Uradiance

How easily we say "happy New Year," as if happiness were a piece of candy.  Happiness is a radical proposition. But it is not a concept. Happiness dissolves concepts. Happiness is not an emotion. It is the gentle explosion of Being in the silence of your heart. Once I asked the Master, “What can I do to serve you?” He answered, “Be happy.” It took me years to understand this. Our happiness is profound seva, service to humanity. What happens to us in the presence of someone who is truly happy - not someone who pretends, and wears a fake smile - but someone who radiates warm, empty, thought-free stillness, melting all tension and fear? Our chattering mind stops. Deep silence awakens. We smile from our groundless core for no reason. Happiness has no cause. One who is essentially joyful doesn't preach, argue, or convert, because happiness needs no religion, politics, or ideology. Yet meeting such a person is a world-changing event, shat...

At the wondrous woundressed hour of Solstice pause, drink from the stillness that washes all turnings in rebirth. Enter the briefest portal and fall into eternity. Listen to the unstruck gong of starry void, where every song of joy germinates in the boundless seed of silence. Each of us can find blessings in our own back yard. How blessed we are in the Northwest to find this sacred mountain, 'Mother of White Streams,' so near us. This morning, December 21, my canine buddy Bowie and I gazed at her from a nearby hilltop at dawn. Thank you, Mountain Mother.

I celebrate the birthday of Guru Dev, Sri Brahmananda Sarasvati, holder of the lineage of Adi Shankaracharya. He passed away the year I was born, yet his light silently infuses millions of souls on earth. I bow to the lineage of the Holy Tradition. I've noticed that New Age do-it-yourself spirituality often disdains the notion of "lineage." But this bow is pure gratitude, not mere submission to authority. And this bow co ntains a deep secret. It is a shield of protection, a pathless path of surrender. Enlightenment is never solitary. Enlightenment is sanga, the beloved community, a continuum of consciousness through time and space. Bowing to one's lineage can be a tender acknowledgment that "realization" is not an achievement of our American individualism. Lineage is a bulwark against the charismatic ego of the solitary self-appointed "spiritual teacher." Lineage is the humility of tradition. The flame passed from candle to candle neve...

Meditation is the crystallization of pure consciousness in a jewel more solid than any material object it could be conscious of. The Self outshines creation, irradiates the cosmos, blessings the heavens and the earth, simply through its witnessing power. As Jesus' said, "I have overcome the world." Then there is no more work to be done. The evanescent world arises as a many-faceted reflection in the diamond essence of awareness. By what word may we describe this distillation of the stars into a gem of singularity, this dissolving of objective creation into the continuum of sparkling subjectivity? The word is Love.

"Spiritual bypass" is a trendy new term used to describe self-delusion and avoidance of the shadow. But it is often used by people who have never tasted the boundlessness and bliss of transcendental consciousness. To transcend is not to bypass. Transcendence is not avoidance, because transcendental absolute unchanging divine consciousness pervades every particle of this body, and every moment of pain and grief. The clear desert air does not avoid or repress the mirage: the mirage just happens as a tremor in the clarity. Of course, if you want to spend a lifetime affirming the "spirituality" of your anger, your grief, you unhappy moods, your mirage, then go for it. When you have exhausted the fantasy that "spirituality" is just the ordinary pain of human life, then come to Transcendental Meditation and taste the peace that passes all understanding. On this pathless path, nothing needs to be controlled, repressed, or surpassed. The transcendent embra...

When we feel overwhelmed by so many conflicts in the world, we imagine that we cannot be happy until we solve them. But it is not our duty to solve the world's conflicts. Our duty is to solve just one conflict, the one that underlies them all: the conflict between who I think I am, and who I really am. Can I experience Am without putting any thought, any noun after the verb? Can I feel that joy bubbling up from the unfathomable well of pure Being in my core? It is a gushing spring of silence. When I taste it, then in a very spontaneous way I can pour healing waters over the earth. Share that joy with others, in whatever unique way is most effortless and natural. This is the only solution to the world's conflicts. They cannot be solved until I am happy.

Devotion has many flavors: sweet, bitter, spicy, or tasteless and clear as sky. Sometimes it's the bouquet of divine love with passionate hints of the soul's pain; sometimes the dissolving of the two in one trembling scentless silence. We lose so much when our palate insists on one flavor only. Photo: passiflora incarnata, or passion flower

If you witness thoughts arising, just where they arise, before the power of maya converts them into words and pictures, you can see that thoughts are simply ripples of stillness, boundless vibrations of pure awareness at play. And in its ground-state, pure awareness is utterly silent. This means that there is no conflict between thoughts and silence. Thoughts are made of silence. We have been told that, when we meditate, we must concentrate on a single thought, or repeat a single word, in order to silence the mind. Disciplinarians, posing as spiritual guides, have indoctrinated us to believe that the mind must not be allowed to wander. But whether they teach in the name of Buddha, Yoga, Christian prayer, or New Thought, their doctrine of concentration and mind-control only suppresses the lively nature of our awareness, and makes us dull. When you see that thought is silence at play, why is there any need to control or concentrate? The mind automatically gets centere...

We live in the perpetual irony that, what we most need to remember, can never be recalled because it is only alive in this moment. So we use all manner of ritual and symbol, by hand and thought, to remind ourselves of what it is like: the bread and wine of Jesus's last supper; the fruit and flowers of puja ; the alms we give to the poor and the service projects, which we often do, if we admit it, only to cleanse our guilty conscious, or acquire sufficient merit to bring our hearts a m oment of peace. Then we practice all sorts of meditation techniques, trying to still the mind, that we might behold the elusive transparency that is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. And what are we trying to find? The very light through which it must be seen. Yet we cannot, no, can never retain or remember, by any vision or merit, that which we are seeking, because it is This .... This is the Fire that burns to ashes the age-old story of our search. We already stand in the...

I was eleven. My father and Dr. Jackson took their sons pheasant hunting. Dad and Dr. Jackson were about forty yards away in the Autumn stubble of a corn field. A pheasant took flight. They aimed and fired and missed. The pheasant flew toward me. I led it a few feet ahead in my sight and pulled the trigger. The pheasant went limp in the air. I felt an ancient exultation. But in the two seconds it took the shot pheasant to plummet earthward, then thud against the ground, dead, I experienced an inner transformation of 10,000 years. That feathered thing of air fell down, but I was falling too, from power to grief to shame... Yes, I was only eleven. But I pledged to my secret heart that I would never use a gun again. I have not told this story until now. I'm sorry. Forgive me. Thank you. Painting: Dead Pheasant, J.M.W. Turner

  Why is it that so many of us always need to be right, always need to win? If we want to ripen and deepen our fragrance, we need to lose and be wrong sometimes. Yoga - which really means ripeness, wholeness - doesn't mean constant victory. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna defines Yoga as "equanimity in loss or gain." Loss is a great teacher. Only one who knows how to embrace loss learns how to be a mighty and humble warrior, how to fall down on the field in defeat, then arise to win. Thi s is the sport of wisdom. I have always learned more from my losses than my victories. Victory could create ego, but loss created a depth, a silence inside. November evening. The moon is full, hanging from a leafless branch. Forms hollow out in the frost, holding space for the formless. They glow with the brilliant colors of their dying.

 You can be an activist by planting Winter squash, walking in a fern forest, listening to your children, or smiling from your heart at someone who is lonely. True activism means gently immersing your whole astonished body in the river of Presence, moved by the breath of beauty like a golden leaf, falling right where you are. True activism means drowning in the mystery of communion with the creature right before you: a disheveled crow, a boy in the rain with his shining basketball, the moon gazing through a spider's web, a crone at the grocery store, marveling at all the soup. These are your tribe. They have no political party. This is your native country. It is all sacred land. Earth is not transfigured by how much you do, but how wantonly and nakedly you plunge into the ocean of this perishing moment.

Why not return to basic sanity, the silent explosion of Grace at the center of your body - not just to please yourself, but to infuse the world with the nectar of Beauty? Let your mind repose in the heart. That is the simplest and most ancient meditation. Sink into the bubbling golden cauldron of your solar plexus. That is true alchemy. Rest in the space where you were never born, you are never one moment old, each breath is a gift from eternity, and the countless electrons of your flesh are all angels of Light.

Awareness of awareness is not a thought. It is pure bliss. Awareness of awareness is the laser-like self-radiant silence where thought dissolves into its source: the subject alone, without an object. Upon tasting even a moment of this diamond emptiness, intellectuals give up philosophy and become mystics. But throughout the ages, after tasting this inmost refulgence, mystic minds could not accept the experience as their own consciousness. So they named it "God," imagining it to be an Other. It is not other. It is not even "it." There is nothing in the universe but consciousness. In fact, there is no nothing, because the very vacuum of empty space is awake and vibrant with creativity. Consciousness is Shiva, the pure, the Self-luminous, the beautiful, the good. Everything that exists is a permutation of Shiva. Shiva is eternally silent, formless, unmanifest, and blissful. Yet the silence vibrates. The stillness dances. The vacuum ...

"Whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give will become in them a spring welling up to eternal life." ~John 4:14 These words of Jesus describe the Shakti of the divine mother, pouring from the silence of pure awareness, which is Shiva. True meditation means alignment with this wellspring in your chest, flowing from the groundless depth of your heart. You tap into the dynamic silence from which all energy is born. Physicists call it the vac uum. Mystics call it the void. Meditators know that it is consciousness. But this boundless awakened space is not empty. It vibrates. The ocean of stillness in the heart's core is surging with mighty waves, in quantum science called "fluctuations of the vacuum." The silence bubbles with creative chaos beneath the limits of all measurement, "Planck's Constant." These waves of pure possibility spring out of the Un-created into creation as the subtlest partic...

Merely to exist is pure grace on a cosmic scale. But to exist in a body, with a chance to express this boundless wonder through individual form, is a gift beyond all miracles. Yet some very "spiritual" people seem to regard this body as a prison, and devote themselves to getting out of it. What a waste to imagine that our precious flesh is bondage and ignorance, when it is really our opportunity to dance as incarnations of the sun, moon, and stars! Once there was a seer whos e gift was telling people how many lifetimes remained for them on earth. A long line of yogis, ascetics, and gloomy advaitists always waited to receive his wisdom. "For you, 7 more lives... For you, 12 more... For you, only 3 more lives..." And they would all depart weeping and gnashing their teeth with disappointment. A certain sinful man, holding a jug of wine in one hand, his other arm entwined in the arm of a gorgeous lady, came to visit that seer. With one loo...

Random memories of ordinary places I once took for granted, now bathed in the Autumn twilight of my longing. Where has this life gone? Roses in an alley. The gaze of a Gernsey cow in a meadow of violets. Abandoned doll on a park bench. Cobblestone sidewalk on a street down which I never walked. Smell of old books in the attic, invoking the whisper of the grandfathers. Frozen cream pushing the tops off milk bottles on the back porch. Barn owl in Winter moonlight. Tangled vine on a ruined fence post, suddenly rioting with berries. Saturday morning, the color of butter dripping over hot pancakes. Where has this life gone? Can I not bathe the present moment with this same liquid sorrow, same transparent beauty, each moment of time immersed in eternity, eternity of my awareness? The dream of the past, the dream of now; does it not all sparkle with love? Painting by Sam Timm

Why do we want to change the world? It is already changing every instant, in every particle and wave. The world we wanted to change a moment ago has already dissolved. If we want to change what is always already changing, then it must be our perception that is stuck.

"I have found, yes, I have found the wealth of the Divine Name’s gem. My true guru gave me a priceless thing. With his grace, I accepted it." ~Mirabai "Breathe the name of God, empty of self and filled with love." ~Rumi O mind, rest in the radiant Name. Sing the melody of the Goddess, O lips. Let these eyes witness all creatures take her form. How can I ever be lost when I wander in the Word that created the world? Wherever I go, I have returned. Needing no vessel, I am the wine. Needing no lyre, I am the music. This body is a filament for the glow of Kundalini Shakti, the electrical One who flows through wing and fur. I am just an animal filled with God. The anxious vanity of a human mind has dissolved into her radiance. My rosary is a broken thread. It's scattered beads have become the stars, and "I" the silence between them. How? By dissolving a syllable of her name into my heartbeat. With no more burden cal...

It requires some courage to live in the constant stream of destruction that is creation. Can you remember what you were anxious about a year ago? A month ago? Or has your mind replaced that calamity with something even worse? Yesterday's catastrophe was terrible. But you can't remember that either, because this morning's crisis is the worst of all. Until tomorrow. Why do you live like this, staggering from one apocalypse to the next? You could be disaster-free, if only you would rest in boundless ambiguity, the Divine Uncertainty of this moment, this breath, this frail sweet ever-perishing body of chaos. Why not embrace the end of the world right now? Today is Judgment Day, and you are the judge. Why not welcome the joyful presence of the great destroyer, Mother Kali, Mistress of Bewilderment?

If I had not once been smaller than a particle of dust, I could not look at dust and see God. If I had not once been vaster than a galaxy, I could not look at the sun and see myself. It is because the human soul passes through every element, every kingdom, every kind of creature, that she feels at home in the chaos of the universe. Yet not being any one creature in particular, she interprets her cosmic longing as its opposite: a sense of alienation. Let your loneliness embrace the night. Search not for a star. You are the womb of constellations. You are the breath that turns them all. No need to cling to your tiny point in this vast wheel. Be the stillness through whom the pleroma dances, ever coming Om. Photo: Milky Way over Mt. Tahoma. Not my photo, but my mountain.

Earth is in her birth pang. It is a long and difficult labor, because so much blame, so much anger, so much compulsive 'taking sides' distracts her from breathing. Breathing is more important than being right. Breathing is more important than taking sides. Breathing Life is more important than ideology, left or right. Give up the blame. If you cannot offer a solution, offer a prayer. Offer your next exhalation. Let the rhythms of the cosmos be the rhythms of your breath. Relax. Dilate. Give birth.

The planets and stars are singing. Every cell of your body is singing. Atoms ring infinitesimal round hollow bells of energy all night. Silence cannot contain itself. Your marrow never sleeps. Trees and stones must hum the melody. The sky's emptiness echos the praises of your flesh. You are music beyond words. Your breath is the drum of creation. Who needs a national anthem? Just kneel for no reason. Flower in quietness.

To taste each inhalation as a gift from the Divine, and each exhalation as your offering, is to enter the holy of holies in the temple of your body, and take part in the highest worship. If you studied all the Vedas, the Torah, the Gospel and Qu'ran, you would learn no more. Each religion began with breathing: grace and gratitude, gift and return. All other rites are images, rehearsals for this astonishing kiss in the silence of your heart. How do I know? I gave up theology, and became a lover.

Back in 1970 a group of us were sitting with Maharishi, and one person asked if civilization would end soon, because there was such violence and injustice. Of course, when the mind is wavering, whatever time we are in feels like the apocalypse. Maharishi smiled and replied, "Heaven and hell are all around you. Your choice." Then he said something I've often heard quoted since, and attributed to many teachers: "What you focus on is what grows in your life. And whatever you re sist will persist." Jai Guru Dev. The world ended today. A new one was just created. Did you notice? If you pay attention, this happens with every breath. You won't regret the past or fear the future when you can rest this wavering mind in the heart of presence. Learn from the rose surrounded by thorns. Now is the silent fragrance that bathes the whole garden in beauty.

O Kali, I vow never to use You as a meme to focus my negative energy around my trauma and political anger. Rather, I will let You use me, to melt the boundaries of outrage, until I can behold the dazzling amethyst of your face at the heart of catastrophe. On this third night of Navaratri I worship You, O Goddess, in the form of Kali Shakti, the power of inner and outer transformation, who destroys what is old in order to dance as the grace of the new. Certainly, now is your time. You are in control. But pure devotion to You does not include Western cultural appropriation of your ancient serpent power. You are not a political icon, a symbol of our resistance to fascism, a channel for ap ocalyptic anxieties, a bandage for sexual wounding, or an embodiment of our trauma. In fact, dear Mother Kali, you are liberation from all such fears and obsessions. In the Vedic tradition, blessed Goddess, you are pure ecstasy, pure freedom, and pure beauty, disguised in the mo...

Mushroom scent of Goddess on the first Fall afternoon; rhyme of the happening apple, worm and all; sky within the sky, cloudless, blue, infinity self-evident; gift of the world to itself, unnoticed... In this ashram with spider-web windows and no roof, there's only one rule: don't fall asleep. Tomorrow will be even more wonderful. Virgo gives birth to Jupiter. Have a blessed Autumn!

It's going to be OK. But not out there. That will never be OK. That is the world of ever-changing forms. What will be OK is deep within you, where there is no passing form, but eternal Being. Your eternal Being has never not been OK. In Being, no problem ever arose. And no solution is necessary, because nothing was ever wrong. Even if you 'die,' it will be OK, because Being never dies. Out there is what dies. The world dies and dissolves each moment, so why worry ab out it? You don't need to look for happiness, because you Are happiness. So why not welcome this fear, this uncertainty, this pang of outrage, this wave of disaster-fatigue, without resistance? These reactions to the world are part of the world: they too are just waves of form out there. They have no Being. You have Being. You are Being. The nature of Being is ever-expanding joy. This is what Jesus meant when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world." The Being you Are is un...

The light of the sun, the moon, the stars and planets has a Source. That Source is the radiance of the stamen in the lotus of your heart. You irradiate the universe. You are joy. You are creativity. You are love. But due to the dazzling confusion of creation's panoply, we think that the Source is outside and above us. The grace of Mother Divine, through the vibrating energy of her bija mantras, can dispel the clouds of this confusion, so that we realign with the light of the Heart. And the most auspicious time for this realignment, through the practice of meditation, is Navaratti, the Nine Days of Mother Divine. Navarati begins on September 21 this year, which is just the time of the Autumn equinox. We in the West are just re-discovering the Goddess, who was essential to ancient Judaism and Christianity. The feminine aspect of the divine was associated with Hochma (Wisdom) in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek. We mostly think of her as a vague intuited feeling. But her wor...

I notice with ironic surprise that those of us who obsess over our spirituality - perfecting our yoga postures, getting the right meditation technique, practicing meticulous purity of diet - are often more anxious than people who just do daily work and play without any pretense of gaining enlightenment. In fact, the romance of sadhana, especially among those of us with a compulsion to hang out in ashrams, or frequent weekend retreats with "spiritual teachers," can be the mask for a neurosis: the avoidance of the ordinary. What if the path of awakening lies, not through ashrams, non-duality workshops, health food stores and yoga studios, but through the small-time sacraments of the commonplace? What if the most profound mystical practices are these: * Give up the search. * Be grateful for this breath. * Just rest your mind in the heart. In fact, this is the surest instruction of the wise, found in the ancient yoga text, Vijnana Bhairava, and the original Christ...

When I come home to the place where I am broken, then I can be whole. If I am willing to confess the weakness of my will, I open like a wound to strength. If I have the courage to say, "My deepest ability is vulnerability," the Gift comes, like a whisper of wind from deep within. Yet I cannot will this mystery, for my will is a broken wing. How could the weak will, will its own strength? All I can will is confession. Confession is my native land, my homecoming. This is metanoia. Only in confession am I free. Only then may the Other approach me, touch me, heal me. Here is wholeness: that my heart only finds healing in a Friend. I was created to be broken. I was broken for communion. I yearn, yet not to be One, but Near... Jesus took bread in his hands, broke it, and gave it to the disciples saying, "Take, eat, this is my body." So we break bread as a sacrament. Yet we pay so much attention to the bread, we forget the power of the breaking. It's ...

""Beauty will save the world." ~Dostoyevsky "Objective" science seems to be skewed toward a utilitarian view of nature: nature as machine without a subject, without a taste for beauty. Are we so sure that beauty is a by-product, and not the motive, the beginning and end, of evolution? A biosphere could have evolved without blossoms. Are flowers inevitable? The job of cradling seeds and distributing pollen might have gotten accomplished in a more mechanical and economic fashion. Whatever the work of fragrance is, from rose to musk, we might sense it as a thread of vibration, a ray of gray light, without a scent. Yet we, and perhaps the bees also, sense the garden as sweetness, with shade upon shade of subtle textures, flavors, aftertastes. Why do birds sing? Another form of communication might have been evolved, an electrical buzz too quiet for humans to hear, and more mathematically accurate for the birds. I suggest that beauty is a ...

A breath is so much richer than a thought, so much more interesting in texture and luminous with vitality. A thought is an abstraction, a mere sign of something else. But a breath is itself, the very energy of Presence. Our civilization has vastly over-rated the power of thought, but under-rated the power of breath. We replace one thought with another and call it "thinking," or "reasoning," but what does it lead to? The next thought. There is no end to the trap of thinking. But superimposing these thoughts onto our energy-state and our body does not penetrate our anxiety or heal us. If we are anxiously thinking of some problem right now, we can be sure that a week from now we will replace this problem with another one and think about that with the same level of anxiety, because our thoughts do not change our energy. And next week, we won't remember what we were worried about this week. We'll just replace it with another catastrophic thought. Yet all the wh...

Jesus doesn't want to "save" you; he wants you to become what he is. Crucify the opposites nailed to your mind: past and future, heaven and hell, matter and spirit, ignorance, enlightenment. Your flesh is the rose, your soul is the fragrance; resurrection is the pollen at the heart of the flower. Feel your heavenly body entangled in this earthly one; the mother bird has woven a strand of pearls into your nest of twigs: her eggs are blue because they contain the sky. Why does your emptiness glow with compassion? Why is your darkest night the womb of morning? Because death is the Kingdom of Presence: as soon you think that the Garden is elsewhere, you have fallen into exile. Don't take two thousand years to remember this moment; turn your pilgrimage into a labyrinthine fire dance. You were a guest at this wedding before you were born; therefor unveil the smile of wonder, recline at the bountiful table of your own breast. Sip the wine of silenc...

You don't need priests or politicians, you make peace on earth simply by being awake. The kingdom is not a nation of laws and borders, a heavenly city descending from the sky, or a utopia designed by economists and college professors. The kingdom is not invoked by shouting magic slogans in the streets, just as food is not created by banging pots. Justice spills into the world from a blossom inside you, overflowing after the shower of grace, tasting blue, like the sky. The kingdom comes a thousand times a day, when you nourish a thirsty stranger with your smile, when your mind is suddenly empty and your heart is filled with nectar. Friend, don't wait for a prince. You are the royalty. Your palace is the present moment. The throne is in your chest. Silence from a golden cup anoints you with astonishment. The pulse of your blood commands the galaxies to shine. Your nakedness is the sun. The gesture of your merest breath absolves all creatures from a colossal an...

The integral silence of pure awareness is oceanic, containing waves of sorrow and waves of joy, both of which are waves of ananda. . The Void is not devoid of p assion. What physicists call "fluctuations in the vacuum" fill empty space. Transcendental feelings permeate unbounded silence. . The great Jewish theologian Joshua Abraham Heschel called this paradox The Divine Pathos: Godhead empathizes with human suffering. Spirituality is not the transcendence of feeling. Indeed, human feeling is but the reflection of transcendent passion. . The Godhead is not passivity. Christian mystic Jan Ruysbroeck wrote about "the wildness of God," and "the wilderness in the Godhead." Entering transcendental consciousness is an ever unfolding relationship of Lover and Beloved in the very silence of the Self. Thus the 4th Century Christian father St. Gregory of Nyssa coined the term "epictisis": eternal becoming in the groundless depths o...

To "witness" does not mean detaching the observer from the observed. Rather, I embrace the whole continuum of my mind, with all its thoughts, as one dynamic emptiness. There is no "I" who witnesses thoughts. Rather, there is just this trackless ocean of vibrant stillness, thoughts arising and dissolving as waves of silence. Thoughts are not other than the stillness of the witness. Thoughts are not other than emptiness. But this stillness, this emptiness, is playful and dynamic. Enjoy thoughts as the ecstatic play of the formless. Detachment is just another version of duality: "witness" vs. "thoughts." And such detachment is a subtle form of violence, division. The condition of witnessing is simply to refrain from grasping or rejecting. Do not grasp one thought out of the stream as more significant. Do not reject another thought as less. Whether pure or impure, whether positive or negative, all thoughts are one continuum, the playful wave...

Word and Silence are not opposites. Together they co-nourish creation. The womb of the Untold ululates in fluctuations of the vacuum. She is the mother of physics, Genesis 1, a feathery hen of breath ruffling darkness into waves of fire, oceanic night-singer of infinite possibility. She was here before God said, "Let there be light," and is still here, beneath all that we can say, the resonant field of eternal Silence, where Words of creation are conceived. W e used to savor the Logos on our own tongues. We could talk the elements into doing anything, inspire the wind, instruct the waters, still the storm, ignite a garden with song, move colossal stones with a whisper. Our language vibrated with mantras, Godspells, healing shamanic gutterals. Even our Hum was an unstruck gong in the heart. We named each other. And respecting the power of names, we were creators. But we lost the science of magical speech when we dissipated Word-energy through gossip, ...

All phenomena dissolve like mist. Therefor all deeds are forgiven. Every stranger is your only child. Relax and do what you like because compassion is your nature. Now pour another cup of whatever kindled this friendship. The candle is so small, and the desert is vast. Don't ask why we met here in this oasis of the heart. As long as we can smile for no reason, we know that we are destined for happiness. Photo: On a wilderness hike at the sacred Mt. Tahoma, I met this little friend sitting just under the surface of the water in a clear mountain stream.

In the Vedic tradition, Bliss is the very essence of Being: part of the three-fold nature of the supreme absolute, "Sat-Chit-Ananda," Being, Consciousness, Bliss. But in English, the word "bliss" is associated with a superficial state of temporary pleasure, a drunken stupor, or a high that won't last. We need to penetrate the real meaning of this important term, for there is nothing superficial about it. Bliss is not an energy, a divine light, a life-force, or an outcome of spiritual practice. Bliss is absolutely n othing. Bliss cannot be quantified. It is not given or received. Bliss cannot be communicated to you by a guru or a lover. Bliss is neither a transaction nor the result of purification. Neither vegan diet, nor yoga, nor celibacy, nor years of meditation lead to bliss. Bliss is giving up on all this. Many wisdom teachers, from Gautama Buddha to Saint Francis, from Sri Ramakrishna to Eckhart Tolle, tell of breakthroughs that were...