Nuggets From James O'Dea & Nipun Mehta's Call
ServiceSpace
--Preeta Bansal
19 minute read
Mar 24, 2021

 

I came to this world with nothing at all
And naked I wandered around
If Azrael [angel of death] made a call on me
How could I turn him down?
The fire of love is in my bones
The fire of love can burn
Remember this in pleasure and pain
To love we shall return.

With this beautiful song offering, James O’Dea closed his unforgettable Awakin Call dialogue with Nipun Mehta, leaving it as he entered, with “nothing at all” – having left it all in the fire of love, peace radiating from the embers. Together, over the course of two meaningful hours that seemed to pass over into the realm of “no time”, the two friends and conscious activists explored their life’s wisdom and stories around living from a heart of service – in part through the lens of James’ “Soul Awakening Prayer”:

Soul awakening.
Heart opening.
Light shining.
Love flowing.
Wounds dissolving.
Peace radiating.

The following are some nuggets from their conversation.

**Important Note: While the following summary captures some special moments and stories from the call, it simply cannot (and does not purport to) replace the vibrational energy or full-body experience of the call. Please do consider giving yourself the gift of experiencing fully the recording of the dialogue and hearing their voices and words -- so as to allow oneself to tune in also to the ineffable space between words -- in either audio alone or video .... And then the suggestion is to read these nuggets only afterward, as reinforcement of some themes.

***

Soul Awakening – what has been a gateway for you for soul awakening?

Nipun – Serendipity: “I remember when I was a teenager, I would at the world with awe and wonder, ‘How much of what is happening around me can I able to draw a clear cause-and-effect line for, and how much of it is just grace?’ … [There is a] question right around that moment of perfect serendipity -- the orchestration of how certain conditions collide in just the right way. And when that happens for me, or rather, when I have the eyes to see that, it arrests my mind. And I start thinking, ‘Oh, what am I? What intelligence am I operating from if my mind is suspended?’ And that to me feels like the space in which a deeper part of me can awaken.

James -- Dancing One’s Passion: [Citing the musical Billy Elliot, and Billy’s statement that he just disappears when he dances] “That's when the serendipity--all of the connections--can flow. When you dance your passion, truly disappearing into it, not caught in your head in your conditioning, not obsessing about the achievements. ‘How am I doing?’ is a real blocker of serendipity. So I think in our conversation, there’s a constant of flow in service -- how we can awaken ourselves and more, how the flow can get bigger and bigger. …

“Michael Singer said [to me], ‘Your path of service will be like the shadow saint.’ And the shadow saint is the one who is praying and praying to Krishna, ‘Please, Krishna, reveal yourself to me, let me see you, I long for you.’ And Krishna appears, and the saint is so moved. And Krishna, who has a funny side, said, ‘Well, since you got me, you can get three wishes.’ And the saint says, ‘Well, the first wish is always to see you. In anything I do, I have you that I look upon. And secondly, the suffering in the world -- it breaks my heart. Could you heal anybody who touches my shadow? And the third request is, may I never see my own shadow or know who it has touched.’”

***

Heart Opening

Nipun’s heart awakening to a deeper soul force, despite and from within Silicon Valley materialistic culture: “The prayer I had was that I don't want to even try to control cause and effect. In fact, it was never in my control, so it sounds silly now. But even at that time, if you say that I'm not trying to control life, you fall into a much deeper flow and there are many layers to this flow. And as you surrender deeper and deeper, you see that there are so many causes to every effect and that ends up being such a profound insight.

“And you look at these kinds of experiences [seeming miracles] and you say, ‘Where do they fit in?’ You know, after college you go get a good job. And at that time it's not enough to just get a job, right? You have to have your own startup. And then it's not enough to have a startup. It has to have this valuation. And then that's not enough. You have to impress how amazing you are to other people. And this whole charade that so many of my peers were part of, and in the middle of that kind of a narrative in my head -- of success -- there were these inexplicable moments [such as quietly willing and lending one’s legs to a differently-abled man so he could board, miraculously, a fast-departing bus]. And it was like, ‘Oh, on the way to taking a midterm test in college, I'm sitting there doing something that feels so right, that I cannot understand.’ Over time, I think, I started to anchor myself more and more there, in that place in myself."

James’ youthful spirit of service and learning to get off the “high horse”: Young James, growing up in London, had an early desire to serve and make a mark. “I organized some young people to survey South London for welfare cases that were not getting help. And it was heart-opening. And at the same time, it had its learning curve. I was nominated ‘Teenager of the Year’ in London and awarded a trophy by the mayor of London. And the minister of welfare wrote to me …. And somehow that was the beginning of learning about my own passion and arrogance, and being on a high horse. And how do you get off that high horse? Because you get a buzz. Science tells us you get a helper’s buzz from helping and then if you recognize and being right. So the question of heart-opening is magnificently important in the development of the activist because he or she has to leave behind the high horse, the arrogance, to enter that pure flow that you were describing.”

James being knifed in Turkey, realizing he had arrived “just in time” to serve: “I remember in Turkey when I was in my mid-twenties and teaching at an elite girls' college. And I was out one night and -- I think, you know, the story -- I was knifed. And I don't think you need to be knifed to experience wholeness, but I lost a lot of blood. It was a big deal and there, it happened like that moment you're describing, My mind said, ‘Time to leave Turkey. It's a dangerous place. I know you escaped with life, but you could have lost it.’ And this deeper flow came in and said, ‘You born for such a time as this. Instead of running away, you were born to serve.’ And I stayed four more years in Turkey and helped the students go through tremendous violence that erupted .…”

Nipun reflecting on James’ experience: “It seems to me that we have a hard time, because we try to transform things too quickly. We don't know how to find the middle way. We sometimes despise the bitter or we sometimes have an immense craving for the sweet. It's very hard to let the bitter be bitter and sweet be sweet, to have that equanimity, to have that internal equipoise, to meet life in that way so that you can hear the voice that you heard, which was your deeper calling. Because one part of you said, ‘Leave.’ Another part of you was this heroic Teenager of the Year. And you were able to just let both of those co-exist, and when they did, it seems like, a deeper intelligence was able to flow through your heart and lead you to action.”

James on the importance of action: As the Dalai Lama potently says "it is not enough to be compassionate". What?! The Dalai Lama says "it is not enough to be compassionate, you must act". And the reason one must serve, he could have said, is that we get feedback from our actions -- that action is too intense, that is too proud, that is too polarizing, that is filled with equipoise, that is truly generous. In the field of action, the heart is getting tested, the whole opening process and developmental process comes.”

Nipun on the value of service to learn to hold boundaries once you’ve opened your heart: “if I get greedy about social change, if I get greedy about trying to do a lot, I find that there's a lot of ‘me’ and that ‘me’ weighs me down. And sometimes it’s subconscious, and the purpose of service is to actually discover all those subconscious layers that you wouldn't have discovered if you hadn't opened your heart, if you hadn't opened yourself to so many needs of the world -- you would never be at these crossroads, but now you're at these crossroads and you sometimes try to bite off more than you can chew, and then you suffer because of it. That suffering is a teaching. I think then at some point, you then learn how to hold these boundaries.”

***

Light Shining in Dark Places

Nipun’s experiences on his walking pilgrimage across India: “there were so many tests, so many moments of just utter heartbreak. And I think, and in retrospect, I can see that, because I had maybe, a lot of confusion or just ego, I was just slammed to the ground repeatedly. And I could see that my wife, who doesn't have the same kinds of issues that I do, was able to be much more even-keeled. But at that time, I was just going through my own process. For example, here we are in India walking with practically no resources. And our food and our nightly lodging would be dependent on the kindness of strangers; would be dependent on serendipity; would be dependent on grace. And here we were sometimes walking in crazy heat; you are tired, you are exhausted. Your ego is taking a constant beating. People are sometimes mean to you for no reason. People give you lectures and tell you what you should do and how you should be. …

"[After one particularly difficult stretch, upon reaching a home after a long walk], the first thing that the man of the house does is berates me, just launches into me about how I'm on the wrong track. And I was like, ‘Okay, I'm going to hold it.’ I am hungry. I just want food. I just want to take a shower. I just want to sleep. And here I was. I had to say that this is how he's feeling and I have to meet life the way it presents itself. It's not a personal thing. He must have had so many other causes that led him to this moment. I've had so many causes leading me here too -- and so we meet in this way. How can I in this moment generate a kind of love, a kind of care, a kind of patience or tolerance or all those things? And I just sat there and we spoke. I ended up eating like very little that night and we left the next morning. … And the next morning this fellow comes up and he says, ‘I just want to apologize for how I behaved last night. I've been going through a really hard time in my life and I've had this headache for months and months that refuses to go away. But today, I woke up this morning and this is the first time I don't have that headache. I don't understand exactly why I don't have that headache, but I just want to say thank you guys for coming to our home.’ And we left. … It's those kinds of repeated moments for me. This was a daily kind of a struggle in different forms. And it's like our ego has so many rough edges and this just was like smoothing it out again and again and again and again. So it was a very humbling element to it.”

James experience in Lebanon, amid the massacres: “After Turkey, my wife and I went to Lebanon. Saw a war of massacres. Very dark, dark time. To the point, Nipun, where I was beginning to feel a feeling I've never been strongly acquainted with -- despair. Like how can humanity be this rough? I mean, the Sabra and Satila massacre. The men had been taken out of Beirut and the women and children and elders were left. They came in the middle of the night and slaughtered them in their beds and on the streets. In one of the Palestinian camps that was reduced to rubble, a man called me over. I was with some doctor. And he said, "I would like to serve you coffee." In the rubble of his home, where his family had been killed, he wanted to serve coffee! And as he did so, again I had one of those pivotal moments, which is I think, through compassion, I saw the indomitable spirit shining through. I saw that you can do all these horrible things to someone and they will turn around and show you their beauty, their dignity. That was the moment in my life. It saved me. It gave the light shining. If the light can shine here, it can shine anywhere.

James on finding the beauty where it is not made visible: “I think when we see glimpses in our own heart, when we find that beauty where it is not made visible, then we are inviting the beauty in. … And maybe we'll have another conversation one day about ‘is the suffering a part of the perfection?’ … We can't ever be flippant about that conversation. I find some people a bit too quick on the draw to say, ‘well, it's all perfect.’ But in my own life and journey, I feel every error I made, every mistake, every part of the illnesses or whatever, have been gifts to me. And I would like to have that conversation that is more widespread where people pass on the question ‘the obstacle has been my gift, my learning, my opportunity. The disease has been my teacher. How about you? When has it been in your life, that the very thing that hurt you must healed you most deeply?’ So that's kind of a cautious conversation to be had thoughtfully -- that I believe that each time we ask that question, ‘How has my suffering or hurts or obstacles been a part of my growth and gifting?’ then we hear God speaking.”

***

Love Flowing

James’ contact with the spiritual masters: “[I’ve had] contact with the masters — masters from different traditions. I think this is also a very critical point, because when you understand the relationship to the masters, you know that you can't do it alone. You'll also get to taste love incarnate. When you meet the love of the masters and experience unconditional love, you know in your own being, ‘I have to cultivate that love, I have to obey it.’ I think it's a ridiculous analogy, but like playing tennis — you get better if you're with a good player. So when you meet a master, it's like ‘finally!’ — you can feel the resonance, the flow, the forgiveness.”

Nipun’s parable about discerning and having the eyes to see the love of a true master: “There's a parable in India. A woman goes to see a master and the master says, ‘Look, I'll come to your place for a meal.’ So she's is super excited, cooks a delicious meal, and is waiting. No one. She is waiting and waiting. The master never shows up. She goes out and there's nobody; there's a dog but that's about it. The next day, she goes in the main assembly to the prayer hall and ask the Master, ‘How come you didn't show up? You said you were going to come for a meal.’ And the master says, ‘I did show up, but you didn't recognize me. I was that dog, and you didn't feed the dog.’"

James’ love for a Holocaust survivor to see her essential essence beyond the polarity: “I was asked at one point to give a talk on the death penalty at the largest synagogue in the Washington, D.C. area. … So I gave the talk and we had questions and answers, and then an old lady stood up and I could see on her arm the markings of the number from the concentration camp. She was a concentration camp survivor. And she said, ‘What about the death penalty for the Nazis? I mean, I can understand maybe no death penalty for a man who kills in a moment of passion, but the Nazis deserved it. And if there was a Nazi here, I would take him by the neck and break his neck — like a chicken.’ It was really intense.

“What I did was just wait, and wait a little longer, and you could have heard a pin drop in the room. And I said, ‘No, you wouldn't. You're far too beautiful for that.’ And she was like a 16-year-old girl. She said, ‘Oh, stop it. Stop it.’ And she sat down and everybody laughed, and they laughed with relief that I could see through the anger and the violence to the essential being. And that's what we're called upon as activists to do: not to get caught in the web of polarity. You could say our task is passion without polarity. It's not always being aloof and standing away from, by no means. I think the spiritual activist can release the passion of God. But without — where the skill comes in — without polarizing.”

That which doesn't end in love: Nipun and James: “That which doesn't end in love will continue to repeat itself until it ends in love.”

***

Wounds Dissolving

James on burnout from Amnesty International and the need to ‘heal thyself’: “I came to a point in Amnesty International, which I thought I was going to work there for life. Well, there was a murder of a 12-year-old boy in Pakistan, Iqbal Masih, who at age four had been shackled to a loom, and at age seven, he escaped and started to organize for children in the carpet industry. At age 11, Amnesty and Reebok gave him a human rights award. At age 12, he was murdered. And when that happened, I felt again crashing burnout – ‘this is too hard’, and I realized that I was going to have to leave Amnesty, that somehow I had swallowed too much of a sense of personal responsibility for a suffering world.

“It gets tricky here and you know this, as well as I do. On the activist path, joining it with a spiritual path becomes tricky, because you have to leave that addiction to being righteous. You have to leave that taking on too much is a form of violence to the self. You need the spaciousness to be part of a healing activation. So I don't ever think that we are caught between sitting on the pillow, transcendence, and acting in the world. I believe we can do both. But there needs to be air that we breathe, that gives us spaciousness, that gives us healing in our own lives and not the desperation. ‘I acted and behold, service was joy’ [Tagore] -- because it was combined with deep self-care, with doing unto the self, not doing unto me, but doing unto the beloved that I truly am in my inner me. That led me to a very expansive shift in my activism, where I even began to feel compassion for the torturer. How is it that somebody can go home and be a loving father and yet, during the day, torture people? Where does the wound come from? How can somebody be so wounded they would gauge out the eyes of a child? I mean, how can you do that? How can you take out the eyes of a child as punishment to the parents, without being deeply, deeply wounded? And so by living the spiritual, listening to what the masters taught me, I began to understand that it's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's about who is wounded and how can they heal. And part of the answer [be]comes, ‘heal thyself.’"

Nipun on “not now” rather than “no”: "It seems to me that there's a kind of humility in that letting things be, saying ‘no’, or ‘not now.’ It almost feels like you can't really start healing if you're burning two sides of the incense at the same time. Outside work is going to create stress, so if there isn't an inner regeneration, our service isn't going to last that long. So before you even get to the healing, what helped you to stay in this place of regeneration? And maybe it meant saying, ‘no,’ maybe it meant saying, ‘I'll come back to this later,’ or maybe it meant activating a different kind of potential in you.

Post-traumatic growth v. stress: Nipun: “we know a lot about post-traumatic stress, but we know very little about post-traumatic growth.”

James: “The most painful thing to see, particularly in the field of human rights is when somebody is oppressed, abused, tortured, or whatever wounds are inflicted on [them]. The most painful thing is when you see the wound attaching itself and organizing around, and the wound has toxicity, it has pain. … We can fix this, we can heal, you know, but there has to be a telling of the truth. There has to be a releasing of the toxin. And when those two things come together, wow! You have a story for humanity, that can be a code: "Go to the truth. And the truth is also the truth of your feelings, not just the truth of your facts." And then releasing the toxin, … and we’re back to the flow.”

***

Peace Radiating

Nipun: “Where I am not is where flow is.”

Nipun’s feeling of flow during an encounter with a Sufi mystic: “I could not generate a thought. It was this holy moment for which all description feels a bit cheap. But in some sense, there's a feeling that I was 'not,' in that moment. And when I was 'not' -- whatever needed to get done through this expression could much more easily get done. It was a kind of flow.”

James on living your peace: “love has to spring spontaneously from within. It is not susceptible to any form of force or coercion. But since it operates without force, it flows between people. And humanity will find a new modality of being through the free interplay of love from heart to heart. So you've got the scale there. The huge scale is partly an illusion in the sense that we have to be loving and peaceful in order for the love and the peace to flow through us. … In an interrelated, interdependent world size does not matter. The smallest act in an interrelated and interdependent whole will percolate through and thus the story ends with our being love and being peace -- and not connecting peace with passivity. Peace is not passive. It is active. The sun is peaceful. Think of that. Think of all the life and support and generosity that comes through the boiling sun. So live your passion. Live your solar dimension. But forget, in some sense, about results and accomplishments.

James on birth and death, and the memory of his mother’s womb: “[My mother’s 11-year-old daughter fell down the steps at school and died shortly afterwards. She discovered in the mourning process that I had been conceived just before the death of her daughter. So I grew into being with hearing the sobbing, mournful heart of my mother. I mean, a terribly painful thing to lose an 11-year-old daughter. And almost trying to sort of climb up and reach to her, to console her. And yet in her beauty and wisdom, when I was born, she said to my father who was deeply wounded, ‘The mourning period is over. It is now time to celebrate James.’ So that fractal moves throughout my life -- the mourning and the celebration of the birth.”

Nipun on knowing what’s ours to do: “[A Hindu mystic] said something very simple and yet very profound. He says, ‘All you have to do is make sure you're not picking up what is not yours to pick up.’ And I said, ‘Well, how do you know what's yours to pick up and what's not yours to pick up?’ And he says, ‘If it falls in your lap, it's yours to pick up. If it falls anywhere but there, that's not for you to hold.’ … So to me, that's a constant practice in service -- is to discover your unique agency, to be honest about what you need to be doing, and to be completely humble and accepting that role.”

James: “We really have to discover that doing what's not in our lap may fill up our time, but we will become disenchanted, burned out by overdoing what has not been given to us. And these are, as you were saying, subtle questions. The game of the journey of development gets more subtle, but the reward is the subtler it gets, the more it radiates and the more power it has.”

***

Two listeners, William & Brahmi Howell, were moved by the stunning conversation to offer this ode of appreciation for a dialogue that many veteran Awakin Calls listeners reviewed as their favorite ever:

Such grace
from two hearts
that send radiance
back and forth
until all is light

Such heart
in the essence
of experience
that shines in and out
and all about

Such beauty
from the heart
of Beauty that beats
in us all as you
so aptly attest

Dear poet
Dear friend
Dear mentor
Dear Heart Brother
Dear devotee of Love

Thanks, James,
for this gorgeous interview
innerview
multiview
maxiview

Loving you

***

With gratitude for being part of this remarkable conversation,
Preeta

 

Posted by Preeta Bansal on Mar 24, 2021


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