Uradiance

Won't you join me in this vow? I will not blame the violence of the world on others. I will claim it with my own heart. I vow to generate peace every day, beginning now, with every breath I breathe.

How can you be lonely? The light of other hearts surrounds you. The pulse of their molecules is embedded in your cardiovascular neurons. Therefor, your own heartbeat is your Comforter. The heart is not just a pump; it is a neural center as conscious as the brain. Through our hearts, we are one hologram pulsating with love. Some day we will understand that this is not mysticism, but physiology. Don't doubt the Invisible: it is filled with friendships. My heart has such divine Friends! Maharishi, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, Thich Nhat Hanh, Amma Shri Karunamayi, Jesus... I no longer call them "masters." Such language implies self-abnegation, and authoritarianism. But the age of servitude is over. Our relationship to the Guru is much more intimate than master and disciple. Friends of the Heart do not ask for bowed heads or self-denial. They long to glorify us, and welcome us into their communion of joy. Here is an innocent expression of spiritual friendship,...

Seen from the material perspective of form, how much energy we expend and how many things we accumulate define our 'work,' all of which vanishes very soon in the field of the ever-changing. But seen from within, from the changeless field of Consciousness which is the Spirit, we are trails of Light passing through momentary particle-worlds, penetrating each others lives, weaving our sparkling threads into the tapestry of a divine body: the transcendental body of the Christos. The degree of beauty and luminosity that we weave into the Lord's eternal body is our true work. Photo: Omega Nebula

What is the sign that you have found your Dharma, the work the cosmos created you for? Not feeling any gap between being, thinking, and doing. What you do is simply the overflow of who you Are. Your service is to Be. Most gracefully the Buddha's feet brush the ground, moving like a cloud. Most firmly the Buddha's fingers heal little creatures with the earth-touching gesture.

Stay centered in the compass of compassion amidst the storm of polarity, the swirl of anger from the Left, from the Right. Your silent eye is not an escape from the problem, it is the solution.

The sense that there is something terribly wrong with the world leads me to say to the other, 'What's wrong with you?' But this is false perception. The right perception is, 'My mind is filled with the sense that something is wrong, and I project this doom onto you.' To 'fix' the world, I must first inquire into my perception. Then I discover that I never know any world except my perception of it. Therefor, to know the nature of the world, I must know the nature of my mind. What is the nature of this mind? A restless need for the moment to be other than it is. But it is impossible to 'fix' this moment and make it other than it is. And this impossible demand is the root of my suffering, is it not? I can never experience the 'fix,' for the fix is always in the future, which leaves me ever exhausted in a problematic present from which I ceaselessly try to separate myself. Yet no matter how I try to improve the world, this pre...

To minimize the genius of the unique individual is also a form of oppression. People may be One, but they are not the same. There is a crudeness about New Age "non-dualism," just as there is a crudeness in the politics of the collective: the intentional ignorance of differences and distinctions. This happens when impatient and immature minds, confusing equality with mediocrity, resent and suppress the flowering of excellence. Yes, we have learned that every particle is a wave of the unified field, but that is no reason to press the leaven of the particular back into dough. Yes,  there is beauty in the sea, but there is equal beauty in the wave. The fulfillment of the sea is to express the wave as individual power, not to level it. Every Buddha is a unique blossoming of Presence, not a flower that fades back into undifferentiated loam.

Sometimes we need an organization, and sometimes we need a disorganization. Grace is beyond executive management.  Shiva administers this vast business the way a crystal manages the sun: thousands of com partments for a single stream of fire, wit hout separation or distinction. Kali S hakti 's style is different: when she dances, her naked toes pulverize our bodies into stabbing slivers of subatomic delight. The current that swirls us into a single massless particle is the entropy that flings us apart. Our minds cannot process such data. This is why confessing our confusion is a potent spiritual path. Look at it this way, friend . We're dry leaves scuttling on a sidewalk, pretending to move our own feet. Resist the wind, and you become a 'me.' Surrender, and you become the wind.  True, what whirls us can never be known, but its name can be felt as a quiver of seduction in the quim of silence. There are extravaga nt chocolate truffles like this. Th...

Don't look for the Truth. Just look at the Lie. Implicit in the search for truth is the lie that you are separate from it. But if you just look into the lie, wherever it arises in the present moment, it will vanish like a mirage in a mirror. The lie cannot endure your gaze. This is why, when Pilate asked Jesus, 'What is Truth?' Jesus did not answer. He simply gazed back. (Painting by 19th C. Russian artist Nicolai Ge)

Just before sunrise this morning, I saw Jesus walking on the fiery waters of my heart, the glorious golden ocean of my outrage. He commanded me, saying, "Don't be a goody-goody! Do some mischief in this world. God loves roughhousing." I said, "What shall I do, Lord, for I am a man of peace." He answered, "Are you angry?" I said, "No, Lord." He answered, "That's funny, because I AM." Then he breathed a pure smokeless blue flame of fiercest love upon me. And I felt long-lost anger rise up through my backbone, undulating like a graceful maiden with a body of lightning, wearing the thinnest veil of yearning, and brandishing a diamond scimitar. I knelt down and cried, "Lord help me, I am angry! I am angry at the slaughterers of Palestinian children and the murderers of rabbis. I am angry at those who cry, 'Peace, peace!' when there is no peace. I am angry at the merchants of war and the presidents t...

I profess peace through total ignorance. It's people who think they know the Truth who make war. We fight for what we believe in. We slaughter the unbelievers, certain that they're wrong. Knowledge begets conflict.  P.H.D.'s take sides. Disciples with a precise theology march off to the crusades and behead each other. But we whose creed is, 'I don't know,' live in joyful compassion, armed with the blessed shield of uncertainty. This isn't about right or wrong, friend, it's an invitation to strip off your doctrines and take a bath with me. Dive in the pool of Unknowing, fathomless and dark among wild berries, somewhere in the sweet-scented forest to which there is no Way.

In Christianity, it is the "Universal Body of Christ," in Jewish mysticism the "Adam Kadman," and in the Vedic tradition of India, the "Purusha." This cosmic consciousness in the body is the only real solution to our world's economic and political crisis. I invite you to awake in seamless waves of stillness where action is play, in symphonic tides of silence where words are just for fun. The earth is one breath of your astonishment, the entire creation a ripple in the ocean of your Presence... Don't let the mind make you smaller than you Are. Cradled in the hologram of Indra's net, your heart spins out threads of beauty, connecting stars and galaxies in the sparkling tapestry of your flesh. Jesus came here just to show you this: every silken wisp of you an oscillation of God-Consciousness, more stable and solid than a proton, yet resonating at a frequency beyond light. Your intent is pure compassion, and it makes the most dista...

No one actually remembers the past, because it doesn't exist. The brain constructs the past out of the energy field of Presence. The Now is a sphere whose surface vibrates as time, yet whose core is the stillness of eternity. Between the core and the surface is the field of Akasha, the space of consciousness. This apparent vacuum actually resonates and sparkles with all the other moments of the infinite past and endless future, as virtual particles of possibility. When our awareness relaxes from the anxious surface of worry and regret, and we stop constructing the artificial time-line, the paltry thread of moments called 'me,' then we settle into Akasha and access all the wisdom that ever was or will be right now, embedded in the silence of the heart.

'Taste and see that the Lord is good.' ~Psalm 34:8 By conceptualizing the whirled, I armor myself from the terrifying and beautiful onslaught of suchness. Generalizations and ideologies protect me from the bright wounded fallenness of what Is. So I impose a concept of order onto the chaos of quiddity, instead of enduring unimaginable random Self-radiance. By thinking about the world instead of tasting it, I veil myself in the gray mail armor of mind, protecting me from the uniqueness of the raindrop. The choice is I or eye. But the eye is too fiery to endure. So 'I' hide behind a shadow of thought, a shield of names. My political and religious I-deas act as filters to keep out the vertigo of beauty, the unspeakable green disorder of the world. Note how our psychiatric/pharmaceutical empire labels everything beyond our comfort zone as a 'disorder,' drugging us into orderly ordinary conduct. Castrated sheep are orderly. Mown grass is ordinary. ...

All day making plans for the evening, all evening planning what to do tomorrow. Don't hang out with such ambitious folks! Be a tipsy lout like me. As soon as you wake up, guzzle sunbeams and get drunk on dawn. After sunset, embrace the night like a lover whose name you never ask. Here's the secret of God's success: during the day, be light. At night, become darkness. If you don't understand this, how can I entrust you with the sky?

"When you wake up," said the Fool, "sing before thinking." "That's impossible!" I answered, "I need a thought to remind me." "Not if you fall asleep," said the Fool, "with the name of the Beloved under your pillow." So night after night I lay my head on the holy name of Krishna, Jesus, Ha'Shem, Mother Divine, Ninety nine names of Allah, a thousand names of Vishnu... but when I awoke, I remembered all the tasks of daylight and forgot to sing. Then one night when the moon was full, I pillowed the universe on my heart and breathed this name: "I am, I am, I am." Now I awake, a fountain of gold, singing all the names of Light.

When I think that I have a problem, my problem is that I think it. When I think it, I separate it from myself, give it weight and mass. In fact, my problem is me, but when I separate my problem from me, through thinking, I give it an existence of its own. Dissolve the distance between my problem and myself, and it ceases to be a dense object. It becomes subject. I pervade my problem, and let it dissolve into pure consciousness. Consciousness is the universal solvent that solves all problems. The solution is to pervade the problem.

We forfeit our inner birthright when our mind moves toward any referent as Truth: a belief, a book, a person, a god, a guru, a Christ, or a Buddha. Any image, word or thought whatsoever is a veil that shrouds the immediate perfection of Awareness. There is a serenely glowing emptiness in the core of your heart; it is not any-thing at all. This hollow seed in you glows with all-sufficient peace, and effuses peace into the environment . For lifetimes you sought to fill this emptiness with something or someone else. Now is the end of that journey. Now you repose within, and you are only drawn outward by the effulgence of grace, not by seeking. The deepest meditation is simply to allow the hollow space within you to Be. To Be a silent explosion into boundlessness, into causeless joy, into self-radiant freedom, is to taste the Truth that needs no external referent. Existence in itself is the supreme bliss, before it exists as any-thing. We are never diminished by our em...