Uradiance

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...

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 surrende...

"When you seem to understand a situation and label it, This is how it is , that is the beginning of your problem. Problems arise from knowing, not from not knowing. Suffering is a product of limited knowledge. "When an event occurs, there could be many possibilities to explain it. You label it wrong from limited knowledge. But when there is amazement, patience and joy, you are in a stat e of I don’t know, may be, and life shifts from the limited I know to all possibilities . 'Stop seeing intentions behind others' mistakes. Then you stop bearing grudges. Your mind drops craving and aversion, and you become free.'    ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Thank you, Beloved Teacher. Humbling me, you expand me. Emptying me, you fulfill me.

Peace to you... The Peace that only comes when the mind is quiet, and the heart spills over with the innocence of a newborn child. This morning, every body is flawless, every atom is pure, every photon of light is perfect, and there is nothing that is not made of this perfect light. In the whole cosmos, the only thing that is not perfect is the thought, "This is imperfect." Celebrate the birth of divine love in the human heart. All holidays, all rituals, are just re-enactments of love's breath. With a mind spacious and free from judgment, with an innocent heart and the eyes of a newborn child, observe what is; deeply, deeply observe what is. Peace be yours... For only the action that flows from Peace, makes Peace.

Learn the lesson of a single snowflake. Isn't every flake flawless in its unique and sacred geometry? The intelligence who perfects a snowflake designs this whole creation. Divine Mother pours perfection upon us, and weaves the very molecules of our flesh from the fibers of her beauty. She is not only Holy Mater, she is Holy Matter. Like a snowflake, each sub-nuclear spark of the physical world is an instantaneous revelation of God, and a momentary effulgence of heaven on earth. Merry Christmas from the inconceivable, born in every photon of your perfect body. Though you dwell in form, form does not confine you, for each particle of you is boundless, and eternity infuses all that appears to change and die. Physicists confirm this: an electron is surrounded by a photon-cloud in which each instantaneous photon of light has an energy charge that is infinite. Your body is made of no-thing but the boundless self-luminosity of the void. The illusion of imperfection ar...

Thoughts that feel good in our hypothalamus and reticular activating system we call rational . Thoughts that don't feel good we call irrational . The gist of our thinking is more often determined by what we had for dinner last night than by any inherent quality called reason . The most radical wisdom requires no thinking, no reasoning at all. Reason is a hoax. For example, the invasion of Iraq felt good to millions of Americans in 2003. Thus it felt perfectly reasonable to bankrupt our economy, exhaust our military power, kill a million people, and hand Iraq over to Iranian influence. This idiotic scheme seemed rational because thinking was simply a disguise for sweet feelings of revenge in our primitive brain. On the other hand, when Osama bin Laden sent us a message in 2004, explaining the reasons for his antipathy toward U.S. foreign policy, we heard it as the ranting of a madman. What he offered was to end the war if America fulfilled three conditions: show neutrality ...

"I have too many thoughts in meditation." So what if you have a thought? A thought is just a wave in the sea of silence. Like right now, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, and Sarah Palin covered in hot melted chocolate wrestling an elk, and Laotzu floating in an emerald sky, playing his pearl-encrusted violin from which stream melodies of silk connected to every star, as a radiant winged donkey with the eyes of Jesus alights on my brow, whispering lyrics of unpublished Elvis songs, which I will sing only to the children of the 60's who remember how we wept by the waters of Babylon, and hung our harps from the willows there, smashed on buds that sprang like green nipples from the sugary bosom of the Great Mother, whose black body of starry Silence dissolves all limits between form and formlessness, allowing us to dance in fractals of Delight, the only energy that is. Welcome to the mirage, where boundless awakened space pervades every ripple of mind...

99% of what gurus say, you could say. You just don't have the white robes and long hair going for you.  99% of what college professors say, you could say. You just don't have the capital letters after your name.  99% of what politicians say, you could say. But you're too intelligent to talk like that.  What I'm saying is, you are the supreme authority in your life, and no one else. What do you say? My most exciting discovery on this journey is that spirituality has nothing to do with authority. Spirituality is an adult issue; authority is an infantile issue.  Many follow a guru, a pope, a holy book, a charismatic preacher, not because they want to be free, but for precisely the opposite reason. They want a surrogate daddy. They want to give their innate authority away to someone else. The infantile comfort we get from giving up our self-authority accounts for much religious behavior. I love my Guru: I do not give him a...

Stop sending yourself postcards: "Having a great time, wish you were here." It's the picture of happiness we send ourselves that makes us miserable. You don't even know your address: how will you get the Christmas card you put in the mail box years ago, full of sleigh bells and snowy farms and mothers who never get mad because they have no job but gazing at babies? Fuck these Christmas lights. You break one, and they all go out. There's a better kind of light, fainter but always glowing in the darkness of your aching heart. This light is never born and never demands perfection. It's your real home. Rest here. Don't send pictures.

Jesus said, 'I am troubled. I need you to hang out with me. Stop your work and come to the garden.'  So I stopped work and went to Gethsemane, where I gave Jesus all my prayers. He said, 'I want your friendship, not your worship.'  Then I told him my ideas about happiness, and gave him all the advice I could think of. He said, 'I love your presence, not your opinion.'  I offered to serve him day and night, ending poverty, fighting for justice, cleansing the earth of corruption.' He said, 'I cherish your being, not your doing.' Then I dozed off. After some time, his voice gently spoke again: ' I just need you to stay awake. That's all I ask. Just be with me, without going to sleep.'

You enter my kingdom by ten thousand roads of death. Each chariot wheel rolls toward its center. No restless search for honey in some other garden, but this dark syrup, blood thickening to stillness. Some pray until dawn. Some ask, "Who listens?" But you have become a wonder without words, eyes dazed wide, worshiping the lance that pierced you. Never crying, "Withdraw it!" you seek no immortality, the whisper of your ebbing breath, my Name. The song swells up your throat, a voice that is yours and not yours, the way smoke curls from a wick just blown out. Then you return to my lips.

Even if you don't "think" your laughter is real, just laugh and it will be. Your body is the channel of joy, not your intellect. Your flesh knew the beauty of its smile before you ever conceived of  "happiness." Smiling takes you to your source. It is a revolutionary act. Your laughter is more ancient than your cerebral cortex. It bubbles up your spine and flowers on top of your brain stem, which is the tree of life in the wildest garden of your physiology. New research in neurology indicates that consciousness reflects in the cortex only when the cortex is flooded by energy from the hypothalamus and reticular activating system of the ancient brain. Whatever the problem, simply wrap it in a belly laugh and you will see the problem, quite literally, in a new light.

It's so crystal clear that each morning we choose to wake up or to wake back down. The moment we awaken, we can start looking for the same patterns of stress and negativity in the news of the world that the mind was mired in yesterday; or we can wake to the miracle of Presence, welcoming the revelation of a Winter sunbeam, the symphony of a raindrop. The mouse-mind is free to click on 'Yesterday' or 'Today.'

Americans are paralyzed by a culture of blame.   Right and left, rich and poor, 99 percent and 1 percent, we blame each other. The tea party blames labor unions. Liberals blame corporations. The occupiers blame Wall Street, and are so disdainful of government they refuse to join the political process to offer real policy changes. College graduates blame employers for not hiring, yet seldom ask themselves, “Why did I major in sociology instead of engineering?” Blame loves to generalize. All bankers are crooked, all poor people lazy. All government programs waste money, federal regulations always dampen growth, and capitalism always makes people greedy. Our national IQ is hardly bolstered by such mindless stereotypes. The blame game cripples our two-party system. But Steve Jobs observed, “The axis today is not liberal and conservative. The axis is constructive-destructive.” Let Americans develop marketable skills instead of blaming scapegoats for our non-p...