From Dream Time

"Most happenings exist where a word has never intruded." (Ranier Marie Rilke)

Didn't we all just dream this?
isn't it how we came here?

I awoke, drawn beyond midnight
by the Self-Luminous.

Walked naked into mist that clothed me
with the pelt of every deer.

The ground was covered with new nipples
quivering virescent out of loam.

Down from stars floated mouths
winged with lips making thirsty sounds.

I saw through everything into the milk
that yearns up cedar roots toward sky.

Saw You, gleaming with inward cream, inebriated.
We awoke into each other's dream, again and again,

more real with each relinquishing
of breath. That astonishment

Was this: nowhere
was there a Word, a Name for anything!

Share What Matters

If you convince me to believe what you believe, it won't do either of us any good. Your opinions interest me even less than my own. Your concerns don't concern me: I already have enough to carry. But if you can share some hint of your Wonder, some moment of your Joy, some whisper of your Love, my heart will expand, my awareness awaken, my whole world change in an instant.

Silence Is Already Here

Why do we try to silence the mind? The kingdom of divine silence is already here. Silence has nothing to do with the mind's ceaseless thinking.

To be silent is not the mind's nature, any more than it is the nature of a songbird not to sing.

Silence is happening quite independently of thoughts. Silence is happening all around and between thoughts. Boundless blue sky contains a gray cloud: so silent awareness contains the mind, with all its chattering.

One experiences profound inward silence this very instant when awareness rests in its own luminous clarity, prior to thought. In other words, when one does nothing at all. Awareness can watch thoughts arise and vanish without being them.

There is no greater discovery than this: "I am not my thoughts! I am awareness! I am free!" Free to let thoughts play as they please. Free to let time past and time future come and go without worry, for time is nothing but thought. As waves of water don't disturb the sea, so thoughts of past and future can't disturb the eternal Presence in which they arise and subside.

Christianity is hunkered down in the notion of history, vested in stories of the past and prophecies of the future. What happened 2000 years ago, what will happen at the last judgment, and when Jesus might return, are bulwarks of Christian thinking. And there is all that anxious speculation about what will happen when I die, and whether my soul will get into heaven.

But what did Jesus actually teach about the nature of thinking, which is the nature of time?

"Take no thought," he said again and again. "Take no thought for your life... Which of you by taking thought can add one inch to your stature? ...Why take thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin... Therefore take no thought, saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or how shall we be clothed?" (Matthew 6). The whole force of Jesus' teaching awakens us from the dream of thought and the anxiety of time, into the eternal kingdom of the present moment. This is why he concludes the sermon with the words, "Take no thought for tomorrow." Like most of us, Jesus' followers constantly worried about the future, but were dead to the miracle of Now. The Kingdom of God was not yet, not yet, and still not yet. But Jesus says in no uncertain terms,"The kingdom of heaven is right here in the midst of you!" (Luke 17:21)

He calls us not to heavy spiritual practice, but to ecstatic self-abandonment. Jesus says of his yoga: "My yoke is easy, my burden is light." (Mathew 11:30) The Sanskrit "yoga" and English "yoke" have the same linguistic root. Jesus invites you to live in fulfillment now: "that your joy may be full" (John 15:11).

Like Gautama Buddha, and contemporary Buddhas such as Eckhart Tolle and Thich Nath Hanh, Jesus revealed the eternal kingdom of Now, a kingdom that can never be known by thought. We believe in the future and the past, but we cannot believe in the present moment. We cannot think Presence: we must be aware of it.

Let us come home to the kingdom by resting our awareness in its own radiant emptiness. Homecoming happens any moment, any place, with the utterly simple resting of awareness in awareness.

Then wave after wave of joy arises from the mysterious stillness that is deeper than thought: causeless waves of effortless silence, flowing out, breaking on the world as an ocean of love. For love is not a practice. Love is what happens when there is no practitioner.

At morning's light, through April mist in still green caverns of forest silence, the day's first ordinary miracles:  a pink apple bud bursting into its diamond-white self, a robin startled by its own song.

All One?

Painting by Liz LaMotte
It takes powerfully individualized persons to become "we." Otherwise, "we" just degenerates into group-think, which is not consciousness at all. Before any of us become "we," each is called, chosen, gloriously anointed, to be no one else.

Only the Alone becomes All-One. There is no cosmos without solitude. The night sky appears so whole and beautiful because light-years of alone-ness encompass every star.

Happy Earth Day

Said the Orthodox Rabbi, "God created Earth 6 thousand years ago."

The Geologist replied, "6 billion, without God."

Said the Buddhist, "There was no beginning."

The Hindu replied, "This earth is but one in an endless cycle."

Said the Fundamentalist, "Earth is doomed: look to heaven."

The Environmentalist replied, "We have already destroyed the earth."

Then Earth spoke. She said, "See this apple blossom, this morning glory, this jasmine flower? It only lasts a day. Why don't you all just shut up and smell it?

Enlightened Doubt

On a clear morning, each dewdrop may feel,
'I contain the Sun!'
But is it true?

An hour from now, both borrowed light and dew,
mirror and reflection,
were never real.

Gentlemen

A whole man is not gentle and timid. A whole man is not bold and aggressive. A whole man is bold and gentle. Plato said, 'Have compassion: every man you meet is fighting a great battle inside.' It' the battle to balance bold and gentle.

Quiting 'God'

"O God, quit me of 'God'!" (Meister Eckhart)

Cast these idols into the fire:

* the God who takes sides in war, any war;

* the God who chooses one tribe over another, the God who chooses one nation over another, the God who chooses one religion over another;

* the God who destroyed the World Trade Center and the God who invaded Iraq;

* the God who orders Arab youths to martyr themselves and the God of Apache helicopters who turns war into a video game;

* the God who tells Mohammad's army to murder the unbelievers and the God who tells Joshua's army to conquer the tribes of Canaan, slaughtering "everything that breathes";

* the God who fires North Korean missiles at Israel and the God who slaughters the children of Gaza with American-made white-phosphorus bombs;

* the God who murders the innocent and calls it holy war and the God who murders the innocent and calls it collateral damage;

* God of the Vatican, God of Jerusalem, God of the Pentagon, God of Powers and Princedoms not one of whom shall survive the withering crossfire of their own jealousy, for they are worse than idols of silver and gold: they are idols of belief;

* God of the cult of Al Qaeda, God of the cult of Zion, God of the Ku Klux Klan and the Patriot militia;

* God who circumcises little girls in central Africa and God who abuses little boys in the archdiocese of Boston;

*God who tells widows in India to throw themselves on their husbands' pyres and God who teaches white children in Mississippi that brown children in Benares must go to hell;

* Mammon of the mega-church who claims that His invisible hand is the free market, Mammon of Wall Street who suckles the pension plans of laborers until they are dry, Mammon of Massey Energy whose stockholders drink the blood of dead coal miners;

* Mammon who divides the rich from the poor, who poisons the milk of the Great Mother, who dwells above the planet but not in it;

* Mammon who elevates man over woman, scientist over shaman, white over color, invader over native, people of the Book over people of the Forest;

* Impostor-God who has never been anything but the shadow of our fear! Be gone! Be gone now!

Let all your churches and temples dissolve like morning mist at the portal of 2012,

that the meek may walk through the gates of peace into the dawn of the earthly paradise,

where the poor in spirit find manna, a dew of compassion on the green earth,

and every garden and forest glade is holy,

and the heart's shrine opens its inmost veil to the radiance of divine Humanity,

and the splendor of Truth shines not from above, like a distant sun,

but wells up like a tear from within the Within,

which is the radiant Am in every I,

the Friend who dwells as one Self

in all our glorious, gentle, bold, most innocent bodies.

Sacred Humanity

Rembrandt's face of Christ

Our humanity is sacred. Our senses are divine gifts. Our body is the garden of breathing. Our flesh is the radiance of God. Only this, only this he was dying to reveal.

Stations

Naked attention to
Naked being in
Naked silence:
The only requirement
To walk this path
Is that you touch the ground
With the soul
Of your foot.

The Chance of a Lifetime

Why do you seek the blessing of a guru?
The moment of birth was your initiation
into the highest spiritual path
when you received three sacred jewels,
talismans to guide you home:
this breath for a prayer,
this body for a temple,
the present moment for a teacher.
Angels and Devas wait countless ages
to receive what you have been given.
Don't waste the precious honor
of a human birth!

One

One made itself
Thou
and got lost loving
so
that longing
could breathe
and holiness
could touch
holiness.
Tell no
one
we were ever
not two.