OVERVIEW
Most human love is conditional. Yes there are moments we experience a freedom in love, however, if we are really honest with ourselves we can recognize that the love we were taught and most of the love we have given or received was conditional. Conditional love requires a victim to be saved or rescued, releasing this empty power can truly transform any moment to experience real love in any area of our lives.
TRANSCRIPTION
I want to, before I jump into my talk, I wanna pull out a lyric from that song. Let them all pass all their dirty remarks. There is one question I’d like to ask. Is there a place for all the hopeless sinners who have hurt all mankind to save his own? Now, I don’t think we need to put people away anywhere, but this is the victim consciousness that we’re gonna get into today. We’ve hurt all of humankind to protect ourselves. That’s what we do when we’re in a state of victim consciousness. All right, people. You ready?
Here comes the fire hose. Releasing the empty power of the victim is the talk title in this month. If you haven’t been here the past three Sundays and heard the words of Reverend Judy and Reverend Amy, I highly recommend that you go and replay those messages. If you have not ever looked at the book Real Love by Greg Bayer, real Love and the Freedom for the Soul, I highly recommend that you make this in, you put it into your library. It’s a dense book. It has a lot of, um, thoughts and information, but it is truly something that is transformational if you really, uh, embrace what he offers.
And just to kind of sum up, cuz we’re coming to the end of this month of love, right? But love continues. I hope, beyond the month of February, just like I hope we celebrate all African American history and all history beyond the month of February. We want these things to continue to happen beyond the designated months or days that we, uh, bring them forward, right? Can you imagine if we only celebrated love for 28, sometimes 29 days? That wouldn’t be a great year, would it? Okay, I digress. The little description that I offered was that most, and actually I would x that out and say all, I’m gonna be a little absolutist here. All human love is conditional.
Ouch. Yes, there are moments that we experience some freedom in our love. However, if we’re really, really honest with ourselves, we can recognize that the love that we were taught, cuz we are learn. We, we, we are taught how to love. You may not recognize it, but all the interactions, especially those from zero to five, is all about learning about what love is. The love that we are taught, and most of the love that we have given to anyone, or that we have received ourselves was all and is conditional. Conditional love requires a victim to be saved or rescued.
Releasing the empty power can truly transform this very moment, this very day. And if you practice it regularly, all of your life. So Reverend Judy spoke to the idea of real love in the community, and we honored some of it here today with the volunteers that we come together to support one another, right? We aren’t islands. And the way that we really can broaden our understanding of love is in community and connection with one another. The challenge is, is that we get inside our heads and our hearts and we got stories. Anyone got a story that they like to tell? And so Reverend Amy kind of brought us forward over the past two weeks, teasing and, and, and helping us, um, see the ways in which Greg Bear talks about how those stories kind of jack us up, right? We are getting love or understanding love as praise, right? Someone says, oh, you did such a great job, right? We want to hear that again. We want to get that hit. We want the praise. So if they praise me, I know that they love me. So I’m gonna do everything I can to manipulate the world so that they say, you did a great job.
Power anyone like power. If your hand isn’t up, you’re lying. Everybody likes power. Everyone wants to be powerful, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, oftentimes the power that we’re seeking is to be one up on something or someone. And if that’s what love is, how does that play out? Pleasure. Everyone likes a little bit of pleasure, but pleasure is not something that happens 24 hours, seven days a week. But if we think that’s what love is, we will do whatever we can to get that pleasure, safety. Everyone loves safety. Everybody wants safety. Whether it’s psychological safety, emotional safety, physical safety. But that is not the totality of love. These are just ways that we experience humanness. The belief is, is that most of us think it’s either gonna go away, right? So then we do these protecting mechanisms. Whatever love we got, whatever scraps we’ve been able to scrounge up in our life, you’re not taking this away from me.
So y’all watch out mm-hmm. <affirmative>, mm-hmm <affirmative>. And then we’re like, but it’s not enough. I want a little bit more. So I’m gonna protect what I have, but I’m gonna try to get more. I’m gonna be secretive about it. So I might lie, I might attack, I might run, I might clinging. And today, Greg Bear talks about we act like victims. And I, you can, you can argue with me. Please do inside your head right now, and we can talk after service. I truly believe that if we learned the ways in which we show up in a victim consciousness and we’re able to release that power, that empty power, that is the behavior, that is the choosing, that is the living that will literally stop war on the planet. It will end abuse. All of the things that we don’t want to see anymore of that. We say, how can God let this happen? It’s not God’s responsibility, it’s ours. We’ve been given everything that we need. We just need to be a little bit more responsible with it.
So go back and listen to the past three weeks, let that kind of support you. But today I wanna reread the, the quote from the book to focus us on this idea of, uh, releasing the empty power of the victim. Everyone has the right to choose what they say and do fair all y’all online. You with me? Don’t check out, don’t multitask. Stay focused. Everyone has the right to choose what they say and do. Anytime that we are tempted to feel like victims and we’re tempted, I’m tempted every single day. Anytime we’re tempted to feel like victims, it is essential. Even lifesaving Greg Bearer says that we remind ourselves of the law of choice. It’s pretty powerful law.
And then he go, he uses some pretty strong language here in that there is selfishness and astonishing arrogance. Ooh, that just hurts. But it’s, it’s astonishing arrogance, actually of violating the law of choice by giving up the power to choose. Other people really do get to make their own decisions, whether you like it or not. Even the unwise choices that affect us in negative ways. That’s just the price that we pay. He says, for living in a world where we get to make our choices, we can’t let the law of choice work kind of over here or when we want it to. It works all the, that’s with the way a law works.
The choices that we make are the ones that us are essential to us learning and growing to live a greater loving and happy life. Just because other people are allowed to make their own choices, it doesn’t mean that we have to allow them to hurt us. And I’m not saying you need to go fight, but you still have a power of choice. Nor do we have to give people what they want. If it’s something that we don’t want to give anyone ever given something you said yes when you didn’t want to. That is the victim consciousness mind that he’s speaking about here. So we all know it, we’ve all experienced it. In the book, there’s a a, a really powerful, uh, pillar that gets presented throughout, and it was emphasized a lot in the, in the chapters that I’m focusing on today. And it’s this idea that at any given moment in time, we are standing in one of two fields. Now, I’m not usually one for duality as we talk about oneness, but in terms of the human mind and our human experience, I think we need to pay attention to this. At any point in time in your day, you are standing in one of two places. From moment to moment, you’re either standing in the field of life, feeling groovy, hanging out with Bob Marley, letting know that everything’s gonna be all right, or you’re standing in the field of death.
Take that in for a minute. Now, this isn’t like, oh, I’m trying to stay in one of those all the time. But we are toggling, we’re multitasking, right? We either stand in one moment, we’re in the field of life, or we’re in the field of death. And this isn’t a con a condemnation to anyone. This isn’t a judgment. This is, I just wanna break down a little bit of what’s going on here and stick with me because there’s, there’s something, um, powerful when we recognize this duality that can actually free us. So I, I hope by the end of this will all feel free. Cause I can see the looks on everyone’s faces. We’re like the victim. Heaviness is just setting in. But chances are that anytime in your life, if you have been feeling less than great about a relationship, less than great about you and your mind, your body, your status in life, your finances, your family history, the government, the show that’s on Netflix, whatever it is, if you haven’t been feeling great about any of it somewhere lingering in your mind and your heart and your consciousness is a sense of being a victim.
And again, not condemning us, this isn’t wrong. This is just calling it out. This is what it is. The mind and the heartset of the victim is experiencing our life as powerless, uninspired, and most notably living at the effect of someone else’s doing. It’s their fault. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, a victim doesn’t have agency. They aren’t sovereign over their own experience. Someone else has the power. Has anyone ever felt that way before? I feel that way every single day. I do every single day. At some point in time, I feel like a victim. So this is not an anomaly. This is something that is happening all the time. And we can do something to be in relationship to that consciousness. Does anyone want to have, uh, a superpower to stand up against feeling powerless? Okay. Does, does anyone want to have greater agency in their life? Yeah. Would you like to feel sovereign that this, not that you’re separate from everyone, but you get to govern and run this show right here, known as you.
Okay, let’s get to it every day. Then we must come face to face with our own victim consciousness. If we have any hope, desire, or aspiration of experiencing what we’ve been exploring this month called real love, we must on a day-to-day basis, my intention today is to give us some greater guidance and offer some tools to releasing the empty power of the victim. Now, I chose the word empty before the word power because there’s something really powerful. There is power in being a victim. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots and lots of power, but I equate it to that, um, that energy that you get from sugar, right? If you’re hungry or you’re just like, it’s three o’clock and you’re at work and you’re just like, man, I’m just a little drowsy. Maybe I’ll just go get a little, a little piece chocolate. Let me just go get a little donut downstairs.
I live above a coffee shop that has gluten-free donuts. It’s rough. Um, but we eat that. We ingest it, we take it in and we get a spike. We get a hit. There’s power there. But the challenge is, is that most of the time there’s a crash and our energy is even lower than it was before We consume that sugar. This is the same power that we find in the victim consciousness. We power there. You get a hit. You, you can manipulate and get what you want. But oftentimes there’s a crash. And the power that we had is empty. It doesn’t sustain itself.
Now, please understand, I’m, um, I’m not saying that that, that the being a victim is something that should go away because we, we, we bump into one another and we all experience this things, circumstances, situations. I am a victim. You are a victim. We are a victim to our experience. We get cut off in traffic. Someone else chose to drive like a bat outta hell, as my mother would say, and cut you off. A city bus breaks down on your way to a really important interview and you don’t get there on time and you lose the opportunity. That wasn’t your fault. You are a victim to that. Our romantic partner or a business partner does something unreasonable with our collective money and our finances fall out. You didn’t make that choice. Someone else did. A local company, their, the runoff from their production facility is leaking into the water. And now people in the community are experiencing health problems.
If we took the time, you could probably come up with 12 other things that you personally are a victim of. And if you don’t have anything, go home and turn on the news tonight. You’ll be reminded of lots of victims and victimization. And we need to be aware of this. And I’m not saying that any of these things aren’t real and that we shouldn’t be upset. We should be up in arms about some of these situations. However, we are reaching a point in our current history where I believe if we don’t start doing something different than standing in the field of death, which is the field of the victimization, the victim consciousness, the damage that is it is going to take, is going to be pretty severe. So severe that we aren’t gonna be able to do anything about it. The next generation that comes won’t be able to do anything about it.
And it may take a few more generations for there to even begin to be some healing, conditional or imitation. Love is what most of us know in our human experience. And it requires drama. It requires drama. In order to have conditional love, you need drama. I was just out to eat with a buddy of mine on Friday night and we hadn’t seen each other for a while. We’re having a great time. And this couple sits down and they, you know, everyone was just kind of like, there was a lot of energy in the restaurant and I wasn’t listening at all to what was being said by the couple next to me. But then all of a sudden the woman picks up a glass and just throws it at the person across from her ice goes flying everywhere and they literally just booked out of the restaurant.
That’s drama, right? And some of us kind of like watching that, right? We get a little hit, we kind of like watching the drama. Anyone like drama on tv, right? But all those are are stories that reinforce this idea of imitation or conditional love. And we act that out in our living. Drama is the core to conditional and imitation. Love. And drama has to have a victim. It also has to have a persecutor and it has to have a rescuer. If you’ve ever heard of the, the triangle of drama, that is also what Greg bear calls the field of death. It doesn’t do anything to add to the quality of our living. It subtracts. It takes away.
So if you’ve ever studied the kingdoms of consciousness, which is kind of one of the underpinning uh, things, if you’ve ever looked at visioning before, there’s the first level of consciousness. And that’s the victim. The thing that frees us, cuz that’s what we’re about, right? We want to get free of this <laugh>. The thing that frees us from that is taking responsibility. That’s it. And again, I’m not usually one about either duality or absolutism, but seriously, I don’t know what else pulls us out of being a victim other than taking responsibility for our experience. That’s it.
I really believe it’s the path to our freedom. Now, we may not understand that, believe it or practice it right away, but as soon as we are a victim to a situation, the second afterwards, we have a choice. The law of choice comes back into play. Maybe you don’t wake up to your, to the law of choice 10 years. Anyone still holding on to something that happened like 10 years ago? Oh yeah, we got it quick over here. He’s like, oh yeah, yeah, right Now you have the opportunity to choose something different right now. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what anyone else does or doesn’t do or what they say or what they don’t say.
This is releasing, you’re getting some power from holding onto that in some way, shape, or form. But it’s empty. Release that empty power and see what there might be. This past week was the national, uh, spiritual conference for the Centers for Spiritual Living. And I was down in, um, Dallas. They did kind of like three campuses. Some of us, I I know some people were on online here, Donna, I saw you online a number of times saying hello. And it was really cool. As I was this month thinking about this talk, the theme or the title for the conference was evolutionary Love for Today’s World.
And I think that’s what Greg Bear is talking about as real love. A lot of us think that love is a noun and it’s a destination. It’s a place you get to. And it’s like once all of these things come into play, then love will be here. And that’s what keeps us on the triangle of drama. That’s what keeps us playing in the field of death. We think there is a sp specific way that love will be realized and then, then we do all the protecting and the getting to keep that right. But real love is evolutionary and practitioners of this love. It requires us to be humble and admit to ourselves that there is something about love that we don’t understand for ourself and for anyone else in our life. And all it takes is a willingness to learn something new, to be shown something different than what we’ve been told, than those stories that are oftentimes running and running and running and running. All right. Is anyone familiar with a 51% rule? <laugh>?
Yes. I don’t know if anyone responded online, I just kind of found out about it. It’s a brilliant idea and I, I I pray that it does something to add to the freedom in liberation that you can experience today. The 51% rule, the basic premise idea is that there’s a tipping point in anything in our lives, but it’s not about scales being balanced 51% if you’re in a relationship with someone 50 50. But there’s this weird thing that we do that we give 49.9999999% and then we hold that little percentage point back and wait and see what they do.
Conditional love. And I know, I know you do it cuz I know I do it. But what if we tip the scales just to 51%? Imagine if throughout the day, if we’re all experiencing walking around being victims and thinking in that victim consciousness and we just went into 51%. At the end of the day, Ernest Holmes often talks about it’s not one prayer, it’s not one action, it’s the sum total of a day. It’s the sum total of a life. It’s the sum total of a week. It’s the sum total of a year. That is where things start to shift when you have this consistency. What if for one week, just 51% of your day was in a space of living, in the field of life as opposed to the field of death? That small little imbalance will rock your world in the most amazing way. Are you, are you following me on this? The rule of 51%. You don’t have to change everything. You just need to go one percentage over the scale, over the edge, over the balance that you try to hold in any relationship. Most importantly, the relationship with yourself of leaning over into the field of life.
The judgements are still gonna be there. You’re not gonna turn ’em off. Our nature is to preserve ourself. We’re animals just like your pets. When they hear a sound, they freak away. That’s why they bite. That’s why they go hide cuz they think they’re threatened. We’re not any different. But we do have this difference. The capacity to remember we have a choice. We don’t just react. We can respond. There’s one other book, um, that I was introduced to that I I just started and I welcome everyone to get it. It is called, uh, the Four Pivots Re-Imagining Justice Re-Imagining Ourselves by Sean Jin Wright.
And I’ve just gotten into maybe the first quarter of the book, but we had a workshop on it this past week. So I’d like super big download. And one of the big takeaways is the word pivot. In order for us to experience real love, in order for us to start tipping the scale into 51% living on the field of life, it just takes a small pivot. If you’ve ever been bowling before, you can throw the ball and all of a sudden it goes into the gutter, you throw the ball and it goes into the gutter. And then someone comes up and says, why don’t you try like pointing your finger, just pivot yourself so that you’re, you’re looking a different way and you throw it and all of a sudden you get a strike. That’s a pivot.
Planes are pivoting all the time. This is something that gets illustrated in terms of how we can change our lives. My wife right now is flying back from Atlanta to Chicago and that plane is not flying in a straight line. It’s not perfect. There’s all sorts of weather and things going on. So what is it doing? It’s pivoting here and there. It’s getting back on a course. It’s cleaning itself up. It’s figuring out the best way, but it’s small little movements. If you’ve ever been sailing before, you’re pivoting and tacking all time. Cuz the wind literally of life doesn’t just blow in one direction. It’s those small pivots that allow us to stay in the flow. It’s those small pivots that allow us to experience love, pivoting our attention just a little bit from that space of the victim consciousness that gets us into the place of trying to get more praise, of trying to experience pleasures.
The only way of love, and trying to protect and fight off any perceived threat that it’s going to go away. The small little pivots that we can make day to day, minute to minute, hour by hour is what we’re talking about here. So how do you pivot? There isn’t one way to do it in terms of the spiritual life and the spiritual practitioner. This is why prayer, meditation, journaling, taking classes, coming here on Sunday, doing any of that work is so important because you can only pivot if you are aware that you need to pivot, right? It’s kind of like waking up to being a fish in water.
It’s the only way that you’re going to change. And so here’s, here’s the practice, I guess for the week to, to bring us to a close here. I even noticed myself doing it. We, it it’s, it’s like a default, default way of showing up. When you run into someone, you know, say, what do you say? How you doing? What’s good? You good? What’s going on? And you’re like, oh, yeah, yeah. Things are, you know, things are pretty good overall. Yeah, life’s good. What did you just learn? Nothing. You didn’t learn anything about yourself. You didn’t learn anything about the other person. It just was easy.
What if you were to first start with yourself? And as opposed to say, how am I ask yourself? What am I experiencing right now? I, I engaged in a workshop that blew my mind. It didn’t necessarily take me to my knees, but I’m still kind of like reeling from it a little bit because it was such a powerful tool of awakening that has made me realize how much of the love in my life has not been real. Not because of anyone else’s fault, but because of the lens with which I view the world. So we were in this workshop and they were talking about different ways of connection. And this question, instead of saying, how are you doing to ask, what are you experiencing right now? And so we broke into dyads. And the job of the person that you’re with is to not say anything, not to offer any advice, just to listen and hear you. So if you want to do this with someone, you gotta have that agreement that you’re not there to advice give. When you do that, you fall onto the field of dun, dun, dun death cuz they’re trying to rescue you.
But to be able to speak and iterate what you are actually experiencing may shock you. So I’m sitting with this other colleague of mine, it’s my turn to go. I take a deep breath in, I close my eyes and I go, I am experiencing loneliness. I don’t know if I’ve ever spoken that out loud before. I don’t know if I have ever really experienced or acknowledged that I get lonely.
And then I took a deep breath and stepped back. And it was almost like this fast time reel of movie. All of the relationships, romantic relationships that I’ve had, all of the work that I’ve done in the various communities and centers and jobs, interactions with friends in my childhood, interactions with people last week, even conversations over texts that I had with my wife last week. All of a sudden I was like, oh my gosh. That is how the victim consciousness is rearing its ugly head in Darryl Jones’ life. The story that I tell myself underneath the experience of feeling lonely is that I am alone.
I’m alone. I’m married, but I’m alone. I’ve got the cutest dog, Charlie Jacobs and Jones, the baby beare boy. But I’m alone. All of you are in here this room with me right now. But there’s a part of me that feels alone. Now, I won’t get into the whole story as to how that evolved over my life. That’s for me to unpack. But if you want to ask, I’ll share it with you at another time. But do you see how asking that question of what are you experiencing right now, all of a sudden opened up the door to greater awareness? When I was humble and honest with myself, that gave me insight and has been freeing me moment by moment as I bump into, whoa, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m that. Yep, the story’s there as I’m alone. And if that is the thing that is operating beneath the surface all the time in terms of that scale, the 51%, my work is to try to spend 51% of my day outside of that story that I’m alone. And I don’t need to manipulate anyone else. I just gotta check my awareness. Stay true and present that that is a thing that has been developing over the past 49 years of this iteration, known as Daryl Jones on the planet. It’s not gonna change just like that. It’s gonna take work every single day. But releasing the power, that empty power that that story has instilled in my life and played out in relationships. Most importantly, the relationship with myself releasing that power over and over and over again.
It opens up to freedom. I’m reminded that I have a choice, that that is not the truth of who I am. The truth of who I am is that I am whole. The truth of who I am is that I am not alone. I am always one with the divine presence. Sometimes it’s with other people. And sometimes I am actually in the collective presence by myself and I’m no longer lonely as the result of that awareness. So I challenge you this week as we move into some prayer. Find a trusted friend, family member, confidants, lover, or do it with yourself, but ask yourself, what am I experiencing it right now? And with all the kindness and compassion that you can really listen to what you’re experiencing, it may be a little scary. It may not be what you want to hear, but I guarantee it is the movement, the pivot that puts you right in the center of your power to choose and step into the field of life. Release and let go. Let the spirit run your life, not the drama. Let the love flow in. And so here and now, I’m so grateful to remember the collective truth.
That there is a power and presence that is love itself. And it’s always available, it’s always available, but it needs us to move. We need to activate love. We need to welcome 51% of that energy into our day and watch what happens. And I’m so grateful right here and right now to declare and affirm that that is what’s happening today By the power of this word, by the collective intention to focus on real love. I know that real love is happening. Real love is happening. Real love is happening. Real love is real. Love is. And so it is.