Uradiance

Become your thirst, essence of wine.  You are never one moment old.  Every opening of your eyelid awakens poppy roots, underground fountains, promises of Spring.  Buds on bare twigs, seeds asleep in loam long to celebrate your beauty.  They tremble, burst, release perfume,  mimicking eternity, wanting  your likeness. Why don't you whisper to them all: "It's time!"

She who would burst into flower....   Must first become full....  And carry her promise.... Even in the desert....   So that the fruit of the Mother's womb....  May cover our table with goodness....  And the world may rejoice... with the women of the New Earth.

Those who are confused tell us to annihilate the 'I.' But this only devastates the effulgence of delight. It is not I who dissolve but the sense of do-ership, the illusory link between the I and action, Purusha and Prakriti. When the thoug ht that 'I am the do-er' vanishes, I remain as the Wonderfull Witness, while action dances on, 1000 times more dynamic, spontaneous, and innocent. This is not an esoteric meditation: it is the experience of the warrior in the midst of battle, the athlete at the peak of performance, the lover in the zone of what she loves. O heart, rest in stillness at the center of whirling!

There is no one outside the great Verb, doing it. It's just happening. Planets around suns, suns around galactic voids, galaxies spiraling with countless other galaxies: where is the dancer separate from the dance? If there is no cosmic do-er, why imagine that there is a do-er in me? Is this not the irony of our experience? When we are fully in the dance, doing what we love in the zone of peak achievement, the do-er vanishes, and we feel a profound stillness at the heart of whirling? To un-do the do-er is the most creative act. No action is insignificant, and no action more significant than another. If I am truly awake, to bake bread for my children and wipe a little bottom, or play baseball with a kid whose father has gone off for his third tour of combat, or walk quietly in the woods, giving thanks for golden photons in a green chalice of leaves, uplifts the world as surely as any peace march, occupy movement, or 'social action.' Perhaps the deepest form ...

I miss you so much it burns. Angels long to be born on earth to feel this pain. The distance between us is also God's breath, given so that we may know what angels only dream. We sense this yearning as a mortal chest wound. They see it with their eyes, as a folded gown of luminous saffron and scarlet. They see twin sunrises bursting in blue emptiness when they gaze into our melancholy. Crinkled in frost on separate twigs, we cannot imagine such unfurling on exhalations of grace, yet some formless honey inside us does. When their pure love looks into buds and cocoons where we swim in nectar, they see flowers. And they envy us, not bitterly, but with their own kind of entanglement that they must be born on earth to unravel. One petal unfolding in darkness here is better than a thousand years in heaven. I love you.

Boundaries exist for boundless Beauty to finally feel her form. Everything else is rehearsal. If you see Her, run and tell me. I will come without delay. But I will not bow down. Bowing is not enough. I must dance with Her. With all my senses I must chime the infinitesimal bells of her perfect body. Then, perhaps, I will confess, I have met her ten thousand times already in faces young and old, and yours my love. It was I who was not yet ready to see.

If I were a mathematician I'd want to prove that circles are in motion, that centers are not points but pools filled with whirling spirals of honey, that edges don't exist, and all possible dimensions are enclosed in a golden mote of lily pollen, my toes and fingers asymptotes approaching the coordinates of some perfect body, whose leavened lips are gently pressed and pouted in a pink torus shaped like a donut, murmuring the cosmic microwave background music of the universe. But I have no aptitude for math, really. I am so filled with astonishment I can't even count to seven without bursting into laughter and tears, and shouting "Thank You!"

Here on earth at this very moment, lovers caress, fathers and mothers hug their children, children run their fingers through the fur of dogs, cats, rabbits, gerbils. Don't be confused by what you hear. Love happens in quietness. Here on earth at this very moment, lovers caress, and hugs outnumber acts of pain a million to one.

There's a milky place like the landscape of dew between violets where galaxies briefly catch. As you can see, there are no dimensions here. Beings pour cream into each others cups. It's all a kind of overflowing - your eyes already filled with what they might see, like eggs containing their golden creatures before creation. Meet me here. Become full.

I have arrived, I never departed. Ever returning, I am the way. I am whoever walks on me. Take one step and you miss the goal. Breathe one breath and all the stars fall back into your lips. In the beginning, it is finished. Say, let there be light, and there is.

Jesus taught that you are the light, your breath is holy, your body is a temple, your very awareness is divine. Jesus did not teach the separation of God and humanity, but their union. Peace on eart h will happen when we take responsibility for our sacred humanity, as Jesus did, and find the above within. The sign that you have divine mind is that you conceive of God. The sign that your heart is divine is that you love God. The sign that your vision is divine is that you see creatures through God's eyes, and care for them. I wish you a happy new year. The divine in Me bows down to the divine in You. Namaste. Photo: Dawn over the Pacific, Christmas morning 2012, by Liz Miller

Dear Baby Jesus, I want you to be my savior, but I don't believe in sin or hell. So what can you save me from? Save me from hipsters. Save me from cynicism. Baby Jesus, save me from much thinking. All I need is your blue sky. You don't have to save me from anger, Jesus, but save me from the numbness of pretending never to be mad. I don't mind being stupid either, and I rather like bewilderment; but save me from the pretense of intelligence in a world created for wonder. Jesus, save me from smiley face people who never admit to feeling sad, and depress-aholics who never admit to feeling happy. Save me from being right, Jesus. Save me from being left too. And please, baby Jesus, save me from political correctness. Save me from those who need to call themselves "black," and those who need to call themselves "white." Save me from hyphens. Just give me shades of color without names. Save me from nations, tribes and ethnicities: all...

Yes, there are angels. They ripple through the sound of birds and chime in silent snow. They soar through your breath and whirl in the cells of your flesh, one toe firmly planted in emptiness, limbs and garments circling, left palm turned upward to receive Being, the other downward to bless Becoming, no wings, only the weightlessness of grace. Why not let them sing your body tonight?

How far must you travel to shift into your Self? How far must you go to align your heart with its own Radiance? It is not the alignment of planets but the alignment of hearts that transforms the world. Let every breath you breath quietly affirm, "I AM the jewel in the lotus. I AM the shift." Every event in the heavens is just a sign pointing to a transformation inside you. Whatever the sky is doing, it is always pointing toward your heart, offering an invitation to awaken now! You need not travel to the center of the galaxy for wisdom and light. You need travel no further than the distance of one breath, from your lips to your heart. Y our own awakened breath spreads waves of happiness throughout the stars.   Here is a Hubble telescopic photo of the The Lynx Arc, discovered in 2003 and considered to be the hottest known star-birthing region in the Universe. It is located as a tiny pulse of love, floating in the space of your heart, in the constellation Lynx,...

When I let go of New Age metaphysics, Sanskrit terminology, lofty verses of ancient scripture, and theological gobbledygook, the Way is very simple. Drop the past and future, rest in Presence, and allow the mind to descend into the heart. Be like a pebble in a well that has no bottom.  St. Theresa said it all in a passage from 'Interior Castle':   This magnificent refuge is inside you.  Enter. Shatter the darkness  that shrouds the doorway...  Ask no permission from authorities.  Slip away... close your eyes  and follow your breath  to the still place  which leads to the invisible path  that guides you home.

The real guru does not invite me to bow down at his feet. He is not a charming face, a white robe, or a pair of sandals. He is the one who awakens Guru Tattva, the Guru Principle, in the eye of my heart. Then I may bow before my own divinity in every living creature.

Without Your grace, the heart is numb, the world is heavy, awareness is nothing. But through You, the heart becomes soft as a rose, the world a breath of air, and pure awareness sparkles, solid as a diamond. Painting: 'Jewel in the Lotus' by Troy Carney

Living lowers our resistance. We are here to be vulnerable: that is our calling. Instead of pretending to be dispassionate, pretending to be above my moral outrage, pretending that there is no I reacting to terrible events, why should I not just accept my poor little mind's judgments with compassion? In fact, why not accept anger as the pure energy it is, without justification? My anger has a right to be here, and does not need to carry the intellectual baggage of  moral outrage at all. Now, resting with undivided attention in this anger, why not sink even deeper into it, and taste the fear that lies at its heart? False detachment, moral reaction, and anger are just layers of armor with which I mask my fear. I confess that I am afraid. I am afraid to live in an unpredictable world, where incomprehensible violence happens to innocent children. It's scary, isn't it? And now, instead of projecting my reaction out there, why not hug this cinder of fear, the burni...

Very delicate young miracle children, be brave. Flower with wonder. Flower with wonder that your molecules of blood and bone, vagus nerve and retina, grit and ground of carbon atoms soaked in tears, dissolved in breath, could flower with wonder. Even for a moment.

Jesus said, "The way is straight and narrow." But the straight and narrow way does not mean the only way.  There are as many ways to the divine as there are human hearts, because each way is simply the way of the heart to its own center. If I follow the way to my heart-center with one-pointed faith and surrender, my way becomes the straight and narrow. Any radius from the circumference to the center of a circle is straight and narrow. But as there are an infinite number of possible points on the circumference, so there are an infinite number of radii to the center. Let our way be so straight and so narrow that it only takes an instant! Whichever way we choose, let us come without delay, without anxiety or doubt. Come to the center now.

The silence at the center of the storm never judges the wind. All this turbulence, my dear, is outside you. The blue emptiness of space remains the same. But a little whirling, with a beam  from the slightest star,  and you call it morning  instead of night. Let my love remind you of your stillness. 

The greatest gift is to find your Self in an Other. Then you will flow from your Self into your Self. I have seen a brook, a trickle from a snow field, rain in a gutter, blood oozing from a cut,   a falling braid of milk between the pitcher and the cu p, a moonbeam, your eyes. All these were one stream, not many, the river of Me flowing into You. For each creature is conceived to melt and flow down on other creatures, the way a mother pours something sweet on the bread of her child while it is still warm.

Hecate, as depicted by mystical Christian artist Wi lliam Blake Embrace every form of God, especially the feminine, for any form we are afraid to embrace, we experience as demonic.   This is what happened when patriarchal societies suppressed powerful women and goddesses. They were depicted as witches, whores, and baby killers. Examples include Asherah and Astarte; Lilith, Adam's first wife; and Mary Magdalene . The witch trials of 17th C. New England condemned i ndependent female land-owners to deprive them of their property, but not before condemning them as demonic. Now we see the demonizing of the feminine in its modern form: the attack of far Right Republicans on women's rights and women's bodies. This is very different in degree, but not in kind, from the attacks on women in conservative Islamic countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan.   Many men hide their fear of powerful women behind religion. In the words of Senator Patti Murray, "Assaul...

Praise to the flaw. Calligraphy of cracks. Scripture of fault lines. Infallibility of chance. Revelation tangled in mycelium fairy ring mushrooms. The Guru's sneeze during guided meditation. The end of the world just before dawn on December 21. Then, at first light, a brand new creation. Just like every morning. Peace. The universe weaves each asymptotic imperfection into her woof of impeccable order, an order that human reason cannot conceive, and so we call it "chaos." The idealist, the moralist, the political or religious perfectionist, deems the world "wicked." But the root of this word means woven, like wicker, like a weir, the weird perfection that can only be comprehended by astonishment.  Wickedness may also be related to "wisdom" and "vision," which derive from the Sanskrit "veda," the visionary source of the most ancient scripture, the Vedas. While there are occasions of random weird and even violent chaos, t...

Your flame trembles. I am the wick. Laughter, pain, astonishment, forests, mountains, oceans of breath and distance are only here to melt and feed our burning.

Giggle on the roller coaster of time. Giggle growing old. Giggle when the wind lifts your skirt and the Spirit runs up your freckled thigh. Giggle when the world sees your white socks. Giggle when your body turns back into bread. Giggle like a baby, no matter when.

There is a practice beyond Surrender. To Know that "it is finished," everything is over, all creation perfected and held in a single dewdrop moment of eternity. You played your part, accomplishing precisely what no one else possibly could: your delight.... Friend, there is a practice beyond Surrender. Do what you Love.

Winter Solstice 2012. May my brain listen to my heart. May this mind descend into the gently pulsating radiance at the center of my perfectly human body. Resting there, let me hear the Unstruck Sound emanating from the core of the galaxy, the golden Hum of divine silence, creating stars in the heavens and photons in my flesh. "Adau Bhagavan Shabdha Rasahi": "In the beginning, God created the universe through a current of sound." One may hear this sound stream as Om, Ram, Soham, Alla'hu, or Elohim. One may hear it as the vibrant effortless seed-mantra given by the Guru at initiation. Or one may hear it as the nameless whisper of the Holy Spirit Breath. But what it means is the same in any language: "I Love, therefor I Am."

The believer said, "God is the greatest of all poets, for God has written a poem of only one Word, which contains everything that has meaning and everything that does not. This is why we sing praises to God." Yaahuuv. We entered the first world. The dancer said, "Even greater is the Goddess who creates the universe without a Word. She just hums. Therefor we sing for no reason." Yaahuuvaah. We entered the second world. The old woman who lives next door said, "I put all the stars into my dough and baked it for you. Smell this bread. Hold it in your hand, and eat." Yaahuuvaa-hey. We entered the third world. Now what do You say? "Thank You. Thank You." Now what do You say? "Thank You. Thank You." Yaahuuvaa-hey-om. We enter the fourth world.

Stars don't even try to understand  this perfect whirling. It happens.  

The center of the galaxy is your own Heart.  There, a black hole of marvelous annihilating creativity empties and purifies your Awareness, the very space that bears the universe. This Self-dissolving Self-generating space is the virgin womb of Kali Shakti, who destroys in order to give birth. What radiates from that center, whirling in a dance of countless stars, is your Body, completely human, completely divine. You are her Child, born of purest virgin consciousness. The rest is all imagination: you get to choose how seriously to take the illusions of 'matter' and 'distance'. The truth is, I Am hugging you Now. Oh how we pull each other into the divine darkness of our yearning! Not even light can escape the abyss of love! Dearest one, let us give birth to one another from the passion that annihilates every form, through an incomprehensible silence beyond union. Don't understand this. Just spin.    Written about 1500, this is music fro...

At some point, bored with eternity, we divided the timeless into seven days. They were too long, so we invented hours. They were too long too, so we invented minutes. The minutes became seconds, ticking, ticking, so we turned the ticking in our heads into clocks. But we were important, so we made bigger circles. We looked at the moon and invented months. We noticed the way the sun paced back and forth across the horizon like a restless golden fat-man, so we invented the year. We called our invention 'time,' piling seasons into rolling heaps of 26,000 rotations. Doesn't that make your mind feel huge? We imagined Maha-Yugas, Manvantaras, and trillion-yeared Days of Vishnu, which were all just sparkles, of course, in the sleepless gaze of Mother Divine. Finally we invented a single giant unit that would end with a significant bang, a war between good and evil, though we never figured out what 'good' and 'evil' actually mean. And aft...

The milky way is not enough, the star-stream tapped from leaf veins, the indefatigable chloroplast, the hidden factory of golden nectar in loam, photons immolated in sacrifice to mold your bronze nakedness - still, not enough, not enough light! The sun does all she can, the moon dips cup fulls from her dark mysterious cellar, pours sparkling stuff into the lips of Spring cloud. Winter makes prisms of remembered splendor, galaxies of roses imprisoned in a snow crystal. But all this in-pouring is not enough, this shoring up of light in you, the radiance pooled and nuggeted in protons of flesh, the beam of your soul undrawn from its scabbard of loneliness. Light Hoarder, sheathed, un-shining, you darken the universe! Friend, haven't you treasured this fire too long? Now spend it, waste it, irradiate everything seen! Be the Outpouring, bright warm wounded glory gushing from the hidden well where stars are born, coiled down in your tap root, your deepest ga...

No enlightened person in the history of the world has ever said, or even thought, "I am enlightened." How could there possibly be an 'I,' or a 'state of enlightenment,' separate from the luminosity of the void in the form of this moment, wherever you are, whatever you are doing?

"Everybody must get stoned!" ~Bob Dylan   Even space gets high on light when the sun finds its vein. Stillness begins spinning, begets the atom. Hemlocks and cedars lit from their roots up, underground mycelium fix of golden mushrooms. Earth wobbles off her axis, but this dizziness isn't her fault. Blame God, the first pusher of all that moves. In the beginning, angels passed out cups of this stuff at the feast where we conceived the galaxies. Now we nod in a fuzz of stars, a quantum snow of bliss. We're drifting nuclei, connected by dilated gazes. We've learned to mingle our roots, like a giant fungus. This is not about chemistry: it's much subtler. This is about the astonishment of the heart, the organ of silence, our addiction to ecstasy. Rumi used the wine of love. We mainline pure consciousness, uncut.

"Is there a God with God?" ~Holy Qu'ran, Sura 27:61 (This verse is recited at 15:25 of the video below.) I would honestly answer, Yes. There is a God with God: God's reflection in the mirror of his own consciousness. This is what Vedic science calls "the Self-referral quality of Consciousness." It is why the One becomes three-in-one: Sat-Chit-Ananda, Being, Awareness, Bliss. Consciousness creates a subject-object relation within its Self, which is really a Subject-Subject relation, a relation of "I and Thou" within That. Christianity describes this same dynamism within the One. For Christians, the Other in the Self is the Child of the Father, the Alone-Born Son of God, conceived through the creative Spirit, who is the Mother. She is the reflecting power of divine creativity, the mirror of God in God. Father, Mother Spirit and Son are all Self-reflections in the dynamic playfulness of pure consciousness. In the mothering mirror o...

This is how God becomes dust. Touch your forehead to the earth, bow down to the light in your body. When the light within lifts up your head, crying "Do not worship me, for I am you," bow down, bow down. All around you, dripping with quietness, flowers are doing this to rain. The golden moth that lives one day is doing this to flame. The moon does it to the sun. One breath does it to another. Receive yourself. Bow down and drink. Be the mother of your heart: this is how dust becomes God.

It rises each morning at dawn filling emptiness with gold. At dusk it sets in darkness. This is only a sign, a reflection of what rises inside you. When it does, friend, it will never set. You have my promise.

A child's lonely wonder: "Everyone knows but me." Don't let her marvel alone! Whisper, "God wonders too." Gaze with your little one into the motionless explosion of a rose.

Why aren't there People Parks where we can run in circles and chase each other naked, nothing up our sleeves, no guns or missiles, just heal nipping, fetching tennis balls and barking "that's mine!" until our panting tongues hang out and we drift back to the angels who watch over us holding leashes in their firm but gentle hands? Photo: My boy, Willy

I used to compare this mystery to wine,  as if it needed to be tasted, or I needed to be changed from one condition to another, from sobriety to some thing wilder and sweeter at last... But "needing" was the very cup that needed to be shattered into sparkling shards of astonishment melting in the unlit fire. Friend, we were tipsy when we arrived. No one had to say, "Let there be light." The splendor was already here.

It is shameful that our schools do not include meditation in their curriculum. 90% of our schooling is Regurgitation. 9.9% is Analysis: breaking things into pieces and labeling them. 0.1% of education is Awareness. Yet what our culture lacks most is awareness. We have material things. We have an overload of information. We have ever-more media and gadgetry. But we lack a systematic inner technology for deepening, purifying, and expanding awareness. What good is knowledge if the container of knowledge is stressed, frail, and small? Of what use is learning if the one who learns knows nothing of his own consciousness? We are teaching classes in the dark. Wouldn't a wise teacher begin by turning the light on in the classroom? Yet when someone says, "Excuse me, but shouldn't we turn the light on before starting class?" they are scorned and mocked.

How did we ever separate divinity and breath? Perhaps we need to return to the revelation of the obvious. According to the Biblical creation story, "God breathed into Adam and he became a living soul." The word for "living soul" puns on a Hebrew word for breath, "nephesh." Throughout the Bible, in both New Testament Greek and Old Testament Hebrew, the word used for Spirit and breath are the same: "pneuma" in Greek, "ruach" in Hebrew. The breath we breathe is the gift of the holy Spirit. The one who is anointed by the holy breath is the Messiah. In Hebrew, "messiach" is God's anointed, one who is filled by Spirit-Breath. Translated into Greek, Messiah is the Christos, the Christ. "Chrism" means anointing. Every breath Christs our body with the Holy Spirit. We only need the anointing of Consciousness. Breath + Consciousness = Prana. How wonderful to have a teacher among us, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who can ...

There is no Word at creation. Love just hums. What's important is the punctuation, heartbeat, rhythm. The message is a pulse of longing in the void. You are the bashful silence of a comma half way down a blank and creamy page, I am the question mark at the end or the beginning? Breathe.

Take a Sabbath from believing.  Rest the mind.  For a whole day, don't believe  in anything.  You'll survive.  And colors will be brighter.

This makes me want to take off all my clothes and run through the streets of Seattle screaming, 'What he said! What he said!'