'O Trinitas!'

Every act of perception is God delighting in Herself. She accomplishes this by dividing Herself into subject & object, to dance duality while dissolving in unity. When I pause to look at this blossoming peony, God forms a Trinity: this 'I', this flower, and the delight of perception.

The West calls this Trinity, Parent, Child and Spirit. Indian philosophy calls it Sat (Being), Chit (Consciousness), Ananda (Bliss). Pure Being may be one, but it is at the same time a self-relation. Aware of itself, Being pulsates with subject-object duality, even prior to the creation of the universe! Yet the eternal subject (God) and the eternal object (Christ) are eternally united in self-delight (Spirit).

Out of this essential community in the unity of God, creation is spontaneously born. How could creation not be born of this throbbing love within the very stillness of the One? Every photon of light, every sub-atomic particle of matter, is composed of pure bliss, a sparkle of delight thrown out of the churning void, struck off by the joy of Being beholding and uniting with itself.

God re-enacts this Holy Trinity in the radiance of each human perception: I see a white blossom, a star, an infant's eyes, a homeless woman's hand. In each act of perception, the universe is created again, expressly for the purpose of peceiving itself. My every taste and touch participates in the hidden ecstasy of God's own self-delight.

And when we gaze into each others eyes, how can we not see God gazing into herself? The Divine is I, the Divine is you, the Divine is you and I dissolving into We. The sexual ecstasy of lovers is but the clue to a more essential bliss, available to awakened awareness in every moment of earthly perception.

How could anyone ever be bored or dissatisfied? Simply to open these eyes, to hear the sound of the robin at first light, to gaze at peaches lying on an old wooden table, is to be the triune God in the act of creation.

O ocean of souls, O communion of one, O solitude of all!

Behold the Lilies

"We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light." (Hildegard of Bingen, 11th C.)

Take a walk in any field. Go hiking in the deep woods. The world is an unfathomable mystery.

You'll be suddenly awakened by a little flower among the ferns: a trillium. It pulsates into your optic nerve as a stream of photons: a Radiance un-mediated and un-translated by thinking. You do not look at this flower through your concept of it: you look at the flower itself, what James Joyce called "the ineluctable modality of the visible." This flower has no name. It is no "thing" contained by its outline, but a living stream of revelation breaking into three dimensions from beyond time and place. It flows from unfathomable depths of the world into your eye. And in that sacrament of perception, the outward mystery of the world meets the inward mystery of consciousness. The world realizes itself in your eye.

Jesus, the wandering poet, pointed to this flower and said, "Behold the lillies of the field!" He wanted his disciples to learn everything they needed to know about God by looking at this flower. In his final sermon, Buddha held up a little flower, saying nothing. That was all he needed to reveal. "See a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower!" exclaimed William Blake, poet of perception. The Kingdom of God is not a theological abstraction. It is the break-through of this trillium, one white three-petaled explosion nestled in furrows of oceanic green.

But if you are like me and other "educated" Westerners, you do something remarkable at this point. You flee from revelation. You turn to your hiking partner and ask, "What is that flower?" And the other replies, "It's a trillium." She may even nail it with its Latin name. "Ah yes, a trillium," you say, and walk on.

What has just happened? You have settled for a name, a concept, rather than suffering the nameless onslaught of Radiance. You have closed your eyes to the incarnate of the Logos, offspring of Father Consciousness and Mother Matter - or if you prefer the Indian terminology, the offspring of Shiva and Shakti. You have replaced the living Christ with an abstract ghost of thought.

The world is a mystery. In the early Church, a mysterion, was a transforming encounter with the divine that could be experienced but not named by the intellect. The generation and incarnation of the Logos from God the Father through God the Mother Spirit was such a mysterion. The mystery is not conceived but perceived. To perceive is to see through; to conceive is to see along side of. We perceive the world that is. We conceive a gray ashen parallel world of thoughts - our incessant commentary on what is, our vain attempt to keep up with stream by solidifying it with names. We dwell not in the world but in our description of the world. Thought constructs a secondary world of asymptotes that never quit touch the flesh.

Here is the lost commandment which God wrote on the tablet of the law for Moses: "Thou shalt not conceive the world, lest thou cover it with the ash of names."

A stream of Radiance flow toward us from the world, yearning to touch our hearts through eye, ear, tongue, fingertips and nostrils. Yet few realize that a similar stream of Radiance flows from within us, through these same gateways of sensation, yearning to touch the incarnate world. The Radiance is one, having divided itself into a subject-object duality before the creation. This a prior effulgence of divine unity into duality is the original play of Shiva, who becomes Shakti in order to dance, to perceive, to delight, to know Himself as Other. Therefor, when we reunite the light within and the light without, in any sacrament of the oridinary, perceiving the shudder of a leaf or the glimmering outline of dragonfly's wing, we allow God and his feminine Spirit to unite in our sensation and, in the bliss which heals the world, merge matter and consciousness.

I call this reunion of creation and creator, Radiance. You may call it what you like. But the constant, quiet, moment-by-moment experience of this unity, enacted in our very eyes and ears and sensations of quiet breath, is our real vocation on earth.

God's ocean of light would wash in waves onto the shores of our body. Then why do we create an artificial veil of thoughts between world and awareness, an ashen layer of names? Some of us spend our whole lives cultivating this ghost-gray bulwark of thoughts. We are frightened of drowning in the blessed radiance of the senses.

Blake wrote, "We were put here for a little while to learn to bear the beams of love." But humans can't stand those unfiltered beams. We cover our eyes, not with our hands, but with our mind.

We need some patient old shamanic farmer to point out just what is. Cat Stevens sings the ancient Celtic spell: "Morning has broken, like the first morning!" Imagine what the world looked like before Adam started naming the creatures! By naming the world, men achieved a kind of control over it, to manipulate its elements. This is called, "technology," and it had a purpose. But in his very genius for technology, man fell from grace. Fallen man now sees lumber in the forest, but cannot see the forest in lumber. Fallen man now sees the parts of his body, but cannot see the holiness of his body. Fallen man now sees the other, but cannot see himself in the other.

For all our fallenness, Eden is still here! Eden is all around us, just as it was before names. But to perceive that garden, we must dance! Dance silences the mind and opens the eye in each atom of the body. Yes, there is an eye in each particle of our being. When that eye is opened through conscious movement - breathing, yoga, dance, a walk in the forest - then our blindness is gone. We see through trillions of eyes, galactically sparkling in the heavens of our flesh.

This world is a dew of Spirit, where God condenses into matter. The true world is uncreated, never a moment old, its sub-atomic essence dissolving just as it appears. We try to make it permanent through names. Our names impose on fleeting now the structures of the past. Thought, full of names, is the past. But existence is only now. Existence cannot be known. It must be danced.

We are permitted to marvel at Creation, but we can never possess it with the mind. This is the real meaning of the temptation of Eve. Her temptation had nothing to do with sex, or material craving. If you read the story carefully, you will see that the serpent of mind offered her an intellectual temptation, not a sensual pleasure. She wanted to grasp with the intellect what cannot be grasped. We continue to fall into Eve's sin whenever we codify the wisdom of the body into a doctrine of the mind. The mind must humbly accept the principle of uncertainty.

To be comfortable with uncertainty is to "dwell in possibility," as Emily Dickenson phrased it. Uncertainty is a highly refined form of beauty: the creativity of chaos. Uncertainly sets us free from the tyranny of the past, and spawns new vision.

Nameless uncertainty empowers us to see without fear. Even scientists need the fearless vision of uncertainly, which is in fact fundamental to modern physics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Sir Arthur Eddington, a founder of quantum physics and a Quaker, wrote: "All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness."

Look at the flower without naming its thing-ness. You are engaging in primordial meditation. See the chaos of its edges dissolve into fractals of boundless light, which is in fact the light of of your own consciousness. The luminosity of this little flower is not to be taken for granted. Named, it is Trillium rhomboideum grandiflorum. Un-named it is the portal between heaven and earth.

Now, imagine what you might behold when you muster the courage to look into a human face this way. Can you gaze into those nameless eyes without saying, "This is a white child, this an Arab child, this child is wealthy, this child is poor?" Fearlessness means, that when we look into the eyes of another, we settle for nothing less than the face of God.

The Incarnation

I delight to see God shining from my body as the super-radiance of evolving self-organized bio-chemical complexity.

Does this glow come from matter, or does matter condense from this glow? The wick is dead without a flame. But the flame is dead without a wick. Matter and Spirit, like particle and wave, are just two ways of seeing the same phenomenon.

Why not settle our bodies into meditation, or walk with awareness in the forest, observing every electron blossom from the boundlessness of conscious space? Then, instead of descending as a mysterious Other from above, will not the Spirit percolate out of the earth as the bio-radiance of sacred matter?

I'm Wiccan, I'm Vedantist, I'm Buddhist, I'm Christian. Do you see a contradiction? Well then, maybe your eye is not open wide enough. The part you focus on defines the whole. When you focus on one sparkle, you see one face or facet and no other. Yet the whole jewel is greater than any facet. The jewel of God-Consciousness has as many faces as there are human hearts.

If you ask me, "Is a tree God?" I say, Yes. "Is God beyond the tree?" Yes. Both are true. I see God through the tree. The tree is a window. But the window is not the sky. I see the sky through the window, and the window illuminated by the sky.

When the eye is clear and simple, every creature on earth is God's window. Gazing through that creature, I enter Bodhichitta: boundless, formless, conscious space. Yet this infinite Buddha mind is contained by an atom.

Now I penetrate even deeper into conscious space. I find that space is alive, vibrant with waves of innate compassion. These loving vibrations of silence generate the whole universe, like a Word spoken. The cosmos is no cold vault of darkness hung with desperate momentary stars. In essence, cosmic space is a Person - one who intimately cares for every finite point conceived within that boundlessness. A vast carefulness envelopes the galaxies: the cosmic Christ, the Buddha nature, Krishna consciousness. If you think these terms signify three different things, you have not experienced thing-less Radiance.

This cosmic Christ yearns to share his love with every sentient being on every world encompassed by the infinite space of awareness. To communicate this love to the least of these his creatures, the infinite Person takes on a finite human body and clothes himself in flesh, the flesh of tbe Avatar. Jesus was the most recent avatar in history. Is there an avatar incarnate today?

Every photon of Jesus' body was God, as is every photon of my body and your's. The difference is, every photon of Jesus' body was conscious, like an opened eye! Jesus' body was the vessel in whom cosmic space became Christ Consciousness, aware of every pain and rapture of human love. Through Christ's excruciating ecstasy on the Cross of his own body, love infused itself into the earth, soaked into the soil, enfolded the fallen sparrow, irradiated every berry on the twig, ennobled the dust. The incarnation of Christ was the consecration of matter, rippling its blessing into the stars.

This brings us back to where we started: the divine chemistry of our own flesh. What good is the work of Christ unless we too, in every atom of flesh, trans-substantiate God's glory into matter?

Truth whirls and turns like a wheel. Dust becomes God as God become dust. This is why fools are wiser than wisemen. They just dance!

Drop Everything & Look

Truth is not giving up some of this to get some of that. "I'll eliminate my bad habits but keep my good ones." "I'll give up this pleasure for lent, and get more spiritual happiness in return." Truth is not a deal. God isn't a business man. You can give up as much as you want, but you won't get anything back!

Truth is dropping everything, the good and the bad, the light and the darkness, all at once, expecting nothing in return. Don't just let go of the stuff you are holding on to: let go of the one who is doing the holding. When Truth happens, no one is left to possess it. No one remains to possess any wealth or poverty, pride or humility, joy or sorrow. No "I" remains to say, "I gave that up."

So what remains?

Ah, that's the nameless mystery, the beginning of Life. That's when every breath, every particle of dust, gets interesting. Whatever it is, please don't name it, because whatever you could name would be something you didn't let go of.

The Chinese philosophers called it the Tao, or Way. Yogis referred to it as Ananda, bliss. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. Buddha called it Nirvana, but refused to say anything about it. He wouldn't even say whether it was existent or non-existent! When we hear these terms, we mythologize them, imagining them as places, or objects of perception, or states of mind. We assume they are some content of experience. But then they would just be more stuff we didn't let go of. What we're talking about is precisely what remains when All is thrown away, including every possible state of mind and any "me" to experience it.

So what does remain?

Look at the motionless explosion of this rose. Look deep within its atoms. Look all the way down to exploding photons sparkling out of unfathomable darkness, vibrant darkness alive with awareness, silent darkness thundering with your own luminous Self.

To Rest as Pure Awakened Space

Churches, temples & mosques exist for one purpose: to awaken Space in our cluttered lives...

Religions have conditioned us to believe that the path is long, the goal far distant, the Holy in a higher place. But the truth is, we live in a cosmic trick, a vast joke whose punchline is all around us.

What we've been looking for is right here, wherever here may be. This is why Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is in the midst of you;" and in the Gospel of Thomas, "The kingdom is poured out over the whole earth, but men do not see it."

The Divine Presence is space itself! There is a notable dictum from the great mystics of the Western tradition, attributed variously to St. Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Voltaire and Pascal, but originally found in the Hermetic sayings of 3rd Century Egypt: God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

Is this not a thought-experiment for contemplating the divinity of space? Yes, let it be repeated: Space is awake and the Divine Presence is space itself.

This is a revelation so a priori, so obvious, and yet so stunning, that it strikes our awareness like the trumpet call of the Last Judgment. It calls us to the temple, the temple of wherever we are right now. Space is awake, even when nobody's here. Space was awake before we were born into it. We generally use space as a means to an end, to be filled with something. But what if space is the ultimate end in itself?

Space, in truth, is the end and the beginning. Space seems nothing at all, yet is the source of all. When the first verses of Genesis tell us that, "in the beginning, the earth was a formless void," that infinite vacuum is not nothing, but the ocean of God's creative consciousness, from which the light of the world will shine.

Space is boundless, ever-expanding, self-aware, and spontaneously creative. Photons, electrons, worlds and galaxies arise or dissolve in the self-awareness of space. Yet bursting with worlds, this effulgent cauldron of creation remains the ever-virgin void, resting in the silent essence of its fertile emptiness.

Space is awake. And when we too are awake, mere empty space satisfies us with its fullness. That is why every great mystic loves the desert. Space-awareness wakes us from the torpor of materialism. In space-awareness, we no longer delude ourselves with the notion that our mind is an effect of brain chemicals. Reality becomes self-evident: the brain and all its chemicals are made out of conscious space. Space-awareness bathes the brain like an embryo swimming in amniotic fluid. Waking space saturates each atom. In fact, the fundamental particles of matter are no-thing, but slightly imbalanced mathematical equations suspended in the conscious space of an infinite zero.

In the words of Sir James Jeans, one of the founders of quantum physics, this world is made from pure intelligence. Max Planck, another founder of modern physics, said that mind is the matrix of matter. Likewise their colleague, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote: All through the material world runs the stuff of our own consciousness.

Where is this cosmic stuff? Far above? Deep within? In another dimension? Why can't we accept the unconditional grace of reality, just as it is? The stuff of consciousness is space, and the stuff of space is consciousness.

We swim in the ocean of a universal Witness who broods over us always. We are dissolved in divine Presence. In the words of the 12th Century mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, God hugs you; you are enfolded in the arms of the Mystery. We are like fish searching for water, surrounded by a miracle so self-evident we just don't notice.

Therefor, the deepest form of worship is simply to be where you are. The beginning and end of spiritual practice is to rest as pure awakened space.

Space can nourish, heal, and re-create you. All you need do is become aware of it. Could any practice be simpler than becoming aware of space? Open your attention to the Great Space around you, to the left and right, above, below, and within the cells of your body. Awareness of space and awareness as space are one. In Great Space, subject and object are the same. Space renews and re-creates you because space is the source whence every particle of your body is born. So bathe in Great Space. Nay, just be aware that you are Great Space.

The ego-mind rebels against this revelation. The ego wants to attain something, to do something. Merely delighting as pure space is too graceful for the ego: not enough drama, not enough journey and quest. Yet the only obstacle to enlightenment is the thought: This is too easy to be real.

No circumstance, no busy-ness, can limit our practice of spacious rest, since space is not affected by anything that occurs within it. We enjoy this Sabbath wherever we are. Remember, we do not find Sabbath rest in the content of space, but in the space that contains all that happens, no matter what the content may be. The riot on an urban sidewalk and the green glen by a forest pond are both but momentary configurations of the same fundamental particles, appearing and dissolving in precisely the same space. Every battle is surrounded by a stillness. We can, at any moment, find instant liberation from suffering by shifting our attention from the content of what is happening to the space around it. This actually occurs, by grace, in the midst of a terrible accident or sudden chaos, which is why so many survivors recall a deep peace, a time-stopping stillness, surrounding the traumatic event.

It bears repeating: We can, at any moment, find instant liberation from suffering by shifting our attention from the content of what is happening to the space around it.

This is a practice, and it need only be practiced for an instant: a one-moment meditation. It is not an escape. We remain thoroughly in the world, though not of the world. And the space we make conscious through this practice becomes available for others, as a blessing of peace. This practice can become our deeper work, no matter what other work we are doing. By merely being awakened space, you are a healing presence in the world.

Great Space in Hinduism
The ancient rishis of India called this Great Space, Sat-Chit-Ananda: Truth-Consciousness-Bliss. Later Hindu priests populated Great Space with gods and goddesses. But gods and goddesses are just relative points of view within the Great Space of awareness. They are no different than you and me. A god or a me arises like a ripple in the ocean of space. This me only exists in relation to a you. Each of these waves is made out of the same space. And each wave, while individualized at its peak, is the whole ocean at its base. Hence all of us are but relative views of Great Space arising within that space. Indian philosophy starkly states that this Atman, the individual soul, is nothing but Brahman, the eternal space of God. We are each other.


Great Space in Buddhism
Gautama the Buddha taught this same truth in a different way. He wiped away all gods, goddesses and separate souls, reminding us that we are just empty space: sunya. Western scholars misinterpret Buddha's teaching as nihilism, regarding emptiness as a negation. But sunya purifies and re-creates us. Emptiness is a positive experience.

Great Space in Judaism
Jewish mystics call the emptiness of Great Space, Ayin, which in Hebrew means nothing. It is the equivalent of Mu in Zen Buddhism: the cosmic no. The mystical Jewish vision of God is Ayin Soph Aur. Soph means point, Aur means light. Ayin Soph Aur literally means pointless light. It is self-luminous space without any point of view. The light of creation (Aur ha'Olam) emanates from the darkness of Ayin. Thus, as we have seen, the Hebrew creation story in Genesis 1 describes the foundations of quantum physics: the material particle vibrating in waves from the cosmic ocean of the vacuum.


Great Space in Christianity
Christian mystics personified the emptiness of Great Space as a Virgin Mother engendering the Word or Logos, who is the seed of the material universe existing as pure thought before manifesting as matter. Christian theology insisted that creation is born out of nothing: ex nihilo. Yn Christian contemplative prayer, we return to the silence that was there before God said, Let there be light. Medieval mystics named this state of interior prayer, the Cloud of Unknowing. They called their practice the negative way: Via Negativa. The deepest form of Christian contemplation was apophatic rather than cataphatic prayer. In Greek, this means without any form as opposed to with form. These mystics realized God as Great Space in its radiant emptiness. Their method of Christian contemplative prayer is being revived today as Centering Prayer.

In meditation, I rest in a stillness where no images arise. This seems like nothing, because it is so empty and dark. But in my Sabbath rest from the work of thought, I discover that the Mother of God is within me as the Great Space of awareness. All creation is born from her silent womb. The 3nd Century Christian Gnostic, Valentinus, wrote that the real Virgin Mother is mystical eternal silence. In the 13th Century, Saint Bonaventure wrote, You too must be a Mary if Christ would be born in you.

Today, churches, temples and mosques exist for one purpose: to awaken space in our cluttered lives. A New Age teacher may call it cosmic consciousness. A Yoga tradition may use the Sanskrit term, samadhi. Buddhists may call it this Great Space, bodhichitta. A Christian might say, the Christ within. The name we use makes no difference at all. Indeed, some of us discover that when we try to name Great Space, we aren't in it any more!

Great Space is a practice, not a philosophical concept. Thinking about it has no value, since pure awakened space is freedom from thought. Whatever name we may call the Great Space, we need to rest there, beyond thoughts and names. Thoughts and names kill our silence. Don't measure the ocean in a little cup. Throw the cup into the sea. Then dive in after it with your whole body.

This does not mean that we suppress thoughts or attempt to erase them. Such misguided practice only gives us a headache! Simply realize that Great Space is always there, even when the mind is cluttered with thoughts, as the sky is there even when there are clouds. Great Space is between thoughts, beneath them, and pervading them. It is what's already there, before a thought can appear.

Great Space has no opposite. She embraces every belief, religion and creed. Ever boundless, taintless and clear, Great Space is within you, and you are within her. Your deepest fear and bitterest pain, your birth and death, are enfolded by the vastness of Great Space, whose nature is compassion. Stillness surrounds the battle. The solution is always already here. Become aware of Great Space. You don't even have to believe in it. Just rest.

Jai Guru Dev

Prayer of the Heart

I. Three Jewels

There are three precious jewels which you were given in your mother's womb. I am only going to remind you of their value, for you have let them get tarnished. Once you understand the value of what you already have, you will experience the deepest meditation and the highest form of prayer just by breathing. Before you set out on this life, your Inward Teacher gave you these three talismans to take on your journey: Breath, Heart, Silence.

The human body itself is the great sacrament. When you are fully embodied, no further sacrament is needed. If we would but attend to this body with as much devotion as we attend to church buildings, we would enter the temple of God at once!

As the center of the temple is the Holy of Holies, the center of the body is the Heart. The Heart is not merely a physical organ, but the seat of the soul. The Heart is like a radio: it is constructed out of physical matter but in such a way as to receive invisible energies, turning them into music. We can attune our hearts to God just as surely as we can set our radio to our favorite channel. In this prayer, we quite literally put our awareness there, in that beating organ at the center of the body. Prayer is a sacrament: spiritual presence in a physical object. When your attention rests in the Heart, you pass through a tiny golden portal to the Kingdom. Eternity dwells in a tiny spark at the center of your heart. Passing through that infinitesimal point, you discover yourself in God. This is the door of which Jesus spoke: "I am the door."

Down through the door of the Heart flows the Breath, the carrier of all that nourishes and heals. Breath is the unacknowledged physician in every human body. It cleanses each cell, enlivens each atom. If we would employ the power of our breath, we would not need to worry about the growing costs of health care. As our Heart is the physical sign of the soul, so our Breath is the physical sign of God's Spirit. The Biblical authors knew this. In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures they used the same word to express both spirit and breath. The double meaning of the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma corresponds to the double reality of our own breath. Breath is both the vehicle for oxygen and the host for spiritual energy. Each great religious tradition acknowledges this subtle energy in the breath: it is called chi in China, prana in India, spiritus in the West.

Just breathing is the purest prayer. What turns ordinary respiration into worship? Awareness. Fully conscious of breath, I discover that each breath is a gift. I am not breathing: I am breathed by God. Inhalation is grace; exhalation is surrender. Breathing in, breathing out: grace and surrender. Merely observing this gift, with awareness, transforms mechanical act into angelic sacrament.

The jewel of Silence is our third birthright. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the 7th Century wrote, "Above all things, love silence. Out of your silence will arise something that will draw you into deeper silence. If you practice this, inexpressible Light will dawn upon you."

When we become aware of the Silence that is always here, beneath the static chatter of our thoughts, we immediately enter the kingdom of the present moment. Silence is the space where God dwells. Only when we enter the spacious silence of the present moment can we meet God. For God is never in the future, never in the past. God is presence itself.

"Take no thought for tomorrow," Jesus declared. He always brought his listeners into the Kingdom of Now. They asked when the kingdom would come and he replied, "The kingdom of heaven is right here, in the midst of you!" He declared, "Before Abraham was, I AM." The whole spiritual journey is from here to now. Those who aren't ready for this journey study old maps.

Then how do we dwell in silent presence without being swept into the past and future by a flood of thoughts?

First, we acknowledge the fact that thinking creates time. The past and future only exist as thoughts. They have no objective reality whatsoever. We carry past and future in our heads, but our hearts always beat in the Kingdom of Now.

Failure to acknowledge this is the seed of suffering. Our memories of time past and our anxieties of time future are simply stresses carried in the neurons of our brain. Time is a neurological phenomena, a chemical-electric activity in the cortex. Time is anxiety, anxiety is time.

The solution to the problem of time is simply to become aware of time as a sensation in the brain. Watch time forming inside you as a knot of thoughts, fears, desires. See how you label this knot past and future. Instead of being mesmerized and absorbed by mental images, inner movies about what happened or what might happen, be aware of these thoughts as physical sensations. The moment you become aware, "Ah, this is just a passing thought, just some chemical activity in my brain," the thought loses its grip on your brain. You can observe the sensation that underlies the thought, without converting it into a mental picture. Then, penetrating that sensation without resistance, you can rest in the silence that is always there, behind every thought. This silence is the pure awareness that observes thoughts, but is never a thought. It is the stillness of the space where thoughts come and go. This still space of awareness is the real you: the watcher of thoughts and not the thoughts you are watching. This is why Jesus said, "Watch and pray". For the watcher, not the thinker, finds God.

Only silence can watch thoughts come and go, and silence is always in the present. Silence not only brings stillness, it brings the end of time. The end of time is Now.

Let each breath be an anchor that moors you to the silent depth of the heart. Follow your exhalation from the mind into the heart. At the very end of the exhalation, you will discover a moment of complete emptiness, just before inhalation begins. In that emptiness, there is no thought, no mind, no time: just silent emptiness. This is Christ's kinosis, or self-emptiness. "He emptied himself" (Philippians 2). Rest in that measureless empty stillness at the end of the exhalation, where this little stream of soul returns to the ocean of Spirit. From that depth will rise the inhalation, your next breath, a gift. Yes, you will discover that this breath is not really yours. It is the gift of the infinite.


Heart Mandala with the seed syllable, "Hum".

II. INSTRUCTIONS

These meditation instructions should be practiced, not analyzed. With eyes closed, practice each step for awhile until it becomes natural and easy. Then move to the next step. Don't try to force your way through the whole sequence at one time. Use the instructions that work. Own them. In the end, they flow together as one simple process carried out, not by your effort, but by Grace. The Grace of your Inner Teacher.

• Close your eyes and observe the breath. Observe with gentle attention, not forced concentration. Let the breath flow naturally from the nostrils down to the abdomen. Be aware of it all the way.

• As you breathe out, let go of tension. Let go of any subtle holding in the muscles of the shoulders, chest, or belly. As you release muscle tension, let go of the past. Release memories, simply by returning attention to the breath. As you breathe out, can you give up any subtle tension you are still holding in the rib cage, the diaphram?

• Allow awareness to sink from the head to the heart, quite literally. Gaze down into your heart and feel it beating. Give it room to beat. Feel its warmth. With awareness in the heart, observe whatever sensation comes, without analyzing or labeling the sensation "good" or "bad," "pain" or "pleasure." You may have denied your heart for a long time. Attention here might release strange feelings: heat, cold, fluttering, anger, fear, sadness. These words are just labels. Feel the sensations as energy without words. Eventually, you will experience a glow of happiness without cause. Don't let this confuse you: the innate joy of the heart is causeless. It is your birthright. You don't have to accomplish anything in order to deserve happiness.

• Now you are simply breathing in the heart. At the end of your exhalation, notice the stillness, emptiness, silence: the still point. This is the door. Here, surrender. This is the boundless space from which creation arises, the formless void mentioned in the first verse of the Bible. It is there even before God says, 'Let there be light.'

• After spending some time observing the exhalation in silent surrender, become aware of the inhalation. Observe each in-breath as a stream of living energy, flowing into your heart.

• Receive the inhalation with gratitude. Note its effortlessness. The breath is given. It is not something you work for. With this awareness, you will feel a soft thrill, a warmth deep in the heart. This is the outward and physical sign of Grace.

• Continue for as long as you wish, just resting and breathing through the heart. Nothing could be simpler. Nothing could be more profound. With every inhalation, receive. With every exhalation, offer. Breathing is the whole story of salvation: gift and response. Your breath is Holy Communion on the heart's alter. The Holy Breath, which is the Holy Spirit, consecrates and transmutes your body into the body of Christ.


Eastern Orthodox icon: 'Heart of Christ'

III. The Divine Name

When you find yourself gazing down into the heart, you have become Mary gazing down at the newborn child. A strange and wonderful sensation arises which is both physical and spiritual: it is what you have been seeking. All other desires are but shadows of this yearning for the birth of Christ in you. When empty of thought, silently watching, untainted by time, awareness is a virgin womb. The Christian Gnostic,Valentinus, wrote that "the true Virgin Mother is the mystical eternal silence." That mystical eternal silence is the mothering womb of your pure and simple awareness. St. Bonaventure wrote: "You too must be a Mary if you would give birth to the Christ."

The Christ of God is born in the womb of awareness as an Inward Light. The Spirit who begets Him is your breath. Your heart is the manger, for there is no room in the busy inn of your mind.

It sometimes happens that, even when we plunge into the ocean of silence, our heart is so filled with gratitude that it needs to cry out, to express the beauty it gives birth to. This requires no more than a single word - a prayer word - what the Orthodox masters called eucharistos monologistos, "one-word prayer." We must remember that this word is the effect, not the cause, of prayer. The word is not a technique but an effulgence. The word is the gift of silence.

In the East, this prayer word is called mantra, which means vehicle for the mind in Sanskrit. In the Orthodox tradition of Christianity, it is called the Name. The prayer word is neither a mechanical repetition nor a focus of concentration. The word need not be uttered on every breath. It is felt, not spoken, a breath of silence. As when a bird soars in a stream of wind, only beating its wings with a gentle occasional pulse to sustain that effortless air-born flight, we invoke the Name.

Breathing out or breathing in, gently and without effort hear the Name. Let the Name arise on the breath, as a white bubble arises on the crest of a wave. Praying the divine Name fuses breath and mind in the heart. As the Name is carried on the breath, it sends its subtle but powerful energy into every cell of the body, thrilling each electron with joy. This is how the word of prayer becomes the Word of creation, which God speaks in the genesis of heaven and earth. "In the beginning was the Word.... all things were created through Him." So the Indian Mandukya Upanishad declares, "The syllable Om is eternal Godhead, and is the universe. Whatever was, whatever is, whatever shall be, is Om." When the Word vibrates in the Heart, we attune ourselves to the source of creation. Then we become a channel for the Word to bless all sentient beings, and re-create the world through our humble awareness.

The ancient masters of Christian prayer experienced this epiphany through the name of Jesus. By means of the breath, Orthodox masters carried Jesus into their hearts. St. Hesychius of Jerusalem (4th Century) spoke of "breathing Jesus Christ." In the 6th Century, St. John Climacus wrote, "Let the Name of Jesus be joined to your breath: then you shall know the use of silence." A later saint, Nichodimus of the Holy Mountain, wrote, "Let Jesus be your breath."

I invite you to listen to God's Breath in your heart. The Spirit will reveal a prayer-word appropriate for you, a word that links you to the Christ of God. After all, the original Aramaic meaning of messiah is God's out-breathing.

Prayer is not your work, but God's work in you. When divine breath centers to a single fiery seed of love in your heart, it's silence vibrates with the thunder of God's Name. The Word incarnates in your body. Though you are not aware of its true amplitude, this Word sends forth a wave of healing that ripples through every photon of light, every atom of creation, regenerating not your flesh alone, but all humanity. Your body is inter-woven in one particle-field with every child in Darfur and every mother in Tibet. This is as true in quantum physics as in the Church's phrase, "universal body of Christ."

IV. The Culture of Prayer

We need to confess that there is a spiritual void in our hearts. Most of today's social and economic problems arise from our denial of that void. We deny the void by stuffing it: filling it with alcohol, stimulants, fat food, nerve-pounding music, instant sex, even violence. The busy-ness of work can be a way to stuff our inner void. Even shopping! Strolling through the mall, we buy not out of necessity, but despair. Our national economy thrives on spiritual emptiness.

Ironically, the solution is right where the problem is: the heart. Nowhere but here will we find the antidote to our anger, our anxiety, and the dryness of our workdays. If we would but take some time each morning and evening to enter the heart through prayer, this would be the little leaven to raise the loaf, a little salt to bring out the taste of life. You can renew your world by renewing your heart. As the heart feels the world, so the world becomes....

This prayer is not a flight from darkness: it embraces darkness. Prayer regards inner emptiness as sacred ground. Embrace your emptiness, and you will become the space of compassion. Embrace your darkness, and you will find radiance in the void.

Parable of the Pub

One night Jesus, Krishna, Buddha and Mohammad went to a pub. It was quite an evening. When it was very late, the tavern keeper brought them the bill. They began to argue.

Jesus looked at Krishna and said, "You claim your pot is always full, no matter what is taken out of it. You pay the bill."

Krishna looked at Buddha and said, "You don't cling to anything because you claim its all emptiness. Why don't you empty your pockets?"

Buddha looked at Jesus and said, "You talk about sacrificing all you've got. You could at least pay our tab."

Then the three of them turned to the Prophet and stared at him in silence. "Don't look at me," he said. "I don't drink." They kept staring. "Well all right," he said, "I'll admit I took a taste from every bottle, but I didn't swallow."

That did it. A heated argument erupted until the tavern-keeper, who wanted his money, walked over to their table. "Listen," he said. "The wine is Love. The drunker you get the more you give, until you're as tipsy as God. Therefor, the drunkest one among you should act like it, and pay the bill!"

Hearing that, all four of them emptied their pockets, not only paying the tab but honoring the tavern keeper with an enormous tip. Then, linking arms, they staggered out of the tavern in perfect friendship, singing such a crazy song that no one understood it at all.

'Like the Very Heavens for Clearness'

Spiritual teachers speak of the power of the present moment. So we look desperately for something romantic, something wonderful in the Now. We are children rummaging through their mother's closet for a hidden present. But we are disappointed to discover that there is no-thing hidden there. Now is desolate.

Yet the enlightened have told us that Now is eternally beautiful? Do they see something we can't, something hidden in the Now?

In the Bedda Karadda Sutra, the Buddha says: "Deeply observe the present moment, just as it is, and you shall attain the unity of the ancient masters." This seems simple: why can't we do it? Perhaps we have never confronted the desolate truth: only No-Thing is eternally beautiful.

The fish swims in the sea searching for the mysterious element, "water." We search from guru to guru, one religion to another, yet still thirst for the eternal Now.

Perhaps the problem is, we seek some content in the Now. Our seeking is a very refined form of materialism. We seek something, but No-Thing only is holy. God is not the object of our attention, but the Christolization of attention itself.

In Exodus 33:20, God tells Moses, "You cannot see my face, for no man can see me and live." Yet scripture seems to contradict itself, for Exodus 24:9 recounts that "Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up on Mt. Sinai, and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet a pavement of sapphire like the very heaven for clearness." (Exodus 24:9) This could only happen if, in the seeing of God, the seer is annihilated...

The beauty of the present moment is presence itself. Beauty dawns as pure being when the beholder and the beheld dissolve into one radiance, no longer subject and object, but pure Seeing. Subject and object exist in time past, time future, but pure Seeing is always now. What I see is, just as it is, without super-imposition of my past experience, or my plan for the future, on what is. The ego-mind, consisting of memory and desire, past and future, must perish to see the No-Thing that is God.

This is what the Buddha means by, "Deeply observing the present moment, just as it is." In Presence, there is no predilection, no preference for an outcome. The mind is in one place alone, not two: therefor it generates no comparisons: "I would rather it look that way, I insist the event tend toward a different outcome, I prefer to repeat the experience I had the last time I was here."

Up until now, Western civilization has functioned by comparison, dividing the mind. But an age now dawns when life will be lived, and problems will be solved, out of the radiant singularity of Now. The age of reason will dissolve into the age of intuition.

How much work it was, insisting that the world conform to our preferences! But now, in the radiance of this moment, we need not waste half our mind's energy imposing desire upon what is. Our attention is free from preference, free to sink 100% into Now. This is what Buddha means by "deeply." His instruction does not say merely to observe, as with analytic judgment, but to observe deeply, deeply with 100% surrender, until things shimmer in their suchness, just as they are. For the miraculous nature of the Ordinary reveals its radiance the moment we empty ourselves of desire.

In the past age, the content of the present moment was the foreground of our experience: the space that contained this content was background. But now, our primary attention shifts from the content of experience to the space that contains it. That very space scintillates with beauty, and has no boundaries. Thus it absorbs all, and its nature is compassion. Whatever the conflict, the battle that rages, it is bathed by a stillness, and this stillness, the moment we become aware of it, is resolution, and peace.

Look at a star. Now be aware of the night itself.

Something divine shimmers in the space around a star, a twig, a pebble, a human face. This invisible shimmering is really No-Thing: more entrancing by far than the object it envelopes. This Christolized diamond of Presence enfolds the farthest galaxy or the smallest mote of dust. It is, in Vedic langauge, "ano raniyan mahato mahiyan": subtler than the smallest particle, yet vaster than the universe." The whole blue sky sparkles in an atom when attention sinks into the depths of Now without resisting anything. Here, in a frail violet or moth wing, you will see "a pavement of sapphire, like the very heaven for clearness": the ground of consciousness itself, reflected in each surrendered perception.

Jai Guru Dev

HB Seeks SFWB

Here's my entry in the 'Personals' section at the back of the local newspaper : MHB Seeks SF. Mere Human Being Seeks Spiritual Friends.

For soul nourishment, I don't need another Guru with absolute authority. I don't need a savior or an avatar. Not even the second coming of Jesus. (Did he ever leave?) I need spiritual friends, peers, people with the courage to share doubt as well as exaltation, pain as well bliss, falling as well as getting high.

I just buried my parents' ashes under a willow tree by a pond in Pennsylvania. I don't want a new parent-figure, or a dependent child who makes a parent out of me. I want spiritual siblings.

I need to ground my bare feet in a circle, not climb a stairway to the stars. I'm no longer charmed by someone above, or seduced by someone below, on the ladder of souls. I need you beside me, walking this pathless path that leads us to the present moment.

Take my hand.

Quaker Meeting

On Sunday morning I love
the priestless ceremony
of Quaker Meeting.
The minister is each of us, ordained
by the power of simplicity.
Silence is the sermon,
Presence the ritual,
Breathing out, the offering,
Breathing in, the Spirit's gift.
No one even has to say, 'Amen'.
The wood thrush said it at dawn,
waking the world to this
First Day.

DON'T IMPROVE AND DON'T MEDITATE!

NO MEDITATION

The ego wants to do something very difficult. Ego is not ready to accept something that is simple, something natural, something easily attained...." (Shri Shri Ravi Shankar)

We tend to get stuck in the concept of “meditation,” and then we really want to do something! Of course whatever we do must be something complicated. Only very hard, very clever tasks satisfy this intellect. In our culture, simplicity is generally mistaken for stupidity.

So we will not do meditation. We will do not-meditation.We will just observe the coming and going of breath. You may have done this before, but with a desire to attain something. Let it happen without this want. Just meet each Spirit-breath as if she is a wonderful new teacher who has just shown up. Actually she is a very ancient teacher, but she comes to us again and again in each breath. She is Hochmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, Shakti in Sanskrit. In each breath is a wonderful guide who has just shown up.

Experience this breath, not as a thing, but as a wave of dissolving. Let the breath remind you there is nothing to cling to, no object, no concept. For it is all dissolving, and this dissolving is the vibrancy of life. That which is not dissolving, not changing constantly, is dead!

True living is continuous letting go, with no ground to stand on. Be groundless and empty. Follow Christ’s example of "kinosis": self-emptying. This Greek term is used in Phillipians, chapter 2, where we read that "he emptied himself." Follow Buddha’s enlightenment: he saw that everything is quite empty, "shunyata!" Follow the wisdom of modern physics: we know that each atom is almost entirely empty space, and each photon inside that atom is an instantaneous wave of light returning to the void as soon as it appears. Yet, for that instant, the photon contains virtually infinite energy. This is real. This is truth. This is what you're made of. You are the incarnation of the infinite, yet utterly empty of any content at all. This is a paradox, is it not? When you are nothing, you are vast and powerful. That is why Jesus said, "Whoever clings to his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life will find it."

So let go of clinging as you let go of each breath. If you're not letting go, you're not breathing, are you? In self-emptying, moment by moment, find eternal life.

When you sit, with a very light touch of awareness, follow your inhalation to the heart-space. Rest there awhile. When you feel settled, notice your exhalation. Follow it up into your brow, and out into the space in front of your brow. Dissolve with your breath into that space.

The rising and falling of your breath empties, sweeps, and cleanses the hollow channel from your heart to your brow. This empty yet sacred avenue of breath joins heaven and earth. Your angels descend on the inhalation. Your ancesters ascend on your exhalation . This wonderful Way is the "straight and narrow path." It connects all the worlds like beads on one golden strand of breath. The mysteries of this Way are innumerable, for the Way is endless. Yet it is only the rising and falling of your breath in the space between your heart and your brow.

Simple, timeless, this not-doing is found in every religious path. It is the path within the path: nothing erudite, nothing exotic, yet vast and marvelous. In Buddhism, Zazen. In Hinduism, Ajapa-japa. In the early Church, the Prayer of the Heart. The fire of Presence consumes the kindling of the past. The smoke of the offering rises into the blue sky and dissolves. You offer each Breath, and rising, it dissolves into Awareness. You are the sky.



DON'T IMPROVE!

"Take no thought for tomorrow... " ( Jesus)

"Give up worrying about the past. Give up dreaming of the future. The past no longer exists. The future has not been born. But deeply observe the present moment, just as it is, and you shall attain the peace and unity of the ancient masters." (Buddha, Bheda Karata Sutta)

Please don't try to improve the world. I don't need you to improve me. How do you feel when you meet someone who wants to improve you? Is it not an assault, a subtle form of violence against you?

"But there is injustice in the world, and I want to improve it!" Is your attempt to improve the world not another form, a subtler form, of injustice?

Injustice is an unwarrented gap in power between two lives. But injustice begins within ourselves. It begins when we divide one part of our personality against another, and make one part of ourself more powerful in order to suppress another. My mind, full of ideals about how I want to be in the future, begins to manipulate my behavior. My thoughts try to change the present state of mind into a better state, a higher state. I mold the present into the future. I cannot embrace the Now.

Self-improvement is a war on what is, an attack on Presence. It imposes a "should" on the world. Our "should" is a weapon of mass destruction: we use it on ourselves, then on others, then on the whole earth. All utopian plans to design a better world contain this "should." The Communist idealists had a vision: a golden age of human equality. They ruined half the world trying to impose their vision. The Neo-conservative idealists have a vision: a golden age of global democracy sustained by the free-market. They are destroying everything else. Idealism is a form a violence, hope is a form of violence, for the desire to change the world contains the unspoken desire to destroy it.

Does this mean that we must passively accept injustice? God forbid! It means that there is a better way, a non-violent way, to transform our world: a form of creative action which arises not from attacking what is, but from wholeness.

Creative action can begin from unconditional acceptance of the present moment. "In the beginning, God created..." This present moment is always the Beginning. When we see the beauty and grace in things as they are, right now, we can allow our action to arise as participation in the moment of creation.

What is, is. Otherwise, it could not be. Though our small intellects may not comprehend the purpose and design, things are as they must be now. Therefor, non-violent action responds to the world without insisting on improvement. Non-violence is a dialogue with what is, not a plan for what should be.

If I truly want good, I will not divide the world into better and worse. I will not engage in judgment or comparison. Good can only arise from good: good is never the outcome of a conflict with evil. That is why Jesus said, "Love your enemy... Do not resist the evil one."

The action that arises from Now is not "an improvement." It is a response. It is a wave of silence, a tremor of unity, a gesture of the whole through its parts. Never a war, but a dance.

"Improvement" arises from a divided mind, a worried mind, a mind split into present and future. Action based on worry will always produce more tension, more division.

So if I want a good world, I will begin by healing myself of worry. I will relax into the wholeness of the present moment with undivided attention. It is possible to worry about the past and the future, but it is impossible to worry about the present. The present moment does not have to be thought, and worry only exists in thought. People who do heroic deeds never feel like heros. They just act in the present moment.

The end of worry is Now. Now is courage. If you have the courage to be fully in this Now, you are improving the world.

Parable of A Disobedient Woman

After the prosecutor had made his case against her, she stood in the hushed court and began her defense. During her speech, the Judge's face grew increasingly red and fierce. Sweat poured from his temples: his crown continually slipped over his forhead and fell off.

"I can accept death, your honor, and hardship, and the pain of childbirth, and endless labor. But what I will not accept is guilt. My actions have a consequence, it's true: but I will not allow you to besmirch my good name. I have not done wrong. I have only done an act that results in suffering. I accept my suffering, but I do not accept the condemnation you would attach to it, and to my children."

"But," spluttered the judge, "I clearly told you, as your magistrate and king, that you must not eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. You ate it. Therefor you disobeyed. Disobediance is an evil. Thus you are condemned as a sinner forever!"

"You are mistaken, O Judge and King. For when you told me not to eat of the fruit, you did not tell me that disobedience was an evil. And because I had not yet eaten of the fruit of knowledge, I knew not what evil was. Therefor I ate in innocence."

The sweaty crown began to slip. The veins pulsed on the Judge's neck. "Insolent woman!" he shouted. "Naturally you knew that you must obey my commandment, for I created you, and that which is a creature is a natural born slave to its creator! Therefor you should have known, you should have known!"

"Quite the contrary, sir," said the mild woman with a small sad smile, a smile that nevertheless grew as she spoke until it flashed from her eyes and her brow, and her whole being shined with a light brighter than the tinsel on the crown of her accuser. "You did not create me to be a slave. For you declared, 'Let us create humanity in our own image and likeness.' Did you not say that I was to be the ruler of this earth and have dominion over all its creatures? Did you not make me as your earthly reflection, to be your co-creator? And what does it mean to be your image if not to reflect your freedom, your power of choice? Therefor I ate of the fruit as a noble act of freedom. I was not disobedient: I was simply being true to my nature, the nature you gave me when you created me in the image of your own free will."

The judge rose, flecks of saliva shaken from his lips by the words he proclaimed: "You are condemned to exile, sorrow, pain and death!"

"I know," she replied gently, "I know. But I will wear my suffering as a crown more noble than yours. My suffering is not punishment for sin: it is simply the birth pang of the soul who rises from innocence to experience. Though I have lost my innocence, I have not lost my virtue. In fact, it is you who have done evil!"

Everyone in the court gasped at this impertinence.

"Yes," she continued, "It is you who have sinned. For when you condemn me, you condemn me unjustly, since I acted out of innocence, not yet having any knowledge of good and evil. Sin for me had no meaning. To accuse me of sin, then, is both a falsehood and an injustice. Since falsehood and injustice are ungodly, then you by condemning me deny your own godly nature, while I have remained true to mine. You, my God, are the sinner, not I!"

From the back of the courtroom, a young man moved from the shadows to the light and stood beside her.

"You again!" said the Judge. "I sent you away, away, yet you always come back when I condemn one of these sinners! What do you want this time?"

"I have come for her sake," the man said, "not for your's." Then he smiled to the woman, taking her hand. "Come, I will accompany you through the valley of the shadow of death. I cannot remove your pain. But friendship can heal the blight of judgment. You will go forth as a sufferer, but not a sinner. All that you endure, I will endure: not to take it from you, but to give you the assurance that you have a friend."

"What is a friend?" asked the woman, warily.

He answered, "A friend is someone who knows your sorrows as if they were his own."

Together they turned to the jury. The judge demanded, "Have you reached a verdict?'"

"We have, your honor?"

"How do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?"

"Your honor, we sentence the defendant to suffering and death, but we find her not guilty."

The judge stared at the young man, his eyes smouldering. "Your Mother is behind this, isn’t she? Ever since I divorced the woman, she has been sending you back to confuse my judgment! Can’t you and that woman just leave me to my work? Can’t you see its all a simple matter of right and wrong; guilty and not guilty; Heaven and Hell? Why must you always ruin justice with your God-forsaken mercy?"

The defendant walked out of the courtroom with the young man, as the Judge turned toward the officers, shouting, "Bring in the next slave for me to judge. There must be someone here who is guilty!"