Uradiance

How should I pray? Where I Am, You also possess an I. Where I disappear into Am, You also disappear. We are two I's who see one Am in the mirror of love. Can there be any prayer but to breathe and dissolve?

"I Am. Thinking is optional." ~ Willy

I find it when I dissolve the "it." It finds me when "I" dissolve. When "I" and "it" are both dissolved, there is only the finding.

All through my long heavy life, angels whispered, "Lighten up!" In each opening bud, each moth wing or burst of blueberry on my tongue, Mother Divine revealed my brevity: a thousand hints a day of wondrous impermanence! But every playful message of mortality brought fear of disaster. This is the condition of my human mind. Instead of playfulness, I saw the weight of death everywhere. Yet still in my fading, as I gazed through my window, I saw blossoms burst, birds sing and vanish, magnificent cloud shapes shift and dissolve, and I heard the ancient whisper. Finally, the moment approaches. "I knew it, I knew death would come. There was every reason to be gloomy after all!" Yes, death, the dreaded doorway: I face the burden of judgment. What now? It opens. But day does not shut down in darkness. The shadow lifts. My body does not grow heavier. A single breath releases the entire weight. And the silence that once whispered now sings: radiant dew...

There is no greater beauty, no greater wealth, no greater creativity, no greater fountain of love or service to others, than attunement to your own heart . Dare to love your Self. Bathe in tears of devotion to your own radiance. Know that you are peace, you are beauty, you are eternal. Taste sukadeva , the sweet nectar of inner silence. You are a cell full of honey in the comb of God. You cannot find such primal sweetness in another. Only when your heart makes its own honey will you nourish others.    This is Divine Mother's plan for you. By her grace, become ananda , pure joy. Return to your Self. Make honey. Then overflow.   Photo by Sabrina Ryan

The boundless light that shines from the smallest atom in this body is my God. Love is my religion. The present moment is my place of worship. Breath is my sacrament. And with this breath, I gently sweep away every creed, every hierarchy, every priestly power that would bind the sacred freedom of my heart. How can I possess such authority? Because I have been born on earth as a human being.

I cannot make peace because I am peace. Peace is not made, it is awakened. How did Jesus bring peace to the world? He did not preach an ideology, or organize a protest movement. "He breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit." True peace is a living breath, a radiant energy. It overflows from the Being deep in the silent core of our hearts. Tense angry people don't need our politics or our protest: they need our presence . Peace is not anti-war. Anti doesn't work. Being against Israel will not bring justice to Palestinians. Being against Islam will not make Christians safe. Being against the Right will not make the Left more convincing. Being against the rich will not prosper the poor. Being anti-war will not bring peace. Anti only polarizes our energy and fuels our conflict. I don't need to be for or against anybody. I need to transform my own Being so that I can breathe love, I need to expand my own awareness so that I can embrace both side...

A broken heart lets in light. If the heart breaks wide open, the stream has no end. It flows through to other hearts. Wounds connect us. Wounds are our windows into each other. Don't be hasty to heal and close. Don't be a knower. Be a window.

  I spoke to my soul, "You must strive to solve the great political problems of this world: war, poverty, injustice, environmental catastrophe. This is your duty!" My soul replied, "Each of us learns precisely the lesson we need at this moment. The world must be just as it is. If you've come to fix it, we're not interested. Why deprive others of the opportunity to learn from the fruit of their actions? Why interfere in the exercise and consequence of their free will?" "But I see crisis everywhere I look!" "Then the crisis is your seeing." "But is there nothing WRONG?" I cried. "Is there no SIN?" To which my soul replied, "The original sin is forgetting how to be happy." I was dumbfounded by these answers from my own soul. I had one more question. "Which voice is I, yours or mine?" At this, my soul rose dancing on its tail, transformed into a rainbow-colored dove-winge...

How are "self-help" and "self-control" working out for you? For me, they are illusions. "I" am not very helpful to "me." I can no more control my life than a falling leaf controls the breeze. But I can surrender. I can surrender to the Grace of Mother Divine.

Does creativity arise from my thoughts, or from the spacious crystal silence between them? If I observe very deeply, I see that my creativity manifests in silent waves of Being, not concepts. Only after the creative impulse wells up like a tear of joy from the a priori silence deeper than mind, only then do I quantify those waves of infinite stillness into finite thoughts. The images that form my thoughts come from memory. Thoughts are images of the past. But the creative power that energizes thoughts is image-less. If past images are not empowered by the image-less vibration of Presence, my thoughts are not creative. Every wave of creation is connected to the ocean of quietness beneath it. Every great work of art or dance incorporates stillness, every great work of music or literature incorporates silence, and in every true poem what remains unspoken makes it poetry. We feel the "greatness" in art because we feel, through its forms, the awe of the formless. In Am...

To bless others, be grateful for your blessings: this breath, this touch of breeze on your flesh, this call of the thrush in a nearby oak. No ordination into ministry or priesthood is necessary. That was all in a past age. Simply be aware of how blessed you are right now, and blessing will flow through your heart, your hand, your word.

I get absorbed in a thought. It has world-shaking significance. An hour later, that thought seems so small. By then, of course, I have been taken in by another thought. Awareness is not thought. Awareness is the great mother, watching thoughts play and roughhouse in the sandbox of this mind. She watches over my thoughts, but is not among them. She does not take sides in their tussle. Yes, the world appears to have innumerable problems. But getting stuck in my thoughts is the only real problem. Lost in the whirl of thoughts, I lose the still warm core of Self-nourishment that is the first step in solving any problem. I am not my thoughts. I am Awareness. My true nature is motherhood for all beings. Om shantih, shantih, shantih.

Do not judge the mirror. We label the purest mirror 'impure' when we see our own doubts reflected in it. The Guru is here simply to be a mirror. That is why judging the Guru is futile. Those who are obsessed with money see the Guru as a swindler. Those who are obsessed with sex see the Guru as a seducer. Those who have a big ego see the Guru as an egomaniac. Those who are full of shadows see the Guru as a demon. Jesus himself was accused of all these things. If you don't experience the mystery of attraction to a particular Guru, then just ignore him. You are not required to be a disciple. But judging the Guru is worthless: it lowers your energy, not the Guru's. One seeker gives away his inner authority to any so-called Guru who comes through town. Another declares all Gurus false. These are just two poles of one ignorance. The first lacks a center: the slightest breeze of glamor will knock him over. The other is too centered, too fixed in a separate self, in...

Thinking is a useful tool when we need to solve a problem. But in between problems, we have plenty of time to set thinking aside and simply be aware , bathing each object in sparkling subjectivity, without forming an idea about it. Unnecessary compulsive thinking is "anxiety": braincells gone wild. Many use prescription drugs or alcohol to temporarily suppress the over-thinking mind. Anxious thinking is like taking snapshots of the empty sky. Why not just be that emptiness, without taking pictures? Why not become present , without thought? The cultivation of Presence is meditation. Meditation does not take us to a mystical and "higher" world, which would just be another thought. Meditation brings us back to this world, this breath, this body. Here in the only world there is, we can relax into our innate energy, not the frenetic energy of thinking what should be, but the graceful energy of what is , the ocean of nature flowing around and through us like sap ...

 I met an all-too-precious True Believer wearing an enormous yellow button inscribed with the letters J.O.Y. I took the bait and asked him what the letters stood for. He said, " Jesus, Others, Yourself . Put Jesus first, then others, and finally yourself. That is the way to joy!" I tried it for several years but it didn't work. So I took a different path. I put my Self first. It's hard to admit this in a culture where the righteous pretend that "self" is a dirty four-letter word, when in fact Self is the unconscious legislator of everything they experience. Here is what I discovered: If I try to put Jesus before myself, I don't have anywhere to put him. The radiant heart of my Self-awareness is the only place where my Lord can find a dwelling. If I put Others before myself, I don't have anything to offer them, because I don't know who is making the offering. But if I start by nourishing the Light Within, and I meditate in the vast lu...

The Tree of Life at the center of the world is the golden-chain lobelia in my back yard - as is the tree in your yard. Adore the dryad of this particular tree. All Gods are clustered inside her, as ripe seeds in the core of the pomegranate. Some will yet insist, "There is only one way, and God is above you." They do not know that a berry is holy, an egg echoes with stars, a galaxy swirls in the hologram of a snail. My heart windows your heart. All hearts open to an inner sky. Photo: My back yard lobelia in blossom.