March 28, 2020 Saturday Evening, Covid-19 Zoom Retreat
The Power of Love to Create the Future We Seek Through Knowing Our Oneness
Barbara: Good evening to you all. I hope this has been a helpful day for you. It’s good for many of us to just settle back and have some quiet time to meditate, if nothing else. And while practice definitely helps, I hope hearing dharma talks and instructions and just gathering together as a sangha has helped people feel less overwhelmed and uncomfortable with the situation.
(announcements)
There are other wonderful things you can do other than formal meditation practice. Getting outside to walk. Just as we finished earlier, before lunch, suddenly I looked up at the window here and saw a dear friend looking in the window at me. She finger-spelled to me, “I just came to say hi.” And she reached her arms out in a hug outside the window, I walked up to the window and, hand to hand, we hugged each other, with the glass between us. She hugged Hal that way too. If you have friends in your neighborhood, simply go and knock on their window and wave hello. You can do that safely from a distance. Remember, the trees, the flowers, the rabbits, the squirrels, they all want love, too. Lots of ways to connect.
(announcements)
I’m going to bring Aaron in and let him start. When Aaron incorporates, my consciousness is out of the body. I’m literally not here. I have no idea what he’s saying, I don’t hear what he’s saying, at all. I’m out of the body; he’s in the body. One at a time in the body! I will give you Aaron now, and I’ll see you all in the morning. Thank you.
Aaron: My blessings and love to you all. I am Aaron. We have been through the basic dharma truth today: everything in this conditioned realm arises from conditions and ceases when the conditions cease.
This Covid-19 virus is a conditioned thing. What are the conditions out of which it arose? If we want any conditioned thing to release itself, we need to ask, what are the conditions that are holding it in place? Let’s explore that a bit together.
In your world there have been plagues; there have been wars. There have been extreme environmental conditions—the Ice Age, for example. In the past 50 years or so you have been inching toward the extreme in many areas of conditions, such as extreme environmental deterioration with the melting of the polar caps, with the warming of the earth, the rising of the seas, and the weather changes these have brought. The Earth is approaching a point where it is no longer going to be able to sustain life if things continue this way.
There were times—back in the 60’s, for example, and the Cold War—where people were aiming a huge number of nuclear missiles at each other. How many nuclear missiles does it take to destroy the world? And you are still building bigger and bigger nuclear weapons. There are many groups of people on Earth who are literally starving to death or being killed by enemies who hate them: people in refugee camps; people living in extreme poverty. How long is this hatred going to be sustainable?
Now, here I deviate from the traditional dharma talk. I realize that in doing so I may cause discomfort for some people. Normally in a talk like this I would try to keep it to clear, straight dharma; what you can know from your own experience. There’s nothing I will say here that you cannot know, but perhaps not from your remembered human experience of this lifetime.
Remember, you are old souls. This is not your first go-around here, and I presume it will not be your last. The question will be, what kind of world do you choose to live in—not just your children and your grandchildren but YOU. Do you want to have to live in a sterile cube of some sort, needing to put on a gas mask when you go out? Do you never want to be able to walk beneath the blue sky? Do you want to have to live a lifetime on the most minimum of food? What do you want?
Do you instead to choose to rejoice, to sing and dance with your dear friends out barefoot on the grass? Do you choose not to have more animal species become extinct, including the human? What do you choose? Everything arises from conditions and ceases when the conditions cease. You are part of those conditions.
How can you work with this right now, in this moment, in this lifetime? Most of the very uncomfortable conditions of the past came because people were more or less consumed by fear and reacted out of feelings of hatred. Is this how you want to live?
Now let me skip to a different picture. Covid-19, so named, is a virus that has existed for a long time. It is advantageous: when it sees a place where it can take advantage, it will. I think here of small animals like rabbits who were transported to a different continent, Australia, and because there were no predators they took over. One rabbit was fine; a dozen rabbits, fine. Ten million rabbits destroying everything in sight—didn’t work. That which would naturally stop the growth of these rabbits at a level which was manageable, that was non-existent.
That which will stop the growth of Covid-19 is love. It really is as simple as that.
Too many of you have forgotten how to love; how to keep your hearts open; how to cherish everything. Too many of the human population on Earth are living from a place of separation and have forgotten their essential connection with all that is. Covid-19 did not build itself up here with an intelligent thought, “Ah, I’m going to kill people.” Not at all. It did not come, either, with the thought, “I’m going to teach them a lesson.” Simply, the natural balance of openheartedness, connection, and love has been fading away. This created the environment in which such a virus could thrive.
It’s up to you to draw the lessons and respond in a more wholesome way, if the human race wishes not to be, —I would not say destroyed; some will remain, but if you do not wish millions and millions of deaths. I’m not saying that to scare you. I do not think that’s going to be the outcome— now is the time to act, to choose to live literally as if everything on the Earth was an expression of the Divine, including yourselves.
Think here of a sun and the child’s drawing of the sun, which is a circle with points as rays emerging. This is obviously a metaphor; the sun is a conditioned thing. If we call this metaphorical sun the source, the essence of love and light, the essence of the Divine, God, Goddess, Love, then everything that expresses from the sun is also part of that source and light.
As soon as you begin to act, to live, as if only part of what expresses from the sun is beautiful and to be cherished and the rest is not good, but is something to be eradicated, you create a duality of good and evil. But everything is an expression of love. Let me explain what I mean by that. Am I saying that a murderer is an expression of love? The essence, the awakened essence of that murderer is not a murderer, it is the Divine itself, but it became distorted.
When I say ‘distorted’, please think of a bright flashlight shining down on a smooth body of water like a lake. It is night time—you can see the light seem to bend where it hits the water because the water is of a different density than the air. You see the light hit the water and deflect, and it seems to be a bend, a distortion of the flashlight beam. That which you call evil is simply love hitting a heavier density and expressing itself as a distortion. This does not mean you say, “Oh, it’s just a distortion; let it go. If it wants to kill, let it kill.” But you cease to think of it as other than God, Goddess, Love. You begin to know it as something that moved into a distortion but at its essence still is love.
It’s hard to find the right words, here. For some of you the word ‘God’ or ‘Goddess’ doesn’t have much meaning. ‘Creator’ doesn’t have meaning, ‘Source’. Let us simply call it That Which Is, or Essence.
We start stories “In the beginning…”, but in this story there is no beginning. Love was, it simply was and always has been. At first, it was as your biblical opening verses say, without any expression, the Earth void of anything. Love simply was. It could not be seen or heard, but it was.
Love wanted to know expressions of itself. Perhaps it felt lonely; who knows. So, it said, almost as the Bible states—but beware, I’m not quoting the Bible. I certainly do not give you the Bible as a statement of fact. But yes, “Let there be light.” That might be a metaphor for, “Let there be expressions of myself.” Love looked at light and said, “Yes, I like light. Let there be joy—yes. Let there be things growing on this ball of rock—fertile soil and plants. Let there be seeds.” Love did not say, “I created that.” Rather, it held the conditions so that the earth and all that grows and lives upon it, the seas and all that grows and lives within it, could come forth because the condition of love, of creation, of the power to co-create, existed. When sentient life came forth, the power to create came with it, because each of you is a direct expression of that love and light, nothing less.
You have so much power, but you misuse your power when you live in fear. Then you have the tendency to build walls, to imprison anyone who is different from you; to not regard each sentient being as part of you, or at least as a direct sister, brother—a beloved one.
As the Earth grows more and more into this duality, life becomes unsustainable. The power, the growing power of coronavirus is one reminder of this, a very potent, and I would say, a timely one. How long were you going to continue destroying the Earth’s environment, hating each other and pointing weapons at each other? How long? Is it time for that to stop?
The coronavirus did not come forth with an intellectual idea, or even a specific will, “I’m going to stop it.” Rather, its coming forth gave you something to focus on. Because the conditions were present for it to arise, it arose. And those conditions involved lowering your vibrational frequency, living in fear, living in hatred.
Some of you who have known me for 30 years and more have heard me say very often, you are here in the incarnation to learn how to live with love. This is why you came into the incarnation. Yes, there is karma. Karma drew you back. But there is also a free will. You have the ability to come back into this human form and live it differently than you have before, live it truly knowing the divinity of every sentient thing, and even that which is not known to be sentient, like the blue sky; knowing that everything matters.
You get to this insight through your vipassana practice, watching how you contract with fear, with anger, and beginning to see that you do have a choice. You always have a choice. Nothing can make you hate or strike out in hatred at another being. You always have a choice. But it takes practice.
So you practice in all the little ways. Maybe you sit in meditation outside, and suddenly a fly is flying around your head. Hearing, or maybe feeling it walking on your forehead. Touching, touching, contact, consciousness. Unpleasant feeling. Impulse, wanting to brush it away or, even more, swat it. A mental formation of hatred, of separation, arises. How long do you have to practice before you catch that arising mental formation of separation before you come back into your heart and remember, “This is not how I choose to live.”?
Coming back to another biblical metaphor, the Garden of Eden. At some point, each of you lived fully in non-duality, knowing your oneness with All That Is. But then you were curious, and you wanted to have your own free will, to manifest that free will. This choice is an essential part of maturation. You know that a baby at the start does not differentiate between itself and its mother. It sees the mother as part of itself. Could it live through its life feeling that? No. It needs to know, “I am.” Ram Dass, in a recent video that he made, calls it, “somebody training”. Every baby goes into this “somebody training.” You have to learn that you’re a somebody, separate. But then you have to take it the next step, to go past that illusion of separation, which came to you just for the purpose of teaching you. As you begin to know, “No, I have never been separate,” you understand the power of the free will that you have as expression of the One. Each of you, all of these beautiful faces out here, each an expression of the one heart, one awareness. That which is awake, Dharmakaya, each of you is a precious expression of that. Now, are you going to express the bend, the distortion, seeking only for the self, or are you going to express as the clarity, the love? Here is where your vipassana practice helps you to see what is truly for the highest good of all beings and offer it in love, and what is not.
This Earth was reaching a point where in another 50 years it was not going to be viable, if you had not already destroyed it through nuclear war. It would not be viable because you were destroying the climate, because so many beings were caught in fear and hatred. So I see Covid-19—I cannot say it intentionally came for this, of course; I’ve already said that. But you are being offered an opportunity here to stop, to stop the mad rush for more and more possessions; the mad rush for more and more personal power; the mad rush for separation of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’. You are given a precious time to move into quiet space and reflect: what is the world I wish to see in a year? In 5 years? In 10 years? If I know what it looks like, I will know how to get there. Use this precious time to meditate daily and reflect: what is the world that together we can co-create so that all beings from the tiniest plant to the largest redwood, the tiniest ant to the elephant, so that all beings may live in peace?
We offer the prayer, “May all beings be free of suffering. May all beings be happy and have peace.” You are the expression of love. You are the expression of the Divine. As such, you have immense power to co-create that which you seek. Or you can give up and say, “I can’t do it.” The illusion is, “I’m too small. I’m powerless.” You are not powerless. Join together hand to hand and create that which you seek to create.
Watch the arisings of fear, of anger, of doubt, and remember—not learn, remember, how to relate to them with an open heart; not as something that is ‘evil’, because there is no ‘evil’, but as that bend that needs attention to bring it back into a straight line, into a full knowing, “I am love.”
Say it with me, all of you out there: I am love. I am love. I am love. I am love. Say it and remember it.
Your Earth is never going to be the same again, now that Covid-19 has sprung forth on it. Hopefully it will be better, and not worse. This choice is yours, what comes of this catalyst. The Earth was never the same again after the first atomic bomb was dropped. You have harnessed the use of atomic power and put it to some very good uses, and put it to some very unskillful uses, too. The world was never the same again once fire was developed, that man could create fire. Think of the wonderful and the unskillful uses of fire.
How are you going to put this together? You are love, my dear ones, and you have the choice: I choose to express in this world as love, to touch everything with love. In this way I choose to overcome that which has pushed me and the world into distortion, to truly love , knowing we are all brothers and sisters expressing out of that Light.
Your practice is a most powerful tool for this. Mindfulness is a most powerful tool. When you practice, remember not just to practice within the mundane realm but to invite the deepening of practice so you have experiences of the supramundane, of the Unconditioned, because these will change you. These will help you to know who you are, what you are. You can spend forever just moving around in the mundane realm, saying, “Some day I’m going to wake up. Some day I will experience the Unconditioned and then I will know.” Why not today? Isn’t it time?
When you practice, watching objects arise and fall away, become aware of that moment when an object arises and then ceases and there’s a moment before anything else arises into your attention. Rest in that space. Get to know that space between the objects. That space is vast, and you’ve only touched the edge of it. Get to know that space, the awakened heart moment. Start to know yourself as that expression of love, of God, Goddess, Divinity. You are That. Start to know that. Then start to see that everything else is also that, so you can treat it with more respect.
Use this time to reevaluate what your lives have been about and what you seek for the world in the future, what you seek for yourselves in the future. Coming back to a favorite quote, “If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.”
There’s so much more I could say to you, so much more that could be shared, but perhaps this is sufficient, just to remember: You are love, and you have the power to choose love in every moment. But you cannot do it without practice. When something pushes you, instead of pushing back, stop and say, “Thank you. Thank you for that reminder.” Then, you don’t have to stand there and let yourself be batted about. Step back and say no. “No, you may not push me in that way. No. You are also love. Do you really want to push me?” And if it says, “Yes!” then back away, go someplace else. Say no clearly and step back.
Sometimes the stepping back will mean not literally stepping back but holding your place. Barbara spoke earlier of the movements for peace and human rights, and how non-violent action from a heart of love, from ahimsa, the essence of non-harm; how this can shift everything. “No.” When enough people are willing to say no to hatred on this Earth, to misuse of Earth’s resources, to the misuse of the Earth itself, it will happen.
Trust the power that you have, all of you, to do that. Everything arises from conditions, and when the conditions cease, it will cease. It is up to you to help bring forth the cessation of the conditions that cause fear, hatred, and the destruction of everything you hold dear. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.
I see that it’s 8:25pm. I’m going to ask if John will come in and lead us in one last chant. I thank you all for this time with you. I hope what I have said has been helpful and will inspire you to open your hearts in love, not to fear; to know how powerful you truly are to co-create the Earth you wish.
I’m not a dreamer; I’m very much a realist. You can do it. I do not predict the future, but I know science can find ways to destroy this virus. That will come. But there will be other viruses. There will always be mutations of one sort or another. Your true power is in the power of love to create such a high vibration that that which is destructive cannot find a place to root itself.
I love you very much. May you all be well and happy and have peace.