Many of us are under the misapprehension that happiness is defined by a constancy of laughter, an absence of conflict and a lack of pain. But it is actually a much different beast, or should I say dove. Laughter without connectedness is just empty comedy, it does not last. Harmony without understanding and love is just a low form of tolerance. And no pain with no love is just a vacant existence. 'It is far better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all' (Tennyson) The real definition of happiness from a spiritual perspective is very simply about connectedness. The more connected we are with each other, nature and God the happier we will be. This happiness is about lasting fulfilment. It is not imprisoned by one or two emotions. At its highest, real and full happiness encapsulates them all. It is a little like the perfection of nature itself. It changes. Often. Some days there are cyclones, some there are tornados, often it is sunny and calm, at other times it is rainy. Every day, though, has its perfection. Every moment is faultless. Every emotion, every feeling is an expression of love – the more love, the higher it will be and the more connected it will make us. As we have talked about before, pain is like this. Even anger at its highest can make us happy. Most emotions that we call negative, however, are usually about disconnecting us from each other, it is only at their absolute positive pole that they become obviously loving. I have a friend who felt the most love in her life at the funeral of her son. She was extremely sad and in pain, but there were moments were she felt immense love and connectedness. It was the saddest and happiest and most connected time of her life. Many women speak of childbirth as the most significant moment of their lives. A time of the greatest pain, but also, perhaps the most love, the most connectedness, the most happiness. For most sports people, the ultimate experience often comes at the apex of the most pain. The runner, the gymnast, the ballet dancer tell of pushing through pain to effortlessness and blissfulness. Or to be even more mainstream, if you have ever done a fun-run you will know the pain and the bliss. Many artists feel they have to have pain for them to be creative. That their best works often comes at the time of most pain. Many people that have major tragedies occur in their lives, such as an accident or other near-death experience, recall these events as turning points, often as epiphanies of great connectedness or love. Others have got very angry about an inequality or injustice and that anger has fuelled a flow of love and connectedness that became immediately immensely powerful. This oneness is born in anger but immediately is transformed via determination into the flow of love that creates enormous happiness. Some people argue that Christ was not happy being crucified, but in that great pain, I would contend, came his moments of highest connectedness and greatest happiness. To be really happy does not mean there are not events that from an outsiders point of view look painful. The happy person sees all of them as expressions of love and is therefore happy. The point is that to be truly happy we need to fill every moment, every emotion with the highest love, the highest connectedness. This is actually the nature of God if you think about it. Being omnipotent means you are involved in every thing, every experience, the difference is God is always connected and knows it, and is therefore ultimately blissful, but also full of pain. Our paths are all completed in that blissful connectedness. No matter which journey we take to get there. In the end, it is the one thing that is sure. In the beginning, the middle and the end, we are one. The highest happiness is simply being in the highest flow of love.

We have become the kings and queens of prejudgement. There is so much information for us to take in it is almost a prerequisite for sanity that we develop methods of screening out the unimportant. The only thing is that the media, advertising the sounds and sights of the illusion are shouting all the time at us in CAPITALS TELLING US THAT WHAT THEY ARE SAYING IS VERY IMPORTANT. Sadly, we believe them and we start to filter out the wrong things. We start to believe it is really an imperative to be rich and famous and have power over others. We really do think that the terrorists are everywhere, that to be in fear is a normal state and that we need a facelift or botox to retain our worth. Even more than this, we become the experts of categorising so as not to experience a thing fully. If something does not have a name it does not exist. We look at things and measure and analyse their surfaces and mistake that for their reality. 'O he is gay, or she is too young, or too old, or too fat. He is a druggie, an alcoholic, he’s divorced or bankrupt' do you see what I mean? These dimensions of prejudgment are so insidious that we begin to be bored with everything because we have prejudged everything. We have seen it all. The reality is that we have actually experienced very little. Instead of scanning over the top of everything and labeling and prejudging, if we stopped at any single thing and experienced it fully in the infinite power and presence of now, we would find that there are universes within each thing we are not even glimpsing. Jamie was bored and uninspired. There was nothing to do. His playstation needed an upgrade, the internet was dull and his girlfriend was away with her parents. He thought about his future. What he might do. A surfer? A professional skater? ‘Nah’ he thought, ‘I couldn’t do that – I am not good enough’. He turned on the TV and sat and stared, flicking through hundreds of channels and falling deeper into his chair. He was overweight, lacking in confidence and too young for most things but already too old to change. His parents were out and he had wondered for some time what their preoccupation with alcohol  was about. So he decided to try some. A bottle of whisky had been opened and was sort of water colored so he poured a little into a glass and refilled it carefully with water. It was so strong on his lips and actually so distasteful that he immediately wanted to spit it out. But he ploughed on, assuring himself that it must be important because all the adults were drinking it all the time. The effect was immediate, he felt himself relax. As though there was a distance between the nothingness he had just been getting bored with and the excitement and ‘maturity’ of being more adult. Believe it or not his addiction had begun. He was no more than 11, but he very quickly associated alcohol and drugs with the distance he needed from pain and boredom and the things he did not understand. The example of most adults was to reinforce this in Jamie’s mind. He saw it over and over again that when people were troubled or perhaps did not understand why something had happened, drugs where there to distance them from the pain. And he was always bored. He had labels for everything and everyone, mostly they came from others but he enjoyed them all. He enjoyed the safety they gave him. He never had to listen or to think because all the labels meant he could dismiss a thing before it tried to change him. Whenever he met someone new, inside his head he would scan for a label, a prejudgement and then dismiss them. She’s a ‘red-neck’, he’s a ‘hippie’, they’re ‘gay’, a ‘muslim’, never done drugs or whatever it might be. The reality was while they were able to be labelled he was able to dismiss. And not listen, not change, not grow. Everyone was in a minority group and everyone and everything was at a distance and therefore boring. This approach of Jamie’s is quite universal. We are taught to stay on the surface of our lives, to stay with the ego and not allow the deeper introspection that might allow us to realise our other deeper dimensions. This is what the world of the ego demands. For it the past and future are incredibly important but the now is not, in the now it is lost. The ego is always striving to be one cm higher than the next person and labels ensure this. The ego will walk in a room and see tables and chairs that have a past and future, dead matter with a function and perhaps fashion. In a few moments it will have prejudged in some manner with labels and names and be quickly bored. But the heart will come and feel energy, it will see the color and energy of things, see the life within the flowers on the table, or even the table and chairs themselves. It might feel a depth in any single thing perhaps even a single point of paint on one of the legs of the chairs. The heart will feel vibrating energy, love all around and even the smallest thing will open multi-dimensional universes of perception and reality. The heart does not know how to label and name, to prejudge or analyse intellectually, it knows only how to feel. How to feel eternity and infinity in a moment. By the time Jamie was 20, he had tried every drug known to man, he had robbed and stealed and long ago been kicked out of his house. He lived now on the streets of an unnamed city with pain coursing through every cell of his being more and more. His overwhelming desire was for more distance. More distance from his pain. Distance from the things he did not understand. From the people he hated. From those that he ripped off. Distance was his mantra. Distance from his heart. Because it was his heart, his conscience, that the drugs were in charge of silencing. Then one night his addictions became too much. His blaming and prejudging every one and everything else took him to the side of a road with a syringe full of something that he knew was way too much, but it was all he knew. He hated himself. He hated that he couldn’t get this figured out. That he couldn’t be like everyone else. The world was screwed up and this was the only way to get distance, to get numb. The walls were closing in on his life. There was no other way he knew except distance. He no longer knew how to love and worse, he had no idea how to receive it. His mum and dad and sisters and brother had only last week came and offered to give him whatever he needed, had hugged him and told him they loved him, but he had returned to the only comfort he understood. He certainly had no idea how to receive their love. And as the syringe squeezed down and into the last of his veins, he felt the ultimate pain of regret. Of not seeing. Of not looking any deeper than the surface. Of not knowing the 'universe in a grain of sand' or the vastness of 'eternity in an hour'. He looked at himself there on the gutter with vomit oozing gently from his pain wrecked body and felt the lament of someone who had not seen. And suddenly he did. He saw the love that had surrounded him, the people that had cared, the leaves and the flowers that had tried to radiate energy and meaning to him, the raindrops, O those raindrops that splashed on his face. And the pain now was so full and all encompassing, the pain of regret. He looked up and there was finally a friend. No judgement, no labels just a friend with unconditional love. And in the pain he could finally see that it would be resolved. He would get another chance. It would be even more painful, but he would get another chance. He knew that he had to make it through and it would only come with this deeper seeing that he felt now. That even the pain was an exhortation for him to see. And finally he welcomed it, He felt the pain a wonderful blessing. For the pain meant he was still being given the chance to grow. ‘O blessed pain’ he thought, ‘O blessed pain, thank you.’ His friend continued to smile. Nothing said. And he realised something more. That all his life he had craved distance when actually all he wanted  to feel now was closeness. He realised that the labels and the prejudging kept him stuck in the ego, stuck in the illusion of the surface. He realised that just looking at something with his heart, just like he was doing now, he could see things with much more depth and authenticity. He realised all his labels did was try and identify the only part of a thing that was actually not real, that the real reality was far deeper and beyond the names and labels. He looked around and realised that science and our world had millions of different names for all these things but in reality there was only one name that made sense and that was love. All this was love. It was love in a trillion bazillion different guises but it was all love. Every label, every criticism had shut the door on another way love could shine through. His friend smiled broadly and they walked off. He had all the time in the world.

Topics Include: - how to get out of a spiritual funk - learn if you are on the right path, working at the right job or if you have found your soul-mate. - widen your meditation experience with group meditation The spiritual seekers worst nightmare In the spiritual community, a common theme is of getting stuck. We wonder if we are on the right path, whether we are working at the right job, if we are doing what our heart is telling us to do, whether our friends really understand us, whether we should move from our current location in the city to in the country with the cows and the forests, or from the country to the city, or from this city to another city. We wonder where our soulmate is, or if this is our soulmate? Whether we should be Buddhist or Hindu or Christian or Muslim or this sect or that cult. We wonder why in every moment it is not blatantly obvious that we are living our absolute highest? "To progress, we have to change.." The reality is that there is no career, there is no soul mate, there is no place, no city, no country, no one else that can add very much to our spiritual life if we are not present. We must realize that every day is not rainy. Every day is not sunny. Some days there are floods and tornados and some days there are storms and rainbows, and some days are just like any other day. But every day is perfect and there is only one answer to being stuck and that is the flow of love. We cannot blame our place or our wife or our job, if we want to live a higher life, we need to stop, be in the present moment and offer and/or receive love. It is that simple. If we are not happy, or indeed if we are not as happy as we were formerly, there is only one answer, the flow of love. We need to stop and be. In the flow of love. We tend to believe that if we had another job with more money and less financial strain then we would be able to meditate more. That if my life wasn’t so stressful, then I would be able to be in my heart. That if I find my soul mate, then I will be more spiritual. That I have so much to do to just function in my normal day to day life that I have no time to meditate or to be in the flow of love. That I have kids or my wife is sick or I just got fired or I was abused when I was a kid, or I am too fat or too thin, or I am addicted to drugs or alcoholic or whatever the story, because that is what all these things are, our stories. The stories of our egos, the soap operas of our minds.

Topics Include: - appreciate the power of the mind - create an ego that will serve you not you serve it.
One of the finest instruments given to us at the start of our life here on earth is our wonderful and complex mind. From the point of view of our meditation life the mind can be a blessing, but, if not properly trained, a profound hindrance. Its main feature is its malleability. This is also its problem. It can be made to believe anything. Indeed, it can even believe that it is in charge. It is programmed by its own thoughts, its own creation, and the more a thought is repeated the more likely it is to be believed. The mind is a master of habit. A habit is a thought pattern that requires no decision making process. For a computer this would be called a program. We program our mind by repetition. Just reflect for a moment how powerful this is. Just by repeating a thought pattern over and over, firstly it becomes a habit (so we no longer make decisions about it) and most often it becomes a belief, no matter how wrong it might actuality be. It is as though the mind is on ‘automatic’ and it programs itself by the things we repeat to it. It’s actually amazingly ingenious. With this very same process it creates an ego, which is really nothing more than a bunch of habits and repeated thoughts about what has happened - our past, and what might happen - our future. The ego exists only in the mind’s past and future. Whenever we observe the mind we see this play of time. The ego does not understand what exists in the now. The mind has very little to do with the flow of love in the present moment. However, the heart is completely in the present moment, which also contains within it the entire universe and all of time, i.e. eternity. From the present moment the heart in the flow of love projects out through the mind in intuition, inspiration and creativity. The mind and ego should really be a mouthpiece of the heart, but most often it gets so carried away with itself and its own noise that it completely shuts the heart out. It tries to make us believe that it is the only reality, and attempts to do this by always keeping us thinking about the past or the future, and never experiencing the present moment where it does not understand who it is.

Topics Include: Understand the relationship between charity and oneness.

Roger walked into what was sometimes known as 'The Lost City' and was immediately struck by the level of suffering. This was not one or two homeless and hungry, this was tens of thousands of lost, lonely and painful souls. There were those bankrupt, those ostracised for their colour, religion, their weight or lack of weight, their ugly faces or scars or criminal record, their sexuality, their violence, their mental illness, their lack of education. There were people everywhere, in everyone’s faces, most were barely conscious from a cocktail of alcohol and drugs and petrol and paint cans. Everyone was on top of everyone and all they seemed to want was distance. A mess of urine and faeces littered the landscape but mostly it choked Rogers breath. He could barely breathe without feeling he was going to vomit. Involuntarily already he had dry wretched but had been able to hide it feebly behind a movement of his hand. He stared away not because he meant to, but because he physically could not get his eyes to look. He had never seen anything like it. This lack of human dignity, lack of human self-worth. Then he recognised a face, a shining light, a nerdy, gawky looking girl he recognised from high school. She caught his eyes immediately and smiled. There was nothing at all attractive about her physically but in this place she exuded warmth and presence. All the suffering people around her seemed to gather another breath as she walked past.

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