Uradiance

The distance from my soul to the Master is the distance of my doubt. It may be ten thousand light years, or a thin veil of mist, a mirage of separation. A single exhalation dispels it, and i am I.   That distance is only the length of my breath, a journey from the space between my eyebrows to the hollow bowl of my chest. The golden thread that leads my heart back to Him does not stretch above me into the heavens, or out over the sea to an ashram in India, but inward, through the depths of my own consciousness, to the golden Sun at the center of my heart.   Here is the truth. There is nothing I receive from the hug of Divine Mother, the darshan of the Master, the touch of my forehead on the Guru's sandals, six months in the ashram, or even the most secret whisper of the Divine in my ear, that I cannot receive where I already am, right here in my own meditation room, breathing down to the deepest center of the soul. This is not to say there is no need for the ...

"I do not call you servants anymore... I call you Friends." ~John 15:15 No need to keep returning to the garden, seeking another glance, another taste of the flower. The essence of Guru Shakti permeates us now, however far we wander, the seasoned wine of an ancient friendship. It is light and nonbinding, this perfume. Love is freedom. No need to worship a white robe, a beard, a pair of sandals. We worship the light that radiates from our own heart's depth. Then we serve the light in every person we meet. This is true bhakti, and this inward light is the real Guru.

  My problems arise when I try to do what is happening... I would be declared insane if I claimed to make the sun rise, the seasons change, the earth turn, and the stars rotate through the Zodiac. Why am I any less insane if I claim to bake bread, make money, or lift a single stone? I cannot even "do" the physiology in my own body. Do I breathe my breath while sleeping? Who breathes me? Do I beat my heart? Who beats it day and night? I cannot control the morphology of a single cell, or instruct a strand of DNA to mutate and not to mutate. Therefor, when I work or play, who works and plays? When I achieve success, who succeeds, who fails? When I work hard, the work gets done, but where does "hard" come from? One person says, "This is hard work." Another accomplishes that same work without stress. What is the difference? Is it in the work done, or in the sense of do-ership imposed by the mind? There are two ways to be ignorant and karmic...

    What happens  to pain  when we don't  resist?

Instead of telling your kids all those violent myths about "heroes" slaughtering their enemies in the name of God, you might tell them this one... God was so plagued by human prayers, he needed some quiet time. All he heard was, "I want, I want, I want. Why won't you give me this, why won't you give me that!" The voices in God's head drove God crazy. So God left the temple and hid in the forest where it was peaceful. But people found him in a tree and started praying to the trees, "I want this, I want that!" So God hid in a rock in the desert. But people started worshiping stones, crystals, Shiva lingams, praying, "Please fix this for me, please fix that!" Then God hid in a snake. "They'll never look for me here!" But people started worshiping God in the form of serpents and other animals, "O Serpent God, give me, give me, give me! Why won't you answer all my prayers?" Then God escaped into...

It's not enough to be an activist. We have to do nothing too. It is so important to honor silence! During a very stressful time in the world, when tension, antagonism, disconnection abound, we need to imbibe the power of Silence and give it to the world for grounding and stability. Most of us focus too much on what happens in silence - the changing forms that arise in formless space, the sounds coming and going, the chaos - but we don't attend to the spaciousness in which it's all happening. Silence may embrace chaos, but the Silence that contains it is creativity, nourishment, and peace. Have you ever shifted the background to the foreground, and honored Silence itself? Please honor pure Silence until it solidifies into a jewel, shining out of your breastbone, sparkling deep in your center, flooding your heart with pulsations of pure Presence, the Presence of divine Being. This is an essential practice for sanity during chaotic times. Do it not just for y...

For a Rumi to be, there must be a Shams. How easily we forget that St. Francis of Assisi was not just a flower child. He was a deeply disciplined practitioner of daily prayer, surrendered to his Master Jesus. How easily we forget that Bu ddhist poets who spoke of spontaneous satori were profoundly absorbed in meditation practices of 'Zen,' a word which comes from the Chinese 'Chan,' which comes from the Sanskrit 'Dyan,' which is the seventh limb of Astanga Yoga, meaning 'Meditation.' How easily we quote Rumi's most ecstatic verses, forgetting that he was devoted to the feet of his guru, Shams, from whom he received initiation; that he and his master were embroiled in the religious disputes of their age, committed for life and for death. Rumi spent his life in exile because of his beliefs; his master, Shams, was murdered by his rivals. How easily we smell the rose blossom, and forget that it has been deeply rooted in one place ...

How cruel to imagine that there is no sacred distance between us. Otherwise we are ruthlessly One, and love is impossible. Distance is an ocean of delight. Therefor, we praise the distance, and swim through it with our whole flesh. (P icture: Ariadne in Naxos , Evelyn de Morgan, 1877)

  A hawk attacked a serpent who was sunning on a rock. Repeatedly the hawk aimed its beak at the serpent and dived down. Each time the hawk attacked, the serpent languidly and effortlessly rolled its body, and the hawk missed its mark. Over and over again the hawk attacked with intense concentration, while the serpent merely followed its nature, lounging in the sunlight, rolling ever so slightly, this way and that. Finally, the hawk broke its neck against the naked stone. The serpent continued to luxuriate in a pool of afternoon sunlight.   Non-resistance would seem to be the opposite of discipline. But non-resistance is the final discipline, the most radical form of activism. Awareness is contracted and over-shadowed by whatever it resists. This contraction of awareness is ego. Ego is nothing but the naturally-expanded, already-liberated, sparkling clarity of awareness contracted and self-limited by resisting some form that arises within it . In med...

What a tragedy to waste our life imitating someone else's work, no matter how great, instead of doing our own, however humble. Life has given each one of us a Gift to share. No one else in the world can give it. This earth would not be complete without your small but essential Gift. Your duty is not to worry about how "great" it is, but to share it unconditionally. That is the secret o f joy. Let us not define our work as others define work, or measure its value by status or income. Our work may be a global business enterprise, or a gentle smile. It may be the Gift of listening, or the simple act of being present, and letting a troubled heart feel heard. Our work may be our children. Our work may be food for the hungry, or singing to feed souls. The work may be a single poem, a single painting, one well-thrown pot, after a lifetime of practice. We abandon it to the earth, for others to find. How do we know our Gift, our Dharma, our own unique Heartw...

“Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean." ~Mark 7:17 If your soul is troubled, even the purest food can make you sick. If your heart is full of light, you can eat with the "common" folk and the food will be blessed by your love - but more likely, by theirs. Some people feel fortunate to have any food at all.

'Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Release Cancer-Causing Chemicals': LINK Now it turns out that energy saving light bulbs are bad for me. Whatever was good for me turns out to be bad. Peanuts. Milk. How about soymilk? Yes, even organic unsweetened soymilk. And fuck whole wheat. I mean, with all that gluten. Every luscious green I buy in the farmer's market: tainted with some chemical or GMO that blew in on the breeze. And even the breeze, tainted with over 400 parts per million Co2. Gag me with a spoon. We're doomed. Every particle of dust is impure. The stars are impure. Kali and Shiva are impure. Jesus is having impure thoughts about Mary Magdalene. The battery in my $45,000 electric car, if I could afford one. According to my manic-depressive girlfriend, the perfect guru made her manic-depressive. Tell me about it. Time and space are tainted.  Everything is tainted. Shit. You can say that again. Perfectly impure. Absolutely perfect with tain...

Complimentarity is as important in politics as in quantum physics. The complimentarity of free markets and regulatory government, is as essential as the interrelationship of particle and wave. Why this naive and childish antagonism between socialism and free enterprise? Government and free markets should work together as a dynamic polarity, the positive and negative energies of one living system. They are compliments, not antagonists. They are Yin and Yang, not Good and Evil. The role of regulatory government is not to eliminate free enterprise but to keep it free. Free from the monopolizing, cannibalizing power of the multinational mega-corporations. Good government keeps the playing field even, providing investments and tax incentives for small business start-ups, especially in economically depressed areas of the nation. The real enemy of the free market is not government, but the mega-corporation. For when the mega-corp dominates the market, it fixes prices and eats up ...

Whether I choose to focus my attention on beauty or conflict, wherever I look in this world I am resonating with myself. And whoever I blame for the problems I see - their capitalism or their socialism, their political party or their religious creed, their economic class, their color, or their whiteness - I am really blaming a shadow of myself, some aspect of my own humanity that I have not forgiven. I see another's actions, but I cannot see their motives. The motives I ascribe to their actions reflect the quality of my heart, not theirs.

She said, "I am the Power, I am the Shakti, I am creating a new earth. "I do not bring change in the old way, through your activism, politics, or religion. I am subtler and more intimate now, like the mist that watered the firmament before creation. "I do not knock and enter, I seep through crevices of Being. You must be very quiet to receive me. Like a tincture of musk and poppies, I infuse. I use the yoni and the wound, the furrow. I fill the black hole with glittering stars of pure possibility; not far away, at the center of a galaxy, but in the core of your proton, the heart of each atom in your body. "I do not need your works, your words, or your ideas. I need your Being. For the gateway to the new earth, the portal where you welcome me, is the stillness between your deeds, the silence between your words, the space between your thoughts. That is where we dance, and turn particles into waves. "To receive me, do dynamically less t...

Now as never be fore in his tory, a perfect grace and healing power pours into this world. But it enters in a subtler and more intimate wa y. It does not come through our activism, our words, or e ven our thoughts. It infuses through the space between our thoughts, the silence between our words, the stillness between our actions. T o taste t h is miraculous nectar of Presence, one must simply rest in the heart, and shift awareness from thinking to Being. The distance traveled is less than the width of a hair, but it is the portal to a new earth. This shift is not happening TO us. It IS us. It is not difficult. In fact, it is too simple, for the ego wants to DO something. Mind loves difficulty. But Grace requires b eing without doing or thinking for a little while. T h is new he aling p ower cannot be organized, institutionalized , occ upied, or enacted. It does not come through politica l or religious work. Its medium is Presence itself. Institutions, belief-systems, an...

"When you think everything is someone else´s fault, you will suffer a lot."  ~Dalai Lama There are two things that crush the heart: politics and religion. If politics stifles your laughter and religion stifles your tears, better go plant a garden. Bury your mind in the dirt where there is no right or wrong. That's where seeds grow. Let belief be manure for redder tomatoes. Let words be fertilizer for silence.

Who draws the borderline? Does the finger of God draw the borderline in rock and sand and river water? Were borders here when Creator Raven whispered the curved world with her wings, this planet without right angles or straight edges anywhere? Were borders here when tribes and herds worked out agreements for sharing water hole and prairie? Were borders here before the white man came to drill the M other for black blood? Strange how Invader drives the tribes out of their home, then carves borderlines, pretending those lives were written in the earth at the first dawn. Who drew the borders of Jordon, Kuwait, Iraq? Invader did, not Arab. Invader etched them in the desert sand in 1922, to serve the 'Anglo-Persian Oil Company' now known as British Petroleum. Who drew the borders of Israel? Invader did, not Canaanite or native Palestinian. Who drew the borders of Ghana, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Rwanda, and that garment factory Lesotho? Not Ashanti or Ibo, Bantu or Mas...

When I laugh, I have no chakras. When my heart is immersed in love, my horoscope contains no signs or planets, just Light. These so-called "chakras" are not wheels or centers of light. They are blocks and obstacles, corks on the bottles of God's wine. The moment I smile genuinely from the heart, my chakras dissolve. Shakti sparkles and pours, and Shakti doesn't care what color the cup is. My work is just to overflow. This horoscope won't bring me one step nearer the Beloved. The moment my eyes brim over, my horoscope is an empty circle. Planets and stars are as dust in the sunbeam I Am. It is only when I am not in love that I busy my mind with signs and conjunctions, chakras and meridians, eight limbs of Yoga, Kabbalah, initiation, and the politics of getting somewhere. Love is pathless. * A friend asked, "Is astrology just for the personality, the ego, the lower self?" I would reply: The personality isn't lower. It's just on the ...

Truth is not the conclusion of a logically argued chain of thoughts, because no chain of thoughts ever ends. Nor can Truth be contained in a single thought, because a single thought evaporates as soon as it is born. Truth is not the content of the mind, because the content of the mind dissolves like mist: not even the most intelligent person remembers their own beliefs when falling asleep. Could it be that Truth has nothing to do with thought at all? Perhaps we would come nearer to Truth if we looked into the emptiness between thoughts, the space around thoughts, the clarity before thoughts. That clarity is not an idea. It is pure awareness. It is the gentle self-effulgent light of compassion, the bliss of unbounded silence, the sparkling of infinite possibility. It is not merely the womb of creation, but the womb of Creator. It erases it's own "it." Now look at our culture. What is America based on today? Argument. Ceaseless argument paralyzes ou...

Ultimately, I am not afraid of any authority, spiritual or temporal. I am not afraid of the god, the government, or the corporation. I am not afraid of the terrorist or the criminal. I am not afraid of any principality or power in heaven or earth. What I really fear is my own heart, my infinite capacity for tenderness. I fear the terrifying softness of surrender to love. Yet that tenderness is my deepest strength. And I would never be emboldened to recognize this paradox, vulnerability and power at the very heart of my humanity, unless I met a living person who embodied and lived it with each breath. This is the role of the Master in my life.

Let May Day bring peace. The blue sky of non-violence. At least for a brief moment today, discriminate between Awareness and Mind. For that moment, you will know eternity. This is the way to Peace.   G az ing at the sky through a lattice of b lossoming branches , I realize that the root of human violence is the failure to discriminate between consciou sness and thought.   B ranches against clear blue. The network of budding twi g s is like the network of thoughts and the network of neurons in the brain . F or b rain and thou ght are the same : overgrown pathway s of reaction, fear and desire.   But the blue sky is awareness itself. Awareness can witness thoughts, but doesn't need to get entangled in them, any more than the sky gets entangled in a tree.  M ind carries the past into the present , with all the confli cts of desi re, resentment , reaction, revenge. Mind pro jects its story of conflict into the world, meet ing other stories. ...