Good Morning

Hi! How are you today? Isn't it a beautiful morning? The entire cosmos is happening in the boundless silence of space, and this space is awake; this space is pure awareness enjoying the bliss of its own nature, witnessing countless suns and galaxies that arise and dissolve within it. And this space is who you really are.

Let's meet here. In fact, we are already dancing at the center of the golden flower that has no circumference. This is the space of the Heart.

But please don't imagine we are talking about a belief or philosophy. We are talking about your direct experience of Being, at the simplest, most innocent level, before a single thought arises to cause separation. Jai Guru Dev.

Love Is Freedom From Images

Love arises when there is no self-image.

What is the image of yourself as you were yesterday? Is this what you are right now? What is the image of yourself as you were one year ago? Twenty years ago? One thousand years ago?

What is the image of yourself as you will be tomorrow? Is this who you are right now? What is the image of yourself as you will be one year from now?  A million years from now?

Who are you when you drop all images of yourself? The present moment has no image of itself. It simply Is. Images only exist in the mind as past or future.

When I Am pure existence, without forming an image of myself, I can embrace whatever arises in the moment, and I can welcome everyone I meet as a radiance of the same existence I am. This is the imageless embrace of love.

Scripture says that we are created in the image of God. I say that Love is uncreated, and has no image.

The power of Love is in direct proportion to the mind's capacity for dropping images. Love is the grace of a silent mind.

Courage of the Witness

"Yogastah karukarmani: Inwardly settled in the silence of yoga, perform action." ~Bhagavad Gita 2:48

To witness requires deep inner stillness, which is the state of Yoga. But to witness also requires courage. Not with judgment, but with humor and compassion, witness this tragicomedy of errors that somehow presents every person with perfect lessons of character sublimely choreographed by divine necessity so that all learn precisely what they need to learn each moment, and have a perfect right to without our interference.

The irony is that the silent force exerted by the consciousness of the witness is as healing as any part played by a do-er, since the actor is really a re-actor, spinning tangled karmic circles in the ever-thickening plot of an ever-repeating melodrama.

This is not to say that you shouldn't play your part. But play it with dispassion. Let it go moment by moment, your soul settled in the silence of the witness. And please, never suppose that your part is more important, or less important, than any other's.

Frond

This frond of iris is a miracle, not because it is an iris, but because it exists.

Its thingness is a flower, but its Being is divine. All things bathe in the nectar of Existence. The taste of that nectar is bliss. However fallen, broken, exhausted, or small, each creature floats in the invisible waters of perfection, the Being of the Creator.

We usually see the objects of the world as foreground; we are only aware of their Existence as background, like the blue of the sky. Now a subtler field of human awareness is emerging: we begin to perceive Existence itself as foreground.

The earth, a star, a weed in a chink of sidewalk, an old tire smothered in honeysuckle, a weeping wound, all shimmer through the formless sap of transcendental Beauty.

The miracle is merely To Be. Why not dwell in perpetual astonishment? Why not bow to a drop of dew or a cricket, not because it is a thing, but because it Is? Isness is God.

If you don't understand this, I'm sorry. I can't explain it. Just walk barefoot in wet grass at dawn, and watch a plum bud gently, silently explode...

Sacred Duty

Krishna, this hair-raising tickle of transcendental beauty, outraged the Brahmin priests when he danced with farm girls. Buddha felt the wrath of holy ascetics because he renounced renunciation, daring to savor a breath in his flesh, then a cupful of sweetened milk.

Jesus broke the purity code, condemned to death for hugging lepers and feasting with unclean women. Why were those women so unclean? Because they reminded men of their longing for what cannot be grasped by thought.

Let the radiance at the center of your body incinerate the books of law. Let your heart be a pot-still, your inner heat boiling the commandments into one transparent shot of pure forgiveness.

May the love that blossoms from the silence where looking begins, dissolve all faces of God into diamond emptiness. Your fragrance must escape the flower, your honey overflow the comb. This is your sacred duty: become an outlaw.

Veil of Impurity

Our ego's most ancient veil is the illusion of impurity. "This food is impure. This act is impure. This body is impure. This thought is impure." Close your Eye and let it descend from the mind to the heart. Now open it and see. Nothing is impure. Every form is composed of inviolable light.

Thus a Vedic text declares: "Whether pure or impure, whether filled with purities or impurities, whoever remembers the lotus-eyed Lord gains inner and outer purity."

Collage by Rashani Réa

Ex Nihilo

"Of all the great things to be discovered, the being of nothingness is the greatest." ~Leonardo da Vinci

The great theologians of the Western tradition understood wisely that this creation comes out of nothing: 'ex nihilo.' They found this in the first verse of the Bible, where the earth is created out of 'tohu w'bohu: a formless void.'

But they assumed that a Creator must be necessary to make creation happen. This invention of a creator is an act of the mind, not an immediate perception of what Is. When our mind super-imposes its concept of 'God' onto the ineluctable suchness of the world, we lose the capacity for wonder. We cannot see the dazzling paradox that gives the universe its juiciness: the world is un-created.

No Creator makes it happen. There is no process of creation in time. Neither is there any thing-ness to give weight to no-thing. Every moment, for no purpose, the world simply flowers out of emptiness.

Just as a mirage shimmers in still desert air, so creation shimmers in the void. This is the vibrant playfulness, the dance-nature, of no-thing.

Thinking that it's all something makes us heavy. Knowing it's all nothing makes us light.

Here is a good little article on 'The Physics of Nothing' from the New York Times: LINK

Also recommended is the book, 'Nothingness: the Science of Empty Space,' by Henning Genz, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Heidelburg: LINK

Undistracted

All week, this pinball mind was pinging around this pin ball world, distracted by the news. But if we can just observe the way things really are, the madness of the world becomes a perfect meditation on the nature of awareness and the non-existence of distraction. 

You can never really be distracted in meditation because your mind is the Goddess and your consciousness is Lord Shiva, watching her wild and lovely dance.

Lord Shiva is pure awareness, stunned into silence by Shakti's creative power, the sinuous undulation of your own mind. The Lord is not stunned into unconsciousness, but into higher, clearer, more radiant consciousness. And the more he has to witness, the more conscious he becomes!

The object only enlivens the subject, and the object has been projected into form, out of the ocean of pure consciousness, just so that consciousness can witness, be amazed, and through amazement become conscious of its Self. That is the purpose of prakriti, creation.

Shakti, the very play of your thoughts, irradiates space and time with her splendor, cleansing, healing, re-creating earth and stars, not through your will but hers alone. You are just the wonder, the Keeper of the Space where her dance unfolds.

So let your mind dance as wildly as she pleases. Let her wander throughout creation, caressing and kissing the furthest galaxies. Simply remember the secret: this dancing mind is Shakti and this awareness of the dance is Shiva. Awareness abides as silent witness, wherever the mind goes. Then there is no conflict, no distraction in meditation.

Satyam, Sivam, Subham,
Sundaram, Kantam;
Sat-chit-ananda,
Sampurna, Sukha, Santam;
Chidanandarupah,
Sivoham, Sivoham!

"The true, the auspicious, the good,
the beautiful, the radiant;
existence, awareness, bliss;
fullness, joy, and peace:
the very form of bliss-consciousness,
I am Shiva, I am Shiva!"