Saints

For centuries we have looked for saints as perfect people who perform miracles. As long as we do, we will get burned and disillusioned. Saints are not sinless. They're just ordinary people who let a little crack open up in this dark world, to let the light of Grace through. To do that, the saint needs to know what it is to crack and to break open. You don't have to listen for a voice from heaven. Listen for the whisper of the wounded seed in its furrow, and the sparkling song of a stream in the forest.

Pathless We Are There

Truth is revealed wherever there is innocence, humility and wonder. Pathless, we are there. I am pollen on the stamen of the Truth Flower. So are you. Even the Master is a mote of golden dust. We're all dissolving in a honey drop. Don't try to find a formal Way to this place, or you'll turn the sweet wine sour. Just let ten thousand petals of your rainbow open in all directions at once.

A Smile

Some people are always outraged about some political issue. They are so in love with their anger that they wouldn't know who they were without it. They believe that their outrage and protest change the world, but are they not simply making it an angrier place?

They need to see your smile. They need evidence of happiness. Your smile is a seed that falls into their heart. That seed may not spring up for ten thousand lifetimes. But when it does, it will change their world completely.

Your smile arises from the same silent hollow in the core of your chest where your breath is born. As your breath is not yours, but a gift, so a smile from the depths of the heart is not yours, but a gift, a stream that bathes you, flowing from the light of eternity. Breath is the essence of your body. A smile is the essence of your soul.

Phi & the Wonder of Proportion

All is proportion. That is why the black hole at the center of a proton contains the total information of the universe, and your body is made out of distant galaxies. If you doubt this, even your doubt is filled with stars whose radiance is still traveling toward you. But don't take my word for it, just observe the hollow space in your own eye, and you will pass through light-years in a glance of self-awareness.
"There exists a fantastic Phi relationship between the Equilateral Triangle and the Circle that goes around it: Insert an equilateral triangle inside a circle, add a line at the midpoint of the two sides and extend that line to the circle. The ratio of AG to AB is Phi.

"This only goes to show that Phi or the ubiquitous Golden Measure exists in all shapes, in all dimensions, in all forms. Since the Triangle has a Phi relationship, then the Jewish Star of David must contain this Phi-ness, so must the 3-dim form of the triangle: the Tetrahedron, which is the basic building block of all atomic structure. Thus Phi (1:1.618033) is in all things.

"It is also scale-invariant, meaning that Phi exists in the infinitely small atomic worlds or the infinitely large galactic worlds. Yet its starting point was the humble triangle, the first 2-dim form that God could create." ~Nassim Haramein

Dandelion Mike

This child is singing into a dandelion microphone. His song is being simulcast into every planet of the cosmos. Can you hear it? He sings in the doo-wap of phonemic vibration, spontaneous toddler sighs and giggles containing the most powerful seed mantras of the Samma Veda and the Tantras. Hum, Dhum, Phwat, Soh, Hang, Bhak! Shooby! Just listen, don't translate. But if you must have words, then lowering the vibrations into 'English,' the song would say something like this:

 

'As all the waves in the sea are made of water,
so all the thoughts in the mind are made of silent awareness
resonating in its own boundless essential emptiness.
Therefor all thoughts are equally valid and equally meaningless.
And because every material form in human civilization
is a projection of thought, all forms are also essentially empty,
joyously frolicking in the ocean of consciousness,
like a mirage in the clear blue sky.
Therefor, why argue about anything? Just dance.
A nice man named Jesus told me this,
after he had drunk seven bottles of mysterious juice.'

Open Secrets for Every Child of the Coming Age

These are the Laws of Perfect Joy for every child to learn before their teachers and their schools burden them with knowledge.

1. The Radiance of the Divine is not above you, beyond you, not after your death. It shines from the center of your own heart, now. You are not a reflection of the Light, a seeker of the Light, or an offspring of the Light: you ARE the Light.


2. To begin your duty on earth, you will need a daily practice of meditation that is effortless, natural and energizing; a quiet time dawn and sunset when you sink into the Beauty at the center of your heart. The beginning and end of all spiritual practice is to rest in the heart. This is your Sabbath, attuning you to your Source, by grace. Every good thing you do for humanity will come from this connection to inner silence.

3. Doubtless there are great injustices in the world, but your life will never evolve as long as you waste your days blaming the "other" for your sorrows. A life stuck in blaming the forces outside you, is a life that has not begun to live itself.

4. You blossom as You by taking personal responsibility for the present situation. In the complex sequence of causes that brought you to this moment, the primary cause was a choice you made by your own free will.

5. Your capacity to heal the earth is in direct proportion to your capacity for Wonder. Your most creative state will not be a state of knowing or believing, but a state of bewildering Beauty, when the mind empties itself of all knowledge and belief. Let yourself dissolve into this moment of Wonder. It is the portal to eternity.

To Breathe

To breathe is the purest form of worship. Space is the alter, invisible, omnipresent. Breathing in, offer whatever you encounter in the fire of this moment. Breathing out, awareness is a smokeless blue flame, annihilating both the seer and the seen in love.

Before the Beginning was the Wordless

Creation dances in the stillness you carry inside you. Earth and stars whirl through your body. You knew this as a toddler, stumbling from your mother's to your father's arms.

You knew because you had no Word to explain it. When words came, they cast what they could not describe into an outer darkness. Before the beginning was the Wordless.

Say not that the world was created through the Word, for many worlds were lost, stillborn in shattered cocoons of speechlessness, galaxies unwound to threads of murmur and shadow, melodies fled into the rainforest, wishing to be no more than parrot echos among the cashapona trees.

For each Word spoken, a brown naked vision song was forgotten, sweet on the undulatant tongue
of night, the starless unwritten syllable of your innocence. This is why, if you wish to touch the Creator again, you must return to the prayerless dark; remember the uncreated stillness of the hour before dawn.

Here, now, let your breath taste the nectar of silence...

What It All Doesn't Mean

Some say you must find meaning in life to be happy. I say, people who search for meaning are miserable. Happiness doesn't mean anything. For God's sake, let us live in a world without meaning, where no creature means more than another, each leaf and star, each rusty screw and gentle breath equally significant, equally empty. Devoid of meaning, this cosmos is lighter than air, a centerless whirling where religions do not arise, wars do not begin, and no one knows. But attach meaning to one single shape, and it all collapses in the impenetrably dense black hole of a dust mote. 
Better to dance one moment with a fool 
than sit all day with a holy book, each word 
pointing elsewhere. 

Don't Know


I don't know
what the fuck
is going on
and neither
do you,
but I do know
that humanity
will only survive
through forgiveness.

Love Your Shadow

One sign of the enlightened community is that we regard the stranger, the madman, and the terrorist, as the shadows of our own inner judgment against ourselves. This is why Jesus said, "Love your enemy...do not resist the evil one" (Mat 5). If he were here today, he might simply say, "Embrace your shadow. Do not project it onto others."

Biblical Vedanta


"Yea, the darkness hides not from Thee; but the night shines as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee." ~Psalm 139

The Bible contains a deeply non-dualist strain, encompassing the darkest aspects of human nature as part of our divine wholeness. The Bible unflinchingly embraces the shadow, understanding that it too is God. In the Exodus story, Satan does not harden Pharaoh's heart against the Israelites, God does. In fact, even Satan is an angel, an aspect of divine will: his job is testing people in order that they may evolve. God permits Satan to test Job, and bring obstacles into his life. 

The Hebrew Prophets seldom blame Israel's invaders and captors as evil, rather regarding them as God's left hand, purifying the Israelite ego. Yes, our enemy is also God. In the darkness, the Lord confronts Jacob in the form of a demonic "jinn" or nature spirit by the edge of the river Jordon. He wrestles Jacob until dawn, leaving him wounded yet transformed. Then the antagonist reveals himself as the angel-messenger of God, giving Jacob a new name, "Israel." Israel literally means, "He has wrestled with God." 

In one of the darkest passages of the Bible, Exodus 4:18ff, God explicitly takes the form of Moses' shadow, and tries to kill him in the middle of the night. Is it a dream from Moses' unconscious? Is the demonic murderer really God? Or is it Moses' projection of his darkest fears? Perhaps the answer is yes to all three questions. One never hears a minister preach on this story from the pulpit: it is inexplicable except from a Jungian, non-dualist perspective. To transcend conflict and become whole, or holy, Moses must integrate his darkest, most negative qualities into the unity of his personhood.

Biblical non-dualism is unnerving to those who seek a comfy inviolable distinction between the "good" and the "bad," the light and the dark. But, as the Psalmist reminds us, "darkness and light are both alike to Thee," the Godhead beyond God.

I Am My Body

The 'non-dualist' who says that 'I am not this body' lives in a self-contradiction. The body cannot be anything other than boundless consciousness. Boundless consciousness cannot be anything other than the body.  I love my body. I Am every atom of my body. And every atom of my body is filled with the splendor of the universe.



A single tear circles the stars. It is the supreme yoga, the supreme kriya, the supreme action: to dissolve everything in a drop of wonder.

The Miracle of Ordinary Awareness

The greatest adventure of all is to quit seeking. Do I have the courage to end my flight from the ordinary?

Juicing the mind with bliss is just another addiction. Why do I need to travel to India, to wait in line for a holy man’s darshan? The tantra they taught me on the mountaintop turns out to be a distraction when I'm shopping for potatoes.


Some speak about the miracle of ordinary things. But stones, weeds, and abandoned robins' nests are not miracles until I enfold them with ordinary awareness. To be awake is the miracle. Am I awake enough to see my waking?

No need to taste the wine of Jesus when I gaze at a withered zucchini through the boundless sky of my own eyeball. While I'm searching for yet another Yoga technique, I lose the precious opportunity to make use of the commonplace, the sacrament of boredom. I am feeling so ordinary today. What grace!

I should know by now that on this wild little planet, more stimulation is not necessary. Neither the nectar of bhakti nor the spice of tantra will liberate this mind: the humdrum is a better place for practice.

Boredom is a signal to wake up. Don't just look; look at what is looking. Not at angels, nor at Jesus, nor the celestial glory of the Blessed Virgin. Just look at the one who is looking. That is what Saint Francis told his brother to do. How ordinary!

It is easier to transcend from a neutral state than from excitement or stimulation. I gracefully slip into the infinite, not by getting a kick from a tangy rush of Shakti, but through the transparency of ordinary awareness. Unflavored attention is nearer to freedom than the salt and pepper of vision or ecstasy. Trust in the depths of what is not there. Your emptiness is not a destination, but a door.

Remember the "trust fall," that delicious, blind and backward surrender into the arms of a teenager? Are you not trustworthy? Right now, just fall backward into the groundless well of your own Being. No one will catch you, thank God.
Veiled Christ, by Antonio Corradini



All things just and lovely
are veiled in Possibility...
You are the veil!

Still Silence



True stillness is not the suppression of movement, 
but motion settling into its center. True silence is not 
suppression of voice, but the voice astonished 
by its source. Dance and sing.

Progress




I define 'progress' as leaving things the way they are, letting the weather round my sharp edges and soften my shoulders with moss, until I fall into ruins, tangled with morning glories.

Hum



Close your eyes and hum like a bee drowning in a rose. Listen to delicious honey vibrations in every cell of your body. Totally sensuous. People call you a crazy sidewalk bum. Then you define it as 'meditation,' name the vibration 'Om,' and they call you a saint.

Turn Off This Computer Now


Never before in the history of civilization have so many been so over-informed about the sufferings of so few. This is the work of the media, who profit by spreading a mass epidemic of secondary post-traumatic stress.

Your computer monitor is a very small space. There is a much wider space around you, full of miracles, full of good news. Turn off this computer immediately and become aware of the October sunlight gently filtering through the mist, the echo of crows, the whisper of falling alder leaves.

Every golden leaf is worth more than all the coins on Wall Street. The healing in a sunbeam cures every dis-ease. But of course, I am speaking of THIS sunbeam, and not sunbeams in general, which don't exist. You will never read a study about THIS sunbeam in the Huffington Post.
The radiant ever-expanding miracle of ordinary awareness is the real news.

AM is the Mother of I

 

There are so many outrages in the world, so many problems that make us angry, frightened, and divided! But the original outrage, shattering the whole mirror into fragments, is the separation of I from AM. 

When we heal this wound, we can begin to heal the world.

The first outrage is to 'other' our own source, to distance ourselves from our own boundless Being. All the pain that we humans inflict on one another mimics the original pain, the original sin, of separation from our Self. Why not return to the primordial relationship, the graceful bond of I and AM?
 

Our spiritual tradition portrays this primal relationship in the archetype of Madonna and Child. It is actually not the love that flows from another, but the love that flows from the Self. As a mother gives birth to her child, so AM gives birth to I. And this I is not heavy, not carried as a burden in time. This I is born each moment in a burst wonder, like an ever-dissolving particle vibrating out of the silent energy-field. 

Cherish this momentary I as the child of your Being. I repose at the life-giving Source of the all-mother Am, in ceaseless divine Self-nourishment. Surrender to the breast of Self-nourishment is the only way to become truly selfless. 

The Yoga Vashista states: "For the enlightened, the true relationship is not a relationship of I and Thou, but a relationship of I and Am;" perhaps the most transparent yet most obscure verse in all of scripture.

Jesus liked to quote the great commandment: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Yet implied in this verse is a silent interior commandment: "Love thy Self." I am a wave in the ocean of Am, and I cannot love another until the ocean loves its wave. 

In the Metta Sutra, Buddha taught, "As a mother loves her only child, so embrace all creatures with boundless compassion." Contrary to subsequent "Buddhist" teaching, however, such love does not arise when I renounce myself, but when I hug myself.

I Am. Am is Amma. Amma means Mother.  

When Am unconditionally embraces this little I, in this very moment, the outrage is over. This is the end of blame, the end of estrangement in every relationship. In Self-forgiveness, the world is forgiven.

Why not be the Mother of your own heart?

Rumi's Garden


We all had tears of laughter in our eyes, shouting, "Don't speak the Word, don't create heaven or earth. Let's just stay crushed together in this wine!"

It was no use. The Old Man cried, "Let there be light!" and everything's been tumbling downhill ever since, from chaos toward order.

We've got to get back to the tangle of luscious vines beyond the broken fence! I can almost smell the honeysuckle, and feel the tickle of clover in my ears, lying in that biogenic field among pulsars of dew, gazing at a string of moons through the dragonfly's wing...

Your otherness, my friend, is a drowsy haze within my optic nerve. You are my seeing.

This place must be Rumi's field, out beyond ideas of right or wrong, the wildness that mothered us both.

Here you can drink from the bowl of my heart until it's hollow. This round emptiness is the fullness we really long for; a ringing sound, the laughter that shakes the belly of the void before God speaks.

We get here through repose, not pilgrimage. Now I'll show you the secret of the Sabbath. The world is made out of sparkling beauty. Every breath is an ocean of love.

Just taste the energy beneath the form. Renew your vow to become what was here before Light.


Painting, Garden of Eden, Jan Breughel 

Be the Parent, Not the Child


There is a sense of separateness called 'me.' It whispers, 'You will solve the world's problems if you just find the right party to blame.'

But this very need to blame is the world's greatest problem. Blame corporations, blame religions, blame governments, blame the rich, blame the poor, blame the liberal, blame the conservative, blame the 'other.' The truth is, there is no other.

Blaming another is the sign that I have shirked my own responsibility for world peace. My primary duty is to awaken, and see that who I blame is inseparable from who I Am. There will never be peace on earth without my wholeness.


Parenthood is the sign of wholeness, signifying how unconditionally we enfold one another. The one person we never blame for our world's problems is our own child. When we see humanity as our own children, flame disappears.

In the Metta Sutra, Buddha taught us to pray, 'Just as a mother embraces her child, her only child, let me embrace the whole world in this heart of compassion.' And through the Prophet Isaiah, God sings, 'Can a mother forget her sleeping child? Can she forget the infant at her breast? So I will never forget you!' 


This is why we pray, Our Father, Our Mother. Not that we are children, but that we reach toward our highest potential: to take responsibility for the earth, as a parent.