The Cause of all Suffering and Unconditional Love

 There’s another little message,

we shout it out a lot, and I never get tired of shouting it out
because it’s so important and always relevant.

And that is that this is a place you can come however you are.

It’s so important to have places in the world, places in our lives,
where you can come as you are.

And then within that there’s an invitation,
not a demand, but there’s an invitation.

Why is there not a demand?

Because even God doesn’t demand.
Infinitely patient Life is with us all.

No thumbscrews.
No great pressure for anything.

But a divine invitation
to not only be as you are,
but to pour everything you are into this moment.

To not hold on to what you currently are.

You are currently a bag of human contents.
You’ve got mental contents, emotional contents,
energy contents, bodily contents.

Yes, come, bring it,
Come, come, it’s great.
Wood for the fire. 

And now the invitation,
and here’s the divine invitation,
now pour that back out into Life.
Don’t hold it on to yourself.

Because to hold it on to yourself is called suffering.

The invitation is to come out of suffering.

It’s only the holding on to the contents as an identity,
an “I am this”, that creates our block.
It creates a barrier.

Not that the barrier is even real,
because it’s just an action, isn’t it?

That is our inherent internal suffering
that can be relinquished.

Not by becoming better.
Not by changing the contents.
Not by improving yourself.

But by pouring all of yourself out into Life
and saying, I just won’t hold it.

That is the transformational activity of yoga.

And that’s our thing.
That’s what we’re doing together.

This is a place you can bring it all,
and then there is a divine invitation.

Because love is so powerful here
that it will accept you as you are,
but it won’t leave you as you are.

It will invite you to become more.
It will invite you to relinquish everything you think you are.

Because it will always be a limitation of yourself
to think you are just the contents of your cup.

How wonderful that we’ve done this.
I’m very happy to be a part of it.
Thank you for being here.

---

The power of three.

The power of three is that there’s me,
there’s you,
and there’s That.

My feeling is that relationship is never between two.
It’s always between three.

In fact, relationships between two are doomed to endless problems,
because they’re based on a duality that immediately brings conflict into play.

Even if we’re the best of buds,
even if we’re really accommodating,
we’re unlikely to agree forever.

Eventually, we’ll come into conflict.
That’s the nature of relationship between two.

But when you add a third,
which I would say is the God-power, the truth element,
the deeper presence that moves underneath and between us,

That one isn’t fixed in us.
It can move.
It isn’t locked into anything.
It’s always free.
Always based in love.

And that one creates true relationship.

This is the power of inviting in the third party
into all your relationships.

Even if it’s you and a thousand other people,
there has to be the extra one.

That’s the third force.

And it’s the most overlooked, underrated thing amongst humans.

That’s why we do nothing but squabble.
Nothing but create factions.
Nothing but create sides.
Nothing but disagree,
except for the club we like to echo around with.

Bring the third power into every relationship.

When we do that
something has to happen.

And that is, we have to soften.
We have to relax our position.

If there’s a third party to it,
we have to become more accommodating
than if it was just me and a separate you.

Now we’ve got this other thing going on.

It’s like having God with you all the time.

---

So in the power of three
I go in and then I go out

And that brings me into divine relatedness.
Which is the yogic game.
All experience. All things.

To cease to be unrelated.
To cease to be divorced from.

It’s a big ask.

The more you look into it deeply,
the bigger the ask is,
but also the greater the invitation.

The invitation is to become fully in relationship with everything.

---

The Kleshas

So the topic is suffering.

We are stepping into the recognition that
we are the creators of our own suffering

and we are only ever suffering one thing.

This is the message of the first klesha.

And that is:

You are suffering from your isolation from God.

That is all you are ever suffering from.

You are suffering because
you have temporarily created, through an inner activity,
an illusory barrier between you and your source.

You and God.
You and the underlying presence that is love.
Always free.
Always at peace.
Always clear.

You’ve divorced yourself from that
for whatever seemingly brilliant reason you have for doing so. 

So then the release from your suffering
is also the release of one thing.

It is the release of this contraction inside of you.

We all know it.

We know when we close down.
We all know.

It doesn't require a PHD.
It’s a human experience.

And if you can find a way to release that contraction,
you will cease to suffer.

Not because life changes,
but because you are no longer resisting life.

One cause of suffering.
One antidote.
One path home.

One.

---

You can of course not accept this.

I like that.
That’s really good.

Even truth doesn’t demand that we accept it.

You can go,
no I don’t believe that.
I don’t feel that.
I don’t think that’s true.

It’s fine.
Fine. Have a journey. It’s all cool.
No judgement.

Or you can go,
Did I just find the holy grail?
Did I just find my ticket to eternal bliss?
Did I just find the singular thing
that I need to take care of in my life,
to allow my life to continuously expand
into greater and greater openness to love?

And then there’s the work.
It can seem massive.

But it’s only one experience at a time.

You’ve only got this one to deal with right now.

Your mind right now, and mine,
could be trying to create all kinds of other experiences.
But actually you’ve just got the one.

So the yogi said,
just take the step in front.
Just do what’s in front.

See if you can open to it.
See if you can open just a little.

If not, no problem.
Open to not being able to open.

And just keep gently trying to open yourself to experience.

And you’ll start to liberate yourself from this mechanism.
You’ll start to understand this mechanism.

Because this mechanism isn’t bad.
It came for a reason.

It’s self-protection.

Has it got slightly hyperactive?
And perhaps locked in?

So our suffering becomes almost a way of life.

It is as it is.

My resistance to what is causes a contraction.
And that contraction causes me suffering.

My acceptance of it is as it is,
“I am here”,
releases me from the suffering complex
and makes me available to serve the situation,
and for love to flow from its source again.

It’s ultimately operational.
Functional.
Human.

So we are calling ourselves back to love.

We are suffering only our resistance to love.

And no wonder we suffer,
because we are, on some level,
experiencing being loved by Life.

How much will you let yourself be loved?

God loves you.

---

So we watched this amazing video.
Of a Benedictine monk called Bede Griffiths
Who’d been living in India
for about fifty years.

So he just fused the whole thing together.

He had no trouble at all in the end
being an absolute Catholic Vedantin.
A Catholic yogi.

In fact, he called himself a Christian yogi.

Rather than this and that,
he just went, let’s do this.

And essentially, to give you a feeling for it,
he had a near death experience.

For him it was a massive epiphany
and a breakthrough.

He actually had about a week afterwards,
after the stroke,
where he felt so on the fringe.

He said all the right prayers
to prepare for death.

And it didn’t come.

But he said he had the most amazing epiphany
of what was there waiting for him.

And he said, here’s the news:

It is unconditional love
that is waiting for you on the other side.

The only question is
Can you bear it? 

Have you made yourself in such a way
that you’re ready to be unconditionally loved.

He said, that is the final judgement.

It’s not some dude rolling down a scroll of your sins.

The judgement is this:
can you surrender into unconditional love?

And you train yourself for that on this side.

It’s tough on this side.

And interestingly, he said,
the experience of unconditional love
as you reach your exit point
is so overwhelming,
so powerful,
that it’s very difficult to resist.

He said, I think a few might be able to.
But most just go in.

To live like that
is to fulfill the promise of the divine. 

---

The first klesha is avidya, ignorance.

To ignore and deny this connection with presence.
To turn away from it.
To contract.
To become separate from it.

That is the single cause of all human suffering.

Loads of love.

Namaste.