Name: An Invitation Beyond the Map
Item: Brahma Kumaris
Author: John Levoff

Thank you so much for having us. This is an extraordinary opportunity. My name is John Levoff.

I work in the entertainment industry in that cultured, sophisticated, beautiful city to the south known as Los Angeles. You've heard of it. In Los Angeles, in the business that we have the good fortune to be in, and really what I should say is really the responsibility to be in, when we're in a position to speak to lots of people, we take a deep breath, and we think about what it is that we have to say occasionally.

Now, when you look at entertainment, in film, on television, on radio, on CD, now on iPod and iPads, it may not look like everybody's thinking about the responsibility that they have, but the truth is we all have enormous responsibility to take advantage of the opportunity that we've been given. So in the course of my career, I've thought about that and churned that and worked through that, and when I was invited with my beautiful wife to join in a meditation in Laurel Canyon, and I hadn't done a lot of that kind of thing. I hadn't orientation to spirituality, and I was sensitive to it, tried to stay conscious, tried to stay conscious of myself.

When we were invited to a meditative experience at a friend's house, a couple of Aussie directors and producers in Laurel Canyon, we took advantage of the opportunity, and we went up and we met a teacher, an extraordinary woman from England, formerly at the BBC, who went through a life-changing accident, auto-accident in her case, and she learned this meditation called Raja Yoga Meditation. I'd never heard of any of this before. It was open-eye meditation.

Incredibly difficult, they thought.

Open-eye meditation is hard enough to close the eyes and to be quiet and to be centred, but to have the eyes open, and she explained that the reason was that you could focus and get into a meditative place, and that there's real lasting purpose in that, because that's where we want to be 24-7 in our lives. That's where we want to be in our work.

That's where we want to be in our personal lives. It made really perfect, strong sense to me. It was extraordinary.

We sat and we worked with this meditation, and I thought, wow, that was really amazing. And as we were leaving, she said, you should come to India. India was not on my list.

I've been well-travelled, but I hadn't gone to India, and I hadn't really even considered going to India, but she said, there's a dialogue going on in India, in southern Rajasthan, and you should be a part of it. And my wife told me that I should go, and I do what my wife tells me to do. I learned that over a period of time.

And so three weeks from that point, I was on the plane, on my way to India. I don't know, I'm sure a number of you are Indian, but a number of you have been to India. I'd never been to India before.

Getting to India was an athletic event. 30 hours on the plane. At a certain point, you know how you get into these kinds of things, it becomes almost intoxicating.

The athletic event, you really get up for it. It's almost the longer the trip is, the more you get up for it. We get to Bombay, and then there's a five-hour layover, and I tour Bombay by car overnight.

It was extraordinary. For the five o'clock plane that goes to Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state, on sort of northwestern part of India. And then after that trip, we get into a cab, and we take a five-hour white-knuckle cab ride.

If you've been to India, you know what I'm talking about. A five-hour white-knuckle cab ride north through Gujarat into southern Rajasthan, to the Aravalli Mountains, and up the mountain to a place called Mount Abu for this conference. I had no idea, truly, where I was going, and I had no idea who it was that was really putting the conference on.

It was an act of faith. It truly was. We go through the chaos of India, the colourful, vibrant, amazing chaos of India, and we arrive through these gates into this campus, and it was San Diego State University.

It was the most extraordinary thing, the most beautiful, most pristine, most developed.

There were 400 people who lived on this campus, called Gyan Sarovar, which we later learned. 400 people who lived there as full-time residents.

So we came to join this conference called The Call of the Time. It was being hosted by the organisation, the campus, the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. We have wonderful rooms to stay in, incredible graciousness.

We go to the conference room, and when I say we, there were 44 of us, which we all, as we gathered for the first time, we all met each other. And I realised they were the most extraordinary group of people that I was with. There was a member of the House of Lords from England who was the former chairman of Marks & Spencer.

There was a nun from Sri Lanka. There was an entrepreneur from Thailand who owned 32 businesses, including an oil refinery. There were four business people from Beijing.

There was the national security advisor of Mauritius, the defence minister of Sweden, the mayor of Victoria, the capital city of the Seychelles Islands, the executive vice president of the World Labour Organisation. You sit in a group like that, you say, what am I doing here? This is an amazingly interesting group of people. I was so honoured to be there.

And the conversation that went on for five days was about getting internal and learning about soul consciousness. The whole idea was that we, in a position where we affect numbers of people, where we should take that responsibility very seriously. We need to empower ourselves.

And for the first time for me, and I think for most of the people in that group, we started to talk about knowing ourselves as souls. Separate from our bodies, which are our means of conveyance and our means of expression. But who is the essential we? Who is it when we all go into a funeral, and you've seen open caskets and you see a body, and you say, but that isn't Uncle John.

Who is Uncle John? The B case, as we learned in this meeting,

Visualise the soul as that brilliant point of light that sits where the third eye sits. That's the essence of who we are. And by focussing on that point, and by being silent, we strengthen ourselves internally, and we can connect with divinity.

It was an enormously powerful, an enormously powerful five days that was, I think, transformational for all of us, really inspired us. We looked at each other as all this is going on. By the way, I should tell you, the meeting was conducted by the now 95-year-old administrative head of the organisation, Dadi Janki.

Dadi, senior sister in Hindi. Dadi Janki. And sitting at her right hand was Sister Jayanti, the beauty of Sister Jayanti that you heard earlier.

It was absolutely extraordinary. We looked at each other, and sort of in our breaks, we all said, who are these people? Where did this organisation come from? When we discovered that the organisation has 850,000 students who participate in this meditation, in this teaching, around the world, 8,500 centres in over 120 countries, a respected NGO, non-governmental organisation at the United Nations, the winner of seven Peace Messenger Awards, and Sister Jayanti, by the way, who's the director of the BKs in Europe, is the BK's representative to the United Nations in Geneva, has been a peace emissary for 40 years. We all thought to ourselves, how have we never heard of these people? Then we discover that the campus that we were on, the 400 residents, Gyansarovar is one of three campuses in that area.

There was another campus 10 minutes away by bus, they go back and forth, which is the original campus, Madhuban. And then down the hill, where we started, was yet a third campus, Shantivan, and on the campus of Shantivan is a meditation hall that holds 25,000 people. How could we have never heard of these people? Well, there's a very simple reason why, and it all made it so powerful.

They don't solicit funding, and they don't promote themselves. It is pure integrity and power. I think we're so fortunate to have this organisation on this planet.

We're very inspired by it. I think everybody in that room was. The call of the time dialogues continue, and we came down the hill five days later.

Truly changed, truly changed. It's an amazing organisation, so I'm very happy to be here tonight, and I congratulate all of you to be here tonight, too.

A Personal Journey For Transformation

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