Uradiance

I've finally decided that I want to be Me when I grow up. When we ask a little kid, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" we are really telling them, "You have to become something else. Who you are isn't good enough." I wish at least one adult 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 that!"

I don't care if I live in a great country. I care if I live in a good country. In a good country, a nurse's aid who works six full days a week on the minimum wage, caring for the elderly and disabled, has as much right to quality health care and retirement benefits as any Wall Street investor earning millions off of dividends from the products and labor of other men's hands. In a good country, the pre-school teacher who feeds and educates our poorest most vulnerable children, deserves to keep her job. But over the next decade, over two million children lose Head Start centers under the Paul Ryan budget. In a good country, poor high school graduates receive low interest college loans, in order to acquire job skills and enter the middle class. But under conservative elites and the Paul Ryan budget, Pell Grants for poor students lose $170 billion. In a good country, after four forced tours of combat, a vet with PTSD finds a program for healing. But Pa...

The Hebrew word 'Sabbath' doesn't mean Sunday. It means Stop. In a culture that is always on the Go, how do you stay? How to stop and rest in eternal Presence? This ever-changing creation arises and dissolves in boundless stillness. This ever-blossoming chaos appears and disappears in absolute silence. Just as a mirage shimmers in empty dessert air, the manifest world and the unmanifest silence seem to be opposite values: yet they are one and the same.  Stillness pervades action, silence pervades the Word. The key to the unity is Non-Resistance. Non-Resistance melts noise into silence, and chaos into stillness.

Rest where creation arises. Your own awareness is Vishnu, sleeping on the milk ocean of waking dreams. In dawn's light, nourished by the sea of silence, float on waves of breath. Let thought-worlds bubble and foam without being the thinker.

My favorite comedian, Vanda Mikoloski, says, "Why do we need beliefs? Why can't we just show up?" Presence is unbelievable. I can't believe in the present moment. I can believe in the past, in what is already known, but it is impossible to believe in the present moment: I can only surrender to it. Thinking shields me from the radiance of Presence. A thought is never what is . A thought is the image of what has already happened and gone. Thinking is the shadow of the past, cast into the future to avoid the present. I construct my beliefs from these shadows of the past. Belief is the story I carry, but that story is always over. I wrap myself in a story because I lack the courage to be present. When I drop my beliefs, I can drop my doubts too. Doubt is just the flip-side of belief. Every belief conceals a doubt, springs from a doubt. Doubt is the true believer. To be without believing is faith.

Waking up this morning, I knew that I had been walking barefoot on the Sun all night, my naked golden body made of That compared to which fire is stone. Every breath was a ray of violet lightning. Even now, I am walking there, holding your hand. We stroll through a garden of radiant formless possibility, dreaming a dream that surely must mean something, if only we could share it in good faith. W e dream that we have awakened on a green planet, where snow melts into streams that sing to the forest, anointing tender black seeds of plenteous carbon. They grow into hosts of wild flowers - lupine, alpine aster, cascade lily, indian paint brush - each tiny blossom giving birth to the Sun: the Sun in the heart of the Earth.

Love exactly. Many of us sort of, kind of, know what we love, but not exactly. The whole universe yearns to respond to your love. But you must touch the universe... here !

Blessed be the flow. Rain, tears, rivers, wounds, waves of light, waves of darkness. Milk, moon blood, money, love. Blessed be the flow.

With each step, listen: Evening green forest silence. Listen, and arrive.

Nothing added to this moment makes it more full. Nothing taken away makes it more pure. The sparrow chirps, the silence of dawn is not broken.

My comfort zone was the size of an atom, the tiniest point at the center. "Center of what?" I wondered. So I ventured out to the edge and found that the whole circle was my center. From circumference to circumference I leapt and swam, or perhaps I fell, buoyed by emptiness, arms winging. When there's no ground to touch, does it matter whether you plummet or soar? I came to the horizon of all things, golden beyond light. Its curve contained creation like a smile. Friend, this universe is nothing but a pinprick of love in the core of my heart: you too are my center.

Majestically alone, let solitude blossom. All your friends are golden petals of this heart. Majestically alone, let solitude blossom. It doesn't matter anymore, this difference between one and many. Majestically alone, just open, just open. To hear the poem chanted spontaneously by the author, LINK here.

Is love a duty? Is love a practice? I decide how love should look, then I put this should into practice. Can love ever come from should ? I act the part of love, I mimic what my religion and culture teach me love must be. Do I then experience love? Do you feel my love when I try to love you, because it is my duty? I try and try to put love into action, without ever actually feeling any love. Perhaps love is quite the opposite of duty. Perhaps love has nothing to do with what one should . Come, dare to be graceful. Let the secret unfold its blossoms. Love merely is. I am. Love is what I am when there's no should. I refuse to put a noun after am . Then I am love.

What we fear most is not conflict, but the absence of conflict. We fear unity. Unity is not the suppression of conflict, or the denial of duality. Unity is the singularity of dynamic wholeness, a wholeness that embraces conflict and integrates every seeming contradiction. But we fear unity, we fear peace. That is why war does not cease. War is the eruption of our unconscious, unacknowledged need for conflict. Conflict provides a useful distraction that allows us to avoid the fundamental reality of our solitude. * * * We imagine a conflict, then we spend our time struggling to resolve the conflict we imagine. Our very obsession with resolving the conflict feeds the conflict with energy. Yet this conflict is not our real problem. The fundamental problem is our fear of being one, our uniphobia. And why are we are afraid of the all-one? Because we are afraid to be alone. * * * Are you truly anxious about the economic conflict between capitalism and the worki...

What unacknowledged part of you is Mitt Romney? What unacknowledged part of you is the police officer in his gas mask and riot gear? What part of you is Israel? What part of you is Palestine? What part of you is the secret Iranian nuclear missile program? What part of you is the bratty American gymnast smirking at the world because she only got a silver medal? What part of you is the undocumented Mexican field worker  changing her baby's diaper under the apple trees with hands stained by toxic pesticides? What part of you is the Aurora Batman shooter with his Smith and Wesson assault rifle? What part of you is the dolphin who feels like beaching herself? What part of you is the Paul Ryan budget? What part of you is Jesus?

Please don't forgive me. Whatever I did to you, I did through unconsciousness, not with intention. So please don't forgive me. Whatever I did to you arose as what is , and what is cannot be otherwise. Never waste a moment regretting what is . So please don't forgive me. If you must forgive me, you are still trapped in resistance to what is . You have not accepted the gift of what happens. Your very forgiveness means that some part of you still blames me for delivering your own karma to you. If you must forgive me, you suffer the illusion that we are separate, and that the world might be anything other than the projection of your own light. Whatever I did to you was your opportunity to become free, your opportunity to release yourself from the bondage of reaction. Don't forgive me, thank me. Don't forgive me, and I won't forgive you. I will thank you. All that you have done to me, whether intentionally or unintentionally, I will regard as liber...

Our political, economic and environmental crises will be solved when human beings learn a particular inward skill that has nothing to do with politics, economics, or technology: the skill of dropping the past and awakening to Presence. To awaken and meet together in this Now is not a prerequisite for solving our problems: it is the solution. "Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself." ~Paramahansa Yogananda

Are you a straight line or a spiral? A straight line is consistent, but brittle and easily broken. A spiral embraces contradictions, and weaves them into power. Spiral your opposites.

In the Rasa Lila dance at Vrindavan, the Lord manifests a separate, intimate, personal form for each of the Gopis, while remaining transcendent unmanifest unity. The divine Self is One in all, yet gives to each who yearn for His love an intimate relationship. You can have your chapati and eat it too. God is both formless and personal, bheda-bheda : 'two and not-two.' This is the mystery of devotion. There are as many ways to God as there are human hearts. Through devotion, we humbly embrace the paradox and avoid the conflicts. Devotion invites us to transcend the fundamentalism of the Vedantist, who insists on reducing all to an impersonal Self. Yet devotion also invites us to transcend the exclusivism of the True Believer, who insists on a limited personal form. Happy Birthday, Krishna!

Jesus went from village to village exorcizing demons. Presence exorcizes the past. Each of us accumulates our ghostly past in the form of a story called "me." We carry this ghost around inside us: it feeds on us and takes all our energy, u ntil we are possessed by the past. We keep repeating our story in an endless loop, which prevents us from ever getting to the present moment. Some very common story lines include: "Why does this always happen to me?" "How come they get away with it when I try so hard to be good?"  "I'm always right: why doesn't anybody listen?"  "It's not fair that I have to work so hard and they don't."  "My suffering is worse than your suffering." The past is my demon. The past can be honored as an angel, and consulted for guidance from time to time. But when the past controls and possesses me, it becomes my bondage. When Presence awakens, the story of the pas...

"1 is the most intolerant of numbers." ~David Albert 1 is intolerant. 2 is conflicted. 3 is condescending. 4 is stubborn and overweight. 5, like Hamlet, thinks too much. 6 shows up at the mall in her curlers. 7 is stuffed with esoteric gibberish. 8 wears too much bling bling. 9 can do the full lotus but is only pretending not to have thoughts during meditation. I invite them all for a weekend at my ancestral beach house in the Hamptons, unaware that one is a murderer (that is not a clue). Saturday morning, we find 6's body naked in her bed, evidently poisoned. She never did put on any make-up. To solve the crime we call in Zero, who acts like a nerd but knows everything.

There's a place at the center of your heart where opposites dissolve into each other. When you stand here, you have no enemy, no rival, no opposition. Fear cannot arise. You are incomparably radiant.

When you see the world as Truth, nothing has to "mean" anything. All is full as is, and the smallest detail is always already complete. What does it mean? Om purnamadah purnamidam,  Purnaat purnamudachyateh, Purnasya purnamaadaaya,  Purnamevaavasishyate ~Isha Upanishad   "That pure transcendental wholeness is Full; This relative particle of it is equally Full. From the Full, only the Full can appear. And when Fullness is removed from the Full, Fullness remains." Let all things be full, just as they are. O how marvelous the grace of not meaning!

                                                                         I'm perfectly OK with not knowing. In fact, I'd rather live among people who are content with not knowing than among true believers. If humanity is ever to transcend the insanity of religious conflict, it won't be when 'our' belief triumphs over 'theirs', but when we all embrace the sacred art of Not Knowing. Sounds very Buddhist, right? Yes, we find the discipline of Not Knowing in Buddhist 'sunyata' (emptiness) and the 'nirbija samadhi' (seedless silence) of Vedanta; but we also find it in the heart of Christian mysticism. The 14th C. Cloud of Unkno...