I'd like to speak some tonight on what's called a divine abode and a divine abode means our true home and in the Buddhist tradition that there's these different qualities of heart and awareness that are really considered home and the first loving kindness is what I'd like to speak of tonight and maybe start with a very short story.

It's a Sufi story about a man so good that the angels ask God to give him the gift of miracles. God wisely tells them to ask him if that's really what he wants.

So the angels visit this good man and offer him first the gift of healing by hands, the gift of conversion of souls and lastly the gift of virtue. He refuses them all.

They insist that he choose a gift or they'll choose one for him. Very well, he replies, I ask that I may do a great deal of good without ever knowing it.

So here's how the story ends. The angels are perplexed. They take counsel and resolve upon the following plan.

Every time the saint's shadow fell behind him, it would have the power to cure disease, sooth pain and comfort sorrow.

As he walked behind a mishadow, made arid paths green, caused withered plants to bloom, gave clear water to dried up brooks, fresh colored appale children, enjoyed unhappy men and women.

The saint simply went about his daily life diffusing virtue as the stars diffused light and the flowers sent without ever being aware of it.

The people respecting his humility followed him silently never speaking to him about his miracles. Soon they even forgot his name and called him the holy shadow.

So in a way our reflection is how when we come home to who we are, that's really what we come home to.

That quality of goodness that naturally wants to help and heal and not because we want to feel good about a self.

Not because we even need to know what's happening, but because we know we belong and are connected to all beings and it's just our nature just to want all beings to be healed, to be free from suffering.

We want it because it's the deepest expression of what we are. When we're helping, when we're caring, we're most at home, we're most at home in who we are.

So there's conditional love and conditional love is where we get a kind of a taste of of that loving, a particular experience of somebody else's goodness or beauty wakes up that kind of yeah love.

Unconditional love is when we're inhabiting that presence that is love and that whatever arises is touched by it.

Whatever arises is included in our heart. So this is what the Buddha called Mehta our loving kindness, this unconditional loving presence.

When the Buddha taught about Mehta, he taught about the shadow side, how it is that we don't live at home and that in a way a lot of the practices we do are first recognizing,

okay, how come my heart's closed? First recognizing, oh, my heart's closed, I'm not feeling that flow.

And then sensing, well, what are the habits of thinking, of behaving, of moving through life that in some way create that sense of disconnect where we're not feeling open and free?

One way of understanding our predicament, how we end up closing down is that we enter a world that's challenging.

If you say on a personal family level where our naturalness is not always seen or appreciated and to whatever degree we're not met with that unconditional love,

we kind of fragment and turn on ourselves. We think we're not lovable and we take on, we kind of create this mask and each of us does this.

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