Uradiance

It is not such a blessing to be in the presence of a person whose mind is full of thoughts, even if they are very "intelligent." In fact, it can be exhausting. It's a greater blessing to be with one whose mind is awake in stillness, silent, free from thoughts. Look into their eyes. They will invite you, saying without words, "Welcome to the miracle." This is how little children meet on the playground. When we allow the stream of the world to arise unimpeded by our mental commentary, we don't have to look at the world through a haze of ideas about it. Then everything sparkles with primordial shakti, inherent power. Awareness participates in the Wordless continuum of creation. We see the world as miracle. Like two birds singing among magnolia blossoms, we can still enjoy words and have a conversation. But the words don't arise from our mind. They are not words "about" the world around us. Our word arises out of the continuum, the str...

At the finest level of creation, on the threshold of silence, the particles of the world annihilate and rebirth themselves out of the vacuum every instant. In the final analysis, this clear empty space of infinite mathematical possibility is pure consciousness. This means that the universe is a sparkling ocean of wonder, a miracle of unfathomable energy without past or future, a continuum with no division into subject and object. It is our mind that superimposes time, with stories about the past and future, onto this instantaneous creation. These stories are usually full of conflict between "good" and "evil," light and darkness, and imminent disaster. We project our story onto the energy around us in a desperate attempt to control the apparent chaos of the Unknown. We do not see that the Unknown is miraculous and beautiful: all we see is our story. We are not in control. We are marvelously and blessedly out-of-control. How could we possibly do anything to save t...

"I will wound you for free." "But I want to pay for it." "This will cost you everything ."   "I have already given that." "Then give me your silence," Love said. So I renounced the mind and dove  into the space between thoughts,  where I swam all night among moonbeams  with creatures who glowed with namelessness. Just before dawn, Love severed off my head  with a scimitar of sweetness: wave of stillness, empty mirage, sword of the Prophet,  forever slicing One into Two  for the sake of devotion. "Take that!" Love said. "Thank you!" cried Bewilderment,  breaking the silence,  opening the wound again.

"The light shined in darkness, but the darkness could not overcome it." ~John 1:5 This light is not any Other. This light is not someone before you, or above you, or outside you. This is the light of your own awareness, in the present moment, shining through the power of your past, through your karma, through any bondage that was ever upon you. The light of awareness in the present moment is the most powerful force in creation. There is nothing more healing than being who you are.

Negative thinking begins as a precognitive affect in the primitive brain, below the cerebral cortex. So does positive thinking. The source of positive or negative thinking is not thinking at all. Negative thinking arises as a barely conscious emotional decision to flip our primordial switch toward anger and fear. And we have done this so often it has become an inherited characteristic, a sort of "original sin" buried in the brain, an inherent disposition toward negativity. But we can brush the amygdula with a breath of attention, and flip this deep switch back to the positive. We do it not by intellectual self-analysis, or by thought tripping, but by an effortless intuition, feeling our way down into the old brain and bathing the amygdala in a breath of intent. This is accomplished in a moment, an exhalation. Become aware of your mid-brain, any sensation there at all, even numbness. Now let a silent stream of attention flow with your breath through this a...

Who improves? Compared to whom? The irony is, the moment you cease comparing yourself, you begin to blossom. You discover who the cosmos has been yearning to be as You. The glow of your freshness irradiates the galaxy. Earth, sun, and stars would not be quite the same, were they not infused with You. When you discover a tiny blue violet in the meadow, it never occurs to you to say, "This flower is imperfect, it needs improvement." You accept the flower's perfection, just as it is. Yet for some strange reason, this is not how we encounter other people, and that is not how we encounter ourselves! We insist on changing ourselves, and we insist on changing each other. We want to do people the immense favor of converting them to our ideal, the very ideal that prevents us from being who we actually are. How strange! Most of the harm and mass destruction humans inflict on one another, we carry out in the name of improvement. The irony is, what truly expands and h...

The greatest service you can perform for another person is to remind them who they really are. Giving people food, water, medicine and shelter provides temporary relief, and telling people about Jesus or the Guru gives them temporary inspiration. But sustainable transformation only results from awakening the seed of God in the core of the soul. You do the supreme kindness to another person when you help them awaken their inner self-generating abundance, when you initiate them into the unfathomable light of their own Being.

The miracle is not the flower, but the Existence of the flower. The miracle is not the moon, but the Existence of the moon. The miracle is not the snow, but the way all creatures crystalize from pure Existence and melt back into it. Why are you here? To look deeply into the flower, to look deeply into the moon, to look deeply into the eye of each creature until you behold that jewel of Emptiness. What can you do but love and dissolve? What can you do but bow and fall  on your knees in wonder? You are that Existence.

A thought rooted in the ground of eternal silence is ten million times more powerful than a thought in a thread of mental chatter. Truth is not the final idea in a chain of intellectual argument. Truth is the radiant fullness of empty awareness, before a single thought arises. When I attempt to preach Truth, I uproot it from the field of silence, and Truth withers away. When I claim that Truth is contained in a Book, I shut it in a prison. There is no such thing as a sacred text. What is sacred is the Silence where the words come from, and the space between them. That is what we feel. Truth has no name. We hear "great" words and "great" music. We see "great" works of art. But what makes them "great"? The silence they come from. It percolates through their form. In his "Diaries and Notes," Leonardo Da Vinci wrote: "Among the great things that are to be found among us, the Being of nothingness is the greatest." ...

Humanity wasn't thought up to serve religion. Religion was thought up to serve humanity. If your religion won't evolve, abandon it. Invent a new one. Create fresh ceremonies, offering your wonder to the present moment. Let your own Word renew the earth and sing the stars awake. Perform a miracle: touch the wet grass with your bare feet. Baptize the ocean waves with your naked body. And please, stop arguing over which dead prophet told the truth! The truth shines through every atom of your flesh this very morning. If You yourself are not the light, then they were all wrong. Engraving: William Blake's 'Albion,' embodiment of divine humanity.

Why do I love this picture so much? Reminds me of what I learned when I was a little child: its fun to feel the stillness at the center of whirling.

'Scrying' is the ancient art of seeing destiny in a reflection: a mirrored image in a bowl of water, or a still lake. I scry the world, for it too is an image reflected in a bowl. Let me gaze a little more deeply before reacting. Blaming others for my predicament is the work of the political mind. Seeing clearly how I cause my world is the work of the soul.

There is an ancient Tibetan myth. Like all great myths, it is full of truth. When we die, our soul confronts its shadow, its unresolved work, its denial and projection, in the form of a wrathful deity, hideous and angry, terrifying and lethal. The soul wants to flee back into this world again. But if the soul is brave, then instead of repeating lifetimes pretending the demon is an "other," the soul finally confronts its shadow and owns it. Kissing the monster on the lips, the soul hugs the wrathful deity and welcomes its energy into her heart. At that instant, the demon turns into an angel, liberating the energy that had been bound up in denial, repression, and shadow-making. The soul is free. Light and darkness merge in their original unity, which is limitless bliss. For what is light but darkness unbound? What is darkness but the ground where living seeds of light are buried? Like the individual soul, each world religion holds a dark, violent, Medieval shadow, a letha...

Nothing in the world is extraordinary. When I actually arrive at the mountain top, or at the birth place of Jesus, it turns out to be just as ordinary as standing in the back yard, before I started my journey. Nothing in the world is extraordinary but awareness, and awareness is not of this world. Awareness is the Seer of the world. When I am truly aware, I see the ordinary through the light of the miraculous, because the miracle is What Sees. No peak, no diamond, no sexual delight, no wine, no symphony, no sense perception is ever extraordinary in itself. We fantasize the pinnacle of achievement, but even if our wildest fantasy comes true, when we get there, it is mundane. If I cannot see the ordinary in the miraculous light of true awakening, then beholding the grand canyon, or a masterpiece my Michelangelo, has the same quality as looking at my big toe. The Extraordinary shines from within as the scintillating radiance of consciousness itself. The Miraculo...

This is the Tell All Age, when we celebrate, as much as we dread, the end of privacy. Confusing Truth with self-exposure, we dare each other to reveal everything, and imagine that "spirituality" means tearing away the veil. We mistake modesty for shame, then wonder why we cannot be intimate. I mutilate what is subtle and fragrant when I force the flower open. And that flower may be myself, as well as another. This compulsion to expose leads to a naked, unlayered literalism that cannot discern what is fine, savor the paradox, or taste the bouquet of ambiguity. Impatient exposure is not Nature's way. She nourishes through concealment, storing sweetest fruit beneath the bitter rind, wrapping rainbows in the grizzled cocoon, protecting her miracle in nests, eggs, wombs. Silence is our mother tongue. Whole journeys end and begin there. In ancient times, the deepest Truth was a divine secret, the scent of ecstasy exquisitely veiled in the language of symb...

Lessons of 2014? Most of us can't even remember what we were hysterical or wrathful about this time last year. In fact, in the impeccable precision of chaos, most of us were learning precisely the lesson we needed to learn each moment. We did not die of Ebola. In fact, scientists have discovered abundant sources of antibiotics in the very soil itself. ISIS did not overrun the United States, or even the Middle East. Obama did not start another major war. The streets of Americ a did not explode into anarchy and chaos. The military police did not seize control of our government. The U.S. economy did not collapse; in fact it expanded more than any major economy in the world. None of us died of a disease caused by GMO's. Our planet was not eaten by an angry red solar flare. The world did not end. But Christ did come again, in every crocus, every bloodwart, every honey bee. And several billion people performed infinitesimal acts of kindness, upholding the arc of goodn...

We show the deepest gratitude to our Creator when we acknowledge her infinite presence in our own body.  Every breath we breathe with awareness awakens her Shakti, her energy in us. This Sanskrit word, from which derives the English "shock," signifies the Mother's creative power. Each mote of our dust is wombed like a star in the night of her mystery. She vibrates the electrons in every atom of our flesh. Leaping from axon to dendrite, She is the thrill of light in our photons, the fiery self-annihilation of this very thought in your brain. Our minds are empty cupfuls of her immaculate silence. Even our flaws are composed of her infinitesimal love-sparks. Trillions of particles in your body are dancing with her. Why don't you?

The most abstract element in life is our own awareness. For most human beings, awareness is so abstract that we don't even notice it. The absent-minded professor looks for the glasses that are already on the tip of his nose. Likewise, we are not aware of our own awareness. We are absorbed in sense perception. We store up a back-load of these sensory images, and this inventory of images is the mind. The intellect is a busy postal clerk who ceaselessly sorts and categorize these mental impression. Imagination recombines and projects them into the future. But the future is the past; both exist only as thought. Hence the mind is not awareness. It is the stuff that clouds and overshadows awareness. Awareness shines beyond senses, mind, and intellect, as the sun beyond the clouds. Yet on a cloudy day, we cannot see the very source of our light. Awareness is the abstract background of perception. Material form is the foreground. "Spiritual growth" simply means that ...

Nothing causes more suffering than the search for meaning. The very act of conceptualizing a "meaning" separates us from the essential energy, the bliss, of living. For the mind must be separate from that of which it forms a concept. When "I" separate myself from life in order conceive its "meaning," I only deepen my loneliness. My very quest for meaning causes alienation. But when "I" abandon meaning, the separate "me" collapses into the wholeness of life-energy. Awareness without concepts is free to sparkle as a seamless continuity where subject and object dissolve in the bliss of perception. "Meaning" is swallowed up in delicious chaos, the chaos of ananda, or bliss. What remains is a dance of energy without reason or motive: it simply Is. This dance has no Creator, but wondrously explodes out of nothing, free from causation. That which arises from nothing is un-created. To dive into this uncreated energy of nothing...

Mother Lakshmi sang to me: "Selved in silence, be the axis of the wheeling stars. See how your lover's face flowers out of your own gaze. Did I not give birth to you so that the earth might be grounded in astonishment? This is your work: with every breath, reduce your life to the poverty of wonder."

Atma, the supreme Self, dwells beyond time. Mind, by thinking, creates time and dwells in the past and future. Atma whispers, 'Happy New Year!' to awaken this mind to eternity now. May the Light within make you rich with love every moment of the coming year! As the Purusha, Atma remains settled in the absolute field of timelessness. Yet its Shakti projects this body-mind into the relative field, Prakriti, or nature, where we become subject to the laws of karma and the game of time.  Pl ay the game well. Play your part. Be meticulous. Be on time. But if you fuck up, don't worry about it. We are actors in a theater where we are also the audience, witnessing our own tragicomedy. How exquisite! To be both the doer and the witness, both bound by form for the sake of the drama, yet unbound in pure conscious. Those who say that time doesn't matter because they live in the "eternal now" are as clumsy as those who never tap into the Timeless at all. The...