Uradiance

Everything is dissolving; therefor each particle of dust is infinitely precious. Nothing is important; therefor you are supremely beautiful. No greater or less, no higher or lower, each creature the incomparable ideal of itself. Therefor I am free to give the same attention to your lips that Christ gives the soul. The earth is not important. The sky is not important. Moon and stars are not important. The swirling galaxy is less than a water spider caught in a drain. The highest mountain is a ripple in a sea imagined at the final moment in the fading mind of one just dead. How important are you? The hollow in a reed, an empty cocoon, the hole in a cheerio carried back to the forest in a crow's beak? Tell me what thought you had precisely this time yesterday. Was it important? Where did it go? What happened to that thought is happening to our world this moment. We are dissolving. And all the information we have eve been, is stored nowhere. Existence is loss - yet...

Collage of my words by Rashani Réa

To be astonished by the vast energy that arises from stillness, and dumbfounded by the beauty that resonates in silence. That is meditation. And it happens beyond thought.

The Sabbath happens when we give up seeking. What's important is not how brief it is, but how conscious it is. One moment of awareness-without-seeking is a precious diamond, a sparkling burst of stillness that annihilates time. Something even more wonderful than happiness dawns the instant we give up looking for it.

Mind creates duality between "time" and the "now," as if one is not the other. The seeker wants to stop the flow of "time" and enter the stillness of the present moment, as if "now" is a stasis, a stagnant pool of being, and not a stream of becoming. But there is no "now" to be grasped and rested in, as if the present is a thing or a place. Because "now" is never an object of awareness, but the subject. I Am presence. Presence is a dynamic wave, moving without beginning or end. And all my suffering arises because "I" resist this wave-flow, which is only the flow of myself. The paradox is that when I stop resisting the wave of presence, stillness dawns. A wave keeps moving across the ocean, yet at its base the wave is the ocean, and isn't moving at all. So my life endlessly flows through the tranquility of my own awareness, meeting apparent conflicts that arise and dissolve in the stillness I Am. ...

In the river of God's will, the goal is never in the future. When I separate myself from the flow of the Divine, and attempt to direct its current toward a future outcome, I alienate myself from Life. For God is the very Life from whom I separate myself in order to be in control. Any goal that I desire is my will, not the Way of the Divine. But when I surrender to the Way, I am in a state of Grace. And this very surrender IS the goal, each moment, wherever the Way wanders. Does this sound passive? Of course it does, because our culture educates us to control, to manipulate outcomes, to grasp for the "ideal," and be ever discontented with what Is. Now just see where this culture of "goals" and "ideals," this addiction to thinking about the future, has taken us... The real passivity, the real paralysis comes, not when I surrender, but when I attempt to rise above the stream of Now and focus on future rewards. Thus the B...

(This essay was published in ' Empty Mirror ,' a journal of art and culture, on April 28, 2017.) The relationship of Buddhism and the poetic process is a sublime yet unexplored topic among Western scholars. It’s about the silent space between the words, not just the word itself. The poet John Keats writes: "At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability , that is, when one is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason..." (Letter to his brother, 12/21/1817) In a letter to Reynolds, 5/3/1818, Keats speaks of stepping into the "Thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think." This could mean nothing else but sunya , the Buddha-nature of thought-free emptiness. Keats describes his creativity in terms that Buddhists would recognize as anatta , no-se...

People are so anxious these days, because the message they get from the world is that things are totally out of control - so out of control that no one can fix it. This is exactly the right message for now. Settle down and receive it. Breathe it into your heart: the world is out of your control. When we stop freaking out, we will get the next message, which is: "So what?" So what if everything is out of our control? Do you really want to control the world? Do you want an almighty leader to control the world? Which one? Have you ever been in control? Are you in control right now? "Control is an illusion." That is the second message. Finally, there's a third message for these times, one we can only accept when we surrender the illusion of control. The message is: "All we really have is our compassion, the brokenness of our heart." We are here for compassion, not control. To love with every breath, to love with each small ordinary ...