Lady Weep

Lady, weep rage mourn dissolve and be an infant a dying goddess breathe in shuddering breathe out surrendering this face of listening pressed to your heart I am nearer than sorrow than joy I hear the silence between your breasts that greenest darker vale than tears than sighs where we swim both singing in the long ago and evermore the sea of God I am the ear pressed to your heart.

Lotus Path

Like pulses of energy in the vacuum, or subatomic particles of so-called "matter," events in "time" are not connected by any real causal chain. Our mind invents and superimposes the connection. But the notion of causality only exists as a thread of thought, which dissolves as soon as we fall asleep, or get distracted by a surprise.

Between two moments of time is a causeless abyss. No thread exists, but a boundless chaos of possibility, where according to quantum physics, some events may be more statistically probable than others, but all possibilities reside in vast Uncertainty, blessed Uncertainty, making our radical and spacious Freedom the only constant in the universe.

The Shaman is one who gazes into the abyss of quantum uncertainty. The Shaman beholds that empty spaciousness as foreground, and sees the events that arise within it as background. This courageous shift of perspective empowers the Shaman to de-link one Now from another, to un-ravel the illusion of a causal thread. Then the Shaman is free to create a link from this Now to any other Now that he or she might choose to visit, whether in the past or future, whether in this world or another.

A Buddha or a Christ does not walk on water, but on the ocean of infinite possibility. Wherever they choose to step, a lotus pad materializes out of weightless consciousness, to carry the weight of the body. These mythical images are far closer to reality than one might think...

You will walk like this some, when you courageously abandon every path and goal; when you breathe not only through the crown of your head, but through the soles of your feet; when you travel not to arrive, but simply to caress the earth with healing joy. Namaste.

Tiny Moments

Tiny moments are filled with cosmic grandeur. Such moments of grace make life worth living. A ladybug tipping a long green blade of grass, the whir of a hummingbird in the lilac, a mountain floating on a cloud. The form of the moment could be anything, because the blessing comes not from the object, but from the Radiance of our attention.

Such bejeweled moments cannot be strung together into a story. Stories unravel. But each moment is its own cosmos, suspended in the sparkling void of awareness. The moment is never planned. Planning kills. The moment is given, when the mind is still and all seeking has ended.

Full

At this very moment, the surface of your mind is a bubbling foam of thoughts, each thought lasting but a few moments, or less. Yet beneath this fleeting mind-stuff is an ocean of Silence, self-effulgent, luminous, eternally awake in its own nature, which is perfect joy and peace.

Lacking nothing, your depth is completely contented and full. And any part of it that You express is also full, the whole ocean in a drop. This expression of that fullness removes nothing from the whole, for only fullness can come from fullness, pressed out overflowing. You are perpetually ripe and sweet inside. You have always already come to fruition...

This gently surging sea of contentment is who You actually are. And the Great Masters - like Krishna, Gautama, Elijah, Jesus and Muhammad - are just children born of your all-mothering inward Depth. They came not to establish churches and religions, but simply to remind You of your true nature, take your hand and mine, guiding us back to ourselves.

Why not return to your heart, which is only the journey of a breath, and takes but a heart beat; then share this Radiance with others? Isn't that why we are really here?

What's Wrong With Drowning?

I pretend that I can trace the cause of events to the past. But the chain of causation is broken each instant by a gap filled with the immeasurable void.

I pretend that I can infer and plan what the future will bring. But no future has ever existed anywhere but in the mind. The future consists only of thought, the fickle projection of memory.

Every attempt to fathom time and causation only proves how wildly the winds of karma whirl and buffet me in the storm of Unknowing, and how desperately I construct a flimsy ark of reason against the tidal waves of Divine Chaos that threaten to inundate this moment with eternity.

What's wrong with drowning? Why not plunge this mind into the heart, moved soley by the current of Wonder? A logical assessment of the situation would conclude that I actually have no other recourse but to fling myself into the ocean of Grace with a single prayer: "Thy will be done."

My task is not to decipher the past or future, nor to follow the tangled paths of my own thinking. My task is to connect with Wonder. Wonder dissolves time. Wonder annihilates walls. Wonder dissolves obstacles and conflicts. Wonder is formless, yet gazes upon me with a personal face, radiating like the sun with love in the empty sapphire sky of my freedom.

Invitation

When people try to scare me with horror stories about what's in our food, our water, our air, and how awful our government is, and our corporations, and our religions, and how deluded is this human mind - I just smile like a fool and say, "Look, dew on snowdrops!"

I very rarely tell the secret. Shall I tell it now? All right, but only to you, my dearest friend... No one is a victim. No one is to blame. Whatever burden the past may carry, drop it now. The present moment invites you into sparkling innocence.

To The Beginning

Awareness forms a thought, 'I Am.' A thought becomes desire. Desire seeps into the heart. The heart oozes through its nerves into the body, a tingling in the fingertips.

This dream of Awareness boldly awakens the hands, to touch the hammer, the loom, the nail and wood of work, and then to caress another body...

Only to discover that this too is incomplete, insubstantial, forever instantly perishing, perpetually not enough.

Where is that boundless Radiance that Awareness was seeking through this thought, 'I Am,' through every desire and action?

It is here, prior to the first thought. It is here, prior to creation. The journey does not lead us to the end, but to the beginning.

Just become aware of Awareness.......

like the sky, empty and blue, the blue whose beauty is not separate from its emptiness. The explosion of stillness, this hollow is fulfillment. Its purity is love. It's attainment is prior to any seeking or path.

Just become aware of Awareness, and whatever happens after this, happens not through thought, desire, or work, but through the fragrant flowering of your annihilation.

Jai Guru Dev

Jesus Is My Friend, Not My Savior

This brilliant photo-quote raises the question for me: Is it possible to be a "Christian" without believing in this nightmare mythology?

The answer for me is a resounded Yes. I can be a Christian through the model of Friendship, not Sin and Atonement.

Jesus said, "I no longer call you servants, but Friends." Sin and atonement have nothing to do with my Christianity. Jesus is the beloved friend of my heart, an intimate companion on the way, an enlightened master whose humanity embodies and radiates divine love.

Jesus is also a child of my Divine Mother. So are Buddha, Moses, Mohammad, and the great Rishis of India. In friendship, there is no hierarchy. There is no separation of the human and divine. We are all divinely human children of the Mother.

Jesus is my Friend, but not my Savior. I would never ask my Friend to die for my sins, even if I had any. What is there to be saved from?

God isn't interested in sin. She wants me to make mistakes, learn from them, grow from them, and then move on. It's called evolution, not sin. And God loves evolution. Her creation is the perfect flowering of countless mutations, imperfections, and infinitesimal fuck-ups.

God loves to see what her children will do next, what we will invent, how we will turn our missed notes into new melodies. We ourselves were "created in the image of God," were we not? That means, we are creators too. What will a creator do next? You never know, and neither does the creator. God has no plan. God is amazed.

*

How did we ever get this brutal myth? My take is this: it is a projection of the abused psyche of the dysfunctional "nuclear family" in Dark Age Europe. The nuclear family is a recent and not very successful experiment in human history: nothing like the extended family model of the Bible and other ancient societies.

The experience of the nuclear family in the Dark Ages, whether in a hovel or a castle, was lonely and brutal. The children lived in fear of an abusive angry Father. They fled for protection to a loving but sorrowful Mother. They also were covered from the Father's rage when he beat up the eldest Son. The firstborn Son became the scapegoat and the "savior," by taking upon himself the brutality of the patriarch.

This was such a common experience in European society that it was enshrined in a religious myth, a paradigm for understanding our origins, and our relationship to the creator. The Church used this myth effectively to scare people into submission to authority, because it resonated with their own experience in the dysfunctional family.

When authorities get us to believe we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, and make up a hell to threaten us, they don't need a police force or an army.

But when you give up the myth of the angry Father, when you give up the Medieval belief in hell, when you realize that God is not interested in guilt or punishment, then you can begin to heal from religious abuse, and awaken a living relationship with the Friend, whose luminous joy radiates from the center of your heart, deeper inside than your soul. This is what early Quakers called the "Inward Light" and the "Seed Christ."

The Friend whispers from within us, saying, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Mat 11:28). The Friend says, "Drop all religious duties and just surrender to me: I will free you from bondage, don't worry" (Bhagavad Gita 18:66).

Why do we need any theology at all when there is such a constant revolution of love at the center of the soul?