Uradiance

The essence of shamanism is to play  with the gifts in your body.  What is beyond is here. What is here is beyond. No priest or guru can show you. Trust your nose. The scent is everywhere. Our shamanic alter on the floor of the Evergreen College Farm House, during a retreat in shape shifting into higher consciousness, and healing with stones and plants, led by Cedar Llyn Roberts of the Olympic Mountain EarthWisdom Circle. Thank you, Cedar.

The limitless sky of awareness apparently emerges from sleep into waking, because a thin veil of cloud drifts away. After a deep blue moment of eternal radiance, the mind breathlessly rushes in, whispering, "I'm back. What shall we worry about today?" Dear friend, the past does not exist. Why not wake in the sweetness that is never one moment old, and pierce this dewdrop earth as a ray of God?

History is a post-Biblical concept. Biblical stories suggest something more important than "history": the living power of Christ-consciousness embodied in a human life.  I always find it interesting that some people preach against the Bible as much as true believers preach in favor of it. But people who rant against the Bible must be attached to it on some level. If their unconscious were not entangled in the Bible, they wouldn't spend so much energy fighting it. Preaching against the Bible is especially futile when one objects on the grounds that the Bible could not possibly be historically true. Ya' think? Of course the Bible isn't literal: it was never intended to be.  Do we object to Shakespeare because his plays aren't accurate journalism? We find profound psychological symbolism in ancient myths and tribal stories: do we object that they aren't literal histories? How about Tibetan mandalas: do we reject them because they aren't accura...

Awareness is not a method or a practice. There are many yogic methods for removing stress from the system, removing blockages from the physical, pranic, emotional, and mental bodies. But these techniques can only cleanse the channels of consciousness; they cannot create, enhance, or "raise" consciousness itself. Awareness gently, silently explodes from pure existence, self-luminous, ever-expanding, boundless, perfectly whole and blissful. Awareness has no cause. No effort is made to acquire it. You may need to unblock your system here and there, but don't let anyone ever tell you that you need to get to a higher or more advanced level of consciousness. If you are awake, and aware that you are awake, you hold infinity in your fingertips. Even nearer than that. Nearer than this breath, nearer than the next thought, nearer than the I of Am. The moment you awaken, you are infinite, you are pure, you are the divine Being. No matter who you have been in the past, no matter wh...

The pinnacle of evolution's complexity is the experience of simplicity. Our flesh  was raveled up with galaxies before we were born. To connect the earth and stars  requires no science or magic. Simply awaken to what you are.

If there is a God in heaven who seeks an accounting when we get there, She will not ask whether we were 'right' in our beliefs, but whether we loved. And what is the measure of our love? Not how much we changed the world - for if truth be known, the world changes hardly at all - but how much of ourselves we poured out, expecting nothing in return.

Our minds get so anxious about the world, about vast and tiny circles turning round their eternal centers, when in fact hardly anything is actually happening but the mind's own self-agitation. Take a clear look at this phenomenon called "the world": constant repetition of the same patterns and karmic cycles, the same stories furiously told again and again, with only slight variation in names and faces. What changes? What actually happens ? Atoms and galaxies swirling in the void, keeping very much to their orbits and cycles in a great waltz. What changes is mind, superimposing its fickle chaos onto the screen of energy. If we want to bring the world some peace, settle down the mind. If we want to save the earth, save it from this mind.

   In Orthodox Christian iconography, Mary Magdalene always holds an egg. Whose egg? Has it been fertilized? By whom?  According to the Vedas, the cosmos springs from Hiranyagharba, the Golden Egg. In the book of Genesis, the egg is implicit in the Hebrew word roots. Earth is born from the primal sea of "Tohu Bohu: formless and void." Over the oceanic abyss breathes "Ruach elohim": literally "breath of gods." The Spirit-breath is described as "moving over the face of the waters: m'rekapheth al pane h'yom." The verbal root for "moving" is "rekaph," which originally depicted the ruffling feathers of a mother bird brooding on her egg. Thus the Spirit of God stirring the waters is an image of motherhood. Who stirs the void like a hen warming her egg? Quantum physicists call these ripples in formlessness "fluctuations of the vacuum." Pulses of pure intelligence, waves of mathematical probability, vibr...

I choose to let my heart become a wave and not a particle. Engaged in simple acts of kindness, filled with the silence of love, I feel my heart melt and expand into the ocean of love. Entangled in criticism and judgment, even when I am 'right,' I feel my heart contract and condense into a separate particle. My heart cannot contract and expand, judge and love, at the same time. I get to choose my heart.

You worship the Master as if he wasn't just like you. But why did the Master come? Only to remind you, friend, that you and the Lord of Love were born of one mother. His breath is the same air. His soles are covered with the same dust. Both of you say, "I Am," yet the Am is one. You bow and wash his feet in your tears, but a real Master will not accept such behavior. He lifts you up into his smile and whispers the true name of Light in your ear. Then he bows to you, you bow to me, I bow to the poorest flower. In the ocean of grace, from crown to toes, we wash each others perfect bodies.

The pharaoh represents the stubbornness of our mind, refusing to surrender and let evolution flow. The "firstborn" that must be sacrificed is the ego's most cherished opinion or attachment, blocking the evolutionary flow. Israel symbolizes the impulse of evolving consciousness, yearning to journey from bondage to liberation, back to the garden of the Heart. This journey leads her over the space of purification (the desert), through the stream of enlightenment (the river Jordon), and into into the state of union (the promised land) flowing with shakti and ananda (milk and honey). Unfortunately, when we take the Bible literally instead of reading its sublime allegory, we start fighting over land. Let the chariots of your mind be drowned in the sea of grace. Have a blessed Passover.

Yeats wrote, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold..." The poet may have more wisely said, "Let things fall apart. Why cling to a center?" At times of dissolution and change, rest a few moments, sit quietly, and just let everything fa ll apart... That's right. Don't try to hold it together. Let it fall apart completely. Then notice what remains. Vast imperishable Existence. An Existence that has nothing to do with this mind, an Existence that sustains all with invincible simplicity. This ground of Existence needs no thought, no worry, no little self for its silent work. This imperishable Existence is who we actually are.

  Kwan Yin, April Moon, whisper to me...  "You deserve everything, now. And so it is.  Repose in golden awareness, without a thought,  without a desire. Are you not boundless,  encompassing all? You have everything already."

Our minds become so weary and hopeless because they are always at work creating referents, images, thoughts pointing elsewhere. We waste our days in constant thinking, referring to other than what simply IS. At day's end, the exhausted mind finally shuts down and goes to sleep. We live in a constant drain of worry, because we entertain a perpetual illusion that something is wrong. Therefor, we conclude that we need something "else" to make us happy. And the dis-ease of this ceaseless search for something else is thinking. What can heal us of the dis-ease of thinking? Simply allow the mind to repose in its own nature. As the mind continues to generate thoughts, images, referents to something "else," have enough compassion to let it alone, neither grasping at thoughts nor attempting to stop them. Rest in the silent space of who you are, without reference to anyone or anything else. After a while, there is background-foreground shift. The silent space of Being ...

The Hubble Telescope probes the space between my sternum and my throat, gazing into light years of luminous darkness, the distance of my yearning, filled with so many unknown galaxies and virtual suns, not even God knows how to contain them . Deep in the empyrean of my chest, beyond the rim of wonder, astronomers perceive an infinitesimal pearl of brilliant bliss, its gravity waves sucking in and annihilating red dwarfs, old stars. I will carry you there, over the eleven dimensions of quantum science, on the starship of my breath, through an ether of pure love. You will not survive. Don't prepare yourself, you'll never get ready. Don't fast, it doesn't matter how much you've drunk, or how your knees are shaking. Just climb through this mouth, dive into me, dissolve your name in the rapture of my glittering silence. When the journey is over, I will ask, "Have you awakened? Who are you?" If you recount a story in time, full of deeds an...

"My work is loving the world, here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird... Let me keep my mind on what matters... standing still and learning to be astonished..... " ~Mary Oliver Stand by the edge of any American wet-land. You'll see on some naked branch a black hole in the sky. From that dense tiny darkness, a carillon on scarlet wings, scalding-bright as liquid brass, calls you back to the original moment. The world was made of such molten dark and jubilation from the bell of emptiness. Across the marsh, other glorious ringing towers condense in dots of singular wildness. What is your role, man, in such a perfect world? Learn the secret of the red-wing blackbird: from emptiness, music... Only the human intellect, ever-restless and unsatisfied, could conceive that we were born for any higher purpose than this: to listen, to awaken and be grateful, to become a silence for the song.

Among the tangled white branches of blossoming plum this morning, eleven chickadees, seven sparrows, five rust-bellied phoebes, and one little wren. Feathered, small, exquisitely vulnerable, none of them are singing, "I am a victim," for that is not a song. All of them are singing, "I am privileged to be alive."

Did Jesus have a wife? Who cares? Who cares whether the historical Jesus was married, or whether the historical Krishna made love to a thousand Gopis? The scriptures were written as mystical parable, not literal history. What matters is tha t the grail of your own Magdalenic heart overflows with the wine of Christ-consciousness, and that Radha, who is your yearning, blossoms to the inner sound of Madhva's flute, 'So'ham, God and I are one.'

I become light, I become free, not by ridding my experience of hurt and loss, but by embracing them without resistance. The hurt still aches, the grief yet stings, but the pain is clothed in a new element that is liquid, even luminous, rather than solid. Pain can be a transforming current rather than a fixed weight, when I become its conductor rather than its obstacle. Whoever said that divine energy would never flow through us as hurt, as sorrow, on its way to the ocean of the heart? Detail: The Lamentation by Botticelli

All drinking stories are parables of divine love, which is why Jesus  turned water into wine at the wedding; and all drunks, like madmen  and lovers, have an affinity with the saints.   At the tavern in my heart there's a name on the door that turns all other words to laughter, but I can't pronounce it when I get this way. I just dance in the street and shout at people who pretend to ignore me. But now and then when I’m sober, I start howling, “Don't go to work today, don’t pay off those debts! Your sins are too vast! Just step in here  and taste some bewilderment. The inn keeper won't bill you till the end of time. Then you can tell him, It's all your fault, your hospitality made me tipsy!" Friend, this wine is better than breast milk. When nothing's left, you'll see  the Beloved's face gazing from the bottom of your cup. Then you'll sing like me: “This is the emptiness we all adore!"   ...

Whatever else "liberation" is, surely it is the freedom from needing to be "right." We gain abundant energy when freed from the compulsion to defend a point of view. The self-luminous blue sky of the heart is never "right" or "wrong," and has no viewpoint. That pointlessness is ananda. As pure consciousness, the sky of the heart pervades every point and particle in the universe. When we act in the world from this pointless, omnipresent unbounded field of simple awareness, rather than from a "right" belief, weperform a thousand momentary acts of kindness without accumulating any merit whatsoever, thank god, and without any repository called "me." We are not only more happy, but our actions are more innocent and powerful. I learned this from a peony in my back yard.

In southwestern Siberia, along Russia’s border with China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, the Altai or “Golden” Mountains are home to the semi-nomadic Altai people and to many endangered species, including the totemic snow leopard and argali mountain sheep. The Golden Mountains are sacred to the Altaians and to Buddhists and Burkhanists around the world. Siberia’s highest peak, Mount Belukha, is especially revered. - See more at: http://www.sacredland.org/golden-mountains/#sthash.UaurTRuO.dpuf In southwestern Siberia, along Russia’s border with China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, the Altai or “Golden” Mountains are home to the semi-nomadic Altai people and to many endangered species, including the totemic snow leopard and argali mountain sheep. The Golden Mountains are sacred to the Altaians and to Buddhists and Burkhanists around the world. Siberia’s highest peak, Mount Belukha, is especially revered. - See more at: http://www.sacredland.org/golden-mountains/#sthash.UaurTRu...

  People ask if its all right to do yoga, kriya, and meditation with pets in the room. The official answer of the "pure" who teach these courses is, "no." They tell you all sorts of scary reasons why you shouldn't meditate with pets. Pets will steal your spiritual energy and drag you back on your evolutionary path, sort of like vampires. Or your vibrations will make them craz y; their spines can't handle the kundalini energy. Right. My cat's spine is a lot more flexible that mine, rippling with wisdom. So here's what I do: I ALWAYS meditate with my pets - a cat named Basquiat, a dog named Willy, and a stray named Bowie. My blessed little Sanga. I could never shut the door on them because I love them too much. Maybe they'll drag me back to earth for an extra lifetime. So what? Maybe they're helping me relax and open my heart. Close the doors of compassion: what kind of meditation is that? I cannot call shutting out the bein...

There is no "do-it-yourself" meditation. "Do it yourself" is a very American concept with no root in the ancient breath of the stars. Meditation is collective. It envelopes the earth, embraces the distant past with forgiveness , and enfolds generations of the unborn.   A candle cannot light itself. It receives the flame from another. Only then can it burn on its own. A vast grid of energy beyond this small individual bulb empowers the lamp . Only then can it give light. When I was initiated into meditation, I received the flame of the master's grace, and through him an ancient lineage of masters. I cannot "do" meditation. I can set aside the time and place, every morning and evening. And after meditation, I can express the light through my words and actions, any way I choose. But during that precious meditation time, which is an immersion in eternity, I do nothing. It is a gift of Grace. Many wicks, one flame.

Ouroborus (Greek) Jörmungandr (Norse) Mehen (Egyptian), Quetzecotyl (Aztec), also portrayed in Christian Gnosticism, Medieval alchemy, Taoist alchemy, Freemasonry, and the structure of the Benzine molecule, which was discovered in a dream about a serpent biting its tail by the German chemist Kekule. Why this ancient and all-pervasive symbol of the circular tail-biting serpent?   The serpent is the Goddess Kundalini Shakti, the energy of Consciousness. The serpent in the Garden of Eden should never have been interpreted as evil, but as the very inner force that propels the evolution of human awakening, however painful it may sometimes be. The serpent is always associated with the divine Feminine, who is the intuitive power, deeper than the rational.  The "enso" or empty circle, in Zen sumi ink-painting, is another form of the Ouroborus. It is not just a circle but a stroke of living energy with a beginning and end, a head and tail. Yet the beginning...

                           Resurrected Christ, by William Blake Why spend 10,000 lifetimes struggling to turn a nightmare into a sweet dream, when it only takes a single moment to awaken? The only real option for changing the dream is to wake up. Lost in a dream, I cannot change the dream, especially because I am every other character in the dream as well. Just so, one who is lost in the world cannot change the world. We cannot change the dream of the world, but we can wake up inside and become the Witness, whose clarity is the Self, whose bliss is effortless repose. The is the grace of deep meditation: to awaken the Witness. Though ever-changing in its appearances, the essentially dreamlike nature of the world remains the same. The old dream story just puts on new garments, but it is the same old melodrama, filled with magical beauty and horrific vio...