Values and Metaphysics – John Adams
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DESCRIPTION
Nothing informs our activity in the world more than our values, the space where our inner world is reflected in our outer presence. Where are your values leading you?
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
John Adams (00:00):
Good morning. Good morning. How are you? Great. Good. I’m so glad to be with you this morning and getting a chance to dive into some of this teaching for today. Let me bring up my notes. So I’m trying to figure out which side of the podium I should be over here. Should I be over here? So Carl Young, after his wife had died, he had lots of friends and relationships and he had a relationship with a friendship with this woman named Ruth Bailey. And Ruth Bailey tells this anecdote. He had sort of this near his house. He had sort of a tower kind of thing, I guess. I don’t really know, but I like the idea of it. I think of him as this wizard and a tower. But anyway, so he had this tower. He had been away for a very long time, and when he came back he was puttering around with pots and pans and silverware, and they kept falling, kept dropping.
(01:10):
They kept going on the ground. So he decided, he said, okay. So he picks everything up, he lines it up and he talks to them and he says, look, I am sorry that I have been gone so long. That is enough of this nonsense. And that was it. And then he never dropped anything again. From our teaching, we can do it different way. So we can talk to the objects in our lives and address things that way. But most of the time we go internal, we go inner, we go into our inner belief. So whatever belief he had about being away, or whether it was guilt or some kind of thought pattern that was coming up for him, we address that internally. But I think you can address it either internally or externally, as long as we’re dealing with shifting that consciousness. Right? And so what’s wonderful about the way he did that is he took those objects, and maybe it was a bit of am amplification, but he understood that they contained the energy of home and he was addressing that energy.
(02:22):
And what I like about that is this idea of understanding that and seeing the world as expressions of consciousness. It is an out picturing of our own consciousness. So it is infused with this energy. It’s this energy of our light, the energy of love and life. So what happens is things stop being objects and they start being part of us. They start being part of our consciousness. I’m in this class called Speaking Earth that is about the intersection between nature and spirituality. And one of the things that talking about is this idea of seeing the planet instead of a rock circling around in the universe that we all live on, but seeing it as a living organism, this living thing that we have to care for and nurture and look after and tend to. What happens when we do that is we start to shift our consciousness around it. We start to think about it differently. We hold it differently. We aren’t as cavalier about exploiting the resources or tearing down forests and damming up rivers and so forth. It informs our values. It comes through our heart. We connect to it in a different way.
(03:49):
Let me just scroll down here.
(03:58):
One of the ways that we hold this, and one of the ways that this can come through in our socialization is as monotheism, and I wanted to talk about this for just a second. So monotheism is not the same as oneness. Monotheism is understanding that it’s instead of having a God of the river and a God of the sky and a god of the chair and so forth, we have one God. And the idea is in and of itself fine, but what happens is we start to picture it as a hierarchy. We have God, and then we have, usually it’s us humans. And then everything falls underneath that. And because of this hierarchy, we kind of lean into this idea that I have dominion over everything. I can do whatever I want. And we’ve seen this playing itself out in the world. If you look around, you can see how we tend to objectify everything that falls under us.
(04:57):
We tend to turn them into objects, even people, even each other. Over time, we have said, well, I can buy and sell people. I’ve turned them into objects. So we can see the dark side, the shadow side of that ideology. Oneness is different. Oneness is, I am one with you. You are one with me. I am one with nature. I am one with my pots and pans. There is no difference. And so as I care for myself, and I care for my consciousness and I care for my heart, I am caring for those things that are around me, that are expressing and out picturing from my consciousness into this world. And this is where my values come from. My values are expressed through all of this. And how do we get to our values? So let me see, where are we? Oh, Ben, I can’t even see Ben.
(05:52):
Oh, there we go. So our values come into us through our attention, our beliefs, and our passion. So those things that we advocate for as Gordon was doing, shared with us in the reading, those things that catch our attention, like the environment, it is something that it can ignite your passion, it grabs your attention and it affects your beliefs and clarifies your beliefs about it. So these are things that come in. It can be the environment, it can be any of the isms. It can be ageism, sexism, racism. It can be any of these things that start to clarify for us and form our values. And so the reason why I think this is important, one of the reasons I want to talk about this this morning is because we’re talking about moving from good to great to grand. And to me, the values are the catalyst that get us there.
(06:54):
It is the thing that drives us towards living that grand life. The more we embrace and express and clarify those, the more we move along that spectrum to live that grand experience. And so one of the things I was asking myself is how do we know what our values are? How do we identify them? There are a lot of different ways. There are a lot of different tools. But one of the things that can really help us know what our values are, something we don’t talk about a lot here in our spiritual community, something we don’t talk a lot about at Cityside, and it’s our next slide, which is anger. Anger can really help us understand what our values are because the things that make us angry, help clue us in to where we live with our values. So for example, I was driving over here today and people are being really crazy in their cars, and I was just like, share the road.
(07:52):
Be nicer. And so the value proposition in that is kindness, or it could be compassion or it could be collaboration, cooperation, whatever the word is that lands for you. And I don’t want to tell you what the word or phrase should be, I want you to find that, but you know it because it hits you in your solar plexes. We were doing some work yesterday in class, one of my classes over the weekend. And one of the words that came up for me as we were working with this idea of values was harmony. That’s my word. It hits me in a particular place. It means something to me that it might not mean to others, but that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. It’s a word that resonates for me. It is activated in me. And just as a quick aside, I’m kind of shying away from the word trigger or triggered.
(08:49):
I’m trying to get away from using that language because it evokes imagery that I don’t like. So I’m trying to use the word active or activated more just so you know why I am using that. But that’s what I’m meaning when I’m saying activated. And so what I want to invite you into is this sense of discovering those values, maybe thinking about moments when you become frustrated or angry and understanding, well, what is that? That’s making me angry? And then exploring taking it one step further and go, well, then what’s the value proposition in that? If I’m getting angry because you are being disrespectful, then what is the value there that I’m holding to? The value might be respect, it might be care, it might be love. It could be a lot of different words, but it’s your word that I want you to find.
(09:43):
So let’s move to the next slide. Focus not on doing less or doing more, but on doing what you value. So this is part of activating those values, bringing those into our experience to move from good to great to grand. And our next slide, your core values are the deeply held beliefs that authentically describe your soul. I really like this quote that authentically describe your soul. So as we’re living a spiritual life, we’re committing to that. We’re saying, yes, I’m going to be in the center for spiritual living because I am living a spiritual life, which means that it’s not floating in the unconscious where a lot of times our values do kind of float and hang out, but we’re bringing it into the conscious. We’re bringing it into our awareness so we can live intentionally. And what we do when we discover and explore these values and start to clarify them for ourselves, is we start to map our own soul. We start to really understand who we are in that context. And so on our next slide, I think it’s the next one, oh, I have another quote. Integrity is choosing courage over comfort. It’s choosing what’s right over what is fun or easy or easy. It’s choosing to practice your values rather than simply professing them. And that’s what I’ve been saying, right? Where we’re going to practice our values. So when we just profess them, I was thinking about this a lot.
(11:16):
We’re not really shifting our consciousness. We’re about shifting our consciousness living from a different kind of consciousness. If I’m living from a new consciousness, if I’ve understood that harmony is my value, and now I am going to see and seek that and express that in my life, that means yesterday when I was in class, I was looking for opportunities. But on Wednesday afternoon, I’m going to do the same thing. On Friday, I’m going to do the same thing. Every single moment my consciousness has shifted. So I am expressing in a different way. I am living that from a different place. If I’m doing that, then it’s just words on a page. It’s just an idea that I like, but I’m not actually shifting. So we really want to practice, put our values into practice and lift them. And that’s going to drive us from having a good life. It’s good, it’s fine. It’s okay to having a grand life. So let’s go to the next slide.
(12:20):
Next slide. Whenever we’ll get there. Hello. There’s no more. Oh, okay. Thanks, Ben. Somehow it’s like, oh, I know why. Okay, nevermind. It’s fine. So what I would like you to do is just take a moment with me and just enter into the silence and just find a place. Maybe you can use anger as a way to find your way into your values, but find something that really speaks to you, that pits you in your solar plexes. Not something that you think you should value, but something that you actually do value. So let’s just sit in the silence for just a few seconds with that.
(13:26):
Does that feel like a long time? It’s funny because in talks, when you give a talk like this, I don’t know that it’s expected that you’ll have silence, but I actually really love silence. And it’s one of those things that I really value because I can let go and let God, really, there are a million words and a million resources to find words that may work for you. Words like acceptance, compassion, connection, equality, empathy, gratitude, stewardship, service, prosperity, wisdom, wonder power. Power can be a tricky one. Sometimes we don’t want power to be our value, like oh, power. But I think power is about knowing that we have the power to change, knowing that we have the power to choose knowing that we have the power to set an intention and live it out. So I like the word power as a value, but sometimes you have to unpack them because we’ve had so many other things that have layered on top of them.
(14:47):
So when we step into this new centered, centered, love centered awareness, we start living from these values, we start to live differently, and we embrace into that the focus becomes much more clear. The journey from good to great to grand becomes clear. And I just want to clarify that grand does not necessarily mean big. Big and grand are not synonyms. I always want to say cinnamon, but it’s synonyms. You can have a big bank account, but that doesn’t mean you have a grand life. I know people who live on a shoestring and they’re the happiest people on the planet.
(15:37):
What does that look like for you? And that’s why values help us map our way and guide our way towards that path of unfolding that grand life that we’re calling in for ourselves. So just breathing that in and just knowing that. And of course, going back to the very first slide, Ben, can you bring up that slide with the heart? Yeah. So what we know is that if I had had more time, I probably would’ve made another slide. But these arrows go both ways, that our values will help us understand our passion, will help us draw our attention. What am I paying attention to? There’s a million things going on right now, and I can pay attention to this. Why? Because some reason it’s activating me and it’s activating me from a place of, if it’s activating me from a place of anger, it’s activating me from that anger because it’s speaking to my value in some way.
(16:41):
Maybe it’s not being honored, maybe it’s not being clarified in the right way. So these work both ways. And of course our beliefs are informed by our values, and our values are informed by our beliefs. And so we’re in a process of doing this dance with spirit and with our consciousness and with our life experience that what is out here is we set the pots up and we talk to them and we go, okay, enough of that, I’m sorry. Let’s work together world. And we can take that within. And we’re going to do that right now. We’re just going to take that into ourselves and we can work on our consciousness internally. And if you’re struggling with any of this, that’s why we have spiritual practitioners who go through a series of studies to become proficient at cleaning up their own stuff and learning how to look at their own stuff on a regular basis and can help guide you in using spiritual principle to really clarify and express and live from that value proposition.
(17:47):
So let’s just take a breath and come center together and just recognizing that we live in a bountiful, beautiful, expanded life that sometimes it doesn’t feel like that, but that’s okay. Just know that it is good. Just trust that it is good. Stepping into that with faith, with just this surrender into everything’s working out, everything’s going to be okay. I am okay. You are okay. And this love that simply is, it’s always there and it’s ever present for me and for you, for all of us, it is this love that is expressing us all that is through all the objects in the world. They’re infused with this energy, this field of energy, this field of expression, this field of life, this field of love. It is in the earth. It is in the rocks, it’s in the stars, it’s in us for we are one with it.
(18:53):
It is a towering idea that we are one with this creation, one with this creative love, one with this, all that is all one with spirit. It is never not there. It is always present. So from this place, I just say a word of blessing and thanksgiving for everyone just knowing that as each and every single person finds their way with their values, calls on these values has found their way with their anger to clarify, oh, this is what I care about. This is where my passion is. This is where my attention is going. This is what I believe about, that we live more consciously. We bring things from the unconscious, unaware, sort of habitual place and bring it up into the consciousness. And we create intention. We live intentionally. And by doing that, we expand and brighten and lighten the spirit moving through us and moving through our lives. And we bring into that experience connection to one another, and we deepen and expand it. And it affects the world around us. It affects all of us, the atmosphere we create when we walk into a room or walk around the planet anywhere, we are affecting the world around us. And so we hold this high watch, we hold this high truth, knowing that love is our intention.
(20:17):
I’m so grateful for it, so grateful for this expression, so grateful for this understanding that our values lead us from good, to great to grand. So grateful for this awareness that even something like anger that we might become judgmental about, we can release that judgment because it’s only there to serve us, and we allow it to serve us and bring greater clarity and greater insight and greater intelligence and greater spirit. So grateful for that. So grateful for each and every single one of you to say yes, to living this spiritual life, to being in a conscious spiritual experience. So grateful for all this and all the ways that it unfolds for each and every single person as they find their way with this. So grateful. So grateful. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And together we close this prayer by simply saying, and so it is.
Paige Kizer (21:23):
Thank you, John.