Uradiance: 5/1/16

Beauty Alone

Is there not a secret relationship between beauty and aloneness? Beauty is the fragrance of solitude.

A lovely thing is utterly unique, a singularity set like a jewel at the center of its own energy field. Yet that impeccable aloneness is never lonely, because a beautiful creature is united, through the field of its beauty, with every awakened heart. Nor is your heart ever alone, even in solitude. For when you rest your gaze, your hearing, or any sense upon a thing of beauty, you become the whole field. You communicate that beauty everywhere, and uplift millions of souls.

Political and Spiritual

Positive energy so easily grows weary and turns negative. That is why political practice must be supported by spiritual practice. Otherwise, evolution becomes devolution masked as revolution. Thus I share a Master's words...

"Let us chant Om
and feel that vibration in our body.
Om means peace.
Let peace pervade every cell of our body.
The meaning of Om is love.
Let love pervade every cell of our body.
Om means light and wisdom.
Let light and wisdom permeate our whole being.
Om indicates our origin,
and Om indicates our final destination.
Remember your origin and destination.
Om. Peace. Peace. Peace."
~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Cartoon

We don't say that this cartoon isn't real, but that it is only a momentary ripple on the surface of this ocean - the still, silent, unfathomable sea of consciousness.

What happens when your finger writes letters on water? How deeply do they gash the sea? This world is a cartoon written in disappearing letters on the thinnest surface of our awareness. Don't worry so much about the cartoon; just deepen yourself.

The cartoon may appear noisy, frenetic, horrifying, painful; at other times it may appear silly, comical, poignant or lovely. But the story lines of the cartoon don't penetrate the depths of our true nature, which is silence.

The problem is not the cartoon. It's mad and fleeting forms will continue to come and go, no matter what we do. We reach into the cartoon for brief moments and try to change something. But we are reaching into the field of change itself. The moment we attempt to change anything, it has already changed. Why change what is already changing?

The real problem is, we have lost the ability to fathom what doesn't change: the very depth of our own consciousness. We have forgotten how to repose in the groundless ocean of the Self. Hypnotized by the cartoon, we forget who we are. Like children at a movie, we get frightened because we think the flickering images on the formless white screen are real.

This is why meditation should be the first step in dealing with the world's "problems." When we open to the vast radiant silence of our own Being, the flickering images of the world do not overwhelm us. We can deal with them as "situations," not "problems."

You don't have to deny the existence of the world. Of course it is "real," but only in a relative sense. That wavering mirage of birth and death - yes, even your own birth and your own death - is not an obstacle. It is not even a solid substance. It is a fluid cartoon on the thinnest surface of the Real.

99.99999% of "reality" is within you, and it is never a problem at all. It is silence, it is stillness, it is the fullness of Being. The perfect fullness that cannot be grasped or sought, neither held by memory, nor explained by intellect, is nearer than any search for it. It is who you already are before the search begins. God need not be sought, only awakened.

When you repose in the unfathomable peace of your own existence, your peace resonates in others. This work of resonance, from inner core to outer world, from Self to other, you accomplish not by doing, but Being. And yet this work achieves more transformation in humanity than all your efforts to change the cartoon that you call "the world."

Shatter and Dance

We need a quantum threshold of collective awareness
focusing not on the negative energy of imminent collapse
in both the Republican and Democratic Parties,
but on the phoenix of positive fire that bursts and
births even now from the ashes to incarnate the new
American community of the heart where schools
will be gardens and political solutions will overflow
from meditation, body-whirling, breath song
as hierarchies shatter into local shamanic rings
and how do you know that inside the drum there isn't
ancient sunlight waiting for your belly to dance?

Art by Julie Hoyle

The Master Is Within

We have no need for a teacher who says, "I am the guru." Such teachers come by the dozens. But we have every need for a teacher who says, "The Master is inside you, nearer than your soul. I am here just to show you a way that leads to the Master within. Come by means of this breath, and the gentle whisper of the Word. You will drink from your own Cup of immortality, and taste the Amrit of your own bliss, the only true peace for this world. Then decide for yourself whether to call this Radiance I or Thou."

Jai Guru Dev

No Thing

The answer to our deepest question is never a thing. An idea is a thing. A belief is a thing. The mind itself is a thing, as much as a lump of soil or an emerald. But no thing can ever satisfy our yearning for the infinite. We are really searching for nothing.

Moses asked to know God's name. The name of a thing. God told Moses that the only name of God is I AM. Not "I am this" or "I am that." Just I AM without an object, without a predicate noun. God's verb has no object. I AM means, "I am no thing."

When we let objects, thoughts, memories, desires, pass through naked awareness without grasping them as knowledge, when we let the subject simply be without an object, that is pure meditation.

Then the subject radiates its own un-created light. To know, without knowing any thing, is to know God.

Art: Moses and the Burning Bush by Marc Chagall

Wheel

Petals and thorns

have no sweetness.

Rest here instead,

where bee's feet

get sticky.

Step off the wheel

into its center.

Find the pollen

of stillness.