Peace

In the coming year, you may not bring world peace, but you may bring a healing light to the person right beside you. Walk gently. Go joyfully. Keep returning to your heart. That is enough.

Shabbat Shalom

Shabbat Shalom. Peace of the Sabbath to you. In Hebrew, Sabbath means "stop!" So I tried to stop my mind, but I couldn't. I'm sorry. Forgive me. I can't stop.

I let my mind wander among the stars to the rim of the nebula, beyond blackness, always moving toward Uncreated Wonder. When I arrive at any Edge, I jump off. What a holy Fall!

Perfect meandering in all directions at once is meditation. The mind that gets lost in the infinite is called The Heart.

The absolute stillness of chaos is born of non-resistance, which has nothing to do with concentration. It is just the opposite: the grace that is out of control.

Let your un-diagnosed adult ADHD attain the Sabbath rest. This is Divine Love. You arrive here by caring, but not trying.

Now get on with the silent, fragrant, thousand-petaled explosion of your emptiness.

Photo: Hubble photo of "Star-Forming Region 30 Dorodus"

Awareness Is Why

Only an embodied being can experience transcendental pure awareness, because the disembodied are too entranced, having no contrasting experience of the material world.

This is the inestimable value of a human birth. For it is only through the contrast of spirit and matter that the Self can awaken, and it is in this earthly body that we experience the paradox: both matter and spirit are made out of the same essence, which is pure Awareness.

Awareness is not thought, but thought arises and dissolves as the content of Awareness. Awareness itself is ever free from concepts and images. Awareness is unbounded, self-effulgent, shining with crystalline light, whose nature is ananda, bliss. In the mirror of pure Awareness, this entire creation appears as an uncaused reflection that is not composed of anything else.

Nor is awareness a product of material particles interacting in the neurons of the brain. Quite the contrary: material particles are vibrations of pure Awareness. Quantum physics verifies that the physical universe is made out of no-thing but "fluctuations in the vacuum." Yet the vacuum is awake: it is pure Awareness. And on this ocean of Awareness, universes appear and dissolve as bubbles.

Our waking world, our dream world, and even the black void of our deepest sleep, are ripples in a clarity that never slumbers. Awareness is the witness of birth and death.

But Awareness has a secret dynamism: the relationhip of Awareness aware of its Self. This transcendental relationship, Awareness of Awareness, is the inner space that creates the universe of subjects and objects.

Awareness is not One, but a Holy Trinity. Awareness is Love in Love with Love.  In the Vedic science, this inner Trinity is called Sat-Chit-Ananda. "Sat" is Being, the substance of the objective world. "Chit" is Consciousness, the subject. "Ananda" is Bliss, the ecstatic energy of Subject and Object meeting and dissolving into each other. 

The universe arises from this inner Self-relation of Sat, Chit, and Ananda. Thus the seed of all subject-object experiences in the world is transcendentally located, prior to creation, in pure Awareness.

The entire drama of creation, fall, and redemption, is just the story of Awareness. Awareness becomes separate from its Self, overcomes the duality, and reunites with its Self, for the sake of Love.

What are all these galaxies, worlds, atoms, aeons, lifetimes and infinitesimal moments, but Shiva making love to Parvati through the fire of Awareness? What is all this but Christ embracing the Magdalene in the bridal chamber of the Heart?

Again and yet again, through countless perceptions, countless dissolving kisses of subject and object, Love realizes its Self in the fragrance of a rose, the glimmer of a dragonfly's wing, the song of a thrush, the taste of the Beloved's lips...

And so, through every taste of the ordinary, we encounter the miraculous. Our wonder heals the world.

Unmoved Mover

Aristotle said that God is "The Unmoved Mover" (ὃ οὐ κινούμενος κινεῖ).
Aristotle was actually describing the Witness, who is more inward to us than our very mind, ever silent and awake, shining through us in the midst of the busiest activity. The Unmoved Mover is pure Awareness.

When I was hanging out in Trappist monasteries in France we sang this ancient Latin hymn, 'Rerum Deus' by St. Ambrose, at interludes between hours of manual labor. Ambrose based his conception of God here on Aristotle's Unmoved Mover.

'O God, creation’s secret force,
Thyself unmoved, all motion’s source,
Who from the morn till evening ray
Through all its changes guid’st the day'

When Raphael painted Aristotle's Unmoved Mover on the wall of the Pope's apartment at the Vatican in 1518 (pictured above), he portrayed God as a woman, setting the wheel of the zodiac in motion. In the Biblical tradition, this Unmoved Mover and ever-silent Witness of action is Hochmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek. She is the feminine divine, the womb of creativity.

May all of us find the immovable silence at the center of our turning; for great music, great poetry, great acts of peace making, come from that stillness. This is my prayer for the new year.

Moment of Solstice

The precise moment of solstice is Wednesday, December 21, 5:44 a.m. EST (2:44 a.m. Pacific time). At this instant, the whirling stars invite us to meditate, to meditate and taste, through the sacrament of the macrocosm, what is actually available in every breath...

You are the hub of the wheel. You dwell at the center of all that turns. The still point is everywhere, because its circumference is boundless. Here you may repose in the heart's silence, and be free from the endless karmic cycle, the world-anxiety of action and reaction.
This transcendental awareness is called 'Turiya' in the Upanishads, the thought-free state that is more intimate than waking, dreaming, or deep sleep, and nearer to you than the mind itself. One moment of this heart-silence frees you, along with generations of ancestors, from a mountain of weary weight.

Jesus said, "my kingdom is not of this world," even as he moved through the troubles of outward circumstance. Yes, your core of Christ-consciousness is in the world, but not of the world. The silence at the center of the spinning does not spin.

At the solstice pause, drink from an infinite stillness where everything is washed in rebirth. Enter this brief portal and fall into eternity. Listen to the unstruck gong of the void, the germ of every song of joy.

And never doubt that the solstice repose of light in the womb of divine darkness is the outward sign of a Mystery whose seed lies buried between your every sigh and inhalation. What is the cosmos but the radiant expansion of your own breathing?

De Profundis

The Winter solstice is my favorite holiday of the year. Its message is symbolized by so many great festivals of midnight tree lighting, candle lighting, heart lighting...

This is the time when we have no choice but to Fall, to descend into the shadow and honor the night. Holy night is the Mother of stars. And She is the night in our own heart. We should never be afraid of the dark. Darkness is not the opposite of light, but the womb of light.

As the rose grows from composted loss, so the dark night of our soul gives birth to radiance, but only when we embrace the depth without trying to rise, or ascend to a "higher" state. "De profundus: out of the depths" (Psalm 130). Out of the depths I not only cry, but awaken.

Find the Center

It's not so important whether you are white or black or brown, whether you are gay or straight or transgendered, whether you come from a Muslim or a Jewish or a Hindu background. Just enter the circle from any direction you choose and find the center.

Find the divine essence that makes us all human. For when we awaken the heart, our differences sparkle like multilayered petals on a golden dahlia. But when we focus only on our differences, they divide us, we scatter, the circle is broken.

Do we not share the same blood, breathe the same breath, drink one water, grow food from one soil? Do we not dwell together on the same earth?

The full moon unites us in its silent glow. The reborn sun warms every atom of our sacred flesh. One race, humanity. One God, the light in the heart.

And though it may shine like a rainbow through billions of rays, there is only one religion - love.


Painting: Full Moon Solstice Mandala by Caterina Martinico

Call To Action?

"One who sees stillness in action, and action in stillness,
truly sees." ~Bhagavad Gita, 4:18

In an already too busy culture, we constantly call one another to action. But do we call one another to the source of action?

Action that arises from the chattering mind has a completely different quality than action arising from inner silence. Deep action is not a re-action. Deep action is not other than stillness. Deep action does not come from belief or ideology, hope or regret, but from Presence.

Awaken to Presence, then see what happens, and what doesn't happen.

Winter Rose

December 13 and the rose on my porch is still hanging in there. Here's to all of you roses in Winter, still spreading your beauty in a dark time. That is why you're here. Thank you. Have a blessed Solstice.

Wings of Love

Intimacy does not dissolve boundaries. Intimacy requires boundaries. Love does not erase our limitations. They become translucent. Let love illuminate your wounds, your darkest lines. Learn from the dragonfly, whose wings are precisely defined by the sunlight passing through them.

Painting: 'Shiva Dancing' by Cynthia Rose Young

In A Relationship?

Krishna and Radha appear as two, Lover and Beloved. Yet they are one self-referential whole. She is longing and He is fulfillment. Implying each other, creating each other, vibrating within  each other, they are "Bhedabheda," which in Sanskrit means, "two and not two."

The mystery of Radha-Krishna is your own astonishing Self-awareness. Perhaps you yearn to be "in a relationship," but the truth is, you are never in a relationship. Relationship is in you. You are the continuum of the heart-space in whom all relationships arise and dissolve.

So when you feel this yearning, just become the yearning; let it flow like a river to the sea of your heart.=

The beginning and end of all spiritual practice is to rest in the heart, where stillness delights in the dance of multiplicity without ever actually becoming two. This is the fullness of Radha-Krishna.

Rest as the vastness in whose depth there is no other. For here, both "I" and "Thou" are waves on the ocean of your Being.

You need a soulmate? By the hundreds, by the millions, your soulmates sparkle and dissolve all around you. As they arrive, say farewell. As they depart, greet them.

Everybody you meet is a deeper revelation of who you are. This is true intimacy: a love that welcomes the otherness of its own self-revelation, without needing or clinging.

You grow intimate with all creatures when you are acquainted with your Being. Ever at home in the ground of silence, you are never alone. Your silence regenerates the whole creation. Don't take anyone's word for it. Find out through deep meditation.