I want to talk about this idea of a perfect love,
And that a perfect love sounds perfect until something happens and we find ourselves not loving perfectly.
And then,
Of course,
Because we think we know what perfect love is,
God help us,
Because perfect love has nothing whatsoever to do with any thought about it.
When we miss the mark,
The next thing we know is that we punish ourselves perfectly,
Or we punish others who fail to live up to what it is that we think they are meant to be in their love for us.
So I want to set the tone by saying that when you look at any form of scripture,
And it's such a difficult place to start a talk,
Because it's so essential to understand that the ideas,
The words,
The phrases,
The principles,
These things that are outlined,
Whether we're talking about Old Testament,
New Testament,
Bhagavad Gita,
The Vedic teachings,
They're all basically trying to point to the same possibility,
And all of them point to it in fairly much the same way.
Different language,
Of course,
Different times.
But you can't talk about this idea of perfect love without talking about the idea of rebirth.
And rebirth not in the sense of something that we think to ourselves rebirth,
But the actual experience of it.
I mean,
Who hasn't marveled at,
I remember,
Especially as a kid,
I was so fascinated with butterflies.
Here's this caterpillar,
This rather ungainly creature treading across leaves,
Eating them like a corn cob,
You know,
Chub chub chub chub.
And then something happens and it enters into this chrysalis.
And then at a certain period of time,
It just pops out something,
Obviously connected to the life of a caterpillar,
Because the butterfly doesn't appear out of nothing.
And yet the butterfly is another order of creature.
And that's what I want to look at with you.
I want to look at this idea of another order of love.
And I can only pray that somehow or other you can put aside whatever familiar sensations or images pass through you when you think of the word love.
Because love is not the experience of ourselves in relationship to something we're thinking about.
The love that I want to talk about,
And I'm sorry to take so long getting into it,
Can only be considered a fearless love.
And a fearless love is not a love that when something comes along and threatens it or challenges it,
Turns into something that is the antithesis of love.
It remains love constantly.
It is unconditional,
Meaning that there is no passing moment in time,
No circumstance,
Nothing cruel that someone says that turns it into anything other than what it is in the moment of that intersection between ourselves and that person or that pain or that problem.
It remains true to itself,
A fearless love.
Did you know,
I was sitting here prior to this time that we're going to spend and I might go a little longer than 40 minutes.
I hope you can stay with me.
I'm not talking tomorrow like I usually do on Sundays.
So I'm going to try to weave all of this into a larger understanding.
Do you know that the word love is mentioned over 500 times in the New Testament alone?
But the word love that's mentioned over 500 times is not the word love that we know it.
It is the word agape.
And we're going to talk about this other kind of love because it belongs to another order of our own being,
But that is not yet realized.
We don't live from that consciousness.
We have not passed from one order of being into another,
Which is the whole purpose of this life.
As surely as the caterpillar passes into the butterfly,
The caterpillar passes into the butterfly,
As surely as the seed,
The mustard seed passes into the mustard tree,
There is a passage of a sort,
Which is the purpose of this life.
And I've often spoken about this idea that you and I,
We come into this world as one order of being a kind of seed,
If you will,
That's intended to grow into something else.
So here's 500 times this word agape.
God is love.
He who abides in love abides in God and God in him.
Love thy neighbor as thyself.
Love God with all the heart,
Soul and might,
The two great commandments.
This is my commandment that you love one another as I've loved you.
All of these ideas of love speak of another kind of relationship that we're intended to have with life.
And again,
In other scriptures and in the traditional Buddhist idea,
The tradition,
Loving kindness,
Loving kindness is the parallel of agape,
The capacity,
Infinite capacity to understand and alleviate the suffering of others,
Which is what agape is,
Because it doesn't separate itself from suffering.
You and I,
When we run into suffering in someone else,
Or in ourselves by and large,
The first thing that happens to us is there's this immense barrier,
This shield that comes up,
Because there's something in us that doesn't want to know directly the suffering of another human being,
Let alone to know directly the suffering of ourselves.
And you cannot resist any condition,
And at the same time,
Realize your relationship to it.
And we are full of resistance to anyone,
Any moment that comes along,
And that basically brings up in us in that moment,
Some kind of fear.
So we have to look at this whole idea that there is a love that has no separation in it.
It is nondiscriminatory.
It doesn't separate itself by what it wants and what it doesn't want,
Because love,
Real love,
Always wants the same thing,
Because it always is the same thing,
This agape.
The meaning of it,
As best I can translate it from the original Aramaic,
Is that agape is the action of loving something greater than ourselves.
Love is the action of surrendering ourselves to something greater than ourselves,
Which,
By the way,
If I can spell this out,
That's a real problem for us.
We can profess all the time that we love God,
We love Christ,
That we are practicing Buddhists,
Or we're good Hindus,
Or Jews,
Or Muslims,
Or whatever it is,
And that we love the divine,
However we define it.
But you be honest,
If you can,
What's the first thing that happens to us,
Let alone that we turn immediately to trying to figure out how to protect ourselves from what we see as something perceived to come and take something from us.
But we never question that we can't have this fear without attachment and identification,
Without a sense of self that's forever being derived from something outside of us.
And I don't want to go too fast,
But I just want to get this idea across to you,
That as long as there is something that we are identified with something outside of ourselves,
From which to take some sense of ourself,
Including all the various icons,
Religiously speaking,
All the images that we call on when we think of Christ or the divine,
Or we call on a saint,
Well,
What are we looking at?
We're looking at some image in our mind that we have some derivative relationship with as a source of consolation.
And so we console ourselves.
We don't actually turn ourselves over to something greater than ourselves.
For most of us,
The love of God is secretly the love of an image that ourselves have created,
And we ourselves haven't actually created that.
We brought into a world where we're conditioned to accept these images and these thoughts as being the same thing as what the image represents.
And to be clear with you,
Love doesn't have an image.
There is no image for love.
I realize that the world is replete with the images.
We can buy pictures of them and hang them on the wall.
We can put them on our tables,
On our tables,
Our little sanctuaries.
But the image of God,
The image of Christ,
The image of Buddha,
The image of a Saint Francis of Lausanne,
Or any true awakened person,
That's not the thing.
That person had a relationship directly with this agape,
With this loving kindness.
And that's what it is that we want,
If we want to know what it means to have a life in which,
Making a transition here,
And I'll slow it back down.
How's this for simple?
Will I ever have a moment where what I ordinarily see as something wrong or painful or problematic,
Where some person comes along,
Will I ever have a moment where I'm not afraid?
I don't think we know how deeply this fear runs through our life,
And how as long as there's fear in our life,
There can never be freedom.
There can never be love.
Now,
There's other kinds of love,
Of course.
I love my wife.
I dread the idea of the time when we are no longer together because she's passed,
Or God forbid,
That I should pass first.
We have an agreement that she'll go first,
So that she won't have to bear this suffering.
But that fear,
Even of losing a loved one,
Is not agape.
How can you lose someone you love if the love that you have between you belongs to something that is eternal,
And that your relationship to that love is your relationship to that person through this familiar or otherwise philia,
This brotherly,
Familiar love?
So we have to understand,
If we're going to,
The nature of this fear.
And again,
Right out of the scripture,
East and West,
Perfect love casts out fear.
How can I find such a life?
I must understand something of the nature of fear.
And what is the nature of fear?
I'm not talking about the fear of seeing a spider run across the room.
But even that,
It's pretty important to understand this.
That when any given moment,
The moment itself has no fear in it.
The moment itself has no psychological fear in it,
Not at all.
And if you look at it,
You can see this,
That even the most frightening moments in our life,
In that split second,
If you've ever been,
Had that moment where you're about to have a car accident,
There's no fear in that.
In the moment,
It's unfolding.
Fear appears after the mind has formalized,
Made an image of the event.
And then that mind then having made the image of the event,
Then begins to think about what could have happened.
So that fear always involves time.
Fear always involves the idea that there is a distance between myself and some moment.
That fear doesn't exist without time,
Psychological time,
Without the idea of distance and difference between myself and that which I'm experiencing.
So that in that moment,
We begin to imagine,
Through our perceived,
Through the image we have,
We begin to imagine,
Well,
What could that,
What would,
God,
That would have been terrible.
But in the event itself,
There's no fear.
Because in the event itself,
There's still this moment where time hasn't come into it.
Because our,
At least our capacity as a human being for awareness hasn't been so compromised yet.
God forbid the day that comes,
And it might,
Given the way the world is falling into itself,
And ever trapped in time,
Distance,
And difference,
Which is fear itself,
And not a fear,
Desperation,
So forth and so on.
But let's keep going.
So let's summarize fear as anything of a psychological nature that threatens my sense of self,
My identity,
What I call my life.
That's what fear is.
And there is no fear that appears outside of me,
That doesn't have a corresponding aspect in my consciousness,
With which I am somehow or other identified,
Attached,
And dependent upon.
So that fear comes when something that I'm attached to,
Who I think I am,
Suddenly meets this moment,
And then mind says,
Oh,
My God,
No,
No,
No.
And in that moment,
All we do what?
We can see,
If we can,
That the more defined those,
That attachment,
The more deliberate and rigid become those relationships because of our continual investment of belief in them,
The more rigid those relationships come.
By the way,
Relationships based on being identified with some kind of possession.
And possessions are not the things.
Possessions are things that we are possessed by when we identify with them.
You want to hear a fascinating fact.
The word possessions are mentioned like four times more commonly than the word love in the New Testament.
And all pointing to,
By the way,
Not the problem with the possession,
But that somehow or other,
I'm so identified with this image.
Images are possessions.
Whatever image it is that I have of myself that you have of yourself is a possession.
How do I know?
Because when someone threatens the image,
My attachment to this identity is challenged,
And then I fear or I try to control that person.
Please see it with me.
So that the more we resist these moments,
That these come along and reveal these images and the sense of self as being false,
The more we defend them.
And what happens,
The more we defend them,
The smaller our circle of life becomes.
A lot of great teachers over time have said that this agape,
This love,
You can consider a center,
A world without a center to it.
That there is no,
In any particular point by which all other points are defined.
How is that possible?
We're going to look at this together.
So,
Summary,
The more that we believe we know who we are,
And we believe who we are as a series of reactions to anything that comes along and seems to threaten us,
Take something away from us,
Our religion,
Our politic,
Our ideals,
Our beliefs,
All the rest of that,
Our so-called sense of security,
Anything comes along and threatens that,
Smaller the circle gets,
Smaller and smaller.
And then our solution,
God help us,
This unconscious nature,
Is the smaller the circle gets,
The more fear we feel.
The more fear we feel,
The more we come up with new ideas and new images to try to help us escape a circle that is made smaller with every single thought that we take in order to protect ourselves from what we see as a life come to take from us our life.
So how can we look at this idea of this fear we're talking about and then begin to say,
Wow,
Perfect love casts out fear.
And I beg of you,
There's no way I'll ever be able to express how important this is.
Our consciousness,
The way it is,
It has a response to every single impression that comes into it.
So that there's never a word that we hear like love,
There's never a moment where some impression,
Someone's looking at us,
Someone says something,
There's never a moment where that impression comes in that isn't met almost instantaneously by a corresponding thought,
And all thoughts conditioned.
So that my response to the moment,
A sleeping human being,
Is an instantaneously,
An instant creation of a conditioned thought that I don't create,
I'm not the creator of these thoughts.
They're in this consciousness.
So here's something new,
Here's something old.
It really is it,
But just don't see.
Every moment is new and every moment,
Every impression,
Everything that touches us,
Every word,
Everything,
New,
Old.
So that I am always old.
I'm always the one who knows,
I'm always the one who looks at that moment without understanding that the instant that that conditioned thought comes up,
So does the self that's conditioned to understand it.
And so I'm a captive without knowing it of a consciousness that has no awareness,
What's it doing,
When it's doing it at any time.
So when you hear the word love,
Hear the word God,
Divine,
True self,
It's a knee-jerk conditioned response to it,
And I have a corresponding feeling,
A corresponding sense of self that I take to be the same thing as the thought.
And it's not.
We've had moments in our lives,
I often speak of this and I'll just do it ever so quickly here.
We've had moments in our life where we understand that there was no difference between what was new and true,
What was fresh,
Vital,
What was there that was new,
And the fact that it fell upon us a corresponding similarity.
So that new meant new,
New stirs new,
That that moment where,
As I often speak of it,
You'll just bear with me for a moment,
Where you see that beautiful whatever,
I speak of a seascape or a mountain range or a night sky or some full moon or the sun when it breaks through the clouds,
The walk in the woods by those massive sequoias,
Those massive trees,
And the stillness in that forest power of that waterfall of all that movement,
Where for a moment there's just no me,
There's no you sitting there in so-called enthralled by what it sees,
There is a perfect relationship between what is being observed and the observer,
So that there is without any question at all,
This moment where I no longer exist apart from the perception the moment is producing in this consciousness.
They are literally a singularity,
And we know the beauty of that moment,
We know the awe in it,
We're part of a stillness that requires no sense of self derived from thinking about this,
That,
Or the other,
There is just purely what is.
So that this perfect love,
This agape,
Is our infinite capacity for not just realizing perfect similarity with everything we see,
But in the fact that we are the seer,
Meaning we are the realization of that experience,
And we understand it's the same as who and what we are.
Agape,
The infinite capacity for not just realizing our perfect similarity.
Isn't that so?
Look,
I look at a waterfall,
And I've talked about this,
I look at this waterfall,
I would love one day,
Sorry,
My mind is showing me these falls in South America that are seven miles wide,
Literally a shift in the plate,
And you look at all that movement,
All that sound,
All that sensory input,
And obviously I'm not,
You know,
Guy isn't the waterfall,
He's not that movement,
He's not that seamless power streaming out,
And yet,
In Guy,
In this consciousness,
It's not Guy,
In our consciousness,
And it's not my consciousness,
Our consciousness,
Because everyone can have that exact experience,
Given their character,
In that moment,
There is a perfect similarity.
I experience as directly as possible,
Meaning with as little interference of thought,
And the sense of self it generates,
Because my sense of self in that moment is inseparable from the similarity of the relationship between that movement,
That beauty,
That form,
That color,
Inseparable from that similarity.
Perfect similarity.
So there's no me having the experience,
There's just the perfection of the experience,
And in the perfection of the experience,
The realization that who and what I am is not is not separate from that moment,
Is not separate from that movement,
Is not separate from that sound,
And then there's no one there not to love.
There's nothing there not to love,
Because there's nothing apart from that love.
It is the union of something divine and timeless,
The source of all of those characteristics and qualities,
Realizing that it has been vested somehow or other in this nutcase,
But that in that nutcase is this kernel of agape,
This kernel of corn,
This thing that if it will give itself up for the sake of that greater love,
It will know itself as inseparable from that greater love.
We're 28 minutes in and I have more to go.
Is everybody still there?
I don't really know.
I often think to myself,
I'm some strange madman wandering around talking to myself about God,
And really don't care in one respect.
So now let's look at this.
How is this possible?
How can we understand this perfect similarity?
I want to show you as best I can,
Again,
The words that these are just,
You know,
They're just pointers.
I'm just saying,
Let's look at this.
Let's explore this together.
Because if you'll be an explorer,
Instead of a protector,
You'll discover that there was never anything to protect.
And in that is the beginning of the freedom from this fear.
And that's where love sets you free from fear,
By showing you that you are this unending experience of the exploration of the moment as it is being revealed to you and through you.
And in the relationship of what seems to be in passing time,
It touches what is always there,
Waiting for the experience of itself,
The divine experiencing itself.
It is not I who lives in Christ,
But Christ who lives in I,
The divine experiencing itself.
And let's not get lost,
God forbid that you should get somehow caught up in some kind of sentimentality here.
There is an immense cost for that.
And the immense cost is what?
Is that somehow or other,
I have to begin to understand that I'm all on board.
I love this idea of being an explorer of the divine discovering itself.
But what happens in those moments where,
As part of this logos,
As part of the made in the image of the cosmos,
Myself as a microcosm of everything that was ever created or that will be revealed?
What about all of that?
What about these volcanic forces,
These massive shifts and this friction?
What about those moments where people come along or problems appear?
And in that moment,
I got nothing to do.
I got no similarity with you.
This is what drives people crazy about the spiritual path.
When they hear that there is a direct and definitive relationship where the opposites are not conflicting,
But they're complimentary,
Because how can that man that sets me off?
How can this moment that where everything is so wrong in the world,
And I feel this so deeply,
How can all of that,
How can that have a relationship to me?
I'm against it.
I don't want him to be like that.
I don't want this moment to be this way.
But in that moment,
Where's the love?
Here's what we say.
The love is I know better than you do.
I know what love is,
You don't.
And I can assure you that the moment that there is any distance whatsoever between yourself and what the moment is stirring in you,
The split second there is that distance,
There is the difference,
And in that difference is here.
In that moment,
I'll share something with you.
Why do you think this man is so passionate about what he's speaking to you of?
Because over the many years of my own work and the things that have been developed,
Given to me,
I understand that unless that love keeps an edge,
Unless that passion remains there like that,
I'm dead,
Quite literally.
As I remind you,
I am reminded,
And as I am reminded,
I want to remind myself again,
That what a horrible life it is to look out at the world and fear anything about it.
What a horrible life it is to have an enemy of any kind.
How immensely painful and full of fear it is to be set against anyone or anything,
Which doesn't mean that I automatically,
How do I say this,
It doesn't mean that I accept what I know is wrong,
But there is an allowance for another order of relationship with it by which I can begin to realize that not only do I help seed the very suffering that I resist when I see someone in pain,
But I myself have become a participant in the perpetuation of everything that's killing this planet and the people on it.
So what is this similarity?
How can we understand it so that when we have these moments when we run into people or places or problems and they set us off,
How can we begin to understand that through agape,
Through the love of something greater than ourselves?
What is this perfect similarity?
Because most of you,
I guess you attend most of the talks.
If you don't,
I invite you to find out about it.
Some of you can't stand the idea that this person that really sets you off,
That you have anything in common with that.
It's so distasteful to us.
We look at these politicians on the news,
We see the thieves,
We see the hypocrites,
We see the liars,
We see the snakes,
The world of monsters.
And by the way,
A human being that has no love in it or her or him is a monster.
And we are not born monsters,
But we are swallowed up in a monstrous level of understanding this consciousness perpetuates in order to breed the things that will perpetuate that consciousness.
What is this perfect similarity?
Take a deep breath.
I want to deep breath.
I want to look at this with you.
Over my 70,
Whatever years I have,
There are certain things that I love more than other things.
I'm drawn to them more.
Let's say I'm drawn to them.
And isn't that what I'm drawn to something out of love.
So there is this field.
Oh,
It's about I don't know,
Maybe half a mile from our house here on the mountain.
We go by it every day.
And we go into town.
And that you can that field,
You can watch it,
You know.
Now it's browned out.
And there's the horses and the mules in it.
It's all browned out.
There's this massive oak tree that sits in the middle of the field.
And if you had time lapse photography,
You would see that when the rains come now you can start to see the little greenness green under the dead grains,
Dead flowers.
And then that green gradually overtakes all that.
And then that green starts to blossom yellow.
And the wheat or whatever that is that's growing in that field,
It gets tall.
And so then at a certain point,
Then these winds start to move the flowers and the grains in that field.
And you can watch these waves.
And the wind as it freshens,
You can watch that.
You can watch it like,
You know,
Like a wave.
You see people,
I don't know,
Personally,
I don't understand this.
Going to these large assemblies of human beings standing on I'm number one,
And they make these waves.
Well,
Just like that,
You can see the wave,
And it moves across the field.
And in the observation of that,
There is a grace,
There is a beauty to that moment.
So much is expressed in that split second.
There were a person that write poetry for the rest of their life,
Because there's the onset of the wind.
And then as the wind touches the various grasses and the flowers,
The grasses and flowers absorb some of that wind.
And depending on how much wind there is,
You can see the wave start big,
And then you can see it diminish at the end of the field.
So that you can see like exactly like a wave would break on the shore.
And you get this idea,
It's all right there in front of you that that wave is no different than the wave of water when it washes up on the on the beach.
You can see all of this thing,
This relationship.
And here's the point.
The relationship between what would be seemingly two different orders of nature.
There's the nature of the wind.
That's not the same as the nature of the flower,
Is it?
You can see this,
Please,
You can chime in.
You can see the nature of the wind is obviously invisible.
It's obviously produced by all of these relationships between planetary movements,
Solar oceans,
That wind is not the same as the flower it moves.
And yet,
How can the wind move the flower unless the flower has something in common with the wind that's invisible?
If the flower didn't have something in it that corresponded to the wind,
Then the wind wouldn't move it.
So you'd have wind but you'd have a field of flowers or grains,
Grasses just standing there.
You'd feel the wind but the grass would be like that all rigid.
How many of you know,
Rigid people?
How many of us are rigid?
Defensive.
There is an invisible relationship.
There is a similarity between the wind and the grasses.
They are connected and one moves and the other moves.
And that dance,
That wave reveals not just the symmetry of that relationship,
But the perfect similarity that must exist between what would otherwise seem completely separate creatures.
Is not the wind and the flower,
The wind and the grass,
Are they not separate creatures in our mind?
The way we see it?
Yeah,
That's how we see it.
But now we're looking at this,
Wait a minute,
They're not really separate at all.
They have something in the symmetry and the similarity where one moves the other.
And not only does one move the other,
These similarities between these two of which I speak,
But on one hand,
There must be another kind of similarity,
Mustn't there?
Because again,
The flower is not the wind.
So that here am I,
And here is you.
Here's the person at the office.
Here's my brother.
Here's this person.
And they're nothing but a hot bag of air.
You know,
Whatever the expression might be.
They're an ill wind.
An ill wind has come into my life.
And what happens with you and I,
When that ill wind blows,
When he looks at me this way?
Yes,
Deborah,
We've become a hot mess.
When that happens,
What happens?
Tell me,
Please.
We go,
No,
No,
You are this,
I am that.
They're this way,
But this,
I am that.
They're this way,
But I'm that way.
And there is an abject refusal on the part of a mind that does not and cannot accept that there is something greater than itself,
That there is this relationship.
The flower is not the same as the wind.
The wind is not the same as the flower.
And yet the conditions between them reveal,
If we can see it,
An impersonal relationship.
This impersonal relationship that we can see exists is a revelation,
Isn't it?
Let me take this analogy further.
So here's the wind,
And it has some kind of perfect similarity with the flowers and the grasses.
Now,
Some flowers,
Maybe they're older flowers.
Maybe the stem didn't get all the nourishment that it could have,
Or that's not even right.
It just is what it is.
So some of these flowers,
When the wind comes,
They're like that.
And then maybe some newer flower,
Still a little strong in the ground,
Some blade of grass or a grain,
Maybe it's pretty stout.
But nevertheless,
Each and every one of them are touched and moved by something that they have in common with the wind,
Or the wind couldn't move them.
It's an impersonal relationship,
Again,
Born of an invisible similarity.
So that if we can see this,
Please,
Is not the wind connected to the flower it moves?
Is the wind that moves the flowers,
That bends the tree,
Is it not on one hand something that the flower and the grass and the tree oppose,
As I've discussed now a few times recently?
Naturally,
There's resistance in the flower to being moved.
The tree resists the wind,
But we can see that in the beauty of that similarity,
Of that relationship,
Out of that relationship between wind and tree,
Wind and flower,
There comes the beauty of seeing that.
So that beauty is an expression of an invisible similarity between seemingly different creatures.
And that same similarity creates strength.
The tree is strengthened by the wind that moves against it and into it.
So the wind is not,
The tree doesn't oppose the wind in the same way that you and I oppose people who blow hot air on us.
In that similarity,
There is the perfection of both the wind and the flower,
The wind and the tree.
In that similarity is the perfection of that relationship revealed.
And there's more.
Take a nice deep breath.
If that field of flowers wasn't being moved,
We would feel no corresponding movement.
There would be no movement through us.
Try to see it.
Obviously,
The wind that we see,
That's not stirring this movement in us.
And neither is the creature that's being moved by that wind.
Is it creating this movement in us?
Yet we are in that moment because we are able to see and directly experience that,
The whole revelation of that similarity.
Now I am the expression of that similarity,
Because within me is the flower,
Within me is the field,
Within me is the wind.
But the wind isn't in me,
The flower isn't in me,
The field isn't in me,
But there is a perfect similarity between the observer and the observed.
And it's in that similarity that there's love.
There's no judgment in similarity,
Is there?
In that similarity is compassion,
Is loving kindness.
Why?
Because in that similarity,
I can't add to the pain of another human being,
Let alone to my own by judging myself or judging others.
I'm aware of both at the same time.
I'm aware of all of it at the same time.
And how can I be aware of all of it at the same time,
Unless all of it already dwells within I,
A new order of I,
A man,
A woman reborn into another level of being.
An order of awareness that we can see is always present,
As few and far between as these moments may have been in our life.
And may God help you as a man or a woman and aspirant to begin to see there's no moment in which this isn't taking place.
And can I use my life increasingly dedicated properly to making room at the end so that instead of rejecting the appearance of this similarity because I oppose this quality or I oppose that character,
How can I oppose any quality or character that is stirred in me without that similar character or quality being stirred?
But our problem is that we're identified with character and quality.
That's who we think we are.
You're not character,
You're not quality.
Any more than a tree is just a leaf or a bud on it.
They're aspects.
And I can be,
Have this new awareness that we're talking about,
Which is greater than the sum of the parts.
And that bring this to an end about perfect love,
Casting out fear.
If in fact,
That other order of self,
This new mind,
This new heart,
If in fact it is there and it is,
And it understands its similarity in the light of similarity,
How can there be fear in the light of this love?
That is the infinite expression of our ability as God has given to us to realize that we are perfect similarity.
That the world that we see in everything in it,
Every possible light and dark joy and sorrow,
Every last part of it,
We have been made and fear disappears when that kind of love is there.
And instead of the rejection of the realization of the similarity of being moved,
Of being touched,
See,
We just so badly,
It's just so built into us to identify with everything.
I'm so used to not wanting to be this kind of person.
I'm so used to hating that kind of person.
I'm so conditioned to see any moment that runs counter to some possession that I've identified with as being a punishment set out upon me.
I'm so used to that instantaneous old response to the new moment that it doesn't even dawn on me that the prison isn't what's taking place.
The prison is the part of me that meets it that way and that resists it because it doesn't understand the flow of this similarity.
It doesn't understand the beauty of it.
The eternal ground of a relationship with revelation itself,
The endless discovery that God has made us,
The divine has made you and I in its own image.
And that image has no distance,
No difference,
No time in it.
It is just the pure expression of itself,
Purifying itself constantly.
And we are intended to be a participant in that relationship.
Then we are reborn.
Then we understand the real meaning of Christmas,
Of the high holidays,
Of loving kindness,
Of the Buddha mind.
All of these things mean the same.
It's we who ruin everything with our idea of what we know and what others don't.
Yeah.
So Merry Christmas to all of you.
But let's use it.
See if you can stay awake around your brother or your family or at work.
See if you can stay awake while you're driving in your car.
See if you can catch the anxiety telling you that if you don't deal with this fear,
Something bad will happen.
Because when you understand and feel the movement of that,
You'll understand the damage is being done in you in that moment by your identification with it.
And in the realization of the identification,
The gradual release of that,
So that just there's just this movement,
There's just an endless touch that is touching and being touched,
And the corresponding experience.
Be safe.
See you Wednesday night,
I hope.
Find me.
I speak three times a week,
Four times a week.
Let's work.
Let's explore.
Let's discover this similarity so that not only we can become a new order of human being,
But God willing,
This consciousness can begin to be changed a little bit at a time by our willingness to be changed through our revelations of it.
