Uradiance

"I place on the altar of dawn t he quiet loyalty of breath..." ~John O'Donahue I invite you to see the Cross as creation's radiant blossom, in all its multiplicity and paradox, opening its petals from a singular uncreated center. What beauty, what loss, what fullness, what emptiness, the Cross contains! Its horizontal beams are the past and future. Its vertical beams are consciousness and matter. In our world of opposites, liberation only comes through the Cross, which is the experience and transcendence of polarity. When our conflicted mind of opposites is crucified, we pass through the center, into eternity. But this is not something we do after death: it is this very moment of complete acceptance. The center of the Cross is the matrix that embraces, and by embracing transcends, every pair of opposites: pain and beauty, sorrow and joy, body and soul, thorn and rose. From the center of the Cross, I see that past and future were only thoughts, spirit and mat...

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." ~Rumi Changing the world is not an option. I am vain and deluded to think that I can change the world. Not even Jesus, through his death and resurrection, could change the world. What changes is the heart. And that is everything. Now the Marxist believes that we must change the world to change the heart. The Christian begins by changing the heart, and that is a life's work. This is why, despite all the goble-dee-gook of "liberation theology," the Marxist will inevitably reject Christianity, and the Christian will eventually reject Marxism.

The Feast of the Resurrection, "Easter," is no mere Spring fertility rite, nor an anticipation of heaven after death. In celebrating this mystery, we honor the spiritual potential of matter. We affirm that we take the body with us on the spiritual journey. We proclaim that matter and spirit are a single energy, one field of divine Radiance. For we are not born into bodies life after life as a fall, a punishment, or a karmic flaw. We are here to participate in the spiritual evolution of matter. Whether we take it as historical fact or symbol, the Resurrection of Jesus reveals the infinite and eternal destiny of our flesh. As the body of Jesus ascended into divine light, so shall we. It is not that souls ascend out of the body, but that the body ascends. In the words of the 2nd Century theologian, St. Athanasius, "God became human so that humanity could become God." We are made of evolving and ascending matter. We do not become angels: we keep l...

Waves of mind settle back into particles of the body. Particles of the body settle back into waves of mind. Subject and object collapse into the heart. The world as perceived is a mirage in the still desert air of the perceiver. When this becomes transparent, which it always already is, both mind and body relax, and there is no seeking. The n we can be sure there is no possible hope in religion, politics, astrology, metaphysics, or any system of belief, because all knowledge entraps us in the cage of subject and object, and every thought about the world "out there," no matter how brilliant, sustains our separation from it. Trying to realize the truth through a system of thought is like trying to catch the sea in a net.  Now we are going to eat coffee ice cream with crushed walnuts and melted chocolate and a dash of Kalua. Yes, and our feast will be precisely the bliss of Pythagoras when he heard the music of the spheres,  the ecstasy of Theresa when an angel pierc...

Your body is a perfect land; the rhythm of your seasons keeps eternal time. Your skin is perfectly lined and dimpled; you are written with runes. The algebra of your body is so perfectly factored that your curves approach no asymptote; No parallels or right angles, only the majesty of crescents, half-completed circles of possibility. You shatter the fractal, you seep incompleteness because you are full; a perfect spiral stumbling outward in discovery, a spine of split-open melons. You are the fall, you are the dance; your hollows glow like fruit. You contain all phases of the moon, your belly perfectly swelling in a round reflecting sea. I am not a farmer, I am the singer of this poem; I do not harvest corn and wheat from the gentle slopes and valleys of your perfect body. Nor do I gather the golden pink intoxicating fungi from your dank and perfect woodland shadows. I gather your music, I sing your body; you are the garden, I am only the Spring. Your h...

There are three kinds of knowledge. First, the knowledge of those who think they know, but really know nothing but their thoughts. Second, the knowledge of those who think they don't know. And third, the knowledge of awareness without thinking. Those who think they know dwell in ignorance and bring sorrow. Those who think they do not know are on the path; they enjoy the fruits of humility. Those who know awareness without thinking are awake; they are fully present; they bring peace.

I searched for a practice to lead me there. The search was a mountain, the practice a wall. I was the distance between us. But you were very near. You whispered in my breath, "Just give me this." I found you in my heart. Now my practice is You.

"Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again." ~Thich Nhat Hanh "The mind is the king of the senses, but the breath is the king of the mind." ~Hatha Yoga Pradipika   "Let Jesus be your breath." ~Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, 13th C. Orthodox Christian.  All spiritual traditions are united by gentle attention to the breath, because the breath is the spirit and the spirit is the breath . Ruach means both spirit and breath in Biblical Hebrew. Pneuma means both spirit and breath in New Testament Greek. Chi unites spirit and breath in Taoism. Prana unites spirit and breath in Yoga.  Let every breath be an invitation to soften the heart of the world.

O mind, you drop words into this well, weeping for What Should Be. If you let the water grow still, you could see the Heart gazing back, drowned in the silence of what Is. "When I am silent, I fall into that place where everything is music." ~Rumi

Sugar from the cane sweetens a thousand dishes, yet the cane grows from a seed that has no sweetness, no taste at all. Transcendental Deep Meditation does not taste like fruit because it takes you to the seed. And that is why so many who crave sweets reject such an effortless yet profound meditation. They do not understand that, entering into transcendental silence, one goes beyond sweet and bitter, light and dark, pleasant and unpleasant. One enters the absolute Source of creation, where all possibilities are concentrated into pure Truth, pure Being, pure Consciousness, the way all the branches, flowers and fruits of the sugar cane plant are concentrated in a hidden seed. The turiya state of awareness, as explained in the Upanishads, is beyond waking, dreaming and sleep. In turiya there is no experience whatsoever, because there is no experiencer. There is no subject-object relationship because there are not two. There is absolutely no relativity. Yet emerging from meditati...

My love for you is the way of dissolving,  taught by the pollen to the bee.  No blossom is required; the fragrance has escaped its form.  I am your breath, I have entered your core.  It is you who must draw nearer now. "How can I draw near?" you ask.  Become perfect, accept yourself just as you are.  This is what God does with a twig,  and that is how it buds. This is what God does with a bud and that is how it bursts. Why do a mother's nipples flow with milk? Because, in the thirst of her baby, she sees her own divinity.

When the heart ripens, the whole world tastes sweet. But when the heart is unconscious, the world tastes bitter and hard as unripe fruit. We try to sweeten our senses with artificial stimulants: alcohol, drugs, dangerous edgy adventure, endless groping for a sexual partner, and a barrage of media noise, all to no avail. Because nothing sweetens the world from outside. Only the fragrance released from our innermost core can do that. What sweetens and softens our core? Divine Grace. Only the sunbeam touch of the master's Grace ripens us from within.

Since there is no final proof, its all a story, and we get to believe whichever story we choose. Which story do you prefer? (1) The story about a universe that is random and has no purpose, no plot? Random particles from the void combine to form intricately complex nervous systems that somehow, just by chance, generate thought, imagination and memory. And out of this random chaos without a story we start creating... a story! Yes, we creatures of the universe can do something that the universe cannot do. (2) Here is the other story: A boundless field of pure consciousness yearns to experience itself as an other for the sake of love, and so generates other selves out of its Self-awareness. Needing a vehicles to separate individual selves, this one supreme consciousness solidifies into matter and evolves ever more complex nervous systems, until the human body can say, like its divine progenitor, "I Am." Then, having atomized the absolute One into an infinite diversity, th...

The master is not here to help you achieve great deeds. The master is here to help you become ordinary. Becoming an ordinary human being is the greatest achievement. It means that you forgive everything, and surrender. Wondrous deeds, both great and small, spring from the soil of the ordinary. If you ask someone who has done a deed that others call "great" and "heroic," they will tell you that they never set out to do something great or heroic. They responded to an impulse of natural human compassion. For them, in that moment, the extraordinary was ordinary. If there is a God and a Judgment, when we stand before the throne of the Almighty, God will not ask us what extraordinary deeds we have accomplished. God will ask us if we succeeded in becoming human.

Your child does not need a fancy school or fancy clothes or fancy vacations or a fancy house. Your child needs only one small treasure for a lifetime, and it cannot be purchased. Your child needs a taste of Unconditional Love. Without a taste of that Love, we cannot feel at home anywhere, no matter how much wealth, status or education we acquire. A heart-worm of anxiety will spoil the fruit of every achievement, and a nagging question will haunt our days: "Am I really acceptable? Do I really have a right to be here? Am I not a stranger on the earth?" Through that unanswered question, we will invent a culture, an economy, a religion, alienated from the Mother and alienated from the planet we walk on. Yet with a foundation in Unconditional Love, yes, even the briefest taste in our memory, we will always feel a living Center within, a Sun behind the clouds. We will feel at home on the earth because there once was Love at home, and that Love ever abid es i...

Rest in a heartbeat. All through the darkest hours, the message of your heartbeat is so clear, so regular: "Am wonderful, Am wonderful, Am wonderful." Now some very clever person will ask, "Who is the I who makes this claim?" Am not the ego who clings to a dream of continuity, but the Ecstatic Am, completely liberated to die each moment. Am not constructed from a chain of thoughts.  When dawn sparkles on the sea, which spark of dazzling bewilderment specifically are "you"? To analyze the Self and Not-Self is to grasp for sunbeams on waves. D ancing on a sea of loss and dissolution, Am buoyed up, recreated, never one moment old, b eating out of the void, returning to the void. Teachers of non-dualism and nirvana cause unnatural strain, and only contribute more suffering to the world, if they tell their students to annihilate the ecstatic Am of the heart.  Let the ecstasy of existence throb from the silence of No-Self. A photon of light ...

There is nothing more imperishable than your real smile, the smile that seeks nothing from others, the smile that wells up from the same source as tears, the smile from the silent core of your heart, shining through night and day, through birth and death.

There are as many paths to God as human hearts, as many names for God as there are sighs. First we talk philosophy, then get serious and sing. Names drown in music. Lovers quarrel over where to have supper, then they eat, drink wine, and gaze between candles with perfect understanding in the silent language of fire. We have a hundred restaurants to choose from, but the point is what happens when we are full. الطرق إلى الله هناك طرق عديدة إلى الله بعدد قلوب البشر. وأسماء كثيرة لله بعدد تنهدات القلوب. أولا نتحدث في الفلسفة، ثم نتحول إلى الجِدية ، فنغنّي . وتغرق أسماؤنا في الموسيقى . يتجادل ال محبان عن مكان العشاء، بعدها يتناولان الطعام، ويشربان الخمرة، ويحدقان بين الشموع في تفاهم مطلق عبر لغة النار الصامتة . لدينا مئات المطاعم لنختار من بينها، لكن الأهم ه و ما يحدث عند الثمالة . Translated into Arabic by Dana Chamseddine Painting by Jeri Moore

It is not a lover your body needs but the flame of Presence upon the wick of its agreement. Ignite your reed of stars. Sway with the rhythm of your hollowness. What you see in other eyes is the yearning you feel for where the yearning begins.

To perceive the beauty of the Rose without losing the beauty of the Perceiver, is to redeem the world. When I perceive a thing that Is, but do not perceive its Being, I am lost in materialism. But when I perceive a thing without losing my perception of the Being who creates, pervades, and encompasses it, I enter the ocean of God. No thing is blissful. Yet Being is bliss. When we meditate, we dive into the pure bliss of Being, so that when we emerge from meditation, we may truly taste the world, redeeming the world with mere consciousness, by perceiving things that Are without losing the perception of their Being. After meditation, I perceive not only this rose, but its Being. All things that Are, bathe in the clarity of the ocean of their Being, and their Being is who I Am.

"Jesus pronounced all foods pure." ~Mark 7:19 When you're not in love, all food is unclean. When you're in love, you can eat anything. I've been in love since the creation of the world. Tonight I'm having Ben & Jerry's  Mycelium Honey Mushroom  Butterscotch Peyote Crunch. I love you.

"The rose led us to our eyes." (Hafiz) Silence is an organizing principle more potent that thought. God is no more grasped by thought than the colors of a sunset, the fragrance of a rose, or the cry of a mother at the birth of her child. Beauty stuns the mind into silence, beauty heals, beauty awakens. Beauty is destiny, and God is the beauty in beautiful things. In beauty there is no need for belief. Find small beauties in an ordinary day. Share them. Heal your world with a hundred stunned silences! God is a Presence, not a thought. The grace of fully awakened Presence descends like morning dew out of the climate of a clear heart, freed from thinking. Can God be contained in a belief, in words or images fabricated out of thinking? Is God the conclusion of an intellectual argument? A thought cannot apprehend anything but another thought. Therefor, thoughts cannot find God. Thoughts can only find images of themselves, graven out of mind-stuff. Idols molded f...

Solidify your consciousness into a diamond; dissolve your matter into light. Where the rivers converge, attend the marriage of the Goddess and Lord Shiva. They dance in every atom of your body, every shimmer of your mind; one is a particle, the other a wave, two forms, one love. There is nothing to hold in concentration, there is nothing to reject as impure; simply attend, attend the wedding! Their dispassionate passion creates the world, an orgasm beyond desire, a consummation that has always already happened. He sings, "Your love is sweeter than wine; your name is perfume poured out!" She sings, "Lead me into your chamber, O King; I am the garden and you are the Spring!" Attend whoever you are, wherever you have been; attend whether saint or sinner, foolish or wise. Have you lost your invitation? It makes no difference: attend! Whether you sit with the guests of the Bride or the Groom, whether you come by way of Matter or Spirit: attend! ...

Krishna Loka, Brahma Loka, the world of Krishna, the world of Brahma. These are locations. The Sanskrit "loka" is the root of the English "local." In the end all spirituality, like all politics, is local. When we first begin to transcend and experience divine emptiness, boundless awareness free from thought, that purity of consciousness may seem to be cosmic, diffuse, universal. But as the experience deepens, consciousness solidifies into a jewel. We also know from quantum physics that the vacuum contains "virtual electrons" of energy and "virtual photons" of light. These waves or "fluctuations of the vacuum" each express the infinite field. Yet in a paradox which lies at the heart of matter, these non-localized waves also behave as local particles, "lokas" in the grid of the void. Spirituality is the paradoxical union of the particular and the boundless. We enter cosmic consciousness through a breath, a body, an atom...

Your goal has blossomed into a thousand paths. Each petal leads back to the pollen where you began. Slowly, you move in all directions, traveling nowhere. When anyone asks you to dance, ever so politely you reply, 'No thank you. Can't you see, I am already given to whirling?' This is the etiquette of God's betrothed. Even if Springtime were to bow at your feet, you would demure, you would say, 'I only grow wild for the One who planted the garden.'

'God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.' ~Matthew 5:45 Light doesn't care where it shines. Neither does Grace. A buttercup receives as much radiance as the whole Catholic Church. The fluttering silence of a dragonfly can teach you as much as the Master. The notion that God picks and chooses is an invention of the human ego. Grace does not prefer a golden grail to an earthen jar, or a Christian cup to a Buddhist bowl. God is a profligate wine steward offering the best vintage all night long, to the party crasher as well as the invited guest. Our capacity to receive varies not according to God's preference, but to the degree that our cup is empty. Philippians 2:7 states that Jesus 'emptied himself' completely. The Greek word is 'kinosis,' self-emptying. That is why he was so full of light. Once I asked my Gurudev, 'Who are you, really? Some compare you to Shankara, to Jesu...

"Your work is grace, my work is opening. Your work is light, my work is receiving. Your work is to pour, my work is overflowing. Under the milk of your beams, the gold  invisible awakening, the furious nectar  of desire from pale broken seeds,  this empty cup, a wild rose among thorns.  I am the garden, you are the Spring. My achievement is your presence."  Thus ends the song I heard among the roots and twigs this morning.  We learn by listening to creatures  who sing when they burst open. Painting by Georgia O'Keefe

If I want to savor a moment in eternity it's up to me to make the time. I am here to lead an intentional life. It's useless to say, "All time is sacred, every now is eternal." Those are just words. Eternity is an experience, and it is completely different from duration. That is why the New Testament has different words for chronological time, chronos , and the eternal now, kairos . We intentionally set aside sacred times for prayer, meditation, chanting, worship. Then by grace, the eternal Presence begins to seep into time. It's useless for me to say, "The whole earth is sacred," if I am too careless to hold space intentionally, sacred space for song, for dance, for worship. When I hold sacred space, the all-pervading Presence gradually seeps into my footsteps. Yes, eventually wherever I walk becomes sacred. In Black Elk's words, "Let every step you take be as a prayer." Yet this gift of grace flows into my life only if I make room f...

To recharge the universe with warmth and color, shift attention from what you want to what you have. One blossom, dripping with raindrops, is enough. Desire drains, but gratitude creates. Photo by almost alice

It's all about opening the souls of your feet to the dew of the earth, and the crown of your head to the song of the stars, and feeling what runs up, and feeling what runs down, and feeling where they kiss in the spiral and the helix of your heart.

The only serious theological question for Christians is, where is Christ right now? That is the great Christian koan. I studied in seminary for years with some of the world's great Biblical scholars. I read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek. I took many courses in Christian history, philosophy, theology. They provided lots of data about the Jesus of history, and lots of speculations about his coming in the future, but these teachings never answered the one question of real importance for a Christian: how can I experience Christ in this very moment? I did service work in prisons, mental hospitals and homeless shelters. I actually ran a shelter for families. I looked for Christ in the poor and the hungry and the sick. This work brought me closer to his countenance than studying books! But still, I did not actually meet Christ in person, touch his radiance, or experience the substance of his Being. So I kept asking the Christian koan: where is Christ right now? Through a simpl...

First I argued with my heart. Then I listened to my heart. Then I rested in my heart. Then I dissolved. Now there is only a plum blossom. But a vague memory lingers, the memory of a story; it seems so long ago. The story of a journey, a st ruggle, a mountaintop. Such melodrama! A tale of struggle and quest affirmed by countless ancient books, myths, saints, prophecies, rituals. All over now, like a dream. What remains is the radiance of the heart, the grace of the heart molding figures out of light, dissolving figures into light. Selah. No quest, no struggle, no mountain top: only the miraculous opening of a plum blossom.

Stay with the seed. If we keep dissolving the great into the small, we will never lose touch with the infinite. In the changeless space of the Witness, we marvel as we watch outmoded systems collapse. Even our so-called "government ." No system - financial, military, or religious - is too big to fail. Old global hierarchies are rapidly passing away. As we give thanks for the whole dance of creation and destruction, we choose to focus on creation. In this beautiful dance of Kali, we allow bloated dysfunctional institutions to dissolve back into elemental particles of human community: Circles. At this moment in our evolution, we are not called to form mass movements or national organizations, but small local circles. Circles regenerate humanity from the humblest grass roots level. When we create local shamanic circles, our global destiny organizes itself. We don't waste our vast ever-expanding Presence on something so small as the future. Where...