Uradiance

One solution for our political, economic, and spiritual problems: more inner silence. There is a silence imposed by the mind that is hard, dry, and fruitless. There is a silence between estranged lovers that is cruel as a steel blade. There is the silence of cowards who are afraid to speak out against injustice. But there is a deeper kind of silence, the silence of the heart, that is fragrant with the Word of God, bearing fruit. From this silence spill coun tless worlds of beauty that cannot be conveyed by human speech. The silence of the heart is our true home. Yet it is groundless, placeless. We fall forever inward - blessed to be without wings - until we become the abyss itself. Then the fall is perfect stillness. The heart's silence cannot be imposed by thought or discipline. It is prior to thinking, prior to effort, flowering from the void as the bliss of emptiness, filling every particle of this body with the courage to love.

Liberation is not 'from' but 'through' the cross - the cross of opposites, the cross of duality. Jesus passed through the center, through the bound into the boundless, to become a Western Buddha, our human model, our pattern of liberation. He did not attempt to escape from the flesh. Every photon of his flesh, every particle of his sorrow, became a door to the infinite light.

"All conflict is a waste of energy." ~J. Krishnamurti "If you are distressed by any external circumstance, the suffering is not due to the thing itself, but to your mind's interpretation of it, which you have the power to change at any moment." ~Marcus Aurelius Today we are on the brink, not of one war, but billions of wars. Our minds are so addicted to conflict that a single word, a campaign slogan, a TV image or a Tweet, could set off an explosion. The truth is, our mind love conflict. But if we truly want to end it, we can. We can handle our pain without turning it into suffering. We can handle our fear without turning it into anger. We can handle our past without turning it into a story. How? Feel the conflict in the body, before it becomes a thought. Feel it as energy in the present moment, without a past or future. Feel it as pure sensation, without labeling or judging it. Feel anxiety as a sensation in the body, grief as a sensation...

"No one else is responsible for your misery - it is just you who have forgotten how vast and beautiful you are." ~Sri Sri  Bad things happen to everyone in this world. Good things happen too. They are just events. As they actually happen, they are temporary and momentary. How we string these events together into an Identity-card is up to us, and completely at our discretion. Some people carry the victim card all life long, because some bad things happened to them in the past. Some people have endured horrible events yet don't identify themselves as victims at all: they become active, creative, and inspiring to others. They are not defined by their past. And then there are those who have lived quite privileged lives, yet focus constantly on their problems, imagining themselves to be victims of a terrible fate. What happens to us is not always in our control. But the identity we construct for ourselves is what really determines our "fate," and...

The old artifice of searching, that flimsy bridge between the searcher and the sought, collapses now, an implosion of light into abysmal blackness, creating a simultaneous explosion of the vacuum into hosts of stars. The self and the world are a singular chaos of beauty. The imageless mirror reflects a furiously joyful dancer: yet there is only the reflection, and no one making it! The music of the dance reverberates in the heart of silence. One who tastes the stillness of this dance, and the whirling of this stillness, would not in a thousand lifetimes invent such a dualistic word as 'non-duality,' or such a repressive concept as 'non-dualism.'

There is no conflict in the world that does not first arise in the mind. To end the strife out 'there,' dissolve the mind's discord in a breath of Silence. We don't need mass angry political rallies nearly so much as we need vast gentle group meditations. And when you invite your mind home to your heart, even in the quietness of your own back yard, or on a favorite forest trail, YOU are the group meditation. You have no circumference. Your softest exhalation is attended by multitudes on earth and in heaven.

Is there brilliance in the mind? Is the moon caught in the spider's web? There is no such thing as a "brilliant intellect." To find brilliance, we need to transcend intellect. Brilliance comes from the Atman, the Self, who is far beyond and deeper than the web of thought. The hope of humanity no longer lies with intellectuals, but with intuitives, those who know how to transcend the mind, with all its belief systems. Music, poetry, art, the breakthrough in physics or technol ogy, will come from a silence deeper inside than the intellect. It is not that "I think, therefor I am," but that "I Am, therefor I think." The Am is self-luminous, illimitable, eternal, silent, free of thoughts, and unendurably blissful. Every thought perishes when awareness reposes in that ocean of light. The art of transcending the intellect is meditation. But meditation is in no way "anti-intellectual." Meditation polishes the intellect and bathes th...