Uradiance

Wondering

2012-01-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

I wonder why...
the Prophet must come down from a mountain peak
holding stone tablets of Law.
I wonder why...
the Prophet can't meander out of the valley like a stream
holding ripening berries in her hand.
I wonder why...
a nation can't be built on gentle returning curves
of purple wine-stained hills at dawn,
instead of pillars, steeples and spires.
I wonder why...
the nations don't gather as equals in a circle,
sharing the roll of their hips in a harvest dance
like a single rainbow serpent.
I wonder why...
we need hierarchies, pecking orders, politicians
who prattle on about "American exceptionalism,"
about regaining our miserable "dominance" over the world.
I wonder why...
anyone has to dominate
when berries taste so sweet just as they are,
and even better when you share them in one cup
like lovers
on their wedding night.

Danny Seidman photo, Valley of the Palouse River, SE Washington State

What To Tell A Child

2012-01-28T06:43:00.000-08:00

I've decided that I want to be Me when I grow up.

When you were a kid and someone asked you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" how did you feel? Did you feel adequate? Did you feel that You were enough? That adult was really saying, "You have to be something else. Who you are isn't good enough."

I wish at least one grown-up had told me this when I was a child: "The whole universe is happy, and all the galaxies dance with joy, because You were born! For all eternity, there has never been another You, and there never will be. Yet for this brief moment, on this little planet, You are here! I hope that when you grow up, you will not try to be anyone else. Just be You. Nobody else can do it."

I Love Money

2012-01-27T14:05:00.000-08:00

I love money. Anyone who says they don't like money is full of saintly shit.

Someday we will live in a world without money, which will be beautiful. Until then, let us make peace with money. If you give me all that you have, I will give you all that I have.

But do we have enough trust? Our attitude toward money tells us much about our trust: in the nation, in each other, in ourselves.

When Jesus says, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," he is teaching the law of abundance. When Jesus condemns the rich, he does not condemn their money but their lack of generosity. In Matthew chapter 19, Jesus tells a rich young man to give everything away, not to make him poor but to make him happy.

Through the law of abundance, when the rich man's wealth flows to others, abundance increases for all. Abundance flows through, not to. As the hand receives, it remains open to give, and the hand that is open to give is open to receive even more, pressed out and overflowing. But a grasping fist closes, losing even the little that it clings to.

Neither the Gospel of Jesus nor the Dharma of Buddha teach us to be poor: they teach us to be generous. If we practice the law of generosity, money is a blessing. Money is only a curse when it is not shared.

Every dollar is a sanga, a human community, containing the work of the world. A dollar is sacred. And if it isn't, then we should consecrate it by the way we spend it. This is the economics of the Buddha.

So if you have some money and you really believe that it is evil, please send your money to me. I promise to share it.

Tibetan Bowls

2012-01-27T07:37:00.000-08:00

What grace!
The sound of nothing.
What grace that this
always
already is.
All I can offer in return
is the empty bell
of my smile,
the empty bowl of my heart
ringing
with the food of light.
Bowing to you,
my skull is also a bowl,
my chest a bowl,
my belly a bowl,
my mother's womb a bowl,
empty and full.
Who is the striker
of this music?
The world has no cause.
It simply happens
without end or beginning
for the sake of friendship.

Gratitude to the bowl-masters, Karl Black and David Erentrout, who performed this healing sound meditation at Common Bread, Olympia WA, on 1/26/12, for the students at Evergreen College.

Romney or Buddha?

2012-01-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

.
Time to challenge the assumptions of unregulated laissez-faire economics.

No one pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. We all depend on the labor of others from the pangs of our mother’s womb. We are interconnected as drops of dew on a web. Every dollar we claim to earn on Wall Street represents the sweat of factories, here or abroad, whose workers must forfeit the fruits of their labor to us.

And if we call rich people job creators, then we must call immigrant field hands food creators. Each leaf in our salad, each bean in our coffee, each spoonful of warm soup served on our white linens, we enjoy not only through our labor, but through the grace of calloused palms, aching shoulders, long days of toil by Third World villagers or undocumented farm workers, too often disdained by the very elites who eat from their fingers.

The money in our pockets is not ours only. It is stained with the tears and toil of others. Every dollar is a human community.

Independence is a myth. We are inter-dependent, each upon all. And the rich are especially dependent on the work of the poor.

Wounded Eyed Buddha

2012-01-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

In temple statues, the Buddha has eyes where Jesus has wounds. An open wounded eye in thorn-crowned forehead, wounded eyes in breast and navel, wounded eye in one palm raised to bless, in the other to gaze down touching, healing the earth.

What would we see if we had eyes in the soles of our feet where Jesus was punctured by nails? Perhaps we do, but they are too painful to open.

What if we had eyes to see through the earth into emptiness, to see the breath in stones, the sentience in four-legged and leafy creatures, the luminous Buddha in our enemy, who walks beside us through the labyrinth of Samsara, til we meet as one all-seeing I?

What could I hear with an ear in each cell of my body? What could I touch if my soul were contained in an organ of flesh like a wineskin? But indeed, it is already so!

If pistils and pollinated stamen sprouted through my nerves, connecting trillions of delicate floral orgasms into a single sparkling web of consciousness?

If tongues streamed from my crown like serpents in starry gusts of cosmic time? What would I know with an organ of memory swimming through the marrow of my bones?

What if every atom in my body were an organ of perception? If countless subatomic lingams and yonis ejaculated bold new luminous juices in my DNA? What if rivers changed their courses and continents trembled when I danced, my navel fixed motionless at the center of the vast suffering galaxy whose name is Christ?

What if supernovae and black holes are the imaginal cells of my flesh, yearning me toward rainbow wings tessellated with the stuff of galaxies? What if mastodons still wander through the wilderness of my cerebellum? What if the amygdala might be a dragon guarding veins of golden fossils that burn in ecstasies of the reptilian mind, releasing their smokey ghosts of into eternal night, to roam forever as new constellations?

What if Indra-netted dragonfly-winged cathedrals of pure geodesic space, suspended in the secret bodhichitta mind of Pythagoras, Plotinus, Geordano Bruno, Nikola Tesla and Buckminster Fuller, are the virtual organs of the void itself, hearing, feeling, touching all music that shall ever be composed by the humming of innocent toddlers?

What if silver triremes crowded with jewel-armored Ninja warriors sail up the arteries of my blood, carrying the booty of all my ancestors toward the virgin rain-forest of my lung-bellows, where ancient prayers distill into my silent breath, offered in burnt sacrifice to the sky unfolding from my lips, as I whisper this Word, containing a previous universe, carried again in the ark of a kiss?

O lover, O friend, O Parvati, I pass my secret to your mouth. May your wounds also be eyes, that you may witness the brilliance of this night of love, disappearing into silence.

Behold the Lilies

2012-01-25T14:49:00.000-08:00

"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, un-translated by thought.

Do not look at this flower through your concept of it. Look at the flower itself, what James Joyce called "the ineluctable modality of the visible." The flower has no name. It is no-thing, unrestricted by its outline, a gush of revelation breaking into three dimensions from beyond time and place. The flower flows from the unfathomable depths of uncreated Silence, through the world, and into your eyes - an offering. In this sacrament of perception, consciousness returns to consciousness through the mystery of matter.

Jesus, the wild poet of the Galilean meadows, 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 a flower. Just so, in his final gathering, Buddha held up a little blossom, twirling it in his fingers but saying nothing. Ananda smiled. He understood the complete Dharma through one little flower. Thus the Buddha passed the lineage of wisdom to Ananda. William Blake, the poet of perception, wrote: "See a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower!" The Kingdom of God is not a theological abstraction, but the break-through of this trillium, one white three-petaled explosion nestled in oceanic furrows of green.

Now, if you are like me and other "educated" Westerners, you do something remarkable at this point on your forest walk. You flee from revelation into thinking. Turning to your hiking partner, you ask, "What is that flower's name?" The other replies, "It's a trillium." She may even nail it down with Latin: "trillium grandiflorum."

What has just happened? You have settled for a concept, a verbal description of reality, rather than suffering the nameless onslaught of Radiance. You closed your eyes to the incarnation of the Wordless, the silent offspring of Father Consciousness and Mother Matter. You replaced the living Christ with a ghost of thought. Sometimes names kill. Sometimes we need to un-name things.

The world is a Mystery. According to the Greek fathers of the primitive Church, a Mysterion is a transforming encounter with the divine, beyond names and beyond intellect. Creation ex nihilo, from nothing, is a Mysterion. The incarnation of Christ in a human body is a Mysterion. The Sin of ignorance, our refusal to acknowledge that we live in God's perpetual miracle, is a Mysterion. These first theologians were mystics who refused to define the mysteries, for a Mysterion is experienced, not conceived. In the Middle Ages, however, Christianity lost much of its power and grace when scholastic intellectuals attempted to define as dogma what is intuitive and nameless.

When we define the mysterious suchness of creation through our intellect, we super-impose a gray ashen parallel world upon God's miracle. We impose on nameless radiance an incessant commentary of thoughts. We attempt to keep pace with the fluidity of experience by solidifying it with names, freezing the verb-like essence of the world into nouns. Then we dwell not in the world, but in our description of the world. Thought constructs an asymptotic secondary world of abstractions that never quite touches the flesh.

Here is precisely why, in God's revelation to Moses in Exodus 3, when Moses asks for God's name, the Divine refuses to become a noun, revealing only the verb, I AM. Perhaps this was the lost commandment which God wrote on the tablet of the law that was shattered: "Thou shalt not conceive the world, lest thou cover it with an ash of names."

A stream of Radiance flows toward us through the world, yearning to touch our hearts by the sacramental power of eye, ear, tongue, fingertips and nostrils. A similar stream of Radiance also flows from within us, through these same gateways of sensation, yearning to touch the incarnate world. The Radiance that flows toward us and the Radiance that flow out of us, meeting in moments of perception, are one Radiance, having divided itself into subject-object duality before the creation of the world.

This pulsation of the divine Unity into the play of subject and object is the dance of Shiva and his consort, Shakti. She becomes mother-matter in order to dance with consciousness, to delight Him, to return the offering of his creative fire through form. Therefor, when we reunite the light within us and the light outside us, through any mere sacrament of the commonplace, perceiving the shudder of a leaf or the glimmering of a dragonfly's wing, we allow God and his Spirit to make love, uniting themselves in our act of sensation. This is the bliss which re-unites and heals the world, the dissolution of duality in the One. And it is no more nor less than the simple delight of sensation, merging matter and consciousness.

This reunion of creation and creator, I call Radiance. You may call it what you like. But it is a new kind of substance, the substance of Grace, forming a New Earth, neither matter nor spirit but something sensuously transcendent, divinely sensual. And the quiet, moment-by-moment experience of this unity, through a mindful perception of the ordinary, enacted in our eyes, ears, nostrils, tongue, even the inner fragrance of our gentlest breath, is our true vocation on the earth.

God's ocean of light yearns to wash the shores of our body in its waves. Why then do we create an artificial veil of thought between world and awareness, an ashen layer of names? Some of us spend our whole lives cultivating this ghostly wall of thought. Are we frightened of drowning in the blessed radiance of sensation?

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

Then we need some patient old shamanic farmer to point out what is. We need the artist, perhaps Cat Stevens, to sing us the ancient Celtic spell: "Morning has broken, like the first morning!" We need poets to show us that the world is a dew of Spirit, condensing into matter. In truth, this world is hardly ever one moment old. We try to make it permanent through names, concepts, beliefs. We try to impose the past on this fleeting now. But the past is merely thought. Existence is present, and cannot be known. We must dance it.

When you look at the flower without naming its thing-ness, you engage in the original meditation. You are like Adam before he named the creatures in the Garden. Adam fell into names, but we are still Eden-dwellers. We only need to awaken. Every particle of our being, every cell and photon of this body, is an organ of perception. Through conscious breathing, mindful movement, yoga, dance, and a walk in the forest, our body wakes and our blindness is healed. We see again through trillions of eyes, sparkling in the heaven of flesh. Where were you when you first discovered that your body is made of stars?

Look again at this flower. See the chaos of its edges dissolve into boundless fractals of your own awareness. 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 black child, this an Arab child, this child is wealthy, this child is poor?" Courage means that when we look into the eyes of another, we settle for nothing less than the face of God.

Pansexual

2012-01-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

Have you ever met a pansexual? Perhaps you have pansexual tendencies and don't even know it.

In this age of liberation, we speak of straight, gay, bi-sexual and trans-gendered people. Now it is time to liberate the pansexual.

Pansexuals are not attracted to one partner only, nor is their sexual energy confined to one organ of the body. Pansexuals feel an erotic attraction to the whole cosmos, a sexual relationship with every flower and star. Each cell of the pansexual's flesh overflows with iridescent nectar, each atom vibrates between yearning and bliss, each photon of their body is a sperm of God. For pansexuals, the universe is a single organ of joy aroused, fibrillating through all creatures in perpetual acts of procreation, every point in space-time bathed in the contentment of the now just after consummation. Selah.

For the pansexual, love-making is not primarily between creatures, but between the creature and Creator. Human history has deeply misunderstood pansexuals, often assuming them to be mere celibates and monks because they are not wedded to a partner. But the pansexual feels married to everybody, caught up in the unending sexual union of earth and sky.

History's great pansexuals include Krishna, Kokopelli, Orpheus, whose lovesong dissolved the gates of the underworld, Jesus, wild poet of the Galilean meadows, Rumi, St. Francis of Assisi, Walt Whitman, William Blake, who said "energy is eternal delight," and the Guru who awakens the serpent Kundalini in your own voluptuous spine.

Among women, pansexuals include Radha, Mira, Mary, Billi Holiday, and untold thousands of Magdalenes martyred for the cause of ecstasy, whose immaculately sinful and perfectly fallen bodies transmute matter into Spirit, Spirit into matter, through the all-pervading mystery of their erotic grace.

Painting by Joel Nakamura

Love Your Enemy In You

2012-01-24T11:59:00.000-08:00

When I first heard Jesus say, "Love your enemies," I thought he was talking to saintly pacifists like Gandhi. Now I realize that Jesus gave this teaching, not for my enemies sake, but for my sake, to save my heart from anger and bitterness.

"Love your enemies" means that I love the places of lack and fear inside me, instead of projecting their shadows onto others. When I look at my world through the holes in my heart, they silhouette dark enemy shapes. But that is just a lack of light. Instead of battling the shadows, I can fill the holes in my heart with love.

I need to practice this especially during an election year. Candidates and politicians are the ink blots on which I project my deepest shadows. If a Newt disgusts me, I need to find that shriveled, defensive little creature inside, and hug it warmly. If I resent Mitt, I need to find the poverty, the failed business of my own heart, and cover it with generosity. If I feel disappointed or betrayed by Barack, I need to forgive some unattainable perfection at my core, whose dream is all future without presence, and heal that gaping hope with friendliness.

Only then can I engage in the politics of reality, seeing candidates as real men and women who work for a better nation, each according to their personal vision.

Politics is nothing but a mirror.

Year of the Dragon

2012-01-24T04:31:00.000-08:00

Who is the Dragon in you? Do you fear it, fight it, or dance with it? Is the Dragon a female or male? Dragons I have encountered are beautiful and dangerous, erotic and pure. Perhaps the dragon is simply the bliss we deny ourselves, rising like a fountain in the spine.

I wish there were more dragons swimming around inside me. I like it when a dragon sings. I like it when a dragon flies through the night in my heart like a breathful of stars.

The Joke

2012-01-22T06:51:00.000-08:00

Here is a joke within a joke. Does it make you laugh or cry?

There is only one Being. Many forms, but no separate beings. Only one. That is the joke. Now here is the joke within the joke. When anyone tells us the joke, we turn him into an especially separate being.

A messenger comes to awaken us from sleep. He is like a bubble popping on the ocean. He sees the truth: that every bubble is nothing but water, and only the sea exists. He tells us about his discovery, "I am the ocean, and so are you." Ecstatically sharing this message with us, Jesus said, "I am the light, and you also are the light." Buddha said, "There is no you, no me, only a marvelous ever-expanding emptiness." Shankara said, "No little i's, only one big I." Krishna said, "Just dance until you dissolve in me." All taught exactly the same truth: there is only one of us, only one Self playing in countless forms.

When we heard this message, some of us crucified the messenger. Some of us responded even more stupidly: we exalted the messenger. When he told us that there is only Being, we turned him into a separate being. Making him a savior, we deepened the very illusion from which he was trying to free us.

In John 17, Jesus prayed for his disciples, "That they may all be one, Father, as we are one, I in You, and they in Me, all One."

How did the disciples respond? Did they accept his invitation to drop their separateness and become one? No, they put him on an alter. They worshiped him. Then they separated the Father from the Son, the Son from the Spirit, the Spirit from the soul, and their souls from each other. They invented sin. They turned the ecstatic unity of Jesus into a thousand lonely churches.

Does this make you laugh or cry?

Oneness Playfully Seeking Itself

2012-01-21T17:06:00.000-08:00

Nondualists tell us there is no seeker, no path, and nothing to seek. They often make us feel worse because we didn't get liberated from seeking in their afternoon workshop. Such teachers are not helpful.

Why resist the tendency to seek? Resistance only feeds duality. Just be compassionate toward yourself - be aware of your seeking as a mother embraces her child. The compulsion to seek has been arising in us for thousands of lifetimes. The fact that it doesn't disappear in a flash is not a sign of weakness. Life comes in waves. We can authentically be both jnani and bhakti, non-dual and dual. We are Oneness playfully seeking itself. Where is the conflict?

Many seekers have an authentic moment of realization, "There is no path and nothing to seek: I have dissolved into boundless contentment!" But then, a moment later, the path reappears, and we feel inauthentic. We assume that either the realization was false, or we must give up our spiritual practice. We are trapped in a double bind. It was bad enough that we were seeking: now we feel guilty about it!

This whole drama is another sub-plot of our story, and our mind loves drama. The story about a seeker, a path, a guru and a goal has fed this mind for eons. Someday the voice that tells the story will just fade into silence. Until then, there is no need to beat our breasts and cry, "Woe, I am a weak and fallen seeker!" This is just a new age version of the guilty sinner.

We seek, and sometimes we transcend seeking. Why not accept both realities as true? Why not just say, "I had a moment when no practice was required. There was no separation between who I am and infinite Being. The need for a master dissolved. That moment was authentic. Now it is gone, and I find myself meditating, practicing sadhana, longing to be with my guru agaom. So what? This too is authentic."

Let us have mercy on our ancient mind. The seed of non-seeking is planted. What does it matter if the old habit arises and fades, arises and fades, its power ever diminishing. No need to feed it, either by clinging to the path or rejecting the path.

When we are gently aware of our seeking, our seeking gradually fades into all-mothering awareness, as waves settle into the sea.

Return to the Beginning

2012-01-21T12:33:00.000-08:00

Religion began with the intuition that awareness is the womb of creation. Worship began with the feeling that each breath is a journey home.

Later, the mind added creeds, scriptures, rituals, priests, and "levels of consciousness" just to feel a sense of its own importance.

Dare for a moment to let go of your religion, your philosophy, and all your beliefs: simply be aware as you follow one breath all the way in to your heart, and all the way out to silence.

That silence may only last for a moment, but it is full of eternity. That moment, you are in the beginning. You are re-created.

The Silence of Delight

2012-01-19T04:23:00.000-08:00

Delight is deeper than discipline. Trust in the guidance of your delight.

Is discipline required for my eye to follow a flower to its center, its stillness? Is the eye not focused, is the mind not quieted, by sheer delight?

Discipline too often means doing what we "should" because we lack the courage to do what we love. But delight deepens delight, until we touch the bliss of silence.

At the peak of every delight is pure meditation. When we hear the most beautiful music, make the most beautiful love, taste the most beautiful ice cream, we close our eyes and sink inward.

Deepen your delight, by means of delight, until your heart discovers God, who is the source of every pleasure.

Be Honest, Contradict Yourself!

2012-01-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

If you want to live a truthful and authentic life, you must ceaselessly contradict yourself. Be empty and full, bright and dark, happy and sad, one and many, human and divine. Consistency is for dead people. Be as full of paradox as God, who brings everything out of nothing. Tell bold beautiful lies, each one the Truth.

Politics & Meditation

2012-01-18T16:51:00.000-08:00

When asked about the need for social activism, Ramana Maharishi replied, "Practice self-reform and social reform will happen by itself."

What we need is not political action, but a way to transform the motivation of the heart. If the motivation of the average American were to create a happy community rather than to amass a personal fortune, 99% of our nation's problems would disappear.

Don't worry about the clouds: be the sky.

Teach a citizen to experience the radiance that we are made of, the divinity at the source of every breath, the luminous equality of natural compassion, and that citizen will act for the good of all, spontaneously, without a political movement.

Teach the citizen to meditate. That is the most radical revolutionary act. If you want to change the world with one breath, teach meditation.

Cloud of Witnesses

2012-01-17T18:20:00.000-08:00

"Loneliness" is only a thought. You are never alone. Rest in your breath. Feel the radiant cloud of witnesses within you - angels, Buddhas, all your ancestors, all your friends - waves of consciousness.

Warrior

2012-01-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

During the war in Vietnam, American pacifists invited Thich Nath Hanh, a Vietnamese monk, to teach peace to our war culture. He soon discovered the desultory nature of the American peace movement and decided to work with them first. For they were full of anger, conflict, and negativity. "In order to make peace with others," he taught, "we must first be peace in ourselves." Thus his classic book, Being Peace.

There are pacifists whose deep anger makes them passive. There are warriors who are moved by compassion. Pacifists can create conflict, and warriors can make peace. Who are we to judge the mysteries of the heart?

The Warrior archetype is part of every healthy human being, as much a part of us as Mother, Healer, Child, Trickster, Maiden or Crone. When we attempt to destroy or suppress the Warrior in ourselves, we become passive-aggressive, frustrated by an anger whose energy we don't know how to use, and cannot even name.

The wisest healers teach us not to suppress the Warrior, but to sublimate and integrate the Warrior into the wholeness of our personality, with all the other archetypes. The Warrior makes us vigilant and energetic. We train the Warrior in us to be assertive rather than aggressive, protective rather than destructive, inspiring rather than intimidating. When our culture cultivates dominators rather than defenders, aggressors rather than knights, the problem is not just in our soldiers but our politicians, coaches, educators, and the leaders whom the people elect.

Our national psyche projects into the world the energies of a racist sexist Conquistador, not a true Warrior. That is our problem. Don't blame the troops. They are us.

In the Bhagavad Gita, God reveals to the Warrior the science of skillful action, which is Yoga. Even when we interpret the Gita allegorically, as Gandhi did, we use archetypal Warrior imagery.

The Gita was Gandhi's favorite book. Gandhi did not reject the Warrior archetype, but sublimated it as inner warfare between Truth and falsehood, courage and despair: in his words, "an allegory in which the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna (represents) man's higher impulses struggling against evil." Arjuna is passive and dejected; he wants to give up. Then Krishna tells him to fight, inspiring the Warrior archetype. "Therefor fight for the cause of Truth, Arjuna: this is your duty as a warrior."

In the Republic, Plato writes: "You must be compassionate, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." Let us judge not. For at the end of the battle, God welcomes the true Warrior into his heart with the same embrace as the true Peace-maker.

You enter my kingdom byten thousand paths of dying,
each wheel of the chariotrolling toward its center.
No restless search forhoney in some other garden
brings you here to layyour head in the broken wheat,
but this dark syrup, wineof your heart, you offer me.
Some men pray until dawn;some ask, "Who listens?"
But you become a wonderingwithout words,
dazed, worshiping thelance that pierced you.
You never cry,"Withdraw it!" and seek no immortality.
There is only the whisper of ebbingbreath, the Name
I gave you, this song thatswells your throat, a voice
that is yours and notyours, the way smoke curls
from a wick just blownout: then you return to my lips.

Here I Fall

2012-01-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

"O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam!" ~Exultet, Easter Vigil

A life-coach told me, "You're perfect right now." I tried it out and found it boring. My imperfections delight me more. I'm even less perfect than I was yesterday, thank God.

Why evoke the concept of "perfection" at all, unless you are still unconsciously seeking some status, some finished state? Why would anyone want to be finished?

God is perfect. God is one. Hence, to be perfect, we must all become alike. But God creates me to be like no one. Therefor, God commands me to abandon perfection.

So here I fall, a sloppy fractaled measureless spill from on high, into the blessed ocean of my flaws.

Wake

2012-01-16T16:12:00.000-08:00

"When you wake up," said the Fool, "sing before thinking."

"That's impossible!" I answered, "I'd need a thought to remind me."

"Not if you fall asleep," said the Fool, "with the name of the Beloved under your pillow."

So night after night I lay my head on the holy name of Krishna, Jesus, Ha'Shem, Mother Divine;

Ninety nine names of Allah, a thousand names of Vishnu; but when I awoke, I forgot to sing.

Then one evening when the moon was full, I pillowed the universe on my heart and breathed, "I am, I am." Only the name, "I am."

Now I awake, a golden fountain sighing all the words for Light. At dawn, I am the dawn.

The Arrogance of American Exceptionalism

2012-01-14T10:43:00.000-08:00

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “America is not good because it is great, America is great because it is good.”

The Newt Gingrich creed of “American Exceptionalism” twists this truth, making American greatness an entitlement. Gingrich assumes that, as God’s chosen people, our manifest destiny is world dominion.

But the self-insulating arrogance of this creed only makes us mediocre, isolating us from global dialog. Inferior schools, collapsing infrastructure, exhausted soldiers, corporate serfdom, a growing gap between rich and poor, and a vulture economy that thrives on debt instead of creating real jobs or products, all belie imperial failure rather than greatness. Paralyzed by political corruption and insatiable consumerism, ours is the fate of all puffed-up oligarchies that live beyond their means on the sweat of Third World labor.

But this isn’t the apocalypse. It’s only the collapse of empire, making way for a wiser, leaner lifestyle.

We are called not to restore our own exceptionalism, but to restore exceptional rivers, forests, soil and skies. Not to rebuild corporate military power, but to rebuild community, and the covenant of care between our rich and poor. Not to conquer the planet, but to walk gently as guests of this land, trusting the sustainable wealth of the local and the small.

What is the greatest country? Earth. Who are the greatest people? Human beings. When Americans replace a sense of superiority with a celebration of one world family, we will be more joyful, more relaxed, and not so fat.

Published in McClatchy Newspapers, Dec. 12, 2011, Tacoma News Tribune

Rest Here Before a Thought Arises

2012-01-13T11:23:00.000-08:00

Dare to rest in the lively silence where a thought is about to arise but has not yet arisen.

This silence is not sleep, nor repression, nor self-control, but the rippling surface of eternity, on the threshold between creature and Creator, the invisible axis where exhalation turns to inhalation.

Medieval Christian philosophers called this threshold the synderesis, or pure intellectual soul. Indian philosophers called it ritam bara pragyam, the luminous field of intuition from which the whole mind springs. This field is the seed of thought, but is not a thought. It is the inmost center where the soul is ceaselessly breathed and re-created by the Spirit.

In this soul center we may cognize anything in the universe, because the whole creation exists here in timelessness as a non-localized singularity.

Some New Age teachers refer to this place as the vortex. The vortex is the seed of our best intentions, containing our soul's destined greatness. The poet Emily Dickenson wrote, dwell in possibility. She was inviting us into the vortex, the synderisis, the field of ritam.

Quantum physics also describes this living silence, where no-thing becomes everything. The quantum vacuum vibrates with virtual photons of light and virtual electrons of energy, particles that are and are not. These fluctuations of the vacuum are stirrings of pure possibility, defined in mathematical terms as probability-waves. What we call matter is made of nothing else.

At any instant, one of these fluctuations of immaterial possibility might burst from emptiness as a physical particle, or a new universe. Our bodies contain countless hosts of these possibility-seeds; yet our whole universe may be contained in one of them as well.

The total energy of the field is zero, but at one of its infinitesimal points the energy is infinite. On this paradox all creation stories are founded, both in ancient myth and modern physics. So the first verses of the Hebrew Bible declare that, when God creates the heavens and the earth, the earth is tohu wa bohu, formless and void.

There cannot be two voids, an inner void and an outer void. Abstraction contains no duality. Voidness is absolute emptiness, without differentiation. Therefor the void of consciousness whence thought-vibrations arise, must be precisely the same as the vacuum of physics, from which material worlds arise. When we allow our awareness to settle into this unified field of no-thought and no-thing, we return to the source of creation.

Here in thrilling awakened silence we feel the whole cosmos, the Word of creation, right on the tip of our tongue! Yet because no thought has yet arisen, this space remains boundless and clear, with no me, no past or future, no story. Emptiness so full has no time for past or future.

The Sacrament of Breathing

2012-01-12T04:50:00.000-08:00

We don't struggle to earn a breath. Why should we struggle to earn a living?

Learn from breathing how to trust the Mother for all. Then work becomes offering instead of grasping. To enter the kingdom of heaven, which is the very Presence of this moment, become aware of the gift that abounds in each breath.

We don't take a breath: breath is given. Inhaling, breath flows into our body as Mother's grace. Exhaling, we offer it back. So effortless is this process that we take it for granted. But breathing is profoundly Eucharistic, a two-fold sacrament of grace and offering.

From effortlessly breathing in, we learn how to receive other gifts, like food, shelter, warmth, and love. From breathing out, we learn to give it all away. Do you hold your breath so as not to lose it? Are you afraid to share your breath with the world? Breath is given on one condition only: that you ceaselessly give it back.

If Divine Mother provides each breath, why would she not provide all other necessities? It is only our mind that blocks her grace, inventing the thought of lack.

"Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can a woman forget the infant at her breast?"(Isaiah 49) She never asks whether her child deserves milk. Milk just flows. Yet we imagine we must prove ourselves worthy of Divine Mother's grace!

Have you ever spent an hour, a minute, or the duration of a single breath just resting in Mother's embrace, allowing her to give you what you need?

Neither separate from God nor one with God, you are God's breath. Pray by breathing.

Practice this sacrament of any time, any place: breathe as you always do, but with awareness and gratitude. Simply to breathe is the purest worship.

Money

2012-01-11T20:18:00.000-08:00

A day will come when we replace money with awareness, in a world governed by infinite debt-forgiveness. We will treasure each others' happiness as currency, and share the unfathomable abundance of mutual trust.

Until that day, let us practice the economics of the Buddha. Every dollar in my pocket is part of every dollar on earth, pulsating with the labor and service of men and women everywhere. The dollar I call "mine" is in fact a sangha, a community.

Painting by Marinasoria

Treasures of Darkness

2012-01-09T17:35:00.000-08:00

"I saw you and became empty. This emptiness, more beautiful than existence..." (Rumi)

There is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. And there is a black hole at the center of ourselves.

Cutting edge astrophysics confirms that a black hole at the center of the milky way is the integrity of our galaxy, preventing it from flying apart. Even more astonishing, as black holes absorb light, they emit new photons from the fluctuations of the vacuum at their core. At the center of a black hole, new universes may be born as infinitesimal, quantum space-time bubbles - virtual particles arising out of nothing. This is what the early Christian fathers called creation "ex nihilo." Creation does not arise from one big bang, but as continuous sub-nuclear explosions throughout the fabric of space.

A black hole may seem the most negative force in the cosmos, but it is also the most creative. From the virgin womb of infinite negation, oceans of virtual matter flow, pouring a new creation out of the void as old light is absorbed. A black hole is the bellows-breath of the Great Mother. She breathes in the past and breathes out the future. Re-cycling.

We experience this same mystery in ourselves through meditation. We follow light back into the depths of divine darkness.

Let sensation dissolve into breath, let breath dissolve into the mantra's sound, let sound dissolve into luminous waves of pure awareness, let light dissolve into darkness.

This darkness is more brilliant than light. A churning sea of annihilation and re-creation, the black hole of our own divine center generates the world around us. Where did you think your world came from?

Over forty years ago, I heard the Guru say, One infinite No creates this universe of finite yes's. I am only now beginning to comprehend it. Thank you, Maharishi. Jai Guru Dev.

Solidify Your Being

2012-01-07T08:47:00.000-08:00

I point to a flower and say, "this is," and you see a concrete thing. But can I point to the Being that contains this flower and gives it existence? Being itself seems so abstract that one might even say it does not exist!

To the sleepy mind, Being seems abstract. To the awakened, Being is more solid, more concrete than any thing.

Whether they be subatomic particles or stars in heaven, Being imparts to creatures a momentary and apparent existence. But Being itself is eternally solidified without form, and nearer to our soul than any creature.

When we awaken as pure Being, we know that we are not objects. You are not a thing, separate from other things. You are That which gives existence to all. Tat tvam asi.

Compared to the lightning-bolt of Being that passes through things, things are a mirage.

Pure Being enfolds us, upholds us, births us, and finally receives our death as an offering of love. At that moment, we awaken and rejoice in the boundless majesty of who we really are. We will know our Being as more solid and substantial than the world. Why wait until then? Why not awaken now?

Being is the pure generosity of space, birthing atoms and galaxies, gods and men, world upon world beyond imagining. Yet this marvelous expanse is nothing but our own awareness.

Being is always perfect and complete, as is. In Being as is, we have nothing to fear, for all is finished. There is only one should: to be. If we need to worry about anything, we should worry about why we believe in our worries.

Being requires no effort, and doing flows spontaneously from this effortlessness. The only reason we can't experience this is because we work too hard at Being. But when we go with the flow, offering our intention for the happiness of all, we actually control the flow, with very little doing.

Let Being be, and decisive action will flower from the heart. Do not all great masters teach this principle: dynamic action through effortless silence? Laotzu said, "The way to do is to be." Krishna taught Arjuna, "He who sees stillness in action and action in stillness, truly sees." It will seem, of course, that nothing is happening. When we reflect on our past, we see that life actually has a dreamlike quality, but we don't realize this until it's over, looking back. Why not realize this dreamlike fluidity now, while it is happening?

Dynamic activity occurs in a dream while we quietly rest on our pillow. In the same way, while waking, we may achieve masterful accomplishments when our awareness surrenders to the soft unwavering stillness of our inmost Being.

But none of these blessing manifest until Being awakens in you. You cannot experience the grace of Being through some other being - neither Jesus, nor Buddha, nor your Guru. You only taste the infinite through your own Being.

No one else can accomplish the Effortless. You must accomplish the Effortless through your own non-doing. Practice meditation to awaken the Effortless.

Please, for the sake of the world, awaken the sheer magnificence of who you are. When your heart consciously resonates with Being, you will send heart-waves throughout creation. This is quite literally true: your physical heart is a resonator and transmitter that renews the earth.

Many creatures exist, but there is only one Existence. Touch the Being in your heart and you touch everyone.

Being is above and below, to the left and right, all around and within you. Being penetrates each cell of your flesh, echoes unceasing praise down through your atoms and their nuclei, to the unfathomable silence of God, who contains the farthest galaxies in that motionless explosion of pure Being, appearing as your breath-taking body for the sake of beauty, the dance of radiance, the dazzling Now.

We look at all these ordinary objects in their mundane existence and say, "There are no miracles." But in fact, the miracle is Being itself.

Babies See God

2012-01-06T14:47:00.000-08:00

When I was a baby, I knew how to hide in the space between electrons.

People saw me bouncing and laughing, but they had no idea where I was hiding. Even today when I go there, I can't find any me. But it's not an escape, because that infinite space is everywhere.

Didn't we all dwell in boundless Satsang once, before the technicians of the finite whom we call adults drove us out of God's garden? Now we measure eternity in hours and micro-seconds. We divide our vastness into inches. We have become measurers, which we call being educated. The truly important questions, the vastly simple questions, have been educated out of us: "What are we measuring? Hours of what? Inches of what?"

We have no idea what the world is actually made of. All day, we stumble through our duties without knowing what anything really is.

Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the founders of quantum physics, wrote: "All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness." Einstein developed his theory of relativity after a daydream: fantasizing what it would feel like to ride on a sunbeam.

But in our age of so-called reason, few of us listen to the child-like questions that geniuses like Eddington and Einstein ask. We just go back to our measurements, counting and spending.

My dear friend Ann recently said, "A six month old was sitting next to me in a restaurant. He was just laughing and smiling and kept looking my way. He was so joyful, I couldn't help but feel blessed. He is the new screen-saver of my heart."

We all have memories of being that child, intuitions of a life more graceful.

Babies get it. The world is a lightning bolt of love, flashing out of the void. The stuff of the universe is the bliss of no-thing. Zero hugs all numbers. Silence embraces all words. Stillness bears every achievement.

When you see a baby laughing at what seems to be nothing, eyes twinkling with delight for no apparent reason, please remember that baby is gazing between the electrons, into eternity, at God. That baby is never one moment old. And neither are you.

~Photo on top: me.

'I Am' is the Way

2012-01-06T14:03:00.000-08:00

"I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:16).

Say I Am with reverence and humility. I Am is both my name and God's. This name contains the human I, which is a momentary thought, and the divine Am, which is a boundless radiance in the heart. Speaking this name, I surrender to Am and become myself.

Drop This Thought

2012-01-06T08:44:00.001-08:00

For thinking-addicts, here is a one-moment meditation: DROP THIS THOUGHT.

The practice is unbelievably simple, so don't believe in it. Don't even do it.

Dropping this thought is not the same as trying not to think. Trying not to think us repressive, and a waste of energy. Thoughts are inevitable. But a thought can be dropped, and dropping a thought actually increases energy.

When you drop this thought, the energy that was bound up in thought returns to you as pure awareness - sparkling, limitless, joyful. The moment you drop this thought, an explosion of transparency fills the universe, blessing all creation.

Drop this thought in the well of Presence, where words drown. Drop the affirmation. Drop the belief. What can be repeated in the mind is only an idea, and an idea can never bring us one step closer to Being. A thought of happiness is not happiness. A thought of God is not God. The image of Jesus in your mind is not what Jesus is. Crucify the image.

Truth is not the outcome of thinking. We will never construct a chain of thoughts, an argument, that will end with the realization, "I found the answer! Now everything will be all right!" Truth is a sensation of the heart, not a thought in the head. Drop this thought and taste radiance.

Though we are thinking addicts, one authentic taste of awareness without thought awakens a new destiny. Even for an instant, falling into the well of Presence is a kind of baptism: baptism into the bliss that has no content, no form, no ideology. To taste this bliss is to alight from the ever-circling mind upon the center of the heart, like the swan settling upon still water.

When you drop this thought, there is a surge of pure awareness, transparency without boundaries. Because it is boundless, unobstructed by the form of any concept, awareness dynamically and ceaselessly expands. The sensation of unrestricted expansion is ananda, bliss.

This clarity does not remain inside you: it overflows through your senses, energizing your whole environment. In reality, awareness, senses and environment are all connected in one energy field. Therefor, when you drop this thought, your burst of awareness reverberates throughout creation, cleansing and transforming the world.

Practice this often, but only for a moment. Such a moment of non-doing is an excellent practice for those whose minds are hopelessly fickle and incapable of lasting stillness: in other words, all of us human beings.

Brevity is the soul of practice. Dropping this thought now, you instantly dissolve in the ocean of bliss. It is instant grace, not a state maintained by concentration or mindfulness. Trying to hold on to instant grace, trying to turn it into a constant state, is an artifice, a vanity that robs our character of spontaneous joy.

Just become present for this moment. Stop, look, listen, and be. Then go back to work. Let instant grace happen, again and again. Gradually, in its own time, grace becomes an all-pervading Presence. Then you discover that time never was.

Mooji, Look Without Labeling Things

The Magi (Jan 6, Epiphany)

2012-01-06T08:09:00.001-08:00

Balthazar's legs were stiff. As his servant pressed the animal's powerful neck low to the moon-washed desert sand, the old philosopher slipped from his kneeling camel. More nimbly than their elder, Melchior and Gaspar dismounted without assistance. A porter led their camels to the palm grove for water as the three pilgrims spread their caftans for an hour's rest.

They reclined in silence, the respite of a long night's journey. While traveling had constrained them into an acquaintance not unlike friendship, the three maintained that mutual aloofness native to men of rank. Until now, the three had known each other only as fellow, nay, even rival professors at the Academy in Baghdad.

Old Balthazar was a Persian mathematician who had studied at the temple of Pythagoras in Italy. Having traveled the civilized world, even as far as Tibet, he was lauded as the great Magus of his generation. Leaving hundreds of disciples at the Academy, he had departed with two fellows and a handful of porters on this desolate desert crossing, which he insisted was "his final pilgrimage." Balthazar was chiefly famous for his mathematical description of angels, especially his Geometry of Hierarchies, which proved that the constellations were ordered by "a will toward beauty."

Link here to continue the story...

You Are Bliss Beyond Sorrow and Joy

2012-01-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

The feeling of sadness arises and subsides in the space that is aware of it. If the feeling of sadness were not surrounded by a space, you would not be able to say, "I felt sad, then it subsided, now I feel sad again." Who was watching the sadness arise and depart?

Is this space ever sad?

The feeling of joy arises and subsides in the space that is aware of it. If the feeling of joy were not surrounded by a space, you would not be able to say, "I felt joyful, then it subsided, now I feel joyful again." Who was watching the joy arise and depart?

Is this space ever joyful?

There is a space in which sadness and joy come and go, yet which is neither joyful no sad. It is eternally watching. It is everlasting life.

Your birth happens here, your death happens here, and here you are, before and after.

This space is ceaselessly expanding because it is unlimited by the phenomena that come and go within it. Therefor it is inconceivably blissful, with a bliss beyond sorrow and joy. This eternal space is who you are, right now.

Non-Resistance

2012-01-04T22:55:00.000-08:00

2012. From now on, any resistance is resistance to love. Love is the space in which everything is happening. Pain and pleasure, violence and gentleness, your birth and even your death, all waves in the ocean of love. What is there to defend, to compete with, to struggle against, to vanquish? Resistance is futile. The tidal wave is your heartbeat.

Unstruck

2012-01-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

The most beautiful name is not a name 'of,' but an unstruck sound in the bell of the heart. Resonating in eternal silence, this nameless vibration births the universe. Each particle of your body is one of its frequencies. 'Adau bhagavan shabdha rasahih,' says a Vedic verse: 'In the beginning, God manifested as sound.'

Because we are born from this beginningless Word, we can hear it in the intimacy of our center, when the mind stops chattering and the heart listens.

Holy names and mantras have one purpose: to lead our awareness inward, from the mind to the heart, so that we may bathe in this infinitely subtle, original sound-current and be re-created.

Let words of prayer dissolve into the song of silence. May the New Year bring you closer to the music of God.

Goal

2012-01-04T16:57:00.001-08:00

The ancient goal of mystical mathematics was to circle the square, the enigma portrayed in Leonardo da Vinci's Vesuvian Man.

We circle the square when our mission is to be who we are, and our goal is authentic Presence.

I'm skeptical when I hear people gush about their goals for the New Year. And I'm really not interested when life coaches preach about the importance of goals and vision statements. What's your Three Year Vision Plan? Your Five Year Mission? Your Goal for Eternal Life?

I have no idea. What my needs, my dreams, my concerns will be three years from now, I have no way of telling. I don't even know what tomorrow will bring. When delight dawns, will I even notice it if I'm working on my Five Year Plan?

I am suspicious of goals. Goals separate me from who I am. They detach me from the felt texture of the life I am actually living. When I pursuing my ambition, am I present to you, to my own body, to the ground I walk on?

If goals are so important, what happens when I attain one? In that moment, does any goal remain? If that attainment is the truly important moment, then being goal-less must be the goal, for in that instant the goal dissolves. In that case, I should learn to feel that moment of bliss all the time.

But if that now of goal-attainment is not ultimately important, because the important thing is working toward the goal, then one really doesn't want to achieve any of one's goals: so why pretend to have them?

My goal is to be authentically present, which has nothing to do with time.

"Time and space are infinite. Grains of sand are countless. Atoms in the universe are innumerable, as are the stars and galaxies. There is neither a beginning nor an end because everything is spherical. A sphere has no beginning or end, no goal or direction.

"Truth has no direction, no goal. Truth itself is the goal, and truth is infinite. Experiencing infinity within this finite body, living timelessness within this time span, uncovering bliss even in misery: this is what you are here for."

~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Consent

2012-01-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

When did I consent to play the victim? When did I consent to lack? When did I consent to the authority of my doubts? When did I consent to a government of memories? When did I consent to fear both pain and pleasure? When did I consent to this numbness in my chest? When did I consent to the proposition that my joy must be earned? When did I consent to regard this moment as less than a miracle? When did I consent to stop dancing? When did I consent to ignore the spring of sparkling beauty that bubbles up unbidden from my perfectly broken heart?

Mural: Roman garden, 1st century

Self Inquiry is a Joke

2012-01-04T16:56:00.000-08:00

If someone is telling you a joke, it's important to know it is a joke. If you don't know that your teacher is a trickster who is joking, the situation could get confusing.

Ramana Maharshi's method of self-inquiry, "Who Am I?" is a joke. "Who Am I?" is the first practice in spiritual history that instructed seekers to focus intentionally on an illusion.

The brilliance of this practice dawns only when you understand its purpose, which is not to discover a reality but to penetrate a mirage. Without understanding, you bind yourself to a double illusion.

Most seekers imagine they are looking for an "I." Yet Ramana's whole point is that there is no-thing to find. Bringing our attention to this illusion over and over again does not enlighten our "I," dissolve our "I," or merge our "I" with Brahman, the cosmic Self. We simply get the joke. There was never an "I" to begin with.

The trickster awakens wonder. At the end of a magic trick, when what seemed real turns out to be no-thing, we are wonderfully bewildered and innocent as children. Life opens up as infinite possibility. This is the original state of divine awareness.

But the I-thought crushes this awareness down to a point. The limited "I" feels separate from every other "I," which results in the restless suffering of comparison, competition, fear of and craving for the "other." But of course the "other," as a separate entity, does not exist either.

The momentum of "aham-vritti," the I-concept, may have begun hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yet "I" was never anything but a local momentary disturbance in the boundless ocean of "Am." "Aham-vritti" literally means "ego-waves." "Vrit" is the Sanskrit root of the English word, vibration. "I" am simply a vibration in the unified field of cosmic awareness, than whom there is no other.

One need not get rid of this vibration, this "I," any more than the sky must get rid of a droplet of water vapor, or the sea must get rid of a ripple. "I" am a vibration of stillness, and this unfathomable stillness is always already here.

______________________

"From where does this 'I' arise? Seek for it within: it then vanishes. This is the pursuit of wisdom."

"There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be the day you laugh is also here and now."
~Sri Ramana Maharshi

* Painting by Imre Morocz

Lance and Grail

2012-01-04T15:52:00.001-08:00

The Lance

This is the lance that pierced his side,
these are the nails by which he died,
here a splinter of bloody wood,
and here the cup that caught the blood:
all idols, idols all.
Here is the shroud and the winding sheet,
these are his words, which priests repeat,
a loaf of bread, a cup of wine
to make a sacramental sign:
all idols, idols all.
Two thousand years have passed since he
gave timely birth to eternity:
this is the lance that pierced his side,
these are the nails by which he died,
here is the wedding, but where is the bride?
All idols, idols all.

The Grail

You've visited the sacred shrine,
and sipped the dizziness of wine.
You've known both worlds, and all is frail:
Within your heart's the holy grail.
Ten thousand sins cannot conceal
its pure and patient emptiness
from Him who comes simply to bless
your cup with nectar, not consign
to melting fire a glass so dim,
so fragile it's no more nor less
than your capacity for Him.

Only One of Us Burns in Hell

2012-01-04T15:52:00.000-08:00

There seem to be two in each one of us: a lower self and a higher Self, the I and the Am.

I arise as a tiny wave on the ocean of Am. The peak of the wave is I, yet at its base, this wave is the whole ocean. As wave surrenders to sea, it becomes the sea. Yet the sea loves to play, and it becomes the wave. There is no conflict between the sea and the wave: they are one. Conflict arises only when the wave thinks that it is other than the sea. This thinking takes many forms, but no more deceptively than when it takes a "spiritual" form.

The wave maintains its separation from the sea through "spiritual practices", or through proclaiming its unworthiness and sinfulness. When God hears us repeating mantras, God giggles. When God hears us confessing sins, God laughs uproariously.

But when we are silent, God whispers from deep inside. Deep within, I hear the ocean murmur to the wave, "Just settle down." When the wave of I hearkens to the sea-voice, I rest and remember who I Am.

Yet the very moment my wave settles into the sea, I become agitated, sensing death. I fear annihilation in the sea of Am. Fear stirs me up again. I insist on doing something to maintain the illusion of separateness. "If I settle into the ocean, I will lose myself and drown!" So I tread water. I repeat mantras. I pray to be forgiven. I keep churning myself up into the infinitesimal peak of a tiny wave. I may call this rhythmic churning a "spiritual practice", but it is just the drowning ego's trick for survival.
On the verge of drowning, my last survival strategy is to inflate my unworthiness. "Who am I to become One with God? After all, I'm a sinner. I'm unworthy!" The sinner's ego never rises so high from the sea as when it proclaims its unworthiness!
God says, I Am. The soul says, I Am. There may be an infinite number of I's, but there cannot be more than one Am. My Am is God's Am. The Am cannot burn in hell. But I burn in hell whenever I feel unworthy, and by unworthiness maintain my separation from God. There are two of me: I and Am. But only one of us burns in hell.
Let the soul rest in God. Let the wave surrender to the sea. Let the sea play in eternally fresh, recreated waves of itself.

Let me rest, let me surrender. But what shall I surrender? Let me surrender my God-damned unworthiness!

Moses Yoga

2012-01-04T15:49:00.001-08:00

"The knowledge of the Vedas is found in the scripture of every religion, in the do's and don'ts." (Maharshi Mahesh Yogi)
Many view the Ten Commandments as dusty moralistic platitudes. But the commandments are dynamic practices for connecting divine consciousness to the body. Closely related to the Yamas ("restraints") of Astanga Yoga, the Hebrew commandments are practiced in a holistic program that integrates social action, focussed breathing, and meditation.

The stops in a pipe organ govern the flow of air to make different tones. Likewise, the commandments direct the flow of consciousness through the body's chakras. These chakras are psycho-physical stops that transform the quality and tone of our awareness. The major chakras lie along the spinal path: in the base of the spine, genitals, solar plexus, heart, throat, forehead, and crown. At each chakra, the flow of energy in our body may be blocked or deflected as it rises. When this occurs, the positive emotional quality of that particular chakra expresses its opposite quality. That is why, for example, love quickly becomes angry, generosity is the mirror of greed, and sorrow is the shadow of joy.

1. "Thou shalt not murder" governs the muladhara chakra at the base of the spine, allowing energy to rise upward as heath-giving vitality. But when we entertain hateful thoughts without restraint, we fall into rage and aggression, and these bring sickness.

2. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" governs the svadisthana chakra behind the sexual organs, allowing consciousness to express creativity and communion, rather than lust and genital obsession.

3. "Thou shalt not steal" governs the manipura chakra at the solar plexus, preventing greed. The organ-stop of this commandment allows our consciousness to rise from a sense of lack and possessiveness to an experience of abundance and generosity.

4. "Thou shalt not covet" is the organ-stop for the heart chakra, anahata. It stops the expression of envy, transforming jealously into selfless love.

5. "Thou shalt have no other god but Me" governs the throat chakra, vishudha. When we proclaim our own achievement, we express arrogance. This commandment puts an organ-stop on our egotism, the little individual "me." It allows the energy bound up in self-worship to rise and expand as pure ego-less joy. We can feel true joy in the success of others. In real joy, God is the only Me. Our little "I" dissolves into God's "Am."

6. "Thou shalt make no graven image" governs the ajna chakra in the brow. This does not refer to religious idols so much as the idols of thought. We worship images of thought, graven in our minds, when we cling to memories of the past and fears about the future. The past and future are not real: they are graven images in the mind. They are only made of thought, though they glitter like silver and gold.

Graven images of thought are much more seductive than idols on an alter. This commandment puts an organ-stop on the mind's restlessness. It prevents us from giving ultimate importance to ghosts and illusions: our regrets about the past and our plans for the future. This commandment allows us to focus on the task of the present moment, where true success begins.

7. "Keep the Sabbath" governs the crown chakra, the sahashrara. Sabbath does not mean a day of the week. The Hebrew word literally means stop. Sabbath happens whenever thought stops and our awareness rests in the present moment. Sabbath is inner silence, even in the midst of outer action. Keeping Sabbath means never breaking our connection with God's stillness. This perpetual sabbath is described in the Bhagavad Gita: "He who sees stillness in action and action in stillness, truly sees." The enlightened are those who experience the sabbath rest in the midst of the market place.

At the crown of the head, awareness opens like a many-petaled flower to the boundless sky of God-Consciousness. In that space, the self in the body is co-extensive with the Self of the cosmos. When we enter this chakra, through this commandment, the stream of individual self flows into the calm ocean of divine Self.

Original stillness is the silence before God says, "Let there be light." This silence not only precedes creation in history, it underlies creation in this moment. We can practice Sabbath anywhere, at any moment of the day, simply by letting the stream of our individual consciousness, which rises up the spine, complete its course, flowing through the crown into the blue sky of God. This final at-onement rests on the foundation of the other commandments, which stop the loss of energy at the lower chakras. Then we are not diverted by any other concern but Oneness. We nourish Oneness through an ancient meditation practice: uniting the breath with God's name. This practice is the next commandment.

8. "Thou shalt not take the name of YHWH God in vain." This command really means: "Don't take your breath for granted". The divine name is the sound of the breath. This sound is YHWH. The divine name is the practice of meditation, taught at the root of every great religion. By breathing God's name, we come to rest in the all-pervading silence of the Sabbath.

Breathing without awareness is a wasted opportunity for union with God. We breathe all day and night, but are we conscious of the secret energy, the divine name, in each breath? If we take a breath unconsciously, we take the Lord's name in vain.

YHWH is the meditation mantra of the Hebrew tradition. YHWH is the sound of breathing. This Name is called tetragrammaton, or "four letter Name." The ignorant have speculated about its pronunciation, some saying "Yahweh" and others "Jehovah." But this mantra is never pronounced aloud by the wise. How could it be, since it is the very energy of silence? In the words of Orthdox Saint Theophan the Recluse, "the most sacred name is the soul of silence."

The Talmud records the use of this mantra: "Why is it that the children of Israel pray in this age and are not answered? It is because they no longer know the ineffable name." (Midrash on Psalm 91) Some of the most sacred books of Jewish mysticism are devoted to the divine name and is uses: the Book Bahir and the Sepher Yetsirah. The very Hebrew word for meditation used in the Bible comes from a root meaning to silently repeat a word. "The secret pronunciation of the divine name of four letters the sages confided to their disciples once every seven years" (Talmud, Kiddushan 71a).

We need no longer make this practice a secret. In secret merely means in silence. Jesus uses this expression for prayer in his Sermon on the Mount: "When you pray, go into your inner chamber and pray in secret." The chamber is the heart and prayer is breathing God's name, until it is hallowed in silence. "Hallowed be thy Name."

God's silence is the boundless space between our breaths. At the end of the exhalation, before the next inhalation, awareness merges for an instant with divine silence. The space of this silence is eternal, measureless and still. It is the source of existence, consciousness, and joy. In this silence, breath and Spirit are one. That is why the Bible uses exactly the same word for breath and Spirit: Ruach. Inhaling breath, we incarnate Spirit. Exhaling, we offer Spirit back to its Giver. This is our central purpose, our central function on earth. All other work is secondary.

The syllables of YHWH are Yah and Hu. We find these two seed-mantras in other ancient traditions of meditation: Indian Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Islamic Sufism. Breathing in, we hear Yah flowing down through the crown into the heart as a stream of living Spirit ,born of the infinite sky. Breathing out, we hear Hum vibrating from the heart into every cell, every atom of our body. With each breath, we incarnate God's name in humanity. "In the beginning was the Word... and the Word became flesh."

The commandment, "Thou shalt not take the Lord's Name in vain," is an invitation to conscious breathing. When I practice the gift of conscious breath, then I discover the secret: I do not breathe God. God breathes me.

Two More Commandments?
How then do we interpret the other two commandments, "Thou shalt not bear false witness (lie) " and "Honor thy father and mother'? These two commandments describe the effects of our practice in human society, and in the environment.

9. "Thou shalt not lie." When the chakras are purified, breath flows directly to and from the divine source. There is no deviation in the path of energy rising and descending through the spine. Thus, there is no crookedness in our path of daily living. When the inner flow of energy in the spine is straight, outward behavior is also "straight." We are straight with our neighbor because we are straight with God.

Then we no longer live a lie. Our smile is a true smile. If someone asks us how we're doing, we don't say one thing and feel another. Our deeds are aligned with our words, our words are aligned with our intentions, and our intentions come straight from the silence, the purity, in the core of the heart. Truth flowers in us.

10. "Honor your Father and Mother." Like Eden's Tree of Life, the straight truth-teller stands upright. The flowering tree of this human body unites Earth to Heaven, Creation to Creator. Earth is our Mother and heaven is our Father. Father and Mother in the commandment refer not just to our biological parents, but to the Mother and Father aspects of God, Heaven and Earth. In Yogic science, these are known as Shiva and Shakti. In Chinese medicine, they are Yang and Yin. In the Biblical tradition, they are called the Lord and his Shekinah.

The Hebrew verb Shakan means "to dwell". Shekinah is the energy expressing God in creation. She is Spirit in-dwelling nature and humanity. Hebrew tradition regards this aspect of God as feminine wisdom. The book of Proverbs, chapter 8, reveals that She is with God at the creation of the world. Shekinah is the divine spark in every human heart, longing to return to its source. This longing of the heart for God is fulfilled in the mystical marriage, the wedding of matter and consciousness. You can hear the love song of Lord and Shekinah in the Biblical book, Song of Songs.______________

Having expounded the Ten Commandments through the science of Yoga, we are left with one question. Why are the Biblical commandments not given in the precise order of the chakras, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head?

We can presume that, once upon a time, they were. But emotional disturbance corrupts the flow of energy and shatters the proper alignment of the chakras. This is why scripture places such emphasis on Moses' anger, an anger which prevented him from finally entering the Promised Land. Moses, you will recall, was filled with anger, judgment, and righteous indignation when, descending from the mountain with the tablets of the Law, he beheld the Israelites in revelry, practicing sensual idol-worship. In his wrath, he threw down the tablets and shattered them.

Don't we all engage in idol-worship and sensuality, even when we are on the spiritual path? Our awareness gets distracted and absorbed by the charms and fears of material living. We cannot always practice conscious breathing. We cannot always "pray without ceasing." Should we therefor feel guilty and sinful?

Feelings of guilt and fear of punishment makes us project our "sinfulness" onto others. Then we judge them. Then we are lost! For nothing blocks the flow of spiritual energy like self-righteous judgment of others. Our chakras are no longer aligned in a straight and narrow path. Like Moses, we have "broken the tablets."

This is why Jesus declares, "Judge not, lest ye be judged!"

Make This Your Last Judgment

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"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." (Jesus of Nazareth)

Jesus' statement has usually been taken as a claim to Christian superiority and exclusivism. Yet this statement is not only the essence of Christianity: it is the essence of Vedanta, and Buddhism, and all great spiritual paths.

I Am IS the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to God except through the I Am. The I Am is the portal to God at the center of the soul.

Then what is the Way, the Truth, and the Life? The Way is the spiritual practice taught by the Guru's initiation. The Truth is our own Being. The Life embodies that Being's fullest potential in the form of the Avatar for our inspiration and encouragement. The Avatar, the Guru and the Self are not three different paths. The Avatar, the Guru and the Self are three aspects of the same consciousness. We can practice service to the Guru and his method of meditation, while worshiping our chosen form of God's embodiment - our Ishta-devata - such as Sakyamuni Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, or Sai Baba. As we cultivate our heart's with devotion and our hands with service, we grow in Self-realization. The Way, the Truth and the Life are Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga, and they are one path.

So what is the source of religious conflict that creates so much suffering and warfare in the world?

Judgment.

Karma comes through judgment, liberation through non-judgment. Millions are enlightened by following Christ. No one is enlightened by condemning Christians. Millions are enlightened by following Mohammad. No one is enlightened by condemning Muslims. Millions are enlightened by following following Sai Baba. No one is enlightened by condemning him. Millions are enlightened by practicing TM, Vipassana, Kundalini Yoga, Art of Living. No one is enlightened by claiming one way superior or another false. Let this be our last judgment.

"I worship Christ as Lord," one says. Another: "I worship Krishna." "I merge my awareness with the Formless Divine,' says another. "I serve my Guru and practice his path." "My political activism is my path." "I honor Buddha-nature in all sentient creatures." Where is the conflict between these statements? There is no conflict at all.

Now compare these statements with the following. What is the difference?

"My way is the right way. Your way is the wrong way." "The form of God you worship is not the true God." "Your both wrong, God has no form." "I am a Christian and those who practice any other religion go to hell." "Activism is superior to Meditation." "My Guru is better than your Guru!"

Notice how childish the second set of statements sound. Why? Because religious conflict arises when we make comparison. To judge another person's spiritual path in relation to our own is the root of a great deal of the world's suffering. When we are comparing objective results in a laboratory experiment, when we are choosing which kind of mushrooms are edible, when we are selecting a college suitable for our learning style, we must practice discrimination and comparison. But in the spiritual life, comparison between ourselves and another is unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit, for it denies the sanctity of the others' Personhood.

The first sign that a man has lost his way is when he says, "My way is the only way." In saying this, an evangelical may even feel that he or she is doing us a favor, by informing us of the truth. But real Truth is not to judge.

"Judge not, lest ye be judged." (Jesus of Nazareth)

Holy Matter

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Through all organic matter there runs a song, a ceaseless tremolo of bliss through every sub-nuclear particle in mineral, vegetable or animal kingdom. The molecule of dung, the holly berry ripening in the forest, the wood thrush hidden in dark branches, are creatures who neither worry nor doubt: therefor they are immersed in the oceanic sensuality of the Holy Ghost. Dust, berry, bird infused with delight, with choiceless delight, unweighted by any mental concept of an 'I': this is the organic energy of creation.

*
A stream of photons bursts the bud: I say that stream is consciously blissful. Green seedlings break ground, aching like nipples for the kiss of the sun: I say they are aware. Thrush-throated joy arises at first light, witnessing its own feathered song. The boundless subjectivity of God quivers in each molecule of a leaping salmon. Not terror but bliss explodes through the muscle fibers of a doe, even as the cougar sinks her teeth into the fibrillating artery. Blood-mist sprays in noble delight through the nostrils of that deer, as Spirit surfeits form in mid-leap, and body falls, re-cycling the fuel of the living planet. All organic matter is suffused with awareness, an awareness essentially joyful. Even we humans know that ground-state of joyful awareness in morning stillness as we awaken, just before our first thought comes.

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But as soon as the mind kicks in, we remember what it was we were supposed to be worrying about. We begin another drab day dwelling in our concepts about life instead of living it. Insofar as we live in concepts rather than life itself, we forfeit our birthright - primordial joy. Humans are the only sentient beings to have lost the song of animal ecstasy, the bliss that pulses in each particle of matter. Might it sing again, not in only in our souls, but in our atoms?

*

We rejected the Tree of Life, preferring the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Knowledge is the thinking tree, the realm of opposites created by mind. But the father of all dualism is the division of subject and object. This is our original sin: to abstract ourselves! Through abstract thinking, we become exiles from the Earth before us and the Now around us. We invent the future and the past, which after all, only exist as thoughts, detached from the atomic substance of our bodily presence. We dwell in mind: a ghostly pale parallel world, the asymptote of anxiety, which approaches but cannot touch the sensible world. "In nature there's no blemish but the mind." (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, III.4)
The invention of the abstract mind allowed us to develop science and technology. No doubt science had a purpose in human evolution. But science must now be subsumed and sublimated in a deeper matrix of intuition, where subject and object are re-unted in the primal unity of organic awareness.

The laboratory method of science only succeeds because thought kills matter, and lays it on a dissecting table, embalming the world in "objectivity." Thought triumphantly imagines its superiority over the inanimate earth, and takes dominion over her. Yet science, by this very method, kills the soul of the planet. But the science-lab is by definition an artificial world. It is bleached white, sterilized, and haunted by a sense of exile.

*

The next step in human evolution is the consecration of matter through enlightened sensuality. This enterprise is the meeting of spirituality and science, subjectivity and objectivity. We ourselves will conduct the ultimate experiment in the laboratory of sensation as we transmute matter into consciousness.

The function of awareness is to bless the object of perception, whether it is a flower, the face of a homeless child, or a loaf of bread. The material form is the host, transubstantiated by the act of perception into the body of the Goddess. Before the object is consecrated by our attention, it is merely matter. But when it is infused with awareness, it becomes Mater, the Mother. Our consciousness is the energy that irradiates the earth with divinity. In the coming age, Spirit will not flow down from above. It will flow outward through our senses, until we see God glowing from ordinary things, Christ born in the core of the neutrino and the quark.

This sacrament is foreshadowed in the Third Century Gnostic scroll, the Gospel of Phillip, where the priestly prayer of consecration identifies the Holy Spirit with the Mother: "Come O Holy Mother and fill this bread, transforming it into the body of Christ."
*

Every particle of matter has a spiritual core. It is time for humanity to locate the seat of divinity in the heart of matter. This new mode of sacramental sensation reveals the divinity in our bodies. We now transcend the age-old dualism of soul and flesh. Our goal is not to be liberated from the body, but to glorify it. This body as an ever-dissolving stream of photons, virtual particles of bliss, bubbling up and vanishing in the boundless ocean of awareness.

The only difference between a human and a Christ is that the Christ is fully aware of what the human is.In the 2nd century, St. Athanasius declared: "God is humanity wholly alive." We are not designed for out-of-body experience. Nor are we designed for blind absorption in sensuality. Let us no longer be stuck in neurotic mood-swings between these extremes. Rather, let us unite heaven and earth in enlightened sensationalism. Jesus' prayer, that God's kingdom should come on earth as it is in heaven, is a body-centered prayer for the glorification of matter through sacraments that delight the eye, ear, nose, tongue, flesh.

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Practicing the Consecration of Matter

1. Intentionally defer the power of forming images and words in your mind. Rest as awareness unformed into thoughts. Do this not by suppressing thought, but observing the thought-stream without resistance or concentration. Simply refrain from grasping any particular concept. The instant a mental image begins to form, let it dissolve back into the electricity of the brain, from which they arose. This does not require effort, only attention. And no energy is expended. In fact, energy is gained; for instead of capturing energy in mental movie-making, the energy of thought becomes available to the brain as pure bliss.

Experience the living electricity in your nerves as a continuum of bodily sensation: a scintillating field of energy that envelopes and pervades your form, extending beyond your edges. Do this by letting go of mental pictures and words.

2. We need not give this practice any Sanskrit name, or even label it meditation. Let may simply call it: dissolving thought back into sensation. After a few minutes of this practice, you may allow your attention to sink into the finest particles of this sensation-field. Observe the most minute particular impulse -- such as a tingling in the brain. No sensation is insignificant. Let your attention enter one fine particle of sensation.

Observe the subtlest thread of this sensation as it arises and dissolves into silence. Use this very sensation as the mantra which keeps you on the ever-dissolving edge of the present moment. Do not form a mental image or intellectual concept of this experience. Simply return to the finest particle of sensation arising from empty space.

3. As the sensation dissolves back into empty space, the empty space of awareness, what remains?

Pure silence. You can experience this silence around your body, and within every cell, every atom of your body. With this silence in the body, a paradox seems to occur. Your mind expands to formless infinity, yet you are absorbed in a fine point of atomic sensation. Yet there is no contradiction. It is a fact of science that an atom is filled with vast emptiness, and a single momentary photon has the energy value of infinity. You can experience limitless energy and vast space through the tiniest point in your body. As you enter an instantaneous photon of light, you merge with the all-pervading eternal source. You discover the womb of the great Mother in the heart of matter.

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Jewish mystical tradition calls this experience the Ain Soph Or: "divine no-thing in a point of light." In India, the Upanishads describe the experience as, Ano Raniyan Mahato Mahiyan: "smaller than the smallest, yet greater than the greatest." Jesus called ot: "the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end."
He described the meditation practice of entering the finest point of light, and thereby filling the cosmos with light: "The Eye is the light of the body. If your Eye is single, your whole body will be full of light."

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Growing familiar with this practice, you can use it any time to energize and re-create. Be easy and natural with the practice and don't regard it as a big deal. Simply rest in your body as awareness without thought. This brings peace and joy.

The nature of pure awareness is peace. The nature of pure awareness in the body is bliss. Through the simple practice of resting awareness in the body, you will know your own flesh as the kingdom of heaven on earth. You will experience that your true substance is not dense matter, separate from mind, but a Radiance downy as cotton, glittering with threads that dance at the dawn of creation, out of unfathomable silence.

Prayer and Creation

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The same God who said, Let there be light shining out of darkness, has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, shining in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6)

The light that shines above the heavens and the earth, the light that shines above all worlds, that is the light that shines in your heart. (Chandogya Upanishad)

Prayer is dangerous. Prayer is risky business. In prayer, you risk being changed, "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (1 Cor. 15). Prayer is a naked plunge into infinite possibility. And we must be clear that the one who takes the plunge is not the one who will emerge.

The former self will be annihilated in the darkness of the unpredictable, and what emerges will be someone new. "Your old self is crucified with Christ" (Rom. 6). "You have died; your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3). Yet St. Paul describes the new person who emerges from this terrible transforming darkness, not in terms of destruction, but creation. The one who is reborn from the womb of prayer is a kaine ktisis, in Greek, "a new creation" (Gal. 6). "Put off the old self with all its past deeds, and put on the new self... created anew in the image of its creator" (Col. 3).

For Paul, what happens in an encounter with God is no less than re-creation. We are born out of prayer in dazzling freshness, as if in the first moment of the world. With absolutely nothing behind us, we are bathed in the spaciousness of eternity. Prayer has no memory, no tradition. It is always new wine, and it will burst any old bottle. The archetype of the new creature, the image in which we are re-created, is Christ. Christ is not the personality we were comfortable being before, with its familiar litany of accomplishments and resume of proud deeds. All the dross of personality is burned away by dark flames: our God is a consuming fire, and it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the One Who Is. This is why, in the deepest prayer, memory is of no use. Good deeds are vain. In fact, they are a hindrance to prayer and must be scorched. Our past is of less value than a weather report in yesterday's newspaper. For, "if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things have passed away. Behold, all is made new" (2 Cor. 5). "All that matters is a new creation" (Gal 6).

What we used to call our self - that bundle of memories, beliefs and preferences - has dissolved into nothing. "If anyone thinks that he is something, when in fact he is nothing, he deceives himself" (Gal 6). Are you ready to become nobody? Are you willing to be annihilated? In Exodus, chapter 33, we read that no one can see God and live. If you become that No One, then you can see God. For in the same chapter Moses speaks with God "face to face, as a man speaks with his friends." Not only does Moses see God, but many go up with him to the mountaintop and behold the divine face: Aaron, Nadab, Abiyah, and seventy elders of Israel. How could they have survived? Scholars assume that this contradiction is an example of the Bible's multiple authorship. But this does not explain why the scribes who edited the Bible left such a glaring contradiction in the scripture. Wherever we find a paradox, we are coming very close to truth. We must look deeper.

Psalm 27 declares: "You speak to my heart and say, seek my face; your face, Lord, will I seek." Job receives the vision of God and cries, "Now my eye sees Thee!" (Job 47) Can we endure such a paradox? We are called to prayer by a God who wishes us to see His face, and yet destroys us for doing so! We can only see God if we are willing to die, if we are willing to become whatever scant cinder remains when all we thought we were has been burnt away. O blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom! Prayer is a poverty that enriches, a death that renews, a destruction that creates, and a darkness that enlightens. Prayer is the fire on Mt. Sinai, which burns the tree of life without consuming it. Yes, prayer is dangerous business.

When Moses comes down from the mountain he is so dangerous to behold that he must wear a veil! Yet Moses is the pattern of self-transformation which we are all called to imitate. Referring to Moses in 2 Corinthians 3:17, Paul writes: “Now all of us, with faces unveiled, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed, from glory unto glory, into that same image.” I quake when I hear these words! They breathe a dangerous spirit. Not only do they tell us that we, like Moses, are entitled to see the glory of God; but if we are willing to die to our old selves, we will be transformed into the very thing that we behold, for he says, as in a mirror! This is, in fact, the classic experience of the Christian mystics. According to the Cistercian theologian, Richard of St. Victor (12th C.):

Then the soul sheds its very self altogether and puts on the divine life,
and being wholly conformed to the beauty that it has seen, passes wholly
into that glory... Then the soul is altogether melted into Him whom she
loves.

His contemporary, St. Bernard, declares: “There is a point of rapture where the soul forgets itself and passes wholly into God.” In the words of Meister Eckhart (14th C): “The ground of God and the ground of the soul are one and the same ground.” St. Catherine of Genoa (15th C.) simply says: “My me is God, nor do I recognize any other me except God.”

Such radical expressions of divine union reflect Paul's own statement that, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." What, then, is the mirror where God and God’s image meet face to face? It is the mirror of silence. This is a living silence pregnant with God's Word, an opulent darkness radiant with God's face. When we have the courage to lose ourselves in this silence and gaze into this darkness, we see the very image of God as our own Self… Yes, but as our real Self, whom we have not met until now, whom we can only meet now.

In the beginning, God spoke in the silence, saying, "Let there be light!” Now this silence-before-creation is the very silence within us, and we must understand "the beginning" to be not a beginning in time but in the center of our soul. There we behold the light spoken in the first moment of creation. The abyss of our deepest Self is irradiated by the brilliance of our Creator. How marvelous! The very moment you return to your true center, which is silence, and your true status, which is nothing, you become the source of creation. When you have become precisely nobody, the whole cosmos rings from you like a chime. Effortless and graceful as breath, galaxies uncoil from your heart: "For the same God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts!" (2 Cor. 4)

Is there a method of meditation for this work of re-creation? In his Oration on the Fifth Beatitude, St. Gregory of Nyssa (4th C.) writes:

Just as one sees the sun in a mirror... so you possess within
yourself that for which you yearn, if you return to the grace
of the image that was placed in you from the beginning.

We "return to grace" through silence. This means silencing our thoughts, those little demons who will to create what only God can create in us. Yet the will cannot be silenced by an act of will! Oh who then will silence this inner gossip? St. Gregory of Sinai (14th C.) writes:

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!

All we need do is begin the practice: Grace will carry out the work. The early masters of Christian prayer were called Hesychasts and their method of prayer, Hesychasm, which in Greek simply means silence. Hesychastic prayer makes the heart a workshop of re-creation, where the Word of God is spoken again in and through our soul.

Such prayer is the ceaseless work of discarding the known for the unknown. As soon as we formulate our experience of prayer into something known - a rule, a technique - we turn the image of God into an idol and our own spirit into a relic. As there can be no past in prayer, so there can be no doctrine. What you discovered a moment ago, you must abandon this instant. Then you grow lighter, lighter, poorer, poorer in spirit, until you become nothing. Only then are you light enough to fall on your knees.

No one can follow you into this prayer. You leave no tracks. If you leave a trace, you are not worth following. This is why people have had such a hard time following Jesus. He left no footprints. He never wrote anything down in a book. He strolled over country roads from mystery to mystery, and not even his disciples could agree on what he said or what it meant. Hence we have alternate versions of his sayings in the four Gospels. Every word he spoke left a deeper silence. In his awful Presence, it was very difficult to remember a single word.

Intelligent men and women could hardly recall anything he taught, for their minds were struck dumb with love. And just as his words could not be recalled, so his actions could not be imitated. Every act left a deeper stillness. When he moved, it was the stillness before creation, moving through itself.

You are like Jesus when you pray. You have nowhere to lay your head, no property to stand on, no position or office to hold. All you need is the gaze of God. You live on that gaze. You gaze into that gaze which sees your original goodness, that gaze which by gazing at you imparts goodness to your being. You look into that gaze which sees in a moment all the stars of heaven and they are made. Into that gaze you will gaze and will also be created. Seeing in the mirror of your soul the one who always sees you, and by seeing you creates you holy and innocent each moment, you will cry, "Lord, thy gaze is love!"

Now here is a secret. Before the heavens and earth were made, there was nothing at all but the Spirit. She was like a sea of crystal, a boundless mirror of glass. God was pure seeing, gazing at Himself in this mirror. When God looked, He saw Jesus, begotten as an image of light in the form of a cross, which pierced the four directions, creating space itself. Then, in that same mirror, Jesus looked at Himself and saw you. You were born of his gaze in the mirror of the Spirit. You became one sparkle of his self-knowledge. And that is why, when you look at yourself in the same mirror, you see God.

Now you may ask, "O Lord, is it me or Thee, the one I see in the mirror of prayer?" On the level of the question, there is no answer. On the level of the answer, the question does not arise, for the answer is perfect silence: the silence at the center of your soul where God rests before creating anything.

After hearing all this, I am sure that you want to begin to pray, and your would like to learn some method to practice, some prayer to repeat. So I will tell you about the prayer that re-creates the universe. It consists of a single word. Through this little word, all works in creation are accomplished. Unfortunately, you cannot do this prayer. It has already been done. You cannot practice this word. It has already been spoken. It is being spoken this very moment at the center of your soul. All you can do is be still and watch this prayer happen, be very quiet and hear this word spoken. God is the one who practices this prayer inside you. The breath of God passing through your heart makes the sound of this word. The word sounds like this: Jesus. The breath that makes this sound is the Spirit.

Any one who says, "I am praying," is a liar. Only God can breathe the Word of prayer. Prayer begins in God, flows from God through the heart as you breathe in, and returns to God as you breathe out. So the purest prayer is simply to breathe. Paul understood this and wrote in scripture: "It is the Spirit who cries out within us, Abba, Father!" As God breathes Spirit through you, your heart fills up and overflows with a gentle golden radiance, sweet nectar containing the essence of stars. The healing breath of God gushes forth from your heart and illumines every cell of your body, crying over and over, "I AM!" As you gaze into this abysmal radiance, you can see the savior's face gazing back. And when you see this holy face gazing out of your own center, you will need no further proof that, behind the processes of the universe, there is no mere void or energy or law - but a Person.

Beholding this mystery at the center of your soul, do not make the mistake of thinking that it is you pronouncing this sweet name, breathing this breath, or imagining this image. You are merely eavesdropping on the conversation of the Trinity, the secret blessing of the Father upon the Child, the secret whisper of the Child responding to the Father, and the Breath of love flowing between them. You are privy to this secret; yours to watch and hear, not to do or speak.

In her deepest prayer, your soul is so at one with Christ that she forgets she is praying. She only rests in the immersion of love. She is dissolved and diffused in him and he in her, so that she permeates Christ. She is like a drop of water in a cup of milk: though it remains water, it becomes milk. The substance of the soul takes the unbounded form of Christ's radiance. Christ himself spoke of this union when he prayed for his followers in chapter 17 of John's Gospel, "that they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in us."

In such a deep and simple silence, your soul is no longer an object, for she has returned to the Divine Subject. She no longer has any created thing-ness, for she is just as she was when God first conceived her as a sparkle of his delight. Now I assure you that no soul who has tasted even a drop of this union has ever fully recovered. There always remains a deep inward part of her that is rapt and dumbfounded by love forever.

The New Cross

2012-01-04T15:44:00.000-08:00

Celtic Cross, Book of Kells
"Behold, I make all things new!" (Revelations, 21:5)

1.
The old Cross was a work of mediation, intermediate between God and Man. But the age of mediation is over. We settle for nothing less than the immediate presence of God. The new Cross is a living intersection of God and humanity in the present moment. The center of the living Cross is always now.

The living Cross is never one moment old. And it is green, renewing itself and blossoming as Christ-consciousness on earth in perpetual resurrection. The new Cross is born from every atom of the blessed Mater, mother matter, radiating her Spirit from the sacred physiology of our bodies. All that we behold in stars and distant galaxies is reflected in our own electrons.

The center of the new Cross is here, wherever we may be. On the horizontal of this Cross, past and future are crucified, giving birth to Now. On the vertical, spirit and matter unite. Heaven bows to earth as dust becomes God. Christ is with us in the center, rooted in the earth yet touching the stars. He dies into each breath we breathe, pouring into the core of our heart. And when we exhale, our breath becomes a prayer, we sending Christ's Spirit into nature.

As Jesus, Christ-consciousness appeared in history 2000 years ago. But as Awareness, that divine Being wells up like a tear from inside us this very moment, flowing into the world through our senses. Each act of perception, offered in conscious wonder, incarnates Christ on earth. We meet Christ in a homeless woman's gaze, in the eye of a newborn child, in a red berry on a naked twig, in the sound of a thrush on the still air of an Autumn morning. Why await his Second Coming? He never departed.

The four beams of the new Cross are not the old rugged beams of priesthood, dogma, judgment and war. The beams of the new Cross are the beams of love, described by the mystic poet, William Blake: "We are set on earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love."

The new Cross reaches out to every corner of the earth, embracing all whom Christianity once rejected. The new Cross is unconditionally inclusive. It is the crossroad of all sincere spiritual paths, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern.

The orthodox might object, "Is nothing condemned? Is there no judgment? " The answer is a resounding "Yes! There is judgment. We condemn the violence of judgment itself."

Are not the greatest crimes against humanity committed by the most righteous: those whose political or theological certainty compels them to judge? Do they not imprison, torture, and make war for the sake of what is right? Do we ever hear such terrors committed in the name of wrong? No, the most heinous acts of mass human violence are committed by the righteous, by the saved and the chosen.

But on the beams of the new Cross, judgment itself is crucified!

2.
What are the four beams of the new Cross? To the left, the Divine Feminine. To the right, the Meeting of East and West. Below, the Sacred Earth. Above, the Winged Heart of Mystical Prayer. And at the center, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." (Colossians 1:27)

West
The Westward beam reaches toward the Great Mother, regaining the balance of masculine and feminine power for Western culture. This beam reveals the Holy Trinity as a family: Father, Mother, Child. Through this beam of the Cross our Wiccan, African and Native American mothers suckle us with ancient Goddess wisdom. Through this beam, we find Spirit not above, but in the womb of matter. Matter is Mater.

The open-armed Cross welcomes all to participate in the divine dance of male and female energies. This is the dance of Christ and Sophia, Isis and Osirus, Attis and Cybele, Ishtar and Tamuz. But now the dance is heightened to a new self-awareness and a new responsibility. The marriage is not only an outward material wedding of man and woman, but an inner marriage of the masculine and feminine in each of us. This Crossbeam bursts with blood-red buds of rose.

East
The Eastward beam points toward India, bearing twined opposites blossoming in sacraments of reconciliation between East and West, as Christians and Muslims and Jews break bread and gather in meditation circles with Hindus, Taoists, and Buddhists. Through this beam, with its vibrant ultra-violet buds, we honor civilizations that flourished long before there was ever a university in Paris or a government in Rome or a temple in Jerusalem. Through this beam we are bathed in a beacon of metta, the compassion of Sakyamuni Buddha. We gaze into the countenance of the Bodhisattva and behold the eyes of Christ. In the sparkling rays that dawn in the East and dance from this beam of the Cross, Krishna plays. The breath of his flute is the living Word of creation vibrating over the primal waters of Genesis. In the opening words of the holy Qu'ran, rachman i'raheem, we feel the mercy and compassion of Qwan Yin. The Way Tao is the Way of Jesus.

South
On the vertical dimension of the new Cross, the beam that points downward, tangled with green vines, roots itself in the sacred earth and anoints our human senses with nectar. Is it not through our senses that God delights in creation? How else? The South-pointing Crossbeam roots down in Mother-Matter and reveals this world to be paradise. Earth is the only possible eschaton: the end of time already present. The earth is the sacral plexus of God's universal body. On this living root of the Cross, twin petals of soul and body enfold one stamen, the Christic wand that heals a planet never again to be wasted or taken for granted. This pollen-covered Crossbeam is the human spine, sparkling axis of the cosmos. Each of us, Cruciform, connects sky and earth.

North
The North-pointing beam of this Cross is the path of mystical prayer. It leads beyond theology into namelessness: into the boundless primordial space of pure Being. This Cross-beam radiates upward yet inward, toward Wonder. For the symbolic language of all scripture reveals that to climb up is to move within, the mountain top is the center, and ascending to heaven means entering deeper into the human heart.

This Crossbeam is no sword of knowledge, but a ray of divine bewilderment which points beyond words. Tangled with golden blossoms, this ever-spiraling, widening path raptures us with delight. Through this wild path of love, we participate in Christ's yearning for Mary Magdalene, and the Magdalene's yearning for the Beloved. This love is an eternal current that ebbs and flows between longing and fulfillment. Waves of this love move Winter to Spring and Summer to fall. Nature's cyclic journey is a reflection of the soul's inward pilgrimage to God. Whether we call this love-tide Radha-Krishna, Yahweh-Shekinah, or Christ-Mary makes no difference at all. We must not let mere names suppress the pure and actual experience of this living current, ineluctable delight, flowing through love's winged heart.

At the end of this up-shining Crossbeam, Lover and Beloved meet in the bridal chamber. This mystical space transcends creation. It's entrance is the silence between heartbeats. When you enter humbly into your own heart, descending on a simple breath, the doors of this secret bridal chamber are flung wide open. No stairway of doctrine or dogma can approach these doors. The radiance of the bridal chamber unlocks every gates from inside, rends the veil of all sanctuaries, and expels all patriarchal authorities who would parcel out or quantify the fullness of this Union.

Follow the beam of mystical prayer. Enter the great simplicity of your heart, where faith sinks down in waves of silence that give rhythm to every mantra; where wisdom breathes a peace that passes all understanding; and God erupts as the molten golden core of every electron in your body.

How long is the journey on this beam of mystical prayer? How long is the journey, where reaching the outermost limit is resting in the Center?

It is but the length of a sigh, the distance from the head to the heart. Breathe in. Breathe out. Sink into Christ, the seed of You. Then blossom. You are "all in all." (1 Corinthians 15:28)

Christmas Presence

2012-01-04T15:43:00.000-08:00

Being truly present to your child is greater than any gift in a box under a tree. Even if you have nothing else to give, you can give Christmas presence.

In hard economic times, especially if unemployed, parents can feel a sense of lack at Christmas time. The idea that we lack something is just that, an idea. We don't need to get rid of the idea, 'I lack.' We don't need to replace it with positive thinking, because the effort to think positively is just a reaction to lack, a subtler form of it. It is more graceful and simple just to see 'lack' as an idea, coming and going in the vast Presence that you are.

This sense of 'lack' can be a Guru! It can challenge us to see through it. When we fearlessly see through the mirage of lack, material emptiness becomes spiritual emptiness: spacious, luminous, rich and full.

So, Why Celebrate Christmas?

2012-01-04T15:42:00.000-08:00

I celebrate Christmas to celebrate the incarnation of God in every human child.

I celebrate Christmas because each of us is the Light that shines in darkness.

I celebrate Christmas because Mary's child reminds me that there is no "original sin." There is only original innocence.

I celebrate the Good News of the Gospel where Jesus not only said, "I am the light of the world" but "You are the light of the world;" where Jesus not only revealed God to us but revealed us to us. Did he not say, "Ye are all Gods"? In the words of St. Athanasius, who lived before the Council of Nicea forged chains of creed and dogma: "God is humanity fully alive."

Holy Spirit and Holy Matter get married. Christmas is the fruit of their wedding. I am their only-begotten child. So are you. Let's feast!

Not a particle of dust lacks the sparkle of God's wine. God's dough is rising in each seed of Winter wheat. Your body is the blessed sacrament. Each electron of you bathes in a photon-cloud whose energy is literally infinite. That's not religion: it's physics. Each atom contains the vastness of interstellar space. When I look at my hand, I see the birth of galaxies. When I look at your face, I see God's image in the mirror of all-pervading consciousness. I celebrate Christmas because earth itself is a miracle.

Christmas reminds me to discover the green God resurrected in a pine needle, the blood of God's body in a holly berry, the Mother of God in the darkness of midnight, the manger of God in my heart.

I celebrate Christmas because all God's children are saved the moment they are born, because God feels no wrath, because the divine plan does not include hell. (Some of us use the gift of freewill to invent hell for ourselves, but that is none of God's business.)

God is love and nothing but love, pressed out and overflowing. God's Love enfolds the earth with healing wings. The love of Christ anoints each creature, infusing every heart with Grace free for the taking, like breath. I breathe God. This is why I celebrate. I can't help it.

And when I meet a True Believer who tells me that I must get saved, I reply, "From what?"

Then the True Believer quotes Jesus: "You must be born again, born of the Spirit." Yes, I agree, and I am. In the Bible, the word for Spirit and Breath are precisely the same word: "ruach" in Hebrew, "pneuma" in Greek. When I breathe with conscious gratitude, each breath baptizes me with the Holy Spirit.

If I am truly awake, just to breathe is worship. Just to breathe is to be born again and again. Jesus was not telling me to perform a ritual, but to wake up.

O miraculous birth of God in me, who is never one moment old!

Christ and Nature

2012-01-04T15:40:00.000-08:00

To A Born Again Christian Who Thinks
I Am Headed for Hell...

"The Kingdom of the Father is spread all over the earth
and men do not see it." (Gospel of Thomas, 113)

1.
My dear friend, as you are concerned about my soul, I offer this reply. I offer it to all Evangelical Christians across this land who believe that religion can only take one form, a strictly limited one for sure, and intend to impose it upon the whole nation. I speak as a fellow Christian from a faith that grew right along side of yours, though you may not know much about it since the patriarchs of your tradition tried with great fervor and some success to stamp it out. I am a Quaker. The Quakers were one of the Non-Conformist churches of 17th century Europe who refused to embrace the creeds and confessions of Protestant orthodoxy.

Quakers have no written creed. They profess that Christ is an Inward Light who dwells in every human heart, and the revelation of his Spirit is continuous. For Quakers, revelation is not limited to the Bible, for it pours forth wherever we have eyes to see it. In every star and every green leaf, in the sparkling of raindrops or the eyes of a hungry child, there is revelation and the word of God incarnate. The book of nature is as sacred as any scripture.

This last point is the reason for naming my epistle, Logos and Nature. I find myself too theologically clumsy to separate the genius of one from the other, and I experience such an essential relation between them, that I am forced to consider ecology the moment I mention Christ the Word. For Christ is the Logos personified, the supreme blueprint of creation, "through whom all things were made" (Jn. 1). Christ the Logos is the cosmic mind at rest, whose very thought is natural law.

Ecology means knowledge of home: oikia-logos in Greek. Oikia means home. Logos means knowledge or word. Knowing our home is knowing our ground, our earthly habitat.

We cannot live ecologically until we feel at home here on earth, and in this body. Do we feel at home on planet earth? Do we know our home? Do we know our bodies? Is our mind ever at rest in its ground, this earthly flesh? Or are we estranged from the very planet we walk on, conflicted about bodily processes like eating and sex and growing old?

We eat too much then starve ourselves. We obsess over sex and then over guilt about sex. We pump our muscles into "iron" because we can't stand the natural softness of our bellies. We treat th planet as we treat our bodies, exploiting land, forests, and streams to turn raw materials into cash. Why do we regard nature as raw until she's been man-handled?

We hide birth, old age, and death in clean, white clinical rooms. And if we are religious, we can't wait to get off this planet into the clean white rooms of heaven. Why do we not feel at home in nature's lap, like our brothers and sisters in more primal earth-centered cultures?

2.
During the Endarkenment of the 17th century (some call it the Enlightenment), Western culture divorced itself from mother earth. Science and Protestantism, the two major trends of this period, joined forces to separate the rational soul from nature. Of course the estrangement of nature from the soul began with Plato in ancient Greece, but the divorce was finalized in modern Europe's mechanistic world view, where the universe was regarded as a vast machine; and God, through the agency of reason, was its mechanic. Thus the title of the book that inaugurated the age, Kepler's Celestial Mechanics.

The new paradigm for describing reality was scientific method: the process of attaining perfect objectivity by reducing nature to an inanimate object under laboratory conditions. What are lab conditions? They are conditions where the only intelligence is the mind of the observer, for the object observed has become inanimate. We must kill the object and lay it on a table before the mind. No wonder that, until recently, most of what we know about health and medicine has been gleaned from corpses!

Francis Bacon, father of this scientific method, wrote in his Novum Organum that we should "torture mother nature for her secrets". Descartes declared in his Discourse On Method #6, "We shall be masters and owners of nature." Thus they distorted the commandment of God to Adam, "Take dominion over the earth." Nature was no longer an animate mystery to be revered but a thing, only useful when dead, dissected, and dispirited. Once dead, nature could be lain on conveyor belts in factories, the raw material for industry. Celebrating the absolute schism between subject and object, between spirit and nature, Descartes concluded that Truth is only found in "clear and distinct ideas," not in the external material world. The beauty in the woods and streams was worthless to him.

Following the new paradigm of science, Protestant theology also divorced nature from the soul. It accomplished this gloomy exorcism by denying the mysteries of a more holistic Christianity. Medieval mystics had found God not only in the second person of the Trinity but in the first: as absolute Being, the very ground of Creation. St. Bernard told his monks, the settlers of Western Europe, "You will find more laboring in the woods than you ever will among books: trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from any master!" Hildegaard of Bingen (12th C.) praised every particle of dust as a "glittering glistening mirror" of divinity. Meister Eckhart wrote, "Every creature is a word of God and a book about God."

But with the Protestant mainstream, defined by Calvin and Luther, mystical communion with nature was lost. The awe of experiencing God as cosmos, "all in all" to use St. Paul's phrase, was suppressed. Mystics were burned as witches. God was reduced to an abstract and rational belief. The Word of God was no longer written in the green sap of creation, but in dogma.

Protestantism disenchanted the earth, neutered its creative energy, and caged the Spirit in creeds. As the earth was diminished by Protestant dogma, so was the human brain. Theology confined Truth to the left frontal cortex where the world could be clinically distilled into verbal abstractions. Since then, without even realizing it, Christians have lived in a cerebral ghetto, cut off from the richness of the ancestral brain, and from other modes of intelligence like intuition, imagination, the self-healing wisdom of the body, and the wonder of communion with nature. With such an intellectualized spirituality, no wonder many Christians are more concerned with heaven and hell than with life on earth.

3.
Enough of heaven and hell! It's time to re-enchant this world with divinity, and put the soul back into nature. The re-enchantment has already begun in twentieth century science, leaving theology far behind. The new physics poses fundamental questions about the relation of subject and object, consciousness and matter, similar to the questions of ancient mystics. Einstein wrote, "The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research." Sir James Jeans, a founder of modern physics, stated that "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." Nobel physicist Arthur Eddington heralded the reunion of matter and consciousness: "The stuff of the universe is mind-stuff!"

Then what is the task of theology in the age of the new physics? Cease preaching dogma and start listening to mystics! We Christians must ripen. We must evolve. We must expand our mission: from being born-again Christians to being cosmic Christians. Born-again Christians are born again once. Cosmic Christians are born again each moment, each breath! "God is creating the entire cosmos fully and totally in this present now," said Meister Eckhart. Said Paul the Apostile: "Behold, all is made new!"

To become a cosmic Christian is to grow out of the need to define our lives through dogma, into a need to marvel without words. In pure marvel, our prayers change from petitions to meditations. Human words grow quiet, and we begin to hear the Word of God. The Logos.

The Word of God does not address us in theological concepts: those are human words. The Word is not a thought but a presence. Its truth is not in the intellect, but in the unity of body, mind and environment, harmonized in the radiance of the present moment. We'll need to study, not the Christian philosophers, but the Christian mystics: Meister Eckhart, Hildegaard of Bingen, Theresa of Avila, Teilhard de Chardin -- great but obscure names waiting to be written in our childrens' textbooks -- names like Howard Thurman, the black Quaker-educated Christian who made a profound impression on Martin Luther King. In his biography, Thurman wrote: "As a child, the boundaries of my life spilled over into the mystery of the ocean and the wonder of the dark nights and the wooing of the wind, until the breath of nature and my own breath seemed to be one."

When we see God newly revealed each moment, in sea wave and salt breeze, we'll realize that revelation didn't end at the Council of Nicea, or in the last page of the Bible. We won't be limited by creeds, which are always someone else's descriptions of God. We'll be free to learn from Asian and Third World religions the meditative, artistic, ritual processes that connect our souls directly with the Spirit of nature. We'll see that God reveals herself in non-Western and non-masculine forms just to keep us humble. She will goad and trouble us to move from judgment to celebration, from sect to community. And then we'll discover the truth: Other religions remind us of wisdom once known in the early Church.

4.
Prior to the Nicene Council of 325 AD, Christianity was a diverse, experimental, progressive movement, sparkling with mystical experience, rich with visionary practices of meditation which liberated the spirit and celebrated creation. Christians were inspired by Wisdom, and not yet fettered by creed. This golden age ended when the Roman emperor, Constantine, convened the Bishops at Nicea to suppress all forms of worship that were not useful in gaining political control. They closed the canon of scriptures. They condemned as heretics those who did not conform to their new Trinitarian doctrine. In the three years following this council, the Roman Church slaughtered more Christians than the Roman Empire had killed in the previous 300 years.

Let a new golden age begin now! Proclaim an age for cosmic Christians. They shall no longer confine themselves to books and pews, but burst open old doors and traipse through forests, learning to re-enchant the earth. The Christ Spirit is green. She calls to us, "Come away into the wilderness by yourselves and rest awhile" (Mk 6:31). In wilderness Jesus fasted, and like a Lakato warrior wandered on his vision quest for forty days and nights. Led by Her, the Spirit, Jesus pointed to lilies of the field, birds of the air, stones that shout. Like a tribal shaman, Jesus heard the voice of the elements, the praise-song of creation.

In the remainder of this essay, I will capitalize the word, Creation. For every berry on a twig is full of God, the artist shining through her art. Whether you are a Christian mystic, a Buddhist meditator, a Hindu Yogi, or a Native American shaman, if you enter deeply into a single syllable sung by the thrush, a single dew drop on a violet, a moment of stillness at the end of your own breath, you will fall at the feet of one and the same Creator, feel the pulse of one Spirit, and grow intoxicated with the love of Christ, the Logos.

In such ordinary sacraments, near any country road, Christ touches and heals your heart through nature. You encounter his Lordship in the loam when you plant a tulip bulb. You hear his name in the gentle stir of ten thousand pine needles. If you live in a Christian culture, you hear your breath sighing his name, Jesus. In India, you hear the same breath, Shiva. In Thailand, Buddho. In the silence of the sage brush in South Dakota, you hear Wakan Tanka. One Lord whispers the divine name in all these voices. That name is the Logos.

5.
When we pray, God does not listen to our words at all. God hears only the amplitude and frequency of our love. The cosmic Christian of the coming age will never limit God to a single name and form. We shall not fossilize the Spirit in a single moment of history. The image of the white-robed first-century Rabbi touching and healing the people, lovely as that image may be, is but a single frame, a cross-section, of revelation's eternal continuum. Jesus himself promised, "Lo I AM with you, even until the end of the ages." In what form is he with us? In that white-robed Palestinian form? Or in tongues of formless fire that fall upon us after the Ascension of his body? (Acts 2:3)

The distinctive quality of the Holy Spirit, Christ's post-Ascension form, is its formlessness. Thus Spirit pervades all nature as the breath of the Logos. The Spirit is here in the dust of the down-town streets, and in the furthest star-clouded nebula; here in a photon of light, or in a neuro-peptide molecule of your brain as you think this very thought. This intimate continuum of Divine Personhood awakens at each point in time and space. Space itself is spiritually awake! Nowhere is Christ not born, and never is Christ more than one moment old!

This is no fantasy, my friend, but a fact of physics. Your own body is a cloud of electromagnetism that is as spiritual as it is physical. Your human flesh is an electrical surge, an ocean of abstract waves rising from the silent vacuum at creation's source. Every particle of your body rings with the music of the spheres, echoing throughout the cosmos. You are made of immaterial intelligence, pure mathematics incarnate as matter. Thus writes Freeman Dyson, one of our great astro-physicists:
Even to a hardened theoretical physicist it remains perpetually astonishing that our solid world of trees and stones can be built of quantum fields and nothing else. The quantum field seems far too fluid and insubstantial to be the basic stuff of the universe. Yet we have learned gradually to accept the fact.

Founding quantum physicist, Sir James Jeans, marvels that we live in "a world created out of pure intelligence." That intelligence, as we have noted above, the early Christians called the Logos. Modern physics is a but commentary on the prologue to The Fourth Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word." In fact, the relationship between John's Gospel and quantum physics was explicitly stated by one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, Werner Heisenburg. In a lecture delivered on September 4, 1958, he said:
For modern natural science there is no longer, in the beginning, the material object: but form, mathematical symmetry. And since mathematical structure is by definition an intellectual content, we could say, 'In the beginning was the word' - the Logos.

Even as the Word becomes incarnate in a particle of matter, it remains a wave, connected to the boundless sea of universal intelligence. Thus, the flesh as flesh does not lose its spiritual essence: it remains, quite literally, an infinite radiance. The electrons of your body are particles, but they are also waves of something far more vast than your physical frame. Here is the British physicist, Paul Davies, describing "the infinite self-energy of the electron" in his book, The Matter Myth:
Picture, then, the electron immersed in a shimmering bath of evanescent quantum energy, intense near the electron but dwindling steadily with distance. This restless, seething ferment of virtual photons is, in fact, precisely the electron's electric field described in quantum language... The energy of this photon activity surrounding an electron can be computed. The answer proves, unnervingly, to be infinite.

Your body is myriad electrons, countless infinities of light! Jesus was not the only incarnation of the Logos. He was simply showing you who you really are. Yes, he said, "I am the light of the world." But he also said, "You are the light of the world."

A hundred years ago, if I declared, "Every particle of my body is unlimited, resonating throughout the cosmos," I would be called a mystic or a madman. Today we know that this is an accurate statement of the quantum physical world. According to Bell's Theorem (1964), each local particle is an excited wave of an all-pervading field. The non-local field, of which this particle is an excitation, gives rise to every other particle in space. This local particle cannot be separated in essence from particles in far distant galaxies. They are all vibrations of one continuum. In a simple but accurate analogy: each wave of the sea is, at its base, the entire ocean, and is therefor every other wave. Thus the great physicist Arthur Eddington declared, "When the electron vibrates, the whole universe shakes!"

Your body is this universal dance. Right here on this sacred earth, you are the all in all. Why don't you get intimate with the divine source of the cosmos, which is in fact the deep center of each particle in every atom of your flesh? It is an incontestable truth of astronomy that every one of your protons was once inside a star. If you are at home in your body, if you know who you really are, you can reach out and move those galaxies. This may sound presumptuous, so we'll let Jesus say it: "If you have faith as a mustard seed you shall say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you."(Mt 17:20)

6.
Quantum physics calls creation's source the unified field. Greek philosophy called it the Logos. The Bible called it I AM. I AM is the most precise name because the energy at creation's source is consciousness itself.

The universe springs from the silent depths of I AM. For those whose hearts are open, there will come a sea-change in Christianity, a transformation of perspective that will frighten some, delight others. In the new faith-paradigm, cosmic Christians will know in themselves the source of creation, the very I AM who spoke through Jesus. We will taste and see that I AM living today. We will no longer feel estranged from nature, for I AM the very essence of the earth, pulsating in each atom. I AM all and in all.

When Jesus said, I AM, was he referring to a localized human form, or to the God in every one of us? Was He not a wave referring to the sea? Was the I AM in Jesus not the I AM in you? And was this not the same I AM revealed to Moses in the fire of Mount Sinai? "I AM THAT I AM!" (Ex. 3:14)

When fully awake, we can only say: "I AM Jesus, and Jesus is I," even if they crucify us for heresy. But when asleep, I mis-identify my infinite AM with finite concepts and transient moods. True prayer happens when I sink deep into AM, entering the baptismal golden stream of the Logos. In the courage of prayer, I refuse to end the sentence, "I AM....." I refuse to predicate a finite noun upon my infinite being. I refuse to say, "I am a doctor, I am an American, I am a Christian." My life is transubstantiated from the weight of a noun to a weightless verb: I refuse to turn myself into a thing. Immersed in AM, I return like a radiant river to the ocean of Christ: Christ in me, who is also Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Col. 1:27)

7.
Meeting Jesus at the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene reached out to grasp him. But he said, "Do not touch me!" Have you ever wondered why?

He did not want her to mistake what I AM for his body. For the same reason, he told his disciples, "Before Abraham was, I AM." He was telling us not to worship a particular form, a robe and beard and sandals, in a finite moment of history. He was telling us not to turn him into a thing, an idol. He was urging us to enter the consuming fire, I AM: a formless fire that never destroys, but gives birth continually.
Then Yahweh spoke to you from the midst of the fire: you heard the sound of words but you saw no form... So watch yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day Yahweh spoke to you from the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure! (Dt. 4:12-16)

The central passage in all of Western scripture, these words of Moses teach the Christian never to worship an image of Jesus, whether that image is on an alter or in the mind. For even a mental picture of Jesus is a form and a thing. St. Paul reminds us, "Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now."(2 Cor. 5:16). The thought of Jesus is the last idol to be thrown into the fire!

Then how can we know Jesus now? His flesh was crucified: now know him in your flesh. His Spirit poured out: now know him in your spirit. His blood soaked the ground: now know him in the earth at your feet. An old Celtic blessing invokes "Christ before you, Christ behind you, Christ above you and beneath you, to the left and right of you, Christ in all."

This stick of wood, this acre of earth, this planet, galaxy, every un-miracle of the commonplace, is filled with divine radiance, the glory of the Logos: Christ in the smallest seed, in the eye of the homeless child, in the motionless explosion of a rose, Christ at your fingertips, here, in a piece of bread.

Christianity's Essential Verses Re-Interpreted

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John 4:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten* Son, that whosoever believeth on Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."

* 'Only-Begotton' (Greek: Monogenaes) In Greek this unique word, coined here, does not mean 'only' or 'born,' as the only-child of a parent. It is a theological term meaning 'generated directly out of One.'

≈Ω≈ One divine Consciousness spontaneously radiates the energy of Love throughout its manifold manifestations. Therefor, any conscious being who attunes to Source will remain undeluded by what is ever-changing, and through loving devotion will identify with the unchanging divinity within.

John 14:6 "I Am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."

≈Ω≈ The I Am, who is the core of your being, is the way to God, the truth of God, and the divine source of your Life. There is no other way to unite with God except by entering the doorway of the I Am in your heart.

Deuteronomy 6:5 (The first and great commandment according to Jesus) "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might."

≈Ω≈ This is the Biblical definition of Yoga: Divine Love will naturally flood us when all levels of our personality align in unity. Yoga means union: the integration of body, breath, mind, intellect, and soul.

Leviticus 19:18 (The second great commandment according to Jesus) "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

≈Ω≈ Here is the Biblical expression of Advaita: When one is at rest in the I Am source, one is irradiated by the Christ-Consciousness, who is also the basis of every other person, just as the ocean is the base of every wave. One cannot help but love the other as Self, no matter who it may be, because one sees that the other IS one's Self.

John 10:30 "I and the Father are One."

≈Ω≈ This is Jesus's Zen Koan. Is he describing a relationship, or a unity? If there is only One, there is no relationship of the soul and God. If the soul and God are two, there is no unity. He prays to the Father at his last supper with the disciples, "that they may all be One, as we are One." Here Jesus gives us the deepest mystery: relationship within unity. In Sanskrit, bhakti yogis call this "Bedha-bedha: Two and Not Two."
One divine Consciousness vibrates within itself as self-relationship, becoming an object to its own subjectivity and a subject to its own objective truth. Sat (Truth) beholds itself, becoming Chit (Consciousness) and the two are fused in one by Ananda (Bliss). This is the Holy Trinity, Sat-Chit-Ananda.
A truly conscious person enacts this Trinity in every moment of earthly enjoyment as the Perceiver merges with the Object in the act of Perception. Christ-Consciousness as 'I' perceives Creator-God as 'That' in every human face, even the face of a morning glory on a wooden fence. Subject and object merge in the delight of this perception, and this delight is Ananda, the bliss of the Holy Spirit. Through acts of human perception, the whole creation is offered into the fire of bliss, and in that fire the two become One again. Thus, by delighting in the world, just as it is, we offer creation back to the Creator through the fire of our own awareness.

These are the essential verses of Christianity. The first two are the verses cited by fundamentalists to prove that Christianity is the only spiritual way. They use this verse to reject the wisdom and beauty of all other religions. But when we see these verses as direct spiritual experiences rather than intellectual doctrines, we understand that Christ teaches precisely what Lord Krishna taught in the Bhagavad Gita, what the Sufi masters of Islam teach, what the Buddhist masters teach. Christianity is the Western form of Sanatana Dharma, the universal path, shared by every enlightened master in every tradition.

The Bread of religion is this: that all religions arrive at the same truth. The Spice of religion is this: that each religion teaches the truth in its own particular flavor, with its own stories, symbols and rites.

"Ekam Sat Vipra, Bahudah Vedantihih": "Truth is One, but the wise have called it by many names." (Upanishads)

I offer this exposition of Christian verses not to offend or arouse intellectual argument, but to settle our hearts in an experience of global sat-sang, a world congregation of truth, where all religions are welcomed to celebrate together.

Peace.

Scripture is not History but Symbol

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What impoverished soul would read an exalted hymn like Genesis 1 as a science project from a biology lab? What desperation leads men to regard the profound psychological symbols of Adam and Eve as actual events? How did we mistake those sublime allegories of the mystical journey, the stories of Joseph and Moses, for history?

Reading the Bible as history leads to war. Reading the Bible as symbol leads to wisdom. Some criticize the Bible as 'mere mythology.' That is no criticism. Scripture was intended as mythology. It may utilize some historical places and events, just as Shakespeare used bits of history in his plays; but Shakespeare's plays make no claim to be historically accurate, nor are they discredited because they didn't really happen. As the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, wrote: 'All great stories are true. Some actually happen, and some don't.' Creative authors have always transformed historical events into symbols of the soul, and physical landscapes into landscapes of the inner journey.

Myths are truer than facts. Facts happen once and vanish. Myths are the eternally recurring patterns of consciousness, expressed as stories. In mythical stories, each of us is hero and villain, savior and devil. The journey from Egypt through the desert to the Promised Land is our journey from the bondage of ignorence to the freedom of enlightenment. The central event in this journey is the mountain top, where we see divine fire and hear the Name revealed. This is no earthly mountain to be claimed with a national flag, but the peak experience of transcendental awareness, where Inward Light arises, and we hear the 'I Am' of Spirit as the 'So'Ham' of our own breath.

Yes, there may have been a desert shaman named Moses, a seer named Elijah, a tribal chieftain named Jacob. But what are they now? They are symbols. 'Isra-el' means, 'He has wrestled with God.' Originally, Israel was not a nation state but a state of consciousness, the state of one who wrestled with God and awakened to the Presence.

The name Israel was first given to Jacob, a dishonest, conniving, intensely selfish figure, after he wrestled with Spirit at the fording of the river Jordon. At first, this spirit seemed a dark and frightening energy, like one of the fierce water demons believed to inhabit such places. But with the dawn the spirit revealed itself to be the angel of God. Jacob won, but not before he received a wound from which he must limp forever.

What do we do with such a story? There really is a river Jordon. But we don't know if there ever was a Jacob, or if he had such an experience. As historical event, all we can say about this story, or any Bible story, is not that it is true or false, but that it is impossible to verify. How relevant can 'history' be if it cannot be verified? And besides, it's over.

Yet as spiritual allegory, the story of Jacob is profound. Whether or not it actually happened is irrelevant. It is the story of each deeply-flawed ordinary person who confronts the shadow, enters the stream of awakening, and crosses over to the land of Presence, forever changed, carrying his wounded humanity toward divine awareness with a new name, Israel, 'he has wrestled with God.'

Another story - Elijah - is hardly historical, yet profoundly true. Fleeing to a mountain cave, deeply dejected, Elijah encounters Presence, not through external experiences of fire or wind or earthquake, but through a 'still small voice' within. The Hebrew here is eloquent: 'Qol d'mama daqa,' literally 'the whisper of finely ground-up silence.' This is a description of the quantum field, where the finest particles of our reality arise from the inner silence of creative intelligence. Elijah, like the Buddha, the first Quaker, George Fox, and modern teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, went through a period of depression, and came out the other side fully awake.

Doubtless there was a real Mary, mother of a real rabbi named Jesus. But the 'Virgin Birth,' both here and in the story of Buddha, is allegorical. It represents the pure silence within us, where the Christ-light, or Buddhic Prajna, is born.

The myths of ancient scripture represent, in stunning dramatic detail, those subtle conflicts and ambiguities of our evolving soul that are so perplexing to talk about in the abstract. Therefor, we talk about them in signs. Scripture makes these Mysteries more concrete. Through the stark imagery of the Bible, we get something chewy, something salty, to flavor our dialog on the spiritual journey, so we don't have to bore each other with tedious over-intellectualizing. We live our lives as stories, not essays.

May you cross the desert and the waters, to find the land that flows with milk and honey inside you. May you climb the mountain at the center of your soul, and find peace. Enjoy the journey, especially when its plot gets spicy.

Jesus Is a Yogi

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(Head of the Southern Baptists Declares Yoga a Threat to Christianity, Oct. 7, 2010)

"Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Glorify God in your body." (1 Corinthians, chapter 6) This is the essence of Yoga.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and strength, and mind." (Luke 10:27) Jesus declared this law from the Jewish Torah to be the great commandment. But it is also the definition of Yoga.

Yoga is the alignment of body, breath, mind and soul (Atman) in divine wholeness. Jesus declares that Yoga is the essence of God's law.

Jesus is not only a Buddha. He is a Master Yogi.

The Divine Humility

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I am astonished at the divine humility!

Buddha said, "I am just an ordinary man who is awake." Jesus said, "These things which I do, you shall do also, yes, even greater things than these!" Mohammad was known for his humble patience and declared that no man, not even the greatest prophet, could be equated with the Divine. Krishna removed his royal crown and became a playmate to the cow herders of Vrindavan.

Because of this divine humility, modern seekers are tempted to say, "See, they are just like us!" But where would we be without them? I would be lost without the love of Christ, the compassion of the Buddha, the grace-filled music of Lord Krishna's flute.

On the other hand, it is undeniable that these avatars came to show us who we really are, revealing the divinity that illuminates the human heart. Saint Athanasius, one of the earliest Christian theologians, said, "God became human so that humanity could become divine."

How can we realize this Truth, yet maintain our humility?

The answer is, I AM. God and humanity both declare, I AM. This most sacred name of God (Exodus 3) is the very name we give ourselves in our most innocent moments of self-awareness.

Let us say I AM with reverence and humility, for this is a two-fold name, containing not only the temporal I of humanity, but the AM of eternal Being. Speaking this name, I surrender to the radiance of AM, and become myself.

Take No Thought

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This mind is a useful tool, but what is its purpose? Is it possible that humanity has not even begun to discover the true purpose of mind?

Mind is what I have, not what I am. If I use the mind to judge others, or speculate about the world's problems, or tangle myself in regrets, I only waste energy and create suffering. This is why Jesus says, again and again in the Sermon on the Mount, "Take no thought, do not worry... Take no thought, do not worry..." Our true destiny is Awareness, free from thought.

There is absolutely no difference between a pure thought and an impure thought. Both are like mist dissolving in still air, the still air of awareness. I need not suppress an impure thought or grasp a pure thought, for thoughts are not the Self. I need not weave my destiny out of worries, or spend my energy endlessly sorting through mind-stuff. When I stop clinging to the mists of mind, the golden path of love unfolds from my heart, a beam of morning light in that still air.

Gautama Buddha speaks of Four Great Dignities. When I ask students to guess what they are, they immediately detach from their bodies and enter the ghostly metaphysical realm of thought. This is their conditioned response after years of Western education. They say things like, "Compassion," "Justice," "Peace," "Wisdom." But these are abstractions. Abstractions don't interest a Buddha. A Buddha is interested in just one thing: Presence. For Gautama, the Four Great Dignities are Sitting, Standing, Walking, and Lying Down.

Like the Buddha, Jesus is a healer. His final healing is to bind the wound that tears mind from body. "The Eye is the light of the body. If the Eye is one, then your whole body will be filled with light." (Matthew 6:22) When the Eye of Awareness is pure, un-befuddled by the thousand thoughts of mind, I behold the motionless explosion of a rose, the diaphanous splendor of the first daffodil, the worn face of the homeless, in all its painful and immediate splendor. Simply to see is worship.

How then shall I use my mind in the coming age of Christ-Consciousness?

To envelope my body, as a flame enfolds a wick. To pervade my body, as fire permeates a burning coal. To bathe each sensation of my flesh, each perception of my senses, with the ointment of awareness. To irradiate matter, and make it glow.

Let this body even now begin to glitter with undistracted glory. One day this body shall be Light itself, no longer a body with a spirit, but a spiritual body. Until then, I tend the fire, the infinitesimal hearth in every atom of my sacred humanity. I embrace each crumb with mindfulness. And as mind with body is atoned, I become more present, more available to other creatures.

The more I can embody the Spirit, mystical reality becomes political reality. Wherever I go on earth, I greet the Other as a living flame.

Did Jesus Teach Meditation?

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Hallowed be thy Name. (Luke 11:2, Mat. 6:9)

Holy Father, keep them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one. (John 17:11)

My first guru, Maharshi Mahesh Yogi, told us point blank, "Christ taught meditation and it is in the Bible." Of course he did not mean that you could find the specific label, Transcendental Meditation, or the precise content of its instructions in the Gospel. He did mean that Jesus taught the science of mantra.

The Old Testament refers to the practice of mantra meditation as "calling on Y-H-W-H, the name of the Lord." In the New Testament, Jesus proclaims this practice the key to union with God.

The disciples asked Jesus how to meditate. "Lord, teach us to pray." In Luke's version (Luke 11), Jesus instructs an intimate group in a quiet place when they come upon the Master in prayer. The practice is contained in his famous words: "Father in heaven, hallowed be thy Name."

In Matthew's version, Jesus speaks to the public. Nevertheless, he refers to a meditation technique that is silent and interior (Matthew 6). "When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words."

Jesus teaches us to pray, not audibly, but in the secret chamber of the heart, having shut the door of the senses. We do not need to use many words, but only one word, the Name of God. Indeed, according to the Philocalia, Christian Orthodoxy's definitive compendium of ascetical instruction, the purest form of meditation is monologisthos eucharistos: "one-word prayer."

Jesus's disciples practiced the one-word prayer of God's Name: the mantra. They learned to hallow the divine Name: to let the mantra gracefully settle inward, from external sound to interior vibration, where it finally becomes a gentle radiance of silent light, the presence of God in the heart. The remaining verses of the Lord's Prayer outline the benefits of this graceful mantra practice.

The word hallow is well chosen in the King James version of the Bible. It not only means holy, but is associated with light in many ancient languages. In India, Holi is the Spring festival honoring the rebirth of the sun. In Christian art, halo refers to the aura of a Saint. In Greek, the word heile means a ray of sunlight: it is pronounced just as the German and Dutch words for holy. G. Jobes' Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols declares: "In practically all languages, the word for holy has been derived from the divinely honored sun."

Thus Jesus's instruction to hallow the Name refers to precisely the same experience as Transcendental Meditation, Sahaj Samadhi and other so-called Eastern techniques. They are not Eastern or Western: they are human. They share a common practice and goal: to experience the energizing clarifying effects of the divine Name until, at the subtlest interior level of mantra, a luminous life-giving vibration arises from the solar center of the heart.

Jesus reminds his disciples of this practice again at his final discourse in John 17. In the form of an ecstatic hymn, he reveals that disciples become one with God, just as their Master is one with God, through the practice of the divine Name. "Holy Father, keep them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one." (John 17:11)

Egyptians and Hebrews practiced the ancient science of mantra. Whether or not Jesus was in India, he was in Egypt for many years as a young student. He loved to go into the desert to pray. Therefor he had ample opportunity to contact the Hebrew school of the Prophets as well as Essene communities in Egypt or in Palestine. Jesus brought the practice of mantra from the mystery schools to his disciples. Gnostic Gospels from the Nag Hammadhi library in Egypt, such as the Pistes Sophia and the Gospel of Truth, make explicit reference to the practice of the divine Name as Jesus taught it.

The Gospel of Truth designates the disciples as "Sons of the Name, in whom the Name of the Father is at rest, and who themselves are at rest in his Name." (Gospel of Truth 38) That this Name is no mere theological concept, but a practice of sound to be heard in the depths of the heart, is made clear by the following verses:

"The Logos, or divine Word, is in the heart of those who pronounce it." (26)

"The sign of that which is their sound is that it is the Father." (32)

"They listen to their root; they have leisure for themselves." (42)

In Pistes Sophia, Jesus tells the disciples that "the mystery of the Ineffable is a single word" (2:96). He invokes the sound-stream of the seven vowels, then contracts them into a three-letter word: IAO - in Greek, iota, alpha, omega. Scholars regard this as the Greek version of the Hebrew divine Name. Jesus gives his disciples this sound when he initiates them into meditation. Then he offers an interpretation of the three letters that precisely corresponds to the explanation of Aum (Ah-Hu-Um) given in the scriptures of Yoga. "Iota because the All emerges, Alpha because it is in movement, Omega because the final dissolution will occur" (Pistes Sophia 4:136).

Thus the Name of God, in the subtle form of sound, contains the vast cycle of creation. In Hinduism, the three impulses that Jesus calls emergence, movement, and dissolution are personified by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the three persons of Godhead who are all one Brahman.

Meditation on the mantra enlivens the mechanics of creativity in our consciousness, stirring the three-fold impulses of manifestation, organization, and purification. The mantra takes our attention to the transcendental source of creation, whence the cosmos emerges and into whose silence it dissolves.

But we don't need the Gnostics to find mantra meditation. We find it at the root of Christian orthodoxy, in the letters of St. Pachomius, "father of Christian monasticism." Born in 292 CE, Pachomius established the first rule for monks in the Egyptian desert. In his letters, as yet untranslated from Old Latin, Pachomius designed complex charts of mantric syllables. These sound-syllables are transcribed into Latin, but they are clearly bijas, "seeds of meditation," derived from earlier sacred traditions. Several of these one-syllable meditation seeds are identical with those from the Sanskrit.

The ineffable Name of God in the Old Testament is composed of bija mantras. Though Christians transcribe this word as Yahweh or Jehovah, its sacred vibration is never vocalized in Orthodox Judaism. That is why, when traditional Jews read scripture aloud, they substitute the word Adonai (Lord) or simply ha-Shem (the Name).

The Talmud states that, once every seven years, the secret method for pronouncing this mantra was given to the temple initiates (Kiddushan 71a). The Midrash on Psalm 91 asks, "Why is it that prayers of the children of Israel are no longer answered? It is because they have forgotten the Ineffable Name."

I am quite convinced that this most sacred Biblical mantra signifies the inner vibration of our breath, the sound of Spirit flowing in and through us. Of course, in Biblical language, the word for Spirit is precisely the same as the word for breath. In Yogic literature, the Hebrew Ruach Elohim - Spirit-Breath of God - is the Prana-Shakti, the creative energy carried in the breath.

The bija mantras that form the Hebrew divine Name are Yah and Huh. They resonate in the heart and solar plexus. To breathe them in and out is to repeat the divine Name in Hebrew.

Yet these are universal bijas. They are found in Sanscrit, Tibetan, and Arabic among the Islamic Sufis. This means that we find the science of mantra, and in many cases precisely the same mantras, in Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Meditation is the practice that unites world religions.

It is not by arguing theology but by praying together, meditating together, and breathing together that spiritual seekers will meet in global community.

Jai Guru Dev

(Written for my beloved friend, Vaida)

Jesus At War?

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"He shall banish the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be banished, and he shall command peace to the nations." (Zechariah 9:10)

Jesus is a pacifist. His pacifism is unequivocally and unconditionally explicit in the Gospels. On the political right today, there are many in the Church who lend easy support to the concept of preemptive war. But no war of choice can be regarded as Christian.

To justify war, the Christian Right ignores the peace teachings of Jesus while giving deceptive interpretations of other Gospel passages. We must examine these passages and reject, once and for all, any claim that a Christian could condone wars of aggression and preemption. We must be vigilant against such claims, for the Bible has often been abused to justify fascist and imperial policies: from the slaughter of the Canaanites to the Crusades, from the enslavement of black slaves to the invasion of Iraq. After all, even Hitler used Christianity as an excuse for war:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter.... In boundless love as a Christian, I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.... As a Christian I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. - Adolf Hitler, 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Vol. 1, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

I. False Arguments For War

Luke, Chapter 7

One of the deceptions used to give a Christian justification for war is based on the Gospel of Luke, chapter 7. St. Augustine was the first to use this argument, which asks the pacifist to prove the negative. In this passage, a Roman centurion begs Jesus to heal his sick slave. The disciples assure Jesus that the centurion is a good man, kind to the Jews, a supporter of the synagogue. Jesus heals the man's slave.

Does the healing of the slave indicate that Jesus condones war, simply because the slave's owner is a soldier? One could as easily ask, does it show that Jesus condones slavery?

Such an argument would be a non-sequitur. What the story actually shows is: (A) Jesus' healing power, and (B) Jesus' ministry to the Gentiles. The passage is not written in the context of any teaching about war. Yet Christian sophists claim that Jesus must have supported war, since he did not condemn the centurion for being a soldier! This argument shows how desperate they are to find some shred of evidence from the Gospel to support military violence.

Matthew 10:34-37

The next verse abused to justify violence is Matthew 10:34-37: I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. Quoted out of context, this seems to evoke a martial tone. But taken in context, it is clear that Jesus is talking about the sword of decision, not combat.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

I ask any rational reader a simple question about this passage: is Jesus speaking literally? Does he want young Christians to kill their parents if the parents refuse to convert? Clearly, the context here has nothing to do with violence or war. As he often did, Jesus uses parabolic language. This symbolic "sword" is the same found in Revelations 1:16: "Out of his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword." And in the Epistle to Hebrews 4:12, the Word of God is "sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit... a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart." This is not a weapon of battle, but the sword of discrimination. It is an ancient and universal symbol indeed. In Buddhism, this sword is the Vajra. In Hinduism, it is the Sword of Shiva.

Jesus asks for a radical choice, and choice may bring division in our life-style or relationships. Choosing his Way may even divide family members. Those who take this verse as a justification for war distort the intention of Jesus.

Matthew 21:12-13

The final passage abused by Christian sophists is Matthew 21:12-13, where Jesus cleanses the temple.

Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves. And he said unto them, 'It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.'

Where in this passage is there any physical violence against persons, any use of weapons, or any act of war? In several Gospel scenes, Jesus demonstrates his overwhelming spiritual power (exouzia). Crowds part and authorities slink away from his presence. He never needs to use physical force when he wants to manifest such power. Here in the temple, Jesus certainly overturns the tables and seats of the money-changers: we can legitimately interpret these acts as physical. But we have no justification whatsoever to assume that Jesus strikes or inflicts bodily harm on any man. He uses no weapon of war. The context of this story is Jesus' demand for pure worship, not his teaching on violence.

It is clear that these passages cannot be used to justify war, and any attempt to use them for that purpose is a deception.

II. Legitimate Arguments Against War

There are passages where Jesus discusses war, retaliation, and the use of violence. Christian conservatives gloss over these passages. Yet they are the only places in the Gospel where it is legitimate to look for Jesus' explicit teachings on the subject of war.

Matthew 5: The Sermon On The Mount

The first such passage is Matthew 5, part of the famous Sermon On The Mount. When we read this, we fear and tremble: the words are overwhelming in their purity and their challenge to all that we would justify as "human nature." We glimpse Jesus' uncompromising and absolute pacifism:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you: Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also (5:38-39).... I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. (5:44)

Jesus does not use the ordinary Greek word for love, philios. Philios signifies the love we have for kinsmen and bosom friends. It is a natural emotional connection, a biological and family bond. Jesus does not tell us to feel emotional warmth toward our enemies. His teaching isn't a bumper sticker that says, "Have you hugged your enemy today?"

Jesus uses a rarer Greek word, agape, to suggest a new order of love. Agape is not emotional self-gratification, but an act of the will: to understand, to empathize, to stand in the enemy's boots snf gaze out through the chinks of the enemy's armor. By the power of agape, what we see through the enemy's eyes is ourselves, as the enemy sees us. This is morally demanding and patient work, requiring prayer.

The injunction to "resist not evil" is more literally translated, "resist not the evil one." Here, evil must mean another person, not an abstract moral quality. For if Jesus wanted us not to resist moral evil, this would contradict all the rest of his moral injunctions. His words can only mean non-resistance in a physical sense. Certainly we are called to resist moral evil in ourselves: but we are also called to refrain from physical violence against "the evil one". The phrase, "resist not the evil one," can only mean one thing: non-violence.

Matthew 26:52: The Garden Of Gethsemane

Then came they, and laid hands on Jesus and took him. And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck a servant of the high priest's, and smote off his ear. Then said Jesus unto him, 'Put away thy sword: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.'

In the garden of Gethsemane, after the Passover meal, priestly officials arrest Jesus. This is the only other Gospel passage, after the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus explicitly addresses the issue of violence. And it is the only time a disciple of Jesus uses a weapon. Jesus immediately, decisively rebukes him for it. One could well argue that the disciple strikes, not in aggression, but in defense of the innocent. Yet Jesus rebukes him anyway!

Here we see the same uncompromising pacifism encountered in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus not only preaches his pacifism: he walks the talk all the way to the Cross, spreading his arms to embrace the world with forgiveness, the good and the evil, friends and enemies alike.

Conclusion: Preemptive War

No nation has the right to invade another as a mere insurance policy, based on the presumption that the other nation might be a threat in the future. No one knows the future, and such presumption usurps the throne of God. If the United States is to demonstrate moral leadership, then we must lead by example. But if the U.S. example of preemptive war were imitated by every nation that wished to neutralize its rivals, world chaos would ensue.

In his God-like presumption to know the future, George W. Bush has killed tens of thousands of innocent Arabs -- far more innocents than terrorists ever killed in the U.S. or Europe. Iraq neither threatened us nor participated in the 9/11 attack. The invasion of Iraq cannot possibly be justified as self-defense. As an act of imperialism, Bush's war is naked aggression. As a Christian act, it is worse than naked aggression: it is a denial of Christ.

And what about our troops? Struggling to understand their mission and hold the moral high ground, they act with virtue, nobility and courage. But they have been abused: abused by the civilian leaders of our nation, abused by gray flannel Caesars hiding behind mahogany desks, pouring the blood of the world's finest warriors into the sand as an offering to Mammon, the god of Wall Street. Those who profit from the fog of war can no more call themselves Christians than those who sprinkle doves' blood on an alter of gold.

We must make an absolute ethical distinction between the soldiers who fight this war and the civilian authorities who abuse them. This is precisely why Jesus recognizes the Roman Centurion as a good man, without condoning the policies of the Empire.

The Rapture Is Now

2012-01-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

Many people today are buzzing about the "Rapture" and the "Second Coming" of Christ. When will these events happen? 2012? Tomorrow? We need to get clear about what these symbols of the "End Time" really mean.

The "End Time" comes whenever we wake up.

"Rapture" is not an event in time and space. It is the expansion of individual mind into Christ-Mind: "For we have the mind of Christ" (1 Cor. 2:16). When this expansion of awareness happens collectively, to a sufficient threshold of the population, then a planetary transformation can occur in historical time.

"Second Coming" is not a physical re-appearance of Jesus. It is the awakening of Christ-Consciousness in humanity: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." (Col. 1:27)

If we are to solve conflicts on this planet, we must move from the literal interpretation of these mythic symbols, to an understanding of their spiritual meaning. As rational adults, are we really to suppose that a white-robed sandal-footed savior will float from the sky, while an elite corps of "saved" Christians levitate into his arms? Such infantile literalism is really an insult to the profound intent of the inspired scriptural authors, who used symbol, story, allegory to describe the expansion of consciousness.

The scriptural symbol of pure consciousness is the Air element. The great transformation of humanity will occur "in the Air." According to 1 Thessalonians 4:17, Christ will appear "in the clouds" and "we will be caught up to meet him in the air."

The term "second coming" does not appear at all in scripture. This phrase was invented by Justin Martyr two hundred years after Jesus' earthly life. The Greek word used in 1 Thessalonians is parousia, usually translated as "the coming of the Lord." In Greek, parousia literally means "fullness of being" (para - full, complete; ousia - being). Ousia is not the participle of the verb "to come" but "to be."

This "parousia" happens inside us as the flowering of our spaciousness. It can happen now, if we let it.

As for the so-called "rapture" - another term that does not appear in scripture - our bodies need not float up in the sky to meet God. The real rapture is the expansion of individual mind into "the mind of Christ": the boundless self-luminosity of pure consciousness.

Understanding the spiritual science behind these mythic symbols, we can put away childish religious disputes and participate in the flowering of Christ-Consciousness, which is precisely the same spacious compassion that Buddhists call Bodhichitta and Yogis call Chittakasha. Then we can use our religious practice to heal conflict rather than to cause it!

The decisive practice for healing conflict in the coming age will not be a political movement, an economic policy, or a physical task. Political, economic, and cultural reform will be effects, not causes, of our inward transformation. There is already abundant food on earth, if we knew how to cooperate in its supply, unfettered by greed and political corruption. Medical science already has the means to heal the world's diseases. The physical resources for planetary health and sustainability are not lacking. What is lacking is the consciousness to make the work flow. What is lacking is cooperative, non-competitive, compassionate, non-violent, creative intelligence. This creative intelligence is our true nature: it is abundant, it is the source of abundance, and it is already here, if we would but tap into it.

We simply need to practice Christ-Consciousness now, instead of waiting for a savior to fall from the sky. How then do we practice?

The decisive discovery of this age is that space is awake. The vacuum of pure space is consciousness itself, and its nature is compassion.

The decisive practice for our time is simply this: Allow attention to soften and expand, so that you embrace not only the local content of your experience, but the silent all-pervading stillness that contains it.

This practice is the exclusive property of no religion or guru, but the birthright of all humanity for this age. How can such a simple seemingly insignificant practice heal our planetary conflicts?

Every conflict arises and dissolves in space. There's a stillness around every battle. No matter how violent the conflict, the space around it is always silent, whole and undivided. That space is awake. It is full of compassion.

The solution to a conflict is never within the conflict, but in the spaciousness around it. Why identify with a conflict when you can simply be that space? No effort or esoteric knowledge is required: just a shift of attention from the conflict to the vast expanse in which conflict arises and dissolves.

To soften our attention into healing spaciousness is the rapture. The self-luminosity of that awakened space is the anointing power of Christ.

John 14:6

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I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." ~John 14:6

I Am is the ancient name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus, chapter 3, when God called from the burning bush. Moses asked God for the most personal and intimate name of the divine. God said, "I Am I Am. That is my eternal name."

When Jesus spoke of the I Am, he was not glorifying his own unique personality. He was glorifying the I Am, the divine spark, in each of us.

Your I Am is the way. Your I Am is the truth. Your I Am is the life. Enter the kingdom of God through the portal I Am at the center of your heart.

Jesus said. "I Am the light" (John 8:12). But he also said, "You are the light" (Matthew 5:14). You and Jesus each have your own I, but the I in Jesus and the I in you are luminous out-flowings of one Am.

Am is Christ Consciousness, anointing you and Jesus together. That is what the Greek word, chrism, means: anointing. But Christ does not anoint you from above. Christ wells up and gushes from your heart. Jesus said, "The water I give will become a fountain within you, bubbling up with eternal life" (John 4:14).

Christ is the wellspring of inward light from which flow both Jesus and you. The stream of Jesus became a mighty river. Will you remain a little brook?

"These things which I do, you shall do also," he said (John 14:12).

In his final discourse, Jesus prayed for all who love him, "that they may be one, Father, as we are one, I in them and you in me: may they be brought to complete unity" (John 17:22).

In first century Palestine, the Christ I AM poured through Jesus. Now, the Christ I Am pours through you: irradiating your uniqueness, expressing your incomparable beauty, personalizing divine splendor as your very own I.

Your I is not something to be rejected, but glorified as a vessel of Christ Consciousness. That is why scripture speaks not only of Christ in Jesus, but "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27).

If any transition is happening on this earth, it is simply the awakening of the knowledge of who you really are.

Storming the Kingdom with Kriya

2012-01-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent carry it away by force! (Matthew 11:12) These are the words of Jesus. The kingdom must be taken violently, by storm. What could this possibly mean?

We can understand Jesus' words in the context of the practice of Yoga, especially the practice of Sudarshan Kriya.*

Jesus taught that the kingdom of heaven is within you (Luke 17). Therefor, we know that when the violent carry it away, Jesus depicts no physical pillage, no conquest of an earthly kingdom. The verse must describe an inward passion, a movement of attention to seize a new state of consciousness.

Jesus uses the Greek verb harpazzo: to carry away by force. It means to seize, rob, even to sexually seduce. This verb also describes a mighty wind transporting objects utterly helpless to resist. The Old Testament uses the same image of whirlwind (in Hebrew, galgal) to describe how the Lord carries away prophets like Ezekiel and Elijah in a breath of divine inspiration.

In the Bible's highly charged language, a rapture seizes our soul and has its way with us. We are like chaff in the wind, like lovers seduced by the beloved. This is how we enter the kingdom of God: not by intellectual reasoning, not by repeating prayers of conventional piety, but through a wild movement, a bewildering force, a kriya.

In Sanskrit, kriya literally means creative movement. It is the root of the English word, create. When the grace of the guru stirs in us the transforming wind of kriya, the rhythm and power of this creative breath transports each cell of our body to a higher state of vibration, and carries the mind up into a silence beyond thought.

If we want to be re-created, we must be destroyed, for God is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24). The fiery breath that destroys what is old creates what is new. Meditation is knowing how to surrender to the wind. In Jesus' language, spirit, wind, and breath are exactly the same word, pneuma. When we surrender to the movement of kriya, we surrender to the divine Spirit through our breath.

In the science of Yoga, this ever destroying and creative storm of the Spirit is called Shakti. Shakti is the creative fire of the Goddess within us. Her movement spirals up our spine, lifting our soul to divine love through the transforming whirlwind of kriya.

To practice the kriya, we need courage. The word courage is from a Latin root meaning the heart. In Old French and Old English, courage meant love. True courage is not resistance but surrender. The Master's Kriya seizes our heart, overpowers our mind, burns away what binds us to the past, and refines our karmic dross until all that remains, by grace, is the radiant eternal jewel of awareness, glistening in the now.

Do not resist the wild wind of the Master's grace!
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* Sudarshan Kriya is the specific healing breath practice taught by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in the Art of Living program. LINK (http://srisriravishankar.org/)

Mystical Bride

2012-01-04T15:27:00.001-08:00

Ten thousand voices murmuring inside you, declaiming, insisting, some angry, some full of tears, all falling silent at the Christ whisper:

"Come rest in Me. I Am the mereness of your Being. I Am the Abundance that overflows when simply existing is enough. Repose in Me, for I Am your Self, your Christ, your Christ-Self. I Am more inwardly You than the one you think you are, long-patient lover, awaiting I in the bridal chamber of Am. Come, drink of my aged untasted Wine. Recline at the feast of who you are.

"The canopy I built for this wedding is the sky. All the galaxies are chandeliers, hung low to glitter in your diamond crown. Stars pour my light, filling your cup and singing, "Just as you are, just as you are!" Haven't you understood them? The light comes from inside. Now it is time to shatter your cup, and let me pour this down upon your head, anointing you as I am anointed. It is time to awaken the Christ in you.

"What part of you will not gather under the Chuppah? Your blood, your breath, your desire, your old story of being alone and apart from Me? Invite all of yourself to the wedding, the stumbling unmarried uncle of your doubt, the muttering spinster of your hesitation. Let them whirl with the best of us and call for wine!

"At this wedding, Two become One as One becomes Two. It is not confusion but divine inebriation, wildness of the best vintage, which I have saved for last!

"Therefor, one last time, shout the invitation to your shadow, lingering outside, afraid to pass through this portal into light. Plead again just once to all the parts of you that imagined themselves rejected and despised: Come! You were betrothed to this Joy before you were conceived. There is no time to wonder how worthy you are. The music has begun. The Beloved is impatient with longing. Come this instant, or don't bother to exist!"

Searching for the Magdalene

2012-01-04T15:27:00.000-08:00

(A true story of grace and transformation, originally published in the Quaker journal, 'What Canst Thou Say')

In 1972, I was a pilgrim. Not to India, but to the Medieval shrines of Europe, seeking the heart of Christian prayer. I'd spent several years exploring the wisdom of India with my guru, Maharshi Mahesh. I told him that I longed to know the mystery of Christ. I was not a Hindu.

"Be a Christian," he said. "Take this meditation into the Church."

On my pilgrimage, I visited the pilgrim town of Vezeley in central France. In the crypt beneath the church, I discovered the tomb of Mary Magdalene. I had no idea she was buried in France. For the first time in my life, I prayed through a saint. "O Mary, mother of devotion, guide me to the heart of Christ!" I wasn't even Catholic.

Much later, I learned her mythic story. After the crucifixion, Mary Magdalene boarded a ship bound for Britain with Joseph of Aramethia. On the coast of Provence, where now is the port of Marseilles, Mary disembarked while Joseph continued to Britain with the holy grail. Secluded in a cave in the hills of Provence, Mary became the first Christian mystic.

But as I wandered on, I forgot about my prayer to her. Several weeks later, in the pilgrim church of Conques, I met an old priest with whom I shared my quest. We did not discuss Mary Magdalene. We spoke of Gregorian Chant and the old traditions. I asked him if he knew of a monastery where the old way, especially the Gregorian chant, was still practiced. Mumbling about a tiny Benedictine priory in the south, he scribbled a note which said, "Bedoin, near Carpentras." I stuck it in my wallet.

A month later, bound for Italy, I got off the train in Marseilles by a sudden intuition. I took another train to Avignon, where I reached for the crumpled note in my wallet. "Bedoin, near Carpentras." Carpentras was a three-hour bus ride into Provence. I had no idea where I was going. I had truly become a Wanderer.

In Carpentras, I hitched a ride toward Bedoin, fifteen miles further: not even on the map. No bus, no train stopped there, few cars. I had to walk the last few miles. The village dozed in golden light. Poppies and lavender danced in the fields. Granite hills shimmered in waves of noon-day heat. Everyone in Bedoin was napping: not a soul about town! Was there a priory near-by? A single old man I met didn't know. I started to hike.

Covered with dust and sweat, I walked for hours past meadows baking in the drone of crickets. I came upon a run-down farm where a young British couple leapt through the long grass with butterfly nets. They told me there was no priory near-by and they said that everyone in the region was as crazy as they were. By evening, I was back in Bedoin. With desperate faith, I tried one more country lane at the far end of the village. The sun was an orange candle on the purple hills. I ambled another mile, through apricot groves and a flock of goats without a herder. Then, around a bend, I saw a dome.

It was an ancient Romanesque dome of well-fitted stones, near a farm house and cinder-block dormitory, tidy gardens, no sign at the gate. From the domed chapel came a sound as timeless as the longing in my heart: Gregorian chant.

I knelt in gathering darkness where nine young monks chanted Vespers. An oil lamp flickered from a niche in the granite alter. Carved in relief upon that stone was a woman, wild and naked, long hair covering her breasts. She held the oil lamp in her stone hand and gazed at me.

After Vespers, the monks greeted me in silence and beckoned me to supper: vegetables, cheese, lentil soup and bread without words. Then the prior, a young priest named Father Gerard returned with me to the chapel, where we could whisper despite the rule of silence. I told Pere Gerard of my quest, in stumbling French, and he invited me to stay.

"I don't even know the name of this place," I said.

"C'est La Priore de la Madeleine."

Pointing to the woman in the alter I asked, "Who is she?"

"La Madeleine." It was Mary Magdalene, and this was her priory. Only then, after weeks of wandering, did I recall my prayer at her tomb. "Her cave was in these hills," said Gerard. "This shrine was built for her in the ninth century. She was the first Christian monk. And you are just in time."

"For what?" I asked.

"Her feast."

A Catholic feast begins with Vespers at sundown. I had arrived at Magdalene Priory precisely at Vespers on July 21. The next day, July 22, was The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene.

For months I worked in the apricot groves, sang the daily Latin Hours, rose for Vigils at 3 AM. But the real duty was prayer. In that ancient dome, before the soft granite gaze of the Magdalene, I prayed for hours each day, using the meditation technique of my guru. The stillness inside me grew boundless, then vibrant, then dazzling. I tasted the light at the center of the soul, where the tiny bud of "I" blossoms and dissolves in the "Am" of God. Yet I longed for a personal connection to the Infinite.

Suddenly, doubt shattered my devotion. Can I unite with Christ through a meditation technique from India? Impossible, impure, even adulterous! I vowed to give up meditation and adopt the Jesus Prayer. I would only use the name of Jesus as my mantra. I tried several forms of Christian practice, but none united me with Christ like my guru's subtle method.

Then came my breakthrough. I realized that the conflict was not about East vs. West, but intellect vs. experience. God cannot be thought, for God is. I must surrender my intellect, and plunge into a darkness without concepts, a silence without thoughts. From this emptiness, love is born: light from darkness, Christ from Mary's womb.

Meditation deepened and softened, softened and deepened, until my longing was fulfilled. I realized that my bija mantra, the subtle Sanskrit sound heard in meditation, was really an echo of the one divine Word, the Logos "through whom all things are made" (John 1). This Word vibrates through every ancient language of prayer: Sanskrit, Hebrew, Latin, Arabic. The Logos is the resonant energy of silence. It is pure consciousness, vibrating in itself as the seed syllables of language, before condensing into matter. All matter is born of one Spirit, all language is born of one Logos, and all prayers return to one God.

Those who meditate with faith in the divine Name, in whatsoever religious tradition they are born, enter through one and the same eternal Word into the boundless silence of God.

Gazing into the silent abyss, I gazed into the face of Christ. I saw no form, for his features are dissolved in light. When two kiss, they are one: yet the beloved is nearer than the lover's own heart. They are one, yet two. I understood the Song of Songs, "For your lips are sweeter than wine, and your name is perfume poured out!" I tasted wine beyond lips, sweetness beyond naming. The person of Christ was essentialized in the sapphire radiance at the center of my soul.

"Taste and see that the Lord is good!" cries the Psalmist. O seeker, trust in the authority of your own experience. For we are led by the heart to understanding, not by understanding to the heart.

Judge Not: A Liberal Defense of the Bible

2012-01-04T15:25:00.001-08:00

There is a prevalent stereotype of Christianity, just as there is a stereotype of Islam and a stereotype of the New Age. According to this stereotype, "Christian" means "conservative, bigoted, and pro-war." But people who revel in such stereotypes often need to examine the qualities they project onto others. Stereotyping is itself a form of bigotry, and form of violence.

The truth is, many Christians are liberal, anti-war, multi-cultural, and deeply pluralistic in their acceptance of other religious paths. Their churches host gatherings for Yoga, Vipassana, Sufi dance, and Earth-centered spirituality. Their progressive vision is nourished by the Bible's call to social justice, mercy, and awe.

Taken literally of course, the Bible can be absurd and violent - just like life. But progressive Christians do not always read the scriptures literally. They read through the lens and language of symbolism, as mystics have read scripture in all religions. The Bible tells the story of consciousness itself: our separation from Source, our journey of return, and our re-union.

What makes the Bible profound is the telling of this story, not with pretty pink hearts and flowers, but with uncompromising realism and pathos about human nature. It is a story about men and women who are at once figurative yet utterly like ourselves. The Bible is not pablum, and not for the faint of heart. It can be terrifying and paradoxical, just as our journey of awakening can be terrifying and paradoxical.

The Bible is not history. Yet its language often employs historical events, personalities, and details of daily life as spiritual symbols. In many cases, these historical details are so accurate that archeologists use the Bible as a guide to their dig-sites, as in the case of the Biblical city of Ninevah, once thought to be mythical. The Bible is an utterly unique mix of history and parable, and intentionally so.

As for its literary quality, the structure of Biblical narrative is economical, ironic, and sublimely synchronized with the underlying psychic structure of our own life stories. The Bible is the mirror of the psyche, reflecting our shadow as well as our light. In the words of Yale English professor Harold Bloom, one of the world's most important literary critics, the Bible is our original textbook of human psychology. Great novelists from Shakespeare to Dickens, Melvill to Hardy, Thomas Mann, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, have drawn significantly on Biblical narrative and symbolism.

If you are one of those who cast the Bible aside with a sneer, just make sure it is not because you are afraid to look into its clear honest glass. And if you embrace the more liberal enlightened aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, Goddess worship or Native American lore, while refusing to acknowledge that each of these traditions has its brutes and bigots too, please try to avoid the hypocrisy of doing just the opposite with Biblical religion. For Bible-thumping fundamentalists are not the most typical, but undoubtedly the least typical, of Christians.

Born of the Breath

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It is not a coincidence that Jesus used exactly the same word for Spirit and Breath, pneuma. So did all great teachers. In the Hebrew Bible, the divine Spirit-Breath is ruach, in Sufism, ruh. In Yoga it is called prana, in Taoism, chi.

To be truly alive, said Jesus, we must be born of the Spirit (John 4). Born of the Spirit literally means born of the Breath. Not born again once on some particular day, but born again and again with every breath. This breath, now, is a New Creation.

We think we are 24 or 64. We think we are young or elderly. But when thinking dissolves into breathing, we are never one breath old. This breath is ageless. This breath is eternal life, even if it is your last breath.

Inhale. Something marvelous sparkles inside, cleansing, healing each cell of your body. Exhale. Ancient love pours out to renew the world. Let this very breath be your sacrament. Breathing is the subtlest act of worship.

This is not a belief, but a practice. Welcome every breath as a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Original Grace

2012-01-04T15:24:00.000-08:00

Grace is innate. It flows from within us, not from above. Grace is our very nature.

Grace is deeply misunderstood in both East and West. We have mistaken the grace of a guru or a savior for the Original Grace within us. The grace of a master is helpful, but it is only a secondary grace, a reflection of our true nature. The master's grace is like a jumper-cable that helps our engine start.

Original Grace springs up like an inner fountain. It spontaneously draws our attention inward, from the scattered mind to the silent vortex of the heart - where spirit, soul, and body are one. Original Grace can be defined as the tendency of awareness to settle: to settle down into the boundless sparkling tranquility of its essence, if we will only let it.

In the deepest meditation, we do not enter samadhi through concentration, but through Original Grace, when the mind becomes spontaneously concentrated. The most ancient meditation techniques make use of this effortless tendency to settle down. I once heard Maharshi make up this little parable on the spot.

The wave said to the ocean, "How can I be like you?" The ocean replied, "It's easy, just settle down."

For thousands of years, disciples sought inner peace through concentration and thought-control. Such strenuous techniques are like trying to replace one mirage with another. But there is a more graceful way: just see the mirage as a mirage in empty space. Not by endlessly replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts, but by effortlessly seeing the emptiness of all thoughts, we are liberated from the bondage of our own mind.

Instead of working so hard to choose one thought over another, be choicelessly aware. See the Truth that sets us free: the whole mirage of pleasant or painful thoughts is nothing but the empty space that contains it.

There is no need to work on our thoughts or engage in self-improvement. I always cringe when I hear meditation teachers talk about working with the mind. And, to be honest, don't you find that people obsessed with self-improvement become a bit narcissistic, heavy, and immersed in their own melodrama? Some who practice concentration take great pride in their hard work. But the reality is, we can let thoughts play without getting entangled in them, when we see thoughts as bubbles of the silence in which they arise. The ripples of the pond are nothing but water. "One who sees silence in action and action in silence, truly sees." (Bhagavad Gita, 4:18)

Grace is simply awareness in its settled state, before the birth of a single thought-wave (chitta-vritta). Therefor, any effort to control the mind, or to replace one thought with another, is precisely the opposite of meditation. Effort only swells the identity of the do-er, increases thought-waves, and prevents awareness from settling.

A concentrated mind is the effect of meditation, not its cause. When we taste something delicious, or behold something beautiful, we don't have to concentrate on it. We become automatically concentrated. Beauty stills our thoughts and holds our attention without control. Beauty stuns the mind into silence. That is why graceful meditation is effortless, enthralling the heart with a spark of inner beauty. In the most ancient paths, this spark takes the form of the bija mantra, given by the teacher at initiation. The bija is a sound that delights the mind and draws its chatter back into silence.

The experience of the bija is given at diksha, initiation under the auspice of a guru in a living lineage. This experience makes Grace concrete. Divine grace is condensed and concretized in the form of the bija mantra.

The mantra's power lies not in its meaning, but in its tendency to dissolve thought into Silence. The Sanskrit word mantra comes from mannas (mind) and tra (vehicle), a vehicle to carry the mind to its source. Each seeker must decide for himself or herself the value of initiation. Some claim it is unnecessary. And some of us find that it is the turning point, the pivot, of ten thousand lifetimes.

It doesn't matter what we call such inward anointing: we just know that the beauty of this meditation practice energizes our actions when we come out of meditation, saturating our world with gratitude. Yogis call the beauty of inner silence samadhi. Christian mystics call it the prayer of union. Buddhists call it nirvana, whose clear cool light snuffs out the flames of desire. Whatever we wish to call it, we must remember that it is not really an "it," but pure consciousness shining in its own infinite subjectivity, without an object.

It cannot possibly be experienced through any mental effort, because the radiance at the heart's core is already there as our prior nature, before any concept arises.

Jesus said, "Whoever drinks the water I give shall never thirst again: for the water I give you to drink shall become a fountain springing up into everlasting life." (John 4:14)

His words so simply describe the relationship between the guru and the fountain of Grace within us. When we are ready, the master comes to awaken and inspire the up-welling of our eternal beauty. The source is already there, only waiting to be tapped, as a thirst-quenching spring in the silence of the heart. What awakens within us is not the guru's Grace, but ours! That is why we say, Jai Guru Dev: All gratitude to the guru!
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Painting by Debra Sisson

A Christ Too Near To Be Worshipped

2012-01-04T15:22:00.000-08:00

He said, "Follow me." He never said, "Worship me." Christ cannot be the object of worship, only the subject.

An un-created radiance deeper in me than I, Christ is pure subjectivity itself. For awhile, I may love the human form of one who embodies the Christ, such as Jesus or Krishna or Guru. But I cannot love Christ, for Christ is that in me who loves.

Christ is too near, too intimate to be worshiped. Let the form of Christ be crucified, then resurrected as consciousness.

When seeking becomes centering, and centering becomes radiance, then the Christ within us will illuminate the earth. This is why Jesus called us not to worship in a temple or on a holy hill, but rather, "the true worshiper shall worship in Spirit and in Truth" (John 4:23).

Reverse the direction of worship. Let worship flow from inside out. Your worship is not a limited self seeking God above, but a limitless Self shining forth, pouring your healing breath upon the earth from a heart broken open by invincible beams of love.

(Art by William Blake)

The Rapture

2012-01-04T15:21:00.001-08:00

The Rapture is this breath. The Last Judgment is the day I drop my judgments. The Second Coming is a thrush's song, awakening my heart to the green earth...

I envy Christian fundamentalists who believe the rapture will occur at exactly 6 PM on May 21: or any specific date and hour. I envy them because, when the time comes and absolutely nothing happens, they will have a wondrous moment of disillusionment, of freedom from all hope, and it will be an opportunity for enlightenment!

The rapture is merely the intimation of personal transcendence projected onto the screen of world history. Many people think they need a cosmic event, bigger than life, to give them an excuse to drop their fears and worries. But those who have real faith know that the present moment, lived deeply enough, is the end of time. The rapture can be this very breath.

When the hour strikes and nothing happens, fundamentalists will become intensely aware of a deeper silence than they have ever known: the dissolution of creeds, Bible quotes and sermons. The whole cacophony of religion will dissolve in the realization that this is all there is: the blessed sacrament of the commonplace, just another miraculous ordinary Now on a lovely old planet rolling through the cobalt vastness of eternity.

The disciples asked Jesus when the end would come. He answered, "No one knows." St. Paul wrote, "Now is the appointed time." This is what the Bible actually teaches on the subject. There is nothing to calculate or convert into mystical numerology and prediction, which is just more mental chatter.

Faith means honoring Presence, not future. In a life of faith, the only prayer required is, I Am. I abandon the dead form of what was, and the glamorous mirage of what will be, resting my heart in the ever expanding, softly glowing ocean of what is.

Faith gently shifts attention from the form to the formless. Now is eternal, not because its shape and content have ultimate value, but because the sweet space of pure Being is rapturous, transcending any temporal form it might contain.

Yes, I envy my fundamentalist brothers and sisters this wonderful moment when nothing happens! Belief systems vanish into thin air, creeds evaporate into emptiness, we stand naked in the radiant hopelessness of Now. Such a moment is truly the end of time, the beginning of eternity.

Will God Ever Grow Up?

2012-01-04T15:21:00.000-08:00

Gustav Dore, 'End of the Book of Joshua'

1. Does God Command Slavery and Genocide?
If you read the book of Joshua, along with sections of Numbers and Deuteronomy, you may find it hard to worship the Biblical God. In Deuteronomy 6, Yahweh entitles the Hebrews to the spoils of conquest: buildings that other men have built, fields other men have tilled, wells other men have dug. In Deuteronomy 20, Yahweh gives rules of engagement to Joshua's army as he prepares to attack the tribes of Canaan and conquer their land. The rules of engagement are these: In the towns which the Lord gives you, you put everything that breathes to death. This is Cherem: the Hebrew concept of holy war.

"In those towns which the Lord has given you for an inheritance," according to Deuteronomy 20, you practice genocide. You must slaughter every man, woman, and child, for you must purify the land. The land is impure because other tribes have polluted it with religious practices not prescribed by your tribal God.

But in the out-lying towns, the towns you won't actually inhabit, you make the people a deal they can't refuse. They get to become your slaves. If they resist, you slaughter them...

These rules describe precisely what Joshua did.

Now I don't for one minute believe that any God worthy of worship would decree genocide and slavery. And neither do any Jews I know. But Christian fundamentalists do. They take every word of the Bible literally. So we must spend a few minutes discussing Biblical literalism.

2. The Fallacy of Biblical Literalism
Biblical literalism is, quite frankly, a hoax. Here are several reasons why.

A) Few Christian fundamentalists study Greek and Hebrew. Therefor, they do not read the Bible but a translation of the Bible. Since the original was written in Greek and Hebrew, a translation cannot possibly be the literal word of God.

B) Even if you go to the Greek and Hebrew texts, it is impossible to find the originals. We don’t even have copies of the originals, or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies. For the New Testament alone, there are over five thousand manuscripts, all distant from the originals. And the earliest Gospel was not written until decades after the crucifixion. The stories were passed down orally through a generation of mouths before the first writings, which have been lost.

Of the extant manuscripts of the New Testament, no two are alike. All the manuscripts contain more variants than there are words in the Gospels. Some are tiny strokes of scribal error: that's where we get the word scribble. Others consist of whole narratives missing, added, re-written, or re-located into different parts of the story. If God literally wrote the original, we can never be sure what God really said.

C) Even if we could be sure what God said, we would still be faced with the problem of interpreting what God meant? Were it possible to locate an original text (and how would we know? Would it be written in letters of fire?). Even then we could not be sure how to translate the text into English, for we would not necessarily understand the cultural context of the words. What those words meant then may not be what they mean now.

Do we really know what the first Christians meant by faith? (In Greek, pistes) They had no creed, no doctrine. Priestly councils created doctrines and creeds centuries later. So faith could not be recited as a creed in the primitive Church. What was faith? We don't know?

And what did the early Israelites mean by fear of God? Cringing before a wrathful parent who is about to strike down his disobedient child? Or awe and wonder in the face of sublime mystery? In ancient Israel, was fear of God a positive or a negative experience? We simply can't tell.

D) The most important argument against Biblical literalism is what we may call God's robot problem. According to the Bible itself, God gave us free will. God did not intend us to be robots. Free will is the very image and likeness of God in us. Only when we are free to choose can we choose to love and serve God. For love that is commanded is not chosen, love that is not chosen is not freely given, and love that is not freely given is not love.

But if God wants to write his Word directly onto the page without any trace of human imperfection -- whether of language, cultural prejudice, limited historical perspective or self-centered emotion -- then God needs to put the writer in a trance, move the writer's hand automatically across the page, and rob the writer of free-will. God must obliterate all human choice, memory and decision-making in his prophet, using him as a mechanical instrument. To write a book that is inerrant, infallible, literally "God's word" in every jot and tittle, God must annihilate his most cherished gift to mankind, turning his prophet into a robot.

Does God then contradict his Word to write his Word?

I don't know about you, but if I must literally believe that God commanded the Hebrew army to practice genocide, willed the slaughter of the Canaanite tribes, and blessed the institution of slavery, then I would rather spend eternity in hell with those dastardly Canaanites than spend it in heaven with an almighty fascist.

The Canaanites were over-sexed, it’s true, and they had an eye for religious statuary, but they were children of the earth, living peacefully "in a land flowing with milk and honey." They did not attack and invade the Hebrews: the Hebrews invaded and attacked them.

It may appear, then, that I reject the Bible and its God.

But I do not. I honor them. I understand the Bible as a human enterprise, and its God as the image of truth reflected in the human heart: a small, cranky heart to be sure, but a heart with potential to assimilate, synthesize, expand, and graft to its root the wisdom of a widening cosmos. The heart of man may be a tiny mud puddle, but on a clear night it can reflect ten million stars.

Revelation is never over. It grows. I fully expect that today's New Testament will be part of the future's old one. My Old Testament already includes, in addition to the Hebrew scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Tao Te Ching, not to mention Rumi's Gazals and Basho's Haiku.

3. Writing the Bible
How then do I deal with that bellicose God of Israel who smote the Jebusites, the Amonites, and most of the other Ites? One of my World Religion students said it better than I: The laws are Gods but the words are man's.

Humans wrote the Bible, humans susceptible to cultural, ethnic, national and personal prejudice. They like us could project their unconscious anger or fear upon a giant Other in the sky. They too could re-invent God in their image, or in the image of their own abusive fathers. When universal Consciousness tries to break through the narrow minds of men, that power must be filtered and tinted by humanity, like bright sun muted through a layer of smog.

After the Hebrews had conquered the Promised Land, their scribes needed to justify Hebrew genocide. We do the same today when we justify the invasion of Iraq, or the conquest of Native Americans, or our dependence for the better part of two centuries on slave labor. Our nation loves to re-imagine its history. We dream that we were motivated by a selfless desire, or driven by manifest destiny. We wanted to share the divine blessings of democracy and cleanse the land of its evil ones. We did it to our continent, and now we're doing it to the Middle East. How easily we forget the raw truth. We've slaughtered millions. And in 2003, still traumatized by the attacks of 9/11/01, fear and vengeance were our motivations.

It was no different with the tribal scribes of Israel. They invented a marvelous literary device. They back-engineered their history, expressing God's will as a grandfather-clause that sanctified all that had been done by Joshua's soldiers. Now they could claim the genocide had been divinely ordained before it happened. I do not say they were dishonest. In their tribal ethnocentrism, they felt inspired and truly believed what they wrote. We must balance our repugnance for their self-delusion with some admiration for their honesty in recounting historical detail. Once having devised that ingenious tromp-d'oeil, the Biblical authors pulled no punches in describing Israel’s brutal treatment of the Canaanites. I wish today’s media were as ruthlessly honest in describing the violence of the divinely inspired Bush administration.

4. A Book for Grownups Written By Children
The Bible is not just a vital source of historical detail re-shuffled into tribal propaganda. It is that, but more. The Hebrew scriptures give us honest portraits of men and women struggling with the dark side of faith. Abraham was willing to slit his own son’s throat as a holy sacrifice. Jacob was a liar and a cheat before he became a patriarch. King David, the royal ancestor of Jesus, lusted after Bathsheeba. As she was already married, David ordered her husband to serve on the front line of battle where he would surely be killed. Then David added Bathsheba to his harem.

Moses projected his darkest adolescent fears onto God, waking up in a night-sweat of guilt, convinced that the almighty Father wanted to kill him. Moses could only assuage the Lord's wrath by offering his bloody foreskin. He asked his wife for a knife and made the offering right on the spot. The Biblical author never tells us whether Moses was dealing with God or his own projections. The story seems to shout: “You figure it out!” But pious ministers never preach on this one.

If such stories, full of sexual anxiety and violent fears, were set to rap or hip-hop, the Bible would be popular with the most alienated of youth. The Bible speaks to the heart of our loneliness on the spiritual journey. The Book of Exodus even has a commandment saying, "Care for the homeless wanderer among you, for you too were once homeless wanderers in the land of Egypt: you have the heart of an alien." Don't we? The Bible is raw and disturbing and wounded, like a heart trying to beat itself out of a stone. What other scripture is so brutally honest in depicting the defective humanity of its chosen people?

But beyond these useful insights into human frailty, the Bible reveals even more. Little by little, generation by generation, something remarkable, something both divine and human, emerges from these pages: the story of how we grow in God-Consciousness.

In our wounded vision, we may see this growth as a metamorphosis of God and not of our own eye. The tribal deity of Joshua seems to grow up into the sublime universal justice of the Prophet Isaiah. The justice of Isaiah grows up to be the Comforter, the Spirit of Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus finally calls us not servants but friends, declaring: “A new commandment I give you, to love one another as I have loved you." Even the Law seems to grow up!

As the people of the Book opened their hearts wider and wider through the centuries, a funny thing happened on the way to God-Consciousness. The deity who spoke through their words seemed to mature. Mark Twain observed, "When I was 16 my father wasn't too smart. By the time I was 21, I was amazed how much he had grown."

I am only speaking with Twainish irony when I say that God grows up. Of course God doesn't grow: we do. From tribal genocide to the peaceable kingdom, from war to non-violence, from vengeance to justice, from punishment to forgiveness, our vision widens. And God is only bound by the limits of our moral imagination. For God is that unlimited consciousness into whom we perpetually expand, including more and more of our environment and each other.

But the illusion that God is the one who changes caused real problems for the early Church. Many believers, like the followers of Marcion, would not include the Jewish scriptures in their Bible. They could not believe that the loving God of Jesus was the same God who seemed to will slavery and genocide. Of course it was the same God. It was humans who had changed.

5. The Bible As Mirror
The God we encounter in scripture is a God crucified on the cross of our own mind. Infinite mercy agrees to take the finite shape of our doubt, our prejudice, our refusal to grow. Spirit takes form until form bursts open into Spirit.

The Bible is a mirror of this process. In the mirror of scripture we see the finite and the infinite, our bondage and the boundless Spirit, superimposed. Man and God meet in one Word: not just in the writing of it, but in the image it forms in our minds. We are free to embrace that image according to the circumference of our consciousness. As the mirror of our vision clears, our interpretation of the scripture changes. We interpret the Word according to the likeness we behold, darkly, in that glass. We can see ourselves as vast as Spirit, or we can make the Spirit seem as childish as our own rebellion against who we truly are.

What will people think when they look back at the God of Al Quaida? The God of Pat Robertson and Rev. James Hegge? The God of homophobia and religious hate? Or my God? Or yours? Many will say, "That wasn't God," just as we say it of Joshua’s tribal deity.

But of course, it is God. God is here in the heart of the terrorist, in the heart of the fundamentalist, in the heart of the bigot, just trying to do what God always does: break through our darkness and fill us with Light.

When we have fully grown into the likeness of God, all the laws of Torah and the teachings of the Gospel will resolve into a great simplicity, a blurred image coming into focus. Then we'll see that there never was more than the one commandment: "Love one another, as I have loved you."

How could we possibly grasp such love except through one who loves us? In human form, Spirit hugged the world, even it's enemies. Spirit spread its arms to embrace all tribes, all religions, the rich and the poor, the oppressor and the oppressed. With it's dying and eternal breath, Spirit spoke, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Spirit spread its arms upon the cross in an act of forgiveness so sublime that it still may shock the world into compassion.

So we keep reading the same story of human failure and divine hope, over and over. The story reveals more wisdom each time we read it. But the story isn't growing. We are.

Good Friday

2012-01-04T15:20:00.000-08:00

On Good Friday, a man with ashes on his head goes into a tavern. The tavern keeper says, 'If you were a Christian, you would be in Church today.'

The man says, 'If you were a friend of Jesus, you would know that this is a celebration.'

'What will you have?' asks the bartender.

'Thirst.'

'No one asks for thirst.'

'Lover's do.'

'Shhh! You want to put me out of business? Now drink some wine.'

The man starts weeping, 'This kind of thirst brings tears, and these kind of tears are wine.' Then he staggers out of the tavern, leaving all his gold coins on the bar.

'Wait!' the bartender shouts, following him out the door. 'You don't owe me anything!' But the man has disappeared, and the sky has turned scarlet, like a rose of incomprehensible sorrow and sweetness.

Prayer of the Heart

2012-01-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

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 matrix of our consciousness. 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 in the heart, in that beating organ at the center. Prayer is a sacrament: spiritual presence apprehended through a physical sign. 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. Entering that infinitesimal door, you discover yourself in the infinite expanse of God. This what Jesus meant when he said, "I am the door." The I Am at the center of your Heart is the portal to God-Consciousness.

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 worry much less 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 the 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.

Simply to breathe is the purest form of prayer. But 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 the Almighty. 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. 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 as eternal presence. 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. We carry past and future in our heads, but our hearts always beat now. Our hearts are always in the Kingdom.

Failure to acknowledge presence is the seed of suffering. Regrets of the past and anxieties of the future are actually physiological stresses carried in the neurons of our brain. Time is a neurological phenomena, a chemical-electric activity in the cortex. Time is anxiety, and 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, become aware of these thoughts as minute physical impulses. The moment I become aware, "Ah, this passing thought is just a chemical activity in my brain," the thought loses its binding power. I can observe the sensation that underlies the thought, without converting it into a mental picture. Then, penetrating that sensation without resistance, I can rest in the silence that is always here, behind every thought. This silence is the pure awareness that observes thoughts, but is never a thought itself. Pure awareness is the still space where thoughts arise and dissolve. This still space is the real me. I am the watcher. Thus Jesus taught, "Watch and pray." The watcher, not the thinker, finds God.

The silence that watches thoughts come and go is always in the present. Silence is the end of time.

Let each breath be an anchor that moors you to the silence 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". This syllable is practiced in Tibetan, Yogic, Sufi and Hebrew mystical prayer. 'Hu' is one of the names of God in the Hebrew scriptures.

II. Practice
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. There is no major religious tradition in the world that does not contain this practice.

• 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 tension through the exhalation, let go of grasping thoughts in the mind. What unconscious holding are you doing in the region of the solar plexus? Breathe out this tension. Along with it, drop the mind! Breathing out tension of your body, you can breathe out the tension of time past.

• 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 sensations come, without analyzing or labeling the sensation "good" or "bad," "pain" or "pleasure." You may have denied your heart for a long time. Attention here can release strange feelings: heat, cold, fluttering, anger, fear, sadness. These words are just labels. Feel the sensations as energy without words. After regular practice, eventually you will experience a causeless glow of happiness in the heart.

Don't let this quiet joy confuse you, asking, "What right have I to be joyful?" The innate joy of the heart has no cause. In Sanskrit it is called anahatta, meaning unstruck causeless sound. The heart is called the anahatta chakra. The gracious gift of undeserved happiness is your birthright. You don't have to accomplish anything in order to deserve a song in your heart! As Jnaneshwar sang:

"The moment the energy of Spirit (kundalini shakti) enters the heart region, the self-begotten divine unstruck music begins to play."

• Now you are simply breathing in the heart. At the end of your exhalation, notice the stillness, the silent emptiness, 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 here already, even before God says, Let there be light.

• After spending some time observing the exhalation and resting in silence, 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. Life is a gift.

• 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: the gift of God and the soul's response. Your breath is Holy Communion on the heart's alter.

The Holy Breath is the Holy Spirit, consecrating and trans-substantiating your body into the Host of God. Adam was created out of dust (adamah) by the breath of God (ruach Elohim) to become a living soul (nephesh). Nephesh also means breath in Hebrew, an individual breath descended from the divine breath of the Spirit. So in the prayer of the heart, you become the new Adam: humanity reborn with every breath.

Of course, this is just the description in Western and Biblical terms. Exactly the same experience is described in the sacred literature of the Sufi mystics, the Buddhist masters, and the devotional saints of India. The Upanishads teach:

"The breath goes out with aham (I am) and comes in with Sah (God). Within everyone this natural meditation of ham-sah is happening."

Eastern Orthodox icon of the heart.

III. The Divine Name
When I find myself gazing into the radiance of my Heart, which is the radiance of every Heart, I have become a silent Mary brooding over the manger. A strange and wonderful sensation is born in my core, a sensation both physical and spiritual. It is what we have been seeking. All other desires are but shadows of this yearning for the birth of Christ-Consciousness within. As Augustine wrote, "Our hearts are ever restless till they find their rest in Thee."

Empty of thought, silently watching, untainted by time, my own pure awareness is the Virgin's Womb. So the early Christian Gnostic,Valentinus, said that the true Virgin Mother is "mystical eternal silence within."

Christ is born in the womb of awareness as an Inward Light. The Spirit who begets this offspring of God is the Breath. The Heart is the manger, for there is no room in the busy inn of the mind.

It sometimes happens that, even when we plunge into the ocean of silence, the 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. Please remember that this word is the effect, not the cause, of prayer. The word is not a technique but an effulgence. Word is the gift of silence.

In the East, the prayer-word is called a mantra, which means vehicle for the mind. We get both the English word mind and the Greek suffix -tron (as in electron) from the Sanskrit. Thus man-tra: a carrier or vehicle for the mind. In Biblical traditions, the mantra that carries the mind into the heart is the Divine Name. There is a vast tradition in Kabbalah about the practice of the divine name in Hebrew meditation. There is also a vast tradition in the Philocalia concerning the use of the name of Jesus in Orthodox Christian meditation. LINK

A true experience of mantra is neither repetition nor concentration. These are misconceptions that commonly ruin the innocence of prayer before it even begins! There is no instruction to mechanically repeat the mantra, or to force the mind into focusing. The mantra need not be mechanically synchronized with the breath either. A true prayer-word is felt, not spoken: it is a vibration of silence. As a bird, soaring in a current of wind, only beats its wings with an occasional pulse to sustain its effortless air-born flight, so we invoke the mantra ever so softly. This image is from St. Theresa of Avila.

Breathing out or breathing in, gently and without effort hear the Name. Let the Name arise on the breath of silence as foam arises on the crest of a wave. Touch the Name with your awareness as gently as a feather touching a bubble.

Praying the divine Name with the breath folds the mind into the heart, like sugar stirred into cream. As the mantra dissolves into the breath, its subtle but powerful vibration infuses every cell of the body, thrilling each electron. 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." (John 1) So the Indian Mandukya Upanishad declares, "The syllable Om is the eternal Godhead, and is the universe. Whatever was, whatever is, whatever shall be, is Om." When the mantra vibrates in the Heart, we are attuning our individuality to the universal source of creation.

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 helps your mind merge into God. After all, the original Aramaic meaning of messiah is God's out-breathing. God's anointing happens to you through the grace of the divine Name.

If you have experienced the blessing of initiation by a true spiritual master, then practice the mantra your Guru gave you in this effortless graceful way.

Prayer is not your work, but God's work inside you. When divine breath centers to a single fiery seed of love in your heart, silence vibrates with the thunder of God's Name. The Word incarnates in your body. Though you are not aware of its true amplitude, theWord 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. Every particle of your body is inter-woven in one quantum field with each child in Darfur, every mother in Haiti. This principle is known as Bell's Theorum in physics, and has been verified experimentally. In the words of founding quantum physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, "When the electron vibrates, the whole universe shakes." You are truly part of the "universal body of Christ." Every breath you breathe through the Heart is a breath for the world.

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, fast food, nerve-pounding music, instant sex, even violence. The busy-ness of work is also a way to stuff our inner void. So is shopping! Strolling through the mall, we buy not out of necessity, but despair. Our national economy of consumerism thrives on spiritual emptiness.

Ironically, the solution is right where the problem is: the empty space in the heart. Nowhere but here will we find the antidote to our angst and the dryness of our workdays. If we would only take a little time each morning and evening to enter the Heart through prayer, it might be "the little leaven that raises the whole loaf." Renew your world by renewing your Heart!

This prayer is not a flight from darkness: it embraces darkness. Not a flight from emptiness: it embraces emptiness. Prayer of the Heart accepts our inner emptiness as sacred ground. When we embrace emptiness, we become the vast space of compassion. When we embrace darkness, we hear the silence say, "Let there be light!"

Jai Guru Dev

Kinosis

2012-01-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

"One who clings to his life will lose it; one who loses his life will find it." (Luke 17:33)

I cannot surrender to my self. I can only surrender to the Other.

Some time just before dawn, the wild plum blossomed. A green bud on a tip of forsythia. Sudden frog song from a still green pond, reminding me of my old friend, Basho. Through any ordinary sacrament of perception, dissolving into its moment, I may surrender, encountering the One who is ever more than I.

In chapter two of the Epistle to the Philippians, there is a hymn which may be the most ancient text embedded in the New Testament. It says that Christ emptied himself. "He did not cling to the status of being God, but emptied himself, and became a servant." The Greek word is kinosis, self-emptying.

In the Sufi tradition this is fanaa, self-annihilation; in Buddhist teachings, anatta, no self; in Yogic experience, nirbija samadhi, awareness without any seed of thought or I-concept.

To realize my self is no great wonder, even when I spell it with a capital S. But to lose my self there, in the vast Presence of the Other, even as the Other flowers here, in the center of my heart, is a wonder indeed, and the mystery of mysteries.

After sublime loss, if some remnant of a me exists, I exist only moment by moment by the grace of the Other, a flicker in God's fire, a wave that rises and falls by the whim of the divine sea, a breath breathed by the Beloved.

Even though God becomes my life, my core, my very breath, God is never I. Even though God is deeper inside me than me, God is ever Other. This is why, in the moment of innocence, one prays O Lord and not O Me.

Your Christhood

2012-01-04T15:15:00.000-08:00

Don't make this complicated. A vast space encircles all your problems. A stillness enfolds every battle. In the words of Hildegarde, "God hugs you."

You are not the problems, worried thoughts, or battles swirling in the mind, like clouds in the vast sky. You are the sky itself. You are all-enfolding space, self-effulgent, ever-sparkling, unspeakably blissful. The space of God's love seems far away when your thoughts drift into the past or future, because past and future are just your thoughts.

Your Christhood is now. The Divine is nearer than your next breath. You are anointed with eternity, wherever you go. It glistens like dew on your crown, and shines from your eyes, healing all who meet your gaze. Whatever else happens is a footnote, a mirage, appearing and disappearing in the blue expanse of pure awareness.

Christ's Teaching on the Breath

2012-01-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

"The wind blows where it pleases. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is for everyone who is born of the spirit." (John 3:8)

Let us examine the details of this verse, for it contains Jesus' teaching on breath meditation.

Biblical Greek employs the same word for wind, breath and Spirit. More than once, Jesus makes a wise pun on this word, pneuma.

The wind blows where it pleases. Your breath moves by its own mystery, not by your will. To notice that a breath is given, not taken, turns breathing into a sacrament of Grace.

You hear its sound. Listening within, you sense a whispering sound in your breath, the sound that Elijah the Prophet called "a still small voice of silence": in Hebrew, qol daqah d'mamah. This vibration is the very hum of the cosmos arising out of the void. In Jewish mysticism, the sound of the breath is signified by the most holy name of God, so sacred and interior it cannot be pronounced aloud.

The first syllable of this Name is the inhalation, the second syllable the exhalation. These mantric syllables, Ya and Hum, are found not only in the Hebrew divine name but in Islamic Sufism, Tibetan chant, and Yogic bija-mantras of the heart. Practicing "the prayer of the heart," early Christian mystics conjoined the name of Jesus with the breath, just as the yogi conjoins the mantra with the breath, guiding attention into the heart. The classic manual of Christian prayer, the Philocalia, teaches that we may "enter the heart by means of breathing. Therefor, Let Jesus be your breath." (Hesychius of Jerusalem, 5th C.)

The subtle sound vibrating in the breath is the very Word of creation. En archai ein ho Logos: "In the beginning was the Word," says the Gospel of John. This creative sound is called shabda in Sanskrit. Adau bhagavan shabda rasahih: "In the beginning, the Lord manifested as a current of sound" (Vedic text). The gentle sound of the Spirit in your own breath calls you like a tuning fork to be in harmony with creation's source.

You do not know where it comes from or where it is going. Inhalation arises, but from where? Exhalation returns, but to where? Who is breathing you? Creation's source is mysterious and unfathomable. You and I cannot know it, but we can breathe its power.

So it is for everyone who is born of the Spirit-Breath. Breathe out into boundless space. Merge in the Silence before the next breath arises. This is the Silence in the beginning, where the world is born.

Breathe and be created anew from the source. The breath of the Creator is your very inhalation, this moment. Creation is always new, always now. Christ in you is born, and never one moment old!

When The World Shakes

2012-01-04T15:13:00.000-08:00

"The things that can be shaken - meaning, created things - will be removed, so that what cannot be shaken will remain." (Hebrews 12:27)

Our external world shakes with disaster to make us serious about finding what is immovable within. When the world trembles to the point that we have nothing to stand on, no possessions left, and even the body may pass away, will we be capable of resting in the heart, where there stillness, radiance and unshakable beauty? All spiritual practice is but a rehearsal for that moment.

As Jesus taught, When you see the abomination of desolation... stand in the holy place. (Mat 24:15; King James translation) The abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, refers to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus' listeners knew this. So his statement would drive them deeper within to inquire, "How can we stand in the holy place if the holy place is destroyed?"

Jesus clearly means that our safety and salvation lies not in any external church or ashram or institution, nor in a bomb shelter or a survivalist training camp for well-armed Christian patriots. When the world shakes and great changes are upon us, our only rest is in the heart, the stillness at the center of the soul. There, whether the body survives or not, we will step through a portal of pure consciousness into the realm of divine light. For the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)

I speak not in symbols. I speak of a coming historical event.

Live In the Beginning

2012-01-04T15:12:00.000-08:00

I get to choose whether to live at the end of the world or at the beginning of the world, because the end and the beginning occur simultaneously each moment.

If I choose to see earth's energy as a field of destruction, I am a particle with a very short half-life. If I choose to see earth's energy as a field of creation, I am a wave in the ocean of eternity.

Faith dwells constantly "in the beginning," when out of a formless void God says, "Let there be light." Faith means participating in creation as a wave of light rather than a separate particle.

We do not fear the future, we fear the past. All fear arises from images of memory, and we project these particles of the past to make them concrete, as the future. The only prophecy we need to take seriously is the projection of our own fears.

To live by faith is to become a wave of Presence, and drop the particles of memory.

Drop the mind of the past, and what remains is joyful emptiness, full of expectation, overflowing with waves of possibility.
Out of the living void springs a New Creation.

תשובה

2012-01-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

T'Shuv: Return!

Return to what? A nation? A temple? A book? A creed? A name? A place in the desert? A place in the heart? A listening? An embrace?

T'Shuv is the Biblical prophets' favorite word. They ceaselessly called to Israel, Return! Teshuvah, returning, became the word for repentance in Judaism. It was translated to metanoia in New Testament Greek, which literally means beyond thinking, beyond intellect (meta - nous).

My interpretation is that, in order to return to awareness of God, we must transcend thought. We must rest in a naked humbled presence simpler than knowledge.

But what do I know?

I Found Noah's Ark!

2012-01-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

'Noah's Ark Discovered On Turkish Mountain' (ABC News: Link)

I found Noah's Ark in my garden yesterday, in the hollow of a dahlia bulb, containing in its pollinated vacuum, the unlit wick-like essences of every kind of creature in the cosmos, black threads bundled into the infinitesimal egg, Hiranyagharba, brilliant darkness condensed. But upon observation, the Ark dissolved into my own consciousness, where it had actually been stored since the previous creation.

Countless billions of infinitesimal golden Arks are dancing in each sunbeam. But we won't notice them if we are too busy reading the Bible as literal history. When we take scripture literally, we start looking for proof on cold distant mountain tops, when the proof is all around us, and inside us. We get lost in territorial disputes about who owns the Holy Land, when the holy land is right under our feet. Our consciousness gets high-jacked by the past, by the old stories of tribal religion, which only lead to rivalry and violence.

As a literal text, the Bible can be dangerous. As a symbolic text, the Bible is sublime wisdom, expressed in bold mythic archetypes that are the very forms of our collective conscience. The Bible's eternal symbols are far more true than momentary historical facts.

If you take the Bible literally, you will miss the Word that sings inside you. Don't look for Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. Even if you find an old boat there, so what? All you will hold is a handful of icy fossils. Look for the Ark in the cavern of your heart.

(Picture by 19th C. Pennsylvania Quaker artist Edward Hicks)

The Simple Truth Is Christ Within

2012-01-04T15:07:00.000-08:00

Jesus said, 'I am the light of the world.' Yet he also said, 'You are the light of the world' (Mat 5:14).

Is light two?

Find the luminous core of your own humanity, and you will bathe in the light of Christ. Find the hollow core of your own heart, and you will hear the Word of God, resonating in the vast silence of your Being.

Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." After so many centuries of Christian exclusiveness, isn't it time we got clear about what Jesus meant when he said, "I am the way"?

Was he talking about a beard, a robe, a pair of sandals walking down the dusty streets of 1st Century Palestine? Or was he talking about the radiance of Christ-Consciousness shining in every human heart?

The I am of Jesus cannot refer to a historical personality, for he himself proclaimed, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). Clearly, I am transcends time and form. I am not a Galilean rabbi. I am an inward light, sparkling in you. And the light I am is the light that creates the world.! St. Paul states this plainly: "The very God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts" (2 Cor. 4:6). Paul called this light, "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Eph. 3:17).

Who is the way and the truth and the life? You are the way and the truth and the life when you know that I am. None of us comes to Father-Mother God except through this door, I am, at the center of the soul.

You need not look above or beyond your own core for divinity. When you gaze into your core, you will gaze into the light of every soul. Then and then only will you love your neighbor as yourself, for you will know that your neighbor is yourself. And even your enemy you will love: for the same light that shines in the face of Christ, and in the depth of your soul, shines in the heart of your enemy.

This is not a belief. It is an experience.

Must you wait until you die to meet God? Or is Now the only time to enter Eternal Life? "The kingdom of heaven is within you" (Luke 17:21).

This is the self-evident, self-confirmed, self-luminous Gospel of Jesus, the truth that sets you free. It is not a mystery. It is very simple. The mystery is how it ever got so complicated.

'O Trinitas!'

2012-01-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

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!

Ode to Bullshit

2012-01-02T13:21:00.000-08:00

Glory be to bullshit, that from which blossoms grow, that to which all food returns. I sing the hymn of universal Bullshit.

1% of a seed is the flower, 99% is manure. 1% of a flower is the seed, 99% is manure. And so it goes, all the way up to the galaxies, the green pastures of heaven. I only know this: there's a pretty big Bull up there.

Why are you always right and I'm always wrong? Why am I always right and you're always wrong? Both of us wallow in bullshit.

The orchids and poppies of religious dogma spring from enormous steaming piles of bullshit. The political ideology of the Right is bullshit. The political ideology of the Left is bullshit. The melodrama of the PHD is sparkling bullshit. The latest scientific theory is the flowering of bullshit. The neuro-meta-bio-physics of the most recent article I have read: pure bullshit.

No one has ever seen a theory. Yet we each cling to the theory that appeals most to our insatiable appetite for the self-deluding fragrance of bullshit.

No one has ever seen a quark or an eleven-dimensional 'string.' Quantum physics is a charmed lily growing in bullshit.

No one knows what distant stars and galaxies are, or if they even exist, because all we ever see is a smudge of light millions of years in the past. Who knows but that the stars are dancing archers, scorpions, rams and bulls, each constellation dumping its luminous offal onto the earth?

Astronomy is bullshit. Astrology is bullshit. The night sky is deep bullshit. Rejoice. Wallow.

If you swallowed a pill of bullshit, it would cure you 50% of the time. Ayur Veda, Acupuncture, Chiropractic, Aromatherapy and Crystal Healing: all based solidly on theories of bullshit.

The pharmaceutical industry thrives on the laboratory science of bullshit. When I listen to TV ads for prescription drugs, I can't tell whether they're trying to cure me or kill me.

And don't forget Yoga, O blessed numberless schools of bullshit! 'Hot' bullshit, 'constant flow' bullshit, 'integral' bullshit, 'kundalini' bullshit: all sleek artfully tanned tank-topped bodies covered with the balm of bullshit!

The thousand-petalled lotus in the brain grows in a skull full of bullshit. Matter is bullshit, Spirit is the odor of bullshit.

Rejoice when you finally comprehend that there is nothing to seek because Truth is bullshit, and bullshit shall set you free.

What if Creationists sat down in a pile of bullshit with Evolutionary Biologists? The Creationists might declare, 'Our attempt to understand the laws of science through the first chapter of Genesis is total bullshit.' The Biologists might then confess, 'The Big Bang, Thermodynamics, Darwin's theory, it's all bullshit: we really have no idea where the universe came from.' Wouldn't they all be more awake?

What if Israelis sat down in a pile of bullshit with Palestinians? The Israelis might admit, 'Those old stories about burning bushes, parting seas, the promised land: they're wonderful stories if you're a Jew, but they're all bullshit if you're a Canaanite.' Then the Palestinians could fess up, 'Those theories about Jews running the world's banks and Zionist American plots to take over the world: they sound fine if you're a Palestinian, but they're all bullshit.' Wouldn't they all breathe easier?

And what about those piles of corporate excrement on Wall Street? The only thing that trickles down from the rich to the poor is bullshit.

There are two kinds of people: the enlightened and the ignorant. The ignorant think there is a precious jewel buried in the bullshit. The enlightened are free because they know it's all bullshit.

Non-dualism, fundamentalism, catholicism, protestantism, atheism, buddhism, darwinism and spelling self with a capital 'S': all bullshit!

Imitating your Indian guru by nodding your head from side to side: Bullshit!

Taking Jesus to be your imaginary friend, taking Krishna to be your imaginary friend, or imagining that you have no imaginary friend: all bullshit! Just do what you love!

Join a mega-church led by a bishop in diamond rings who drives a Cadillac and preaches damnation to gay people while seducing teen age boys, or live without any spiritual community at all: either way, it's bullshit. Just do what you love!

Accepting that the mind is full of bullshit is the deepest meditation. Only then can you laugh, flush, and be empty. Just do what you love!

This is the only truth, and even This is bullshit.

Relax. Wallow. There's a pretty big Bull up there.

The World Is Not Such a Violent Place

2011-12-30T10:13:00.000-08:00

The world is not such a violent place. It is really quite lovely. And it's not on the verge of extinction.

Research indicates that "a smarter, more educated world is becoming more peaceful in statistically significant ways." In one of several new books about the decline of violence in our world, Harvard scholar Steven Pinker writes, "The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species." ('The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined').

According to Pinker and other researchers:

* The number of people killed in battle – calculated per 100,000 population – has dropped by 1,000-fold over the centuries as civilizations evolved. Before there were organized countries, battles killed on average more than 500 out of every 100,000 people. In 19th century France, it was 70. In the 20th century with two world wars and a few genocides, it was 60. Now battlefield deaths are down to three-tenths of a person per 100,000.

* The rate of genocide deaths per world population was 1,400 times higher in 1942 than in 2008.

* There were fewer than 20 democracies in 1946. Now there are close to 100. Meanwhile, the number of authoritarian countries has dropped from a high of almost 90 in 1976 to about 25 now.

So why do so many of us feel emotionally jolted, with a sense that the world is on the brink of chaos? It's partially do to the media, of course. Given a thousand stories about peace-making and one about violence, the media repeat the violent image 24-7 and ignore the other stories.

But the media is just imitating an age-old trick of human thinking. We project the shadows of our own mind on the world outside, and see what we want to see.

People in the anti-war movement are vested in seeing a world at war: it gives them an identity. Religious fundamentalists are vested in seeing a world of evil: it gives them a sense of righteousness. Marxist ideologues want to see rich people exploit the poor. It makes them uncomfortable to meet wealthy men and women who are generous and kind. In the same way, laissez-faire capitalists who read Ayn Rand look for poor people who are lazy and deceitful, disregarding any evidence to the contrary.

We perceive the world, not as it actually is, but according to the predilections of our ideology; and we look for conflicts that correspond most readily to our own conflicted thoughts. Most of today's warfare is not in the material world but inside us, on the plane of emotional energy and mental imagery. It is astral warfare, not physical.

That is why humanity's problems cannot be solved merely by political or economic activism: for they are not essentially political-economic problems. They are spiritual problems, solved by the inner activism of mindful and heartful practice. If we do not accompany our politics, our protests, and our Occupy movements with inner activism, we'll just kick the same can round and round.

If you think the world is such a violent place, take a walk down your street. Walk all day through the town and countryside. You'll be hard-pressed to experience a single act of violence.

Now go to the most troubled nation on earth. Even there, the vast majority of people live perfectly non-violent lives. Kids are playing in empty lots. Women are walking down the street together. Men are sitting in village squares, smoking, laughing, sipping tea. Folks are working at their ancient daily tasks. Many of the poor are quite happy. Many of the wealthy are quite miserable. 99% of the time, in 99% of the places, the earth is not violent: it is quite peaceful, and quite ordinary.

In those few places where violence does break out, the press sets up its cameras. By the evening news, they've convinced us that the whole world is on the verge of Armageddon.

A Chicano friend of mine recently told me what a fun place Mexico City is. "I thought it was very dangerous," said I,"with all those drug cartels and murders." He looked at me with pathos, knowing that, as an "educated" U.S. citizen, I am misinformed by a ceaseless barrage of skewed information guaranteed to inflame my prejudices and confirm my suspicions.

I traveled up and own the coast of West Africa as a Merchant Marine seaman, visiting seven different countries. They are nations which the American media portray as violent and dangerous. I certainly experienced a constant buzz of potential violence from American seamen aboard the ship, who were often in advanced stages of alcoholism. But when I went ashore, I walked through cities and villages, nourished from the well of hospitality that is the heart of African people. Fed with friendship and generosity, taken into huts at night by the poorest of village people, I never felt more safe.

TED Talk by Steven Pinker

Freedom is Non-Resistance

2011-12-29T01:33:00.000-08:00

Do you want to know my secret? I don't mind what happens.
~J. Krishnamurti

The gist of ignorance is believing that we have some control over what befalls us. The future is not an option, not a choice. I have no idea what will happen, and neither do you. Our only freedom is to be, or not to be, in the present moment.

Suffering is resistance to change. ~Maharshi Mahesh Yogi

Of course, I can't control the present either, because it's already happening. Freedom does not lie in choosing what happens, but in choosing how to receive it. I can embrace what is with spacious love, or I can resist.

Do not resist. ~Jesus, Sermon on the Mount

Our culture claims to be Christian. Yet the One we call savior said, Do not resist... the meek shall inherit the earth. Yet ours is a culture of resistance. Resistance is chic. Resistance is politically correct. Our schools teach the intellect to protest, to object, to argue. They do not teach our hearts how to surrender to Presence. Our government is all about resisting the opposition. Our religion consists in resisting the world, the flesh, and the devil. Our medicine constantly battles drug-resistant bacteria. Our economic system is the survival of the fittest, where every business competes with every other. This regards non-resisters as cowards and weaklings. Yet resistance only deepens our suffering.

Is it possible for us to evolve from a culture of resistance to a culture of non-resistance? To open up, bend our stiff joints, expand our embrace, and become empty?

Emptiness laughs and nods in agreement. ~Zenrin Kushu

Hope lies not in controlling the future, but in embracing the present. Let the fierce onslaught of now, containing the whole freight train of the past, flow right through you. Eternity doesn't resist time, any more than the sky resists clouds. What arises and dissolves is the world, not you.