Become

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!"

Carry

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.

O Heart, Rest In Stillness

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 thought 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!

Nothing Doing

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 of social action is simply to be awake.

When the heart is alive, the smallest task becomes for us a rite of passage from earth to heaven, and a portal from heaven to earth for the angels.

Only the ignorant say, 'I am an activist,' regarding their good works in higher esteem than the action of common people. Political activism is no more noble than the humble duty of family support, or singing a song, or planting a crop of turnips. When awareness is open and clear as the sky, the light of grace bathes our most ordinary acts. The anonymous sacraments of the commonplace can flood the earth with love.

In Ramana Maharshi's words, 'The real Self is waiting there to take you in. Then whatever is done is done by something else and you have no hand in it.'

Action happens. No one does it, and no one can avoid it. One cannot stop breathing, or beating one's heart. We must eat and keep warm, chop wood and carry water. Yet there is no sense that 'I do' any of this. Here, a great misunderstanding has arisen. It is not 'I' who dissolves, but my sense of do-ership. 'I' remain as the Witness.

Renunciation does not mean refraining from action. It means giving up the claim of do-ership. When I am no longer the do-er, action flows through me innocently, with fresh new life, never one moment old. But when accompanied by an illusory 'do-er,' who only exists as a ghost of thought, my action is the repetition of past thoughts, beliefs and desires, mere karmic momentum.

In every situation, even in the hectic marketplace, our one and only duty is to choose, and the choice is always the same: Do-ership or Surrender. Do I claim to be the creator of the flow, or let it pour as a libation from the still well of Presence?

To offer everything that happens, as it happens, is sanity. Insanity is imagining oneself to be the do-er.

I float on a stream: not an actor or achiever, nor a mover nor a shaker. Any role I play in this drama is just a thought in my head. My real power is not action, but choice. I choose which stream to float on.

Shall I be a leaf on the stream of karma, trapped in the circling eddy of past causes? Or shall I surrender to waves of divine love, that carry me over the ocean of grace from stillness to stillness?

Pain

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.

Beauty

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.

Math

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!"

When You Awoke

When you awoke this morning,
how great was the distance between the worlds?
How far did you travel to remember yourself?
Did you venture to the center of the galaxy
to find your source of light?
Did the journey take a trillion light years,
a thousand lifetimes,
or one breath,
the distance from your forehead to your chest?
You are the Shift that has already happened.
All other distances arise from rims and spirals
in your own glorious body,
where you align seven planets of longing
with the sun in your heart,
and the heart of the void within that.
Go deeper, not farther.
Love sinks.
Have the courage to be groundless.
All spheres of whirling begin here
where with a single breath
you turn these burning cinders
to pearl.

Hugging Now

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.

A Place

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.

Way

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.

New Year Namaste

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 earth 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

Baby Jesus, Save Me From Hipsters

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 I want is people.

Jesus, save me from semi-automatic rifles with extra-long ammo-clips, and from men suffering anxiety about their penis size who think they need such ridiculous weapons.

Baby Jesus, I never understood whether you were conceived out of wedlock or in wedlock, or why the hell it matters; and I never figured out what sort of relationship you had with Mary Magdalene after you grew up; but save me from those who want to define other people's marriages, and other people's families.

Baby Jesus, bless those who work on Christmas day, and all who work two jobs just to earn half a living, while others earn millions collecting stock dividends without working at all: save me from people who call that "justice."

Jesus, save me from noise. Save me from brain-dead music, from amped-up guitars that drown out flutes and gentle acoustic strings and singing bowls. Save me from smooth jazz, from the song of the Food Court, from marching bands and cheer leaders.

Also, please save me from people who dress in polyester suits to match the color of their football team.

Baby Jesus, save me from the next app. Help me get back to real sunlight, water, rocks and mushrooms, without having to photo-shop your entire creation.

Save me from insta-grams of happy hour and lemon fettuccine with arctic char and sweet potato puree.

Jesus, you loved breast milk, bread and wine. You served loaves and fishes and fatted lamb. You never preached about food. In fact, you declared all foods pure. Please save me from people who tell me what to eat and what not to eat. I had a great aunt like that and no one ever married her.

Save me from gluten-free bread, non-alcoholic beer, and vegan health bars. Please, God, just let candy be candy and let me eat a little now and then.

Jesus, save me from glitzy flower quotes by Buddha or Laotzu, that Buddha and Laotzu never said.

Save me from all scriptures, so that I can rediscover them as great stories.

Save me from department store Santas who terrorize toddlers to delight their parents.

Save me from Nordstrom and Wallmart, which are actually the same store. Jesus, I don't mind a one-world government, but save me from a one-world store.

When I was six, I greatly feared that when I grew up the whole world would be a parking lot. Jesus, save me from parking lots and cars.

Dear Baby Jesus, save me from Christmas.

I don't mean the real one; I mean the electronic holiday that makes everybody suicidal, the Nativity scene of midnight shoppers stampeding through the neon super-mall to spend and call it saving. I'm not sure this is what "save" means.

Save Me, baby Jesus. Never stop being born. I don't want to take the Christ out of Christmas, I want to take the Christmas out of Christ.

Please rest in the manger of my body, Jesus; be who I really am.

And never stop filling my heart with your quietness, that star, that Mother's gaze, the white breath of animals, your breath...

Because when I feel that quietness, Lord, deep inside, I am human like you.

Painting, Mary Adcock

Yes There Are Angels

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?

Alignment

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. Your 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, 12 billion light years from earth, the distance between your crown chakra and your solar plexus, 8 million times farther and one million times brighter than the Orion Nebula.

Now is the time to dissolve the illusion of distance. With a single inhalation, travel from earth to heaven; with a single exhalation, travel from the galactic edge to the center.

Worlds depend on your breath. The apocalyptic imagery of the scriptures is written in symbology, referring not to events in the external cosmos, but events in your own body. Let the seven planetary chakras come into alignment with the sun of your heart. And let your heart shift into alignment with the black hole at its core, the mother-womb of pure consciousness.

You are the love you seek. Become the radiant one you've been yearning for. This is the shift, the Second Coming: awaken the Christ in you.

Have a beautiful birth.

Simple

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.

Om Gurave Namah

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.

Your Grace

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

Thank You, Little One

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 burning spot inside me that reacts? Why not observe my own pain instead of blaming the other?

John 33:11 tells us that "Jesus was moved in his spirit, and deeply troubled." See? Even Jesus was vulnerable.

Enter the heart, do not resist the burning, empearl this cinder of pain in a breath, again and again.

The children of the earth are innocent and lovely, but not invulnerable. No one ever promised us a life without loss.

It is only when I surrender to vulnerability that I discover the immortal: a groundless depth, a space within the heart, where moral judgments, emotional reactions, even birth and death, arise and dissolve like dewdrops in the sky. This is why we live. This is why we die.

Thank you, little one, immortal teacher. Pray for us.

Flower (for the Sain Children)

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.

Straight and Narrow

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.

Call It Night

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. 

Gift

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 cup, 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.

The Lesson of Kali: Embrace Every Form

Hecate, as depicted by mystical Christian artist William 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 independent 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, "Assaults on women's rights never come without being disguised as something else." 

The very word "hell" comes from the name of a goddess and is related to Helen, Hellenistic, and Hellas, an ancient name for Greece. Wiccans don't practice evil: they follow the primal earth-centered religion of pre-Christian Europe. Before Christians turned her into a witch from hell, Hecate was a Goddess. The three "weird sisters" of Shakespeare's Macbeth know the fate of the play's hero because, in fact, they are a demonized form of the Three Fates from Greek mythology. 

But Christianity was not always strictly patriarchal. Before the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, Gnostic Christian communities empowered women as leaders, even priests, and regarded the Holy Spirit as the feminine aspect of God. The following hymn is from one of these communities.

Throughout history, some women have been forced to use intimacy as a currency to regain their power: yet such "whores" may be as "spiritual" as any virgin bride. Hence we encounter the paradoxical image of the powerful temple prostitute in the ancient Near East, and the ambiguous mystery of Mary Magdalene in the Jesus stories. The Gnostic Christian hymn, 'Thunder of Perfect Mind,' reveals this paradox. In this hymn from the Nag Hammadi scrolls, we see the Western face of Kali, a vision of the divine Feminine that embraces all her forms, both beautiful and terrible:

I am the first and the last.

I am the honored and the scorned.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am the mother and the daughter.

I am the barren one and many are her sons. 

I am she whose wedding is great,

and I have not taken a husband.

I am the bride and the bridegroom,

and it is my husband who begot me.

I am my mid-wife, 

and the solace of my labor pains.

I am the mother of my father.

I am the staff of his power in his youth,

and he is the rod of my old age.

I am the silence that is incomprehensible

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.

I am the one voice whose sound is many.

I am the utterance of my name.

Why, you who hate me, do you love me?

You who deny me, confess me,

and you who confess me, deny me.

You who know me shall be ignorant,

and those who are ignorant know me.
For I am knowledge and ignorance.

I am shame and boldness.

I am strength and fear.

I am war and peace.

Give heed to me.

I am the disgraced and the exalted.

Give heed to my poverty and to my wealth.

Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,

for you will find me among those who are to come.

And do not look upon me on the dung-heap

nor leave me cast out,

for you will find me in the kingdom.

For I am compassionate and I am cruel.

Be on your guard!

Do not hate my obedience

and do not love my self-control.

In my weakness, do not forsake me,

and do not be afraid of my power. 

Wicker

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, they somehow weave into the harmony of the whole, in one eternal Now that has always already happened in the gaze of the Witness, Mother of Time.

Nature may brook some ruthless economy, but She is never atrocious. War and its idiotic violence never serve the economy of nature. They arise when Believers use their ideals to unravel and "straighten out" nature's wicker. Our intellect cannot fathom the ineluctably woven chaos of She-Who-Is. One may only comprehend her as Wholeness in the now of wonder. Then chaos  resolves into harmony, and every violent or tragic event has its luminous light, its less, its woven thread in the tapestry of perfection. Only through a moment of wonder can we see this wholeness. Only through astonishment is peace possible.

Dance with the morning of things just as they are. Out of that dance arise spontaneous works of Play. 
Works of Play weave the perfect world that is always happening in the wondrous gaze of Mother Wisdom.

Our Burning

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

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.

A Practice

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.

What The Sound Means

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."

4 Worlds with Alice Coltrane

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.

Don't Try

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

Center

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 from the center of the galaxy: Josquin des Prez, Qui Habitat.

Qui habitat in adjutorio Altissimi, in protectione Dei cæli commorabitur. "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." ~Psalm 91:1

I interpret this to mean that one whose awareness merges in the virgin silence, from which all creation arises, will experience spontaneous harmony in the world of action, because all action will be governed by the effortless Tao, without any interference from an individual 'do-er.' Or as Ramana Maharishi puts it, "The real Self is waiting there to take you in. Then whatever is done is done by something else and you have no hand in it."

At Some Point

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 after the bang, nothing
but the inconceivable boredom
of heaven.... O Mother,
deliver us from eternal tedium,
the entropy of perfect peace.
Pray for us now and at the hour, etc...
Recycle us, again and again,
so that we may be useful,
so that we may become
organic fertilizer.
Again and again, recycle us, Mother,
so that we may be food
for mushrooms.

Not Enough Light!

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 gash...
Open it. Wound it wider.

'I Am Enlightened'

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?

Stoned

"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.

'A God With God?'

"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 of virgin silence, the Child is born as the image of divine light. God looks into the mirror of his own Spirit and sees the face of Christ. Then Christ looks in the same mirror and sees You. You were also born of that joy!

Yes, there is a God with God, and that God is I, that God is You, countless Gods with God, reflecting and glorifying the Self. This our Sat-sang and our never-ending Birth.

Bow Down

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.

Rise

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.

What To Say About Wonder

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.

Dog Park

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

Wine

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 something
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.

Education Without Meditation Is Darkness

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.

Divinity and Breath

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 teach us to unite consciousness and breathing, revealing the divinity of our breath through the practice of Sudarshan Kriya!

He is a teacher in the tradition of Jesus. Jesus knew the divinity of his own breath, and awakened others to the divine breath in themselves.

Isn't it time to stop waiting for a Spirit from above, and start breathing the Spirit from our own hearts? Isn't it time to stop expecting the Second Coming, and become the one whom we expect? Isn't it time, not to be Christian, but to be Christ to one another?

Punctuate

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.