I knew at age six that I needed to meditate.

I just couldn't get away with it and I wouldn't know how to but amazingly when I was 14 this kind of book fell in my lap and I began from there and I've kind of been literally kind of researching this my entire life.

Though it didn't do me any good until about five years ago which is quite interesting.

But we have three hearts.

We have three distinct hearts and so one heart leads to the other heart and this will be the meditation that we do tonight.

The meditation of the three hearts.

So you have your physical heart and you can actually feel that.

And it's a fact that you have a physical heart otherwise you know you'd be lying down rather than sitting in that chair.

And then of course the second you connect to your physical heart even by putting your hand on your heart or bringing your felt sense to it you become aware of your emotional heart.

And there it is just like that.

There's your emotional heart.

And then I don't know if you've ever done that thing with meditation where you listen to the spaces between the sounds or you notice the spaces in things.

But if you begin to see the spaces in your emotions so in between the emotional feeling or even behind it you get a sense of that kind of sense of consciousness behind the feeling so that the feelings are still there.

They're not destroyed or you know we're not trying to push our thoughts away and silence our head.

We're not trying to get rid of our emotions.

We're just trying to find the proper order of things.

And if we move into consciousness then we see there's a stillness behind the feelings.

And that stillness is the Hadaim.

That's the source of life itself.

That's presence.

God if you want to call it that.

You don't have to of course.

Life,

The source,

Whatever.

It's not something to believe in.

It's not something that we have to add to ourselves in any way.

And it's not away from you.

You've been living this the whole time.

There's not been a moment of your existence where you have been separate from the love that is.

And it's right inside you.

You know it's like the musk deer.

It kind of wanders around looking for this smell that it thinks it can smell looking outside itself.

You're making me cry now Babbel.

And yet the smell's within it.

And here we are.

And yet because we believe in so many things and because we want to be so many things we're not actually doing anything.

We're not.

Imagine if we took this heart and started seeing from this heart and we took it into our business.

Imagine if we took this heart,

This true heart,

Which you're not doing anything.

Notice you're not doing anything.

We haven't even meditated yet.

Just by following through from your physical heart,

Your emotional heart and into the Hridayam.

And you can learn that this,

You learn to just remain.

You make a choice to remain with this and it slips away and you just come back and over time.

We think we have to go to 100 percent because I work with businesses a lot.

So I've got this analogy that actually all we're after is a controlling stock in our businesses.

I work with Manchester Chamber of Commerce.

So you only need to be in presence 51 percent of the time.

That gives you 49 percent of absolute messing about,

You know munking about and being a crazy person.

And still you're on the road to awakening quite honestly.

Because that's all awakening is isn't it?

It's for awareness of the heart to know itself.

For the truth of life in us to know itself.

And there's nowhere to go because you're it.

You've always been it and you will always be it.

This whole body,

Your life and everything is emanating from the source of life right now.

And there's nothing to believe in.

It's a heck of a thing but it's not even a thing.

So imagine if we ran our politics this way,

Our educational system.

What if we met our partners like this?

What if we just go shopping in Sainsbury's?

You know let's go now and go and buy grapes or something you know and we're just kind of walking past each other in the aisles like this.

It would be a completely different world.

It would be a completely different world.

And yet there's nothing to do.

I don't know kind of I think that sounds like the end of the talk to me quite honestly.

Because there is absolutely nothing to do.

There's no spiritual journey to make.

You might need to clean up your psychology a bit because if you've been very tight for a long time then the conditioning can be very very tough.

And it seems to take a lot of effort at first to kind of begin opening that up.

And at first we think we're trying to change it and get rid of it and things like that.

But actually all we need to do is open some space.

You know and if we don't open the space life will do it for us.

You know life is our spiritual teacher.

You know no matter if you have a teacher or not you will have always had a spiritual teacher and that's your own life.

And if we're conscious then it presents itself one way and if we're not conscious it presents itself as suffering always.

So you know people dying on us or leaving,

Change happening will take personally as if we're losing something because we're not actually in the sort of spacious awareness of what's happening.

But when consciousness begins to kind of manifest to become a more permanent state within us then it's not like we don't grieve when somebody dies.

We had a dear friend die just a month ago.

It's not like we don't grieve but we see it for what it actually is as well.

You know which is just a change of state actually.

And having been there and come back again there's nothing to fear from that apart from there's nothing wrong with loving our lives,

These lives and actually really living them and loving them.

And of course we're going to have an attachment to that because that's part of the human deal.

And so of course that's what we grieve for.

We grieve for the person because the person isn't to be thrown away,

The person is to be loved.

But a person illuminated from within by true spirit if you want to call it that or by the movement of life within themselves so that they know their own illumination,

That's incredible.

And it's not beyond anybody.

It's got nothing to do with your wealth,

Nothing to do with your education,

Nothing to do with how you were brought up,

Nothing to do with what spiritual course you've done,

What religion you belong to,

None of it matters because we're all produced by life itself.

And so we just begin to access that.

So it'd be really lovely if we meditated.

I don't know if you want five minutes to do Luz and things like that and then we could meditate.

Does that sound okay?

Reviews

Lovely discourse on centering while on a beautiful walk in the park. Thank you.

Gold, absolute gold. I love this. Aligns with my ideas as a youth.

I always feel more connected and peaceful after listening to John’s insight and wisdom. I am inspired by his encouragement to follow our own paths and his willingness to support us as we do. ✌🏻🙏🏻♥️

So beautiful, thank you! "If we dont open up, life does it for us"

Thank you so much John I am loving your talks. I feel a sense of peace and find that my body and mind relax when I’m listening to you. You feel like a treat that I give myself🎁😊. Bless you.

Every time I listen to one of your meditations or talks I hear something that shifts, moves something in my heart. I am deeply, truly grateful for the path you share so generously with us. This is a wondrous, clarifying talk.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart✨💛

Brilliant words of insights. Thank you.

You make perfect sense to me! Thank you! 🖤

Great and very true heartfelt perspective on living authentically and through the heart. A new journey for me and really resonated

This is so helpful! Among other things, it is a clear articulation of non-dualism, even if it wasn't an intentional topic. Loved every word and will listen again.

An authentic and profound message delivered engagingly. Thank you 🙏

Plain, simple, awakened truth..this is the profundity. Thank you, John, thank you 🙏

I very much enjoyed this talk. Thought provoking and inspiring way to start the new year. Thank you.

Thank you for this insight!

Incredible talk!
Thank you John for sharing your experience. For someone like me, who can feel that there is something more, but just can't access it, I understood what you were saying.
It's true that our conditioning is so restricted to how we really should be living our lives, it's sad. It is so nice that you are helping in the schools and wherever you can to share your knowledge.
Namaste ✨🙏✨

Resonating, illuminating! Awakening to the mystery of myself which isn’t so mysterious after all !! Obviously... but not all the time or else I wouldn’t have needed this talk to remember. Thank you John for helping me to remember what I already knew but somehow forgot. ❤️

Thank you for sharing your story and your wisdom. It has meant a lot to me. Love.

This was one of the best talks I’ve heard! Thank you so much!!!

Thank you so much! This is wonderful.

I feel like I’ve been freed from a life long struggle. There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to learn, no one to follow. I am it, my heart is where it is, it changes everything.
Thank you.