This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
On The Wings of Love – Rev. Darrell Jones
DESCRIPTION
The foundations of love are taught in all traditions, this Sunday we explore the Four Immeasurable Minds of Buddhism: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity. Discover how your practice of love is necessary to bring greater peace, trust, and understanding to all our relationships in life.
SUMMARY
The talk covers the four “immeasurable minds” of loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity from Buddhism. It emphasizes the importance of self-love and practicing these four elements of love to bring greater peace, understanding, and acceptance into one’s life. The speaker encourages the audience to embrace the idea that they are the “most important person on the planet” and to work on befriending themselves and others with kindness. Jones also touches on the concept of the “drama triangle” and how to shift towards an “empowerment triangle” by choosing to create love in every situation. The key message is that love must be practiced and activated daily, and that one’s willingness to do so is what is truly amazing.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones:
Good morning everybody. Morning. Morning. I didn’t expect I got a little emotional hearing that song. Am I muted or can you hear me okay? Okay. Wow, there’s a lot that wants to come out today, so I’m just going to know that you hear the right thing I spent, it’s so good to be back here. The first impression of being here today was the feeling of connection to community and how good it feels to be in the room with people. So I thank you all for being here today. It feels good to see all of your faces. I hope you’re having that experience too. And I want to acknowledge I wasn’t here last month. My schedule was a little full, but in a good way. I had the opportunity to spend a week in northern Oregon with a number of teenagers from other CSL communities, 13 to 18 year olds. And my intention, I went by myself. There were no teens from Chicago or from this community. My intention is that next year there’ll be at least three going, I don’t know how old you are in the back of the room, and I’ll circle back to this at the end of the talk, but one of the biggest gems, and this is what’s, I wasn’t expecting this, the word willingness.
The willingness in our youth to say yes in the face of fear, in the face of uncertainty, and the willingness to step into community and to be supported by community was very powerful. And I was humbled to see that by some of our youth. It is what our world needs more than ever because I don’t know about you, I’m turning 52 next week, and as much as I like to think I’m young and agile and nimble and open-minded, I’m pretty pigheaded. I’m pretty set in my ways. I like things the way I like them and I think everyone should be like me.
But willingness is the thing. Alright, let me pull myself back. Every year the Centers for Spiritual Living, which we are a part of, creates 52 weeks of talk titles, 52 weeks of not only talk titles but supporting texts and quotes. And every year there’s a team that gets together to write that. I happen to be on the team in 2024 for all of the themes for 2025 and August is one of the months that I chose to wrote for partially because it’s my birthday month. So I thought it would be kind of fun to do this meta birthday gift to myself. I’d figured I’d be talking here, but I didn’t know when and I was really excited that it worked out that I get to kick off this month.
The theme for the year is rising higher, growing Deeper, which is kind of this interesting. We played with this idea. Oftentimes we’re always talking about we have to get bigger, we have to grow over, we have to become something. But it’s this idea that we go in both directions and we use that vision of a tree that whatever you see above the ground is also happening below the ground. There’s equal growth happening in both directions, and that’s where strength is to be deeply rooted in our spirituality. It’s not just what people see and what we experience. It’s this deep depth within ourselves that we acknowledge and on the Wings of Love. That was the title for this month. And we played with the idea of love flying. So the talk titles were the launch of love for the first week, then love’s ascent, soaring in love, and then if you’ve ever been on a plane, a little bit of turbulence in love and then love’s descent landing in some sort of love. So today let us launch love. Let us move into a new relationship with love. Not that the old one that we had was bad, but what if there’s something new possible in your life as a result of opening up to a new relationship with love as you heard in the song. Thank you so much to the band for doing on the Wings of Love. If you don’t know that song, I was nine when it was dropped in 1982 and my little 9-year-old romantic self loved that song.
And so Jeffrey Osborne, it’s been rerecorded by a couple of other artists, but I want to come back to the lyrics for a second. When I first listened to it preparing for this talk, I thought to myself, it’s a love song, right? It is Jeffrey Osborne singing to a Lover. But what if this was a song written by God to you? What if this was a song that Spirit was singing to you? Lover, what if this was the love of life itself? Speaking this poem? Close your eyes for a minute and take in these words being sung to you by the divine. Just smile for me and let the day begin. You are the sunshine that lets my heart, that lights my heart within, and I’m sure that you’re an angel in disguise. Come take my hand and together we will ride on the wings of love up and above the clouds.
The only way to fly is on the wings of love. On the wings of love. Only the two of us together flying high upon the wings of love. You look at me and I begin to melt just like the snow when a ray of sun has felt, and I’m crazy about you, baby. Can’t you see? I’d be so delighted if you would come with me. Yes, you belong to me and I’m yours exclusively right now. We live and breathe each other inseparably. It seems we’re flowing like a stream, running free, traveling on the wings of love. So if you take nothing else today here, that is God singing to you.
Whenever I work with people one-on-one or if I work in a group teaching setting, one of the things that I like to invite everyone to embrace and I want you to embrace today is the most important person on the planet. Do you know who that is? You. You are the most important person on the planet of 8 billion plus people on the planet. No one else is more important than you. Now, some people may argue this and say, oh, well my spouse is, my partner is my child is. They’re all important people, but you are the most important person on the planet. All the other relationships are other people, but you are the common denominator that shows up everywhere you are at the center of everything in your life. So this is the most important place to begin anything, especially love. Love of self is paramount. It is the most important thing. It is more important than anything else. Some may say, well, okay, but don’t get too big for your britches. Darryl, love of God is important. That is paramount. But remember in most new thought teachings, especially in science of mind, we and God are one. So loving yourself is the most tangible way to love God.
Could we have the first slide? So now imagine a bird flying, soaring in the air. What’s up people online by the way, sorry. Hi. You know my invitation. This is not an opportunity to multitask. You’ve got the rest of the week to do that. Be present for your love today. So the wings of the bird must move up and down and move air particles around in order for the bird to take flight, right? Imagine the body of the bird as love and the wings of love, our self and life. For love to fly. Both wings have to move. Both love of self and love of life, or love of others must move for love to fly.
Who here is desiring to experience some greater love in their life? And this is a capital L love, right? We can say there’s agape love, there’s romantic love, there’s filial love, there’s sexual love, there’s all these different kinds of love. I love all the loves. That’s why I use the big L love. So I’m not saying only one. I am sure there is some place, and I like to use this imagery someplace in your life. There is that almost desert light feeling with love where it’s dried up, where it needs water, it needs attention. So who desires to pour some water and to hydrate themselves with love? Okay, let us remember that love is not only found out there, there must be love in here at the same time, in order for love to fly, the book that I selected for this month to focus on comes from the author, the Buddhist monk, Han, may he rest in peace, an amazing mind, an amazing practitioner of Buddhist philosophy and principles, and he’s written so many amazing texts.
This one is called Teachings on Love, and this is where our quote comes from today. Thank you for reading that. And in particular, one of the things I love about a lot of all of the different philosophies, but the Buddhists love to have numbered things. There’s the four immeasurable minds. There’s the four noble truths, there’s the eight pathway, there’s all these I love steps. You can check boxes, you can tangibly hold onto things. So the four measurable minds are the four elements of true love. And I somewhat edited the text to not distract us from a lot of the different words. But the basic idea here is that there’s loving kindness, joy, compassion, and equanimity. And what I love about these is that most of them are written in a tense, that it’s about you bringing it into the world as opposed to you getting something right? I’m going to get joy, I’m going to get compassion. I’m going to get equanimity. I’m going to get kindness. We experience it as we practice it, as we express it.
And I love the way that he talks about living. He says, when you dwell in these elements, you are living in the most beautiful, peaceful, and joyous realm in the universe. If someone asks your address, you can say the four measurable minds, the foundations of love are taught in all religions. The foundations of love can be taught in all traditions. We want to accept and be accepted kindness. That is kind of the fundamental, even deeper than the golden rule to me. But today, we’re going to really delve into these four immeasurable minds of loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, and understand that your practice of these four immeasurable minds is necessary. It’s not a nice to, it’s not. I’ll do it when it is something that we must practice right now. If you desire greater peace, understanding, acceptance, and most importantly love in your life, and one of the things that I was really intrigued by was the idea that they are immeasurable minds, which kind of effed me up a little bit because I like data, I like information, I want to quantify things.
I’m a little type A, I like to do things right? Anyone like to do things right? Okay. But if you think about this for a minute, love is not about right and wrong, but we often simplify it and try to take it there. We try to make it measurable. True love I think is immeasurable because it doesn’t stay static. It’s constantly flying from one place to the next, and we must do what we can to fly with it. So embrace that idea of immeasurable. Some of you might be going back in your history and trying, well, was I loving there? Was I loving there? Was I loving there? Were they loving there? Were they loving there? And maybe they were, they weren’t according to your opinion.
The invitation here today is when you leave here that you walk out into the world and your goal is to experience love as your life moment by moment. One of the other gifts that I really enjoyed from reading thi not Hanh in particular, this book, is the idea that healing needs to happen, right? There’s the intellectual idea of what love is, whatever we may hold that to be, but chances are there’s some sort of valley between where you are and where that is, and there’s the healing journey. If we could go to the next slide, dumb. He said words sometimes get sick. Interesting, and we have to heal them. We have been using the word love to mean appetite or desire as in I love hamburgers. We have to use language more carefully. Love is a beautiful word. We have to restore it to its meaning. The word matri, which is the first principle of the four measurable minds, the root of that word is mitra, which means friends. In Buddhism, the primary meaning of love is friendship. So the wings of love, they move by us befriending ourselves and one another.
The hard part is in many of our Western cultures, we are taught not to get too big for our bridges or be self-centered or heaven forbid, narcissistic. So we self-deprecate or possibly even hide our love of ourself. But to truly love yourself to practice matri in the Buddhist context is to practice being your own friend first and then befriending all of the rest of life. As we make friends with ourselves and the world, the wings of love spread out and begin to move. So this is the first aspect of love, loving kindness. Has anyone ever done that meditation before? It is one of the most powerful and hard practices I’ve ever done.
It’s not easy, and I’m sure there are many of you out here that are like, well, there’s lots of people I don’t want to be friends with. Think of it as less of becoming a friend with someone. You’re not going to sit down and have dinner with everybody on the planet. We’re not trying to be friends with everyone, but you are befriending yourself and others with kindness moment by moment in the practice. If you’ve never done it before, you go through a series of stating these things. There’s lots of different ways you can do it, but generally, I like to say, may I be filled with loving and kindness? May I be well, may I? You start with yourself first, and then you go through and you call into mind someone that you love, someone that’s easy to appreciate and say, may you be filled with love and kindness and then someone neutral, someone you don’t really know, the person you see on the bus every day that you never say hello to.
May they be filled with loving and kindness. May they be well. And then you get to call into mind someone that drives you crazy, someone that you may even want to be violent with, and you’re a nonviolent pacifist. They get you that much, and even to that person, you say, may you be filled with loving kindness. May you be, well, you’re not being friends with them, but why would you not want everyone on the planet to experience safety, peace, acceptance, and love just as much as you want it for yourself? The biggest problem on this planet is that we walk around not accepting one another. We shame, we ostracize. That doesn’t feel, has anyone ever been ostracized before? Has anyone ever been shamed before? The next time you feel yourself going into that, oh, shame on you. You’re throwing a lot out into the world that is not actually making it a better place. Even if someone’s doing something that you don’t like or you think is harming something, the shame doesn’t make it any better. It just adds to the SHIT. You get it?
Okay, next slide. Just to go through these quickly, because time is of the essence here. The second aspect of true love is Una, which means compassion. The intention, the capacity to relieve and transform, suffering. Enlightened sorrows. Has anyone ever suffered before? It’s another thing that doesn’t feel good in life. So to try to lighten that load for yourself and lighten that load, it doesn’t mean that you have to take responsibility for what someone else does or doesn’t do, but when we see someone who’s done something and you can see them, we shame all over ourselves, right? Have you ever been in that space where you’re just like, you’re like you got the shame shovel out and you’re just digging yourself into a hole a little bit more and more, and then someone comes up to you and says, come here baby, I see you. I know that sucked, but I love you. That’s one of the best feelings on the planet. More of that, please. Okay. The third element of true love is mudita joy. The true love always begins. Joy brings joy to us in the ones we love. If our love doesn’t bring joy to both of us, it’s not true love. I really appreciated this because have you ever seen someone laugh or heard someone laugh and you’re like, what are they happy about?
It’s like we won’t allow other people to be happy. We all of a sudden get defensive. I’m not laughing. Or maybe we think they’re laughing at us and we just have all these stories that just are constantly grounding love and not letting it fly. And then there’s times, at least I know I do it, I’m like, oh, I don’t want to be too happy over here. I know those people are having a hard time. We mute our joy and just like if you’ve ever studied emotional intelligence, if you mute any emotion, you mute all of them. So people want more and more and more and more and more happiness, but they’re not willing to experience sadness. It’s part of the spectrum. You got to experience it all. Hear the invitation is to experience joy. Let it be a transformative emotion that we can experience that’s not greedy, that’s not selfish, but allowing it to activate joy for others. And then if we’re not feeling so much joy and someone else over there is having a little joy fest, what if we just, they’re obviously got enough within them that it’s spilling over. What if you accepted a little bit of their joy? Let it spark something within you. And then the last is the fourth element of true love is, which means equanimity, non-attachment, non-discrimination, even mindedness or letting go.
We are all so attached. I could end the talk right there. We are all so attached to outcome. It has to be this way. If it’s not this way, then it’s no good. What if you let go a little bit and there’s this interesting we need in terms of healing words and healing phrases. Letting go doesn’t mean being irresponsible. Letting go doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means that you loosen your grip on the neck of life telling it how it has to be. You are one of 8 billion plus people on the planet. Your opinion matters, but there’s a lot of others. We got to work together to figure this place out. We can soften a little bit of how we hold things. This I believe is one of the hardest ones to practice. Equanimity is at least in the West. So the next time you listen to the news or read about the news, notice how most of the articles are about someone being attacked or wronged, whether it’s a politician, a famous actor, a musician, a business leader, a teacher, a lawyer, a parent, a child, anyone highlighted in the news today is usually either a victim of attack or a perpetrator of attack or they’re highlighted as a hero or some super savior that’s come in and changed the day.
Whether you know it or not, you and me and everyone on the planet, we are addicted to drama. Anyone ever heard of the drama triangle? Can I have the next slide please?
This is a tool that is used in the world of psychology and coaching to help the individual understand their part in every dramatic relationship. It is like that. The world is addicted to it. We can’t get enough drama and to put this next to the four measurable minds of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Drama is not love. Many of us are addicted to drama because it makes us feel something, but I guarantee what you are feeling is not love, at least not in the context of the four measurable minds. Now we can flip this drama triangle and turn it into what some call an empowerment triangle.
We are here to grow our capacity to love every day for the rest of your life. There’s no plateau to get to. There isn’t a perfect level or a stage that we get to and acquire the perfect amount of knowing. Rather, life continues to give us opportunities to expand our capacity. We often think that because something that we don’t like, something that isn’t pretty, something that we perceive as a threat, we get sucked into the drama triangle. It’s trying to happen to me. Now, don’t get me wrong, things happen to us. I’ve talked about this before. I’m not denying or saying that something didn’t happen or something doesn’t exist or that we don’t have rough experiences, but we have the opportunity to flip this triangle upside down. Each moment we can embrace the empowerment triangle. We can put love in the center of our hearts and in our minds and in our lives and embrace that we are a creator of love. How can I create love in this situation?
How can I be a coach for love? Maybe it’s not all about you. Maybe someone else is struggling. How can you be a coach for love? Or maybe something is really, really wrong. Someone is actually under attack and threatened and you need to put your hand up and be a challenger and say, excuse me, love is not present here and we need some more love. As we practice, we spread and flap the wings of love for ourselves and everyone around us. Not to be a savior or a hero, but to be a responsible citizen of our planet earth, contributing to love as opposed to something else. We don’t have the luxury wait for something or someone to change or something else to happen. We are the ones. You are the one. You are the one.
Love yourself first. Love your life and love all the people in your life. And I guarantee that our communities, our families, our environments will begin to shift. If God is all that there is and God is love, then why would we discriminate and say something or someone is not God or not love? Why would we not love the God that we are ourselves? There’s no one else in the world like you, so why would you try to be something that you are not? That’s one of the most humbling practices that I’ve been doing for 52 years. I keep trying to contort this thing into being something else other than Daryl Amani Jones. I’m not Daryl Bernard Jones. I don’t know who that is, but I’m sure that’s a magnificent manifestation. But I’m the only Daryl on this planet that looks like me, that was born at five 30 in the morning on August 10th, 1973 to the parents that I had on the location where I was having the full trajectory of my life of ups and downs, stumbles and falls, picking up and coming down to bring me here to this moment, to be in this room with you with all of your histories that no one else could possibly recreate.
You’re picking up what I’m putting down.
Love yourself. Love your life. Let loving and kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, breathe and fly in your life. It’s not static. You’re never going to get there. Some people’s eyes just bulged a little bit. You’re never going to get there. Let’s come back to a bird for a moment. Do they ever get there? A bird never gets there. They’re always flying their entire life. What the hell? Be a bird. Know that you’re never going to get there. You may make a nest over here and you get comfortable, but you still got to fly out and do something. You have to activate love every single day. I want to remind us all that this is not a practice of getting love. We are not giving to get.
This is about being love everywhere, regardless of what other people do or don’t do. Flapping the wings of self-love and love of life. Take guidance from the way Hanh describes these. Again, maitri love and kindness is the desire to offer happiness, not get happiness, to be happiness for the world. Karuna, compassion, the desire to remove suffering from other people, to be of service, to helping other people relieve just a little bit of discomfort in their world. Three. Joy, the desire to bring joy to people around you and allowing their happiness to bring you joy. And then finally equanimity. Cia, the desire to accept everything and to not discriminate. I want to end today with an affirmation.
I am amazed by my willingness to practice love. I am amazed by my willingness to practice love. I am amazed by my willingness to practice love. Think about that for a minute. If you bump into something in life that just totally upsets you and you stop for a minute and say, I am amazed by my willingness to practice love instantaneously, I guarantee you will step into that discomfort in a different way. And if you walk into a room and you haven’t seen someone in a while and they totally light you up and you’re so excited to see them, and you still say to yourself, I’m amazed by my willingness to practice love, it never takes away anything. It only augments the love that you’re experiencing. I’m amazed by my willingness to practice love. Bring your hands to your hearts. I am amazed by my willingness to practice love.
I am amazed by my willingness to practice love. I’m amazed by my willingness to practice love. I’m amazed by my willingness to practice love. So may we remember this affirmation in some way, shape or form, even if we just say, I practice love. What I affirm and know right now is that the wings of love are spreading and continue to spread. May we step into this week flooring soaring and flying, bringing our loving selves into the world so that we can not only give it, but receive it to be in that back and forth flow, the love of self and the love of life. I’m so grateful for the fulfillment of this word and for our practice of this love may it enrich all and so it is.