Uradiance

May the part of you that never gets married wed every lover on earth. The ceremony is bewilderment. Wed the honeysuckle and wild rose, marry the sound of a bumblebee in a late afternoon sunbeam. All through the black hours, be wooed by the incoming tide; then consummate your silence with sunrise. Though One and Two were never betrothed, marry the confusion. Your engagement ring is the uncut diam ond hidden in a vein of sorrow. Polish it in your chest, tumbling in tears, until the water is quiet. Neither give nor receive that brilliance in marriage. Stay one, remain voluptuous. You can't avoid the void. Some speak of it as naked and empty. Yes, sometimes it is, and you must drown there. Then the void glows with indescribably intimate softness. Receive that touch. And finally, at spiritual midnight, when the darkness is deepest, the void gushes with the Beloved, your secret and eternal Paramour. Be ravished. These are the three forms of the formless. Don't t...

We have thousands of reasons to be happy. But we have one reason to be miserable: the mind. Instead of seeking happiness, just drop the mind that seeks. Why pay so much attention to your thoughts when you can live from the level of intuition, the spontaneous guidance of the heart? The energy of intuitive living feels completely different than the energy of mind. And once you awaken the intuitive heart, you will look back to see that mind is a quaint 18th Century custom we can no longer afford: it has grown sour and toxic. It's been uncorked too long. How does one choose happiness? Well, here is a very ancient way. Let go of thought, sink down through breath, rest in the heart. This is the beginning and end of all spiritual practice. Precisely these instructions are given in the ancient Shiva Sutras of India, and the Philocalia, an early Christian manual on "Prayer of the Heart" from the desert Fathers. If you don't believe that you are entitled to cho...

You are the Master of the Dream, and you are here for a very special task: to reanimate the world with wonder. Until now, awareness has been the background of your waking life, and thought was the foreground. Awareness as pure space was so obscured by the chatter of your thoughts, that you were not even aware of awareness! Now there is a foreground-background shift. Presence solidifies. Pure awareness emerges as the primary substance of your experience, as your mind, with all its anxious thinking, all its images of past and future, subsides into background noise, and finally fades into silence. Those who allow this shift to happen find that their time has come. They lead the world into a new intuitive lifestyle. They function not from the field of mind, but from the field of intuition, which is the spontaneous guidance of the heart. And they teach humanity to make peace through simple Presence. For them, Being predominates over Doing. Our civilization will no longer be dominat...

My intellect wanted to pretend that it knew something important. So I divided space into seven planes. I separated emptiness into physical, astral, mental and buddhic worlds, calling some "gross" and others "subtle." I split no-thing into hierarchies of angels and bodhisattvas. I parted the sea of silence into ninety-names. Then I imagined seven lotuses blossoming in the body of suchness. As I treaded water, going nowhere in the ocean of wonder, I pretended that I was on a journey, ever ascending into higher spheres of wisdom. One day I might reach the goal. Perhaps, I thought, when I get there, I will say something profound. Or I will just hum and call it "the original sound of creation." Then I will adopt a Sanskrit name and charge people $125 an hour to talk to me on the telephone. But now I stare into the face of my cat, I listen to the song of a baby, I smell the first magnolia, and this little mind-bubble pops. No planes exist, no higher ...

  Awaken Space This time around, we're not here to focus on life's content. We're here to focus on life itself. Whatever forms may come and go in the space of life, it is not the content but the container, the space itself, that is our treasure. In the past, our thoughts were the foreground. The spacious sky of awareness was the background, so buried that we weren't aware of it! Now the silent background becomes the foreground. We become aware of awareness. This is the shift that defines our age. To guide a person's attention from the heaviness of objects to the weightless expanse of pure space - from the heaviness of thoughts to the weightless expanse of pure consciousness - what greater service can you perform? To liberate the sky from the non-existent boundary of clouds - what greater freedom can you share? You may be one of those who are called to this work, but until now you felt useless on our planet. Your task was Being, and everyone else seemed...

Seeing the mountain, I know that I know nothing. I am just a cloud.

I feel sorry for the one who says, 'I am not this body.' What hopeless dualism: I vs. the body! A vaporized zero-energy 'I' beyond the warmth of breast-bone and thigh? A blush without a cheek? He doesn't really mean it. Just trying to sound like a skinny saint in a loin cloth. Now hear my confession. I don't wear a loin cloth. I AM my body. The whole cósmos is my body, every atom spinning on the axis of its galaxy, each photon tuned to a bursting star. My skin is too astonishing for the world to contain. I incarnate heavens. Somewhere in my loin glows Krishna Loka. The almond space in my brain stem condenses the Milk Ocean, where Vishnu sleeps on his cobra boat. Mount Meru is a gnat between my eyebrows. Echoing from the hollow in my bones, the hymns of Sama Veda heal forests and wheat fields, calling a new race of honey bees from the planet Venus that orbits my belly button. Stop trying so hard to be a ghost. Find out how crazy s...

"Let me dwell here on the threshold of two worlds." ~Rumi God isn't so into the details. God doesn't care all that much whether you say He or She, creature or creator, one or two. God leaves all the busy work up to the devas, the angels, the elemental spirits, right down to the quarkish ayin soph who creates this very thought in a synapse of your brain, then melts back into divine no-thingness. So if you feel overwhelmed and exhausted by details, maybe you forgot that your awareness is divine, clear and empty as the sky. Drop your 1001 tasks this instant and expand into your true nature, like a bursting bubble of sea foam. This is meditation, and if its true meditation, you only need a short blast of it to saturate your boundaries with boundless Silence. Then you can get back to the unique task of your earth work, like a busy gnome, a tree sylph, or a peony deva. Don't underestimate this wild paradox of being human. You are both crea...

" Now when Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them and said... The kingdom of God is within you.” ~Gospel of Luke 17:20 "Take no thought for tomorrow." ~Gospel of Matthew 6:34 "Before Abraham was, I AM." ~Gospel of John 8:48 Jesus teaches exactly what Buddha, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, Osho, Eckhart Tolle, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and all the awakened ones teach: Be Present. Surrender the burden of your old stories and wake up to the miracle of Now. The present moment is the kingdom of God. The mind doesn't want to hear this, of course. Mind wants to accomplish something very complicated, and weighted down with history. Painting by Rembrandt

The power of Advaita is all-pervading silence. The power of Bhakti is the wave-nature of silence. Particles of matter arise from fluctuations of the vacuum. The dance of Shakti arises from the music of the void. We breathe in. We breathe out. The infinitesimal bindhu between exhalation and inhalation is the stillness where stars and galaxies are born. Rest the befuddled intellect in meditation. One and two are both vibrations of zero

Someone asked, 'What is your inspiration?' I thought about it and realized that my chief inspiration is something so small, so humble, so effortless; yet we cannot live without it. So insignificant that we hardly notice, yet vast beyond conception. My inspiration is a sacrament that encompasses every cycle of ebb and flow, encircling the cosmos, yet is embodied here, in my particular and ordinary now. My inspiration is this breath. This breath, nourished by awareness, illumined by Grace. Grace becomes concrete in this breath, because I am simply aware that I do not take this breath, it is given to me. Nothing more near, more com mon than a breath. Yet what moves my breath moves the planets, turns the galaxy, and pulsates eternity as time. This breath sparkles. It is the milk-flow of the cosmic mother. My breath does not originate in me. It pours from the stars through my crown, my brow, my chest, my belly. Streaming down my spine, a string of liquid pearls...

The only original sin is to doubt that your heart is divine. A pure light shines within you. It matters not whether you call the light Christ, Buddha, Guru, or Goddess. What matters is to merge with That through love. Then you will see the same divinity in others. For the sake of world healing, it is time to be the light you are. Meditate, then radiate. Wouldn't you rather look FROM that place than FOR that place?

As soon as you become aware that "I am made of pure light!" countless hosts of sub-nuclear angels muster to your trumpet of intention. Your flesh is composed of celestial hierarchies, ranked according to the table of the elements, which are waves of bliss. This explains the little rush and plume of gold that fountains from each dendrite in your cerebral cortex. It also explains how you can move a mountain. The material world responds to your intention. Earth is an extension of your body through divine antennae: seeing, hearing, tasting, smell and touch. Send forth your messengers, O Eye, O Tongue, O sacred Nostril! Even your pain is intensely luminous energy, sharpening your focus, melting ancient boundaries, removing the dross of thought, as long as you don't label it, "suffering." But the moment you think, "My body is sick, I am a weak and fallen sinner," the heavenly hosts depart, and you are no more than a lump of uncooked bacon....

I found that when I stopped making any conceptual distinction between happiness and sadness, I became fulfilled. But when I separated the 'state' of happiness from the natural field of awakened space which also contains the poignant sorrows of the world, the 'happiness' became quite brittle and superficial. I don't recognize 'happiness' as anything real anymore. It is like trying to separate the air in a sea bubble from the salt water. Peace.

If you want to feel a great relief from the project of getting enlightened, or saving the earth, just try becoming ordinary. To accomplish this, stop trying to be any-thing. Just Being is enough. You might look at ordinary objects and say, "There are no miracles." But in fact, these objects are miraculous - the dandelion, the cloud, the dewdrop, the eyes of a child - for they exist, and Being itself is a transcendental, breath-taking, never-ending miracle. If you realize that you Are the miracle, you will see everyone as a miracle. That is the only solution to our crisis. Photo: My plastic Buddha