Soul Mate

We've all spent lifetimes looking for that special someone, the One
who must be our final soul mate, our eternal partner, the One who
will make our life so smooth and complete.

But the One we yearn to meet can never be another person, a partner,
a lover, or even the perfect Guru. Impossible. Because then there
would be two, and that wouldn't be the One, would it? It's pretty
obvious, really.

I cannot encounter the One I've been searching for until I surrender
my very search, until I melt into fathomless impeccable solitude, 
until I merge with the edgeless radiance of my own spontaneously 
self-fulfilling energy-field, which is the field of Wholeness. I'm
pretty sure my cat figured this out a long time ago.

No one else can possibly make me happy but me, because happiness
is my nature. It is something to share, not to attain. 

To touch true happiness, I repose in the One I Am. Then, in the
clearest day or the darkest night, I find ten thousand partners to
dance with, all of them waves of the Self.

 Friend, meet me here.

The Weight

Every body has the substance of an echo. We all exist in a lightning bolt, instantly flashing. It has already happened. The universe is as weightless as pure space, the rippling stillness of a mirage. Why be concerned about anything? It is our worry that gives gravity and mass to the appearance of things. Drop the weight, drop the worry, drop the mind.

Is Intelligence Thinking?

Most people equate Intelligence with the power of thinking.
I equate Intelligence with the power of not-thinking. Truly
intelligent people think only when necessary. They spend
 the rest of the time reposing in radiant emptiness.

"Drop all concepts." ~Nisargadatta Maharaj

Privilege

It is so small, and such a waste of energy, to accuse others
of being "privileged." Such resentment arises from a dim
view of oneself. In truth, we are all privileged. It is a
privilege to breathe.

We are privileged because we are the radiance of the Divine.
We are privileged because we embody boundless Light in
every atom of this human form. We are privileged to be
fair-skinned or dark, to be umber, beige, or the color of soil.
We are privileged to be citizens of the earth. We are privileged
to receive the gift of Awareness.

Unfortunately, we have cultivated an entire culture of blame.
Instead of resenting others, why not ennoble our Self-vision?
Why not look inside and see how magnificent we are!
Dropping resentment and comparison, we can discover how
much more energy we have to create happiness.

Bittersweet

Human existence would be anxious if all we knew was the ephemeral, and monotonous if all we knew was the imperishable. But the Creator has graced us with a human nervous system, and gifted to us the arts of yoga, pranayama and meditation, so that we may cultivate a capacity to taste the changeable and changeless together. Beauty is bittersweet, the evanescence of eternity.

Picture: 'The Cosmic Rose, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae,' Heinrich Khunrath, Hamburg, 1595

DoEs
             Your
                          hEart    havE
    Any
                 edgEs ?

Don't Feel Bad, Feel God

"God's treasures are buried in broken hearts..." ~Rumi
Seeing so much pain and injustice in the world, we often say, "I feel bad about this." Yet feeling bad doesn't uplift anyone. Earth doesn't need us to feel bad. Earth needs us to feel compassion. Feeling bad lowers our energy. Feeling compassion emanates a cool healing wave of Life Breath. To feel compassion is to feel the Buddha. To feel compassion is to feel the Christ. Don't feel bad, feel God.

Vibrate with Love

When someone whose body does not vibrate with love speaks of love, it is just a four-letter word that quenches your thirst for beauty no more than an empty paper cup. 

But when someone whose every atom resonates with love speaks that word, the galaxies melt into ghee pouring onto your forehead, dissolving your mind into the heart. 

This is how our most silent vibrations communicate much more than our words. 

We should not be surprised that one who truly loves can speak of nothing else, the way a rose can do nothing but open and share its fragrance. 

We expect nothing else from a rose but opening, fragrance, and roseness. Yet a rose's openness contains the sky and all the stars, very lightly.

Song Sparrow

Can you remember the thought that seemed so important to you five days ago? Can you remember the thought that seemed so important ive minutes ago? Five seconds ago?

The thought I'm having right now always feels important, no matter what it is, because it is charged with Presence. But the thought I had five seconds ago doesn't feel important at all. In fact I can't even remember what it was. Because it doesn't exist.

Only Presence makes a thought come alive. Why not dwell in the energy of now, without a thought? Thank you, sparrow, for your song this morning, not the one you sang yesterday.

Sat Sang

One of the most response-able things we can do is just hang out together, with no other goal. I'm pretty sure that's how worship, dance, and all education began. When we forgot the art of hanging out, we had to invent governments.

Green Tea Haiku

New Age getting old,
Whole Earth frayed at the edges,
but green tea still works...

The world doesn't need
your mind in ceaseless revolt.
It needs you to breathe.

In a sip of tea,
Politics do not exist.
Here, just you and me... 

The whole world conflict
dissolved in green aroma
this very moment.

If you think you are
oppressed, then you are oppressed
by your thoughts. Just stop.

Pour out your anger,
dear desperate anarchist,
into this warm mug.

Surrender your greed
and busy-ness, wealthy one,
into this warm mug.

Come sit together,
sipping some bitter green tea -
no past, no blame.

War is inside you.
You brought it here with you, friend.
Leave it with your shoes...

Sit on this cushion.
Drop injustice at the door.
Presence is your work.

The now of this cup
drowns all yesterdays, may I
serve you more green tea?
 ________

You may listen to this poem HERE

Don't Worry, You ARE Crazy

The problem is, you are worried that you might be crazy. The solution is, know that you are crazy and drop the worry.

The first and last fear is the fear that there is something wrong with me. When I begin to see that the world is melting away, dissolving each instant, like a thin layer of snow on groundlessness, I may doubt my sanity, because I have identified with the ephemeral for so many lifetimes.  

It is precisely at this time that one needs a Guru. The role of the Guru is to assure you, with a gentle whisper or merely a glance, that it is perfectly all right to let go of shadows and reflections. You can simply Be the omnipresent light of pure awareness, without grasping at the world.  

Before his outer form passed from the earth, my first Guru Mahesh Yogi gave me this gift. A group of us were gathered round him as he spoke of the subtle, rather disturbing stage of transition when the world appears as it truly is: an ever dissolving cloud. Then we have no refuge but our own pure awareness, "I Am." Through a Self-confidence instilled by the Guru's grace, we cease grasping these fleeting forms; we let the world come or go as it pleases. Ironically, this is when we become most fully response-able, most capable of love, for we are in the present moment, unburdened by the non-existent past. 

Here is the eternal truth about the non-entanglement of  Purusha with Prakriti, consciousness with the world. Jai Guru Dev.

Thoughts are Sensations in the Brain

Feel your thoughts as sensations in the brain. That's all they are. It is not necessary to convert a thought-sensation into an image or a word, just feel it as electric energy passing through the neurons.

Now become aware of awareness, the space in which these sensations arise and dissolve. This wakened space is not just in the brain, it is around the brain. This space is vast, without edges.

Now listen to the sound of 10,000 galaxies exploding in your chest as the light of bliss. This sound is the pulse of silence. This silence is the soul of love.

The Search Is Doomed

It takes tremendous maturity to see that the search for happiness is doomed from the start, because the very act of seeking is a subtle form of despair. And it requires tremendous valor to give up this search, even for a moment.

But even a single moment without seeking is a precious diamond, a sparkling explosion of stillness that annihilates the future and past. Something far more wonderful than happiness dawns the instant we give up the search.

Photo by Amy Lamb

Be Smaller Than The Smallest

"Ano raniyan, mahato mahiyan: One atom of the smallest is greater than the greatest." ~Upanishads

Become small. The sum of the divine All is found through subtraction. Be the unambitious sunbeam in a dew drop. Then you can dissolve into the boundless.

Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the whole earth." Here the Greek word is πραεῖς (praeis), "powerless and small in stature." It means that those who become smaller than the smallest embrace the vast.

In the Old Testament, Elijah has the same experience. He does not find God in lightning, storm or earthquake. But God speaks in "a still small voice of silence." The Hebrew says, קוֹל דְּמָמָה דַק, "qol d'muma daqa." Literally it means "a voice of finely ground, atomized silence." In his cave on Mount Horeb, Elijah practices deep meditation and enters the sub-nuclear awareness of the quantum vacuum. He hears the voice of the infinite in the infinitesimal. This cures his depression and gives him strength to go back into his prophetic role. (1 Kings, chapter 19)

Every photon is a mass-less, dimensionless, instantaneous portal to eternal Light. Here is the paradox of power. When we humble our mind, reducing the impulse of thought to the finest vibration of silence, our consciousness becomes the boundless expanse of the universe. This is the practice of transcendental deep meditation

"...We are thinking from that level of being - softest, softest, softest - because that is the level of intelligence that is lively at the basis of all creation. So our thought travels all over, and invites all the creativity of innumerable values of natural law (which are the angelic beings and devas). And then with the parental role of the Almighty God, nothing is impossible. Absolutely nothing is impossible.” ~ Maharishi, 14th January 2004.

 Jai Guru Dev

Only Persons

Our violence will not cease until we recognize the radiance of each human 

individual, without identifying people by race, class, profession, or tribe. We
are one human family. Black and White, Rich and Poor, Left and Right,
Christian, Muslim, Eastern, Western: these are just memes invented by the
political mind, with no basis in the real world. There are only persons.

On Not Joining A Movement

The skill of Bhakti lies in living the wisdom, not in joining a movement.

So many think that they must abandon the Master's sadhana because of what they see happening in the movement. This is a tragic mistake. As a movement grows in success, it inevitably becomes less like a family and more like a business, and finally like a corporation. Conflicts between egos arise, hierarchy solidifies, the innocence of the early days fades away. But true innocence flows from your heart, not from the organization..

The Master and the movement are completely different. Will one reject the beauty of Jesus because of what one sees in the Church? So it is with modern spiritual organizations and ashrams. Perfection lies in the formless, not in the form. Take the honey, leave the flower. The form blossoms, releases its fragrance, and fades away. But the formless is bliss.

There is a Student, a Disciple, and a Devotee. A Student visits the ashram to take a course. A Disciple works for the spiritual organization. A Devotee tastes some banned substance bubbling up the spine, then dissolves into the face of the Beloved.

We can't judge the level of devotion by one's degree of involvement in the movement. Some devotees stay under the umbrella, and some don't. Devotees may serve the Master in other, less visible ways. For some Devotees, there are no more courses and no more movement, just vanishing into clarity.

The Student acquires a blessing, the Disciple acquires salvation, the Devotee acquires nothing but divine madness.

The Guru slaps the Devotee hard in the face, then touches his chest like a feather. (This actually happened.) The Devotee never stops tingling with the sting of that wound which cleanses his mind like the space between stars. He feels that feather touch forever in his heart, yearning never to be healed.

You don't understand this? Neither do I. I am no longer singing. I have become my song.

The student goes to the market to purchase a single hothouse rose. The disciple works hard to cultivate the master's garden. The devotee just stumbles through the forest, where it is most pathless and green, ecstatic at the sight of a wild iris.

"Good-for-nothing lout" you call him? I agree. But which one of the three is most likely to play a golden flute? Or dance with babies at the supermarket?

Which one will stay drunk when the righteous throw us all into prison where there isn't any wine, but the stuff that ferments in the charred barrel of the ancient heart?

Art and the Motherland

Great art conveys the secret longing of a pilgrim for home. Great 
art is seldom created by comfortably rooted citizens who have 
always stayed in the same place. Nationalism spawns first-rate
propaganda, but second-rate art. Art expresses displacement, 
uprootedness from the ground of origin. All beauty is bittersweet, 
pervaded by the musk of longing and return. The artist transforms 
this yearning for the lost motherland into omnipresent beauty.

Morning Walk

On my early morning walk, I was absorbed in thinking about the coming day, my mind busily creating the future, which of course does not exist; when I suddenly noticed I had walked right past this perfect green chaos of sky bubbling out of the earth, full of tiny golden stars cupped in amethyst miracles - otherwise known as weeds. Forgive me, mother.

Unpardonable

Anyone who is bored should be thrown in jail. No one has the right
to be bored. Apathy is the one unpardonable sin: it signifies ingratitude
for the gift of life.

Wherever you are, whatever you do, every particle of your body is a
sparkling galaxy of miraculous new worlds. Right now, you are breathing
atoms that Jesus and the Buddha breathed. Feel the DNA whirling in
your flesh; you contain ancient histories, unfathomable destinies, yet you
are only here for an instant of light. What will you do with this single
moment of infinite significance?

Even if you are unhappy, engage in the night. Taste the textures of your
darkness. Follow the wound, it suppurates wisdom. Enter the bruise, 
it's pain melts into compassion. Let your darkness be a precious stone. 
Allow it to solidify, like an onyx in your chest. Then breathe out,
an offering.

Look at the palm of your hand, a landscape of adventures, mountain
journeys no one else could take. From every cell in your thumb,
ancestors are shouting, 'Yes! Begin! We are with you!' Right now,
sitting on the subway with your blank stare, or riding up the escalator
toward the discount floor, absorbed in Bluetooth replays of your
favorite 70's songs, you could awaken. You could awaken now, get
on the big toe of your left foot, and start spinning.

You could let the Enormous Smile that has been patiently waiting
to swallow you up, expand across your face, devouring your entire
universe in causeless happiness.

To fall in love with existence, even for one second, heals the earth.
Let every heartbeat proclaim, 'From now on, fuck it, I'm crazy!'

He Said She Said

He said, "Every man  should have ten wives."
She said, "Every woman should have 10,000 husbands."
He was so offended he started to buzz, and flew back to the hive.

Blame or Blessing

Either blame others, or bless them. But you can't have both. Blessing and blame won't co-exist in the same heart.