Uradiance

  Wishing you all a New Year. Not a happy new year, just a new one. Because if you allow time to be new each moment, you cannot help but be happy, filled with the energy of re-creation. In the coming year, let us resolve never to be more than one moment old! But if we carry the old year into the new one, if we carry our old stories, doubts, angers, politics and belief systems, we cannot possibly b e happy. The mind the past can never bring joy. No thought, no belief, no content carried over in the mind can provide living energy, living Presence. Happiness arises when the mind doesn't cling to its content. That is when we taste the wine of silence between our thoughts. We soar into the empty blue sky of sparkling awareness, without clinging to the clouds. Then no-thing makes our mind happy: our mind IS happiness. I pray that in the coming year, every moment, you will breathe out the old, and breathe in the new. Have a very New Year!

"Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow." ~Jesus Keep falling and falling until you finally feel the gentle jolt of landing squarely in your own wild groundless heart. You are suddenly unbounded, because boundaries only appeared when you tried to be someone else, someone 'better.' Here you don't need to follow any path, because you are your path. You've become the answer to your spiritual questions. Your mind has what it really wanted: silence.   Now the mind doesn't need to condemn or criticize others. It has a much more important task: to rest in the silence of the heart. From this rest, tremendous vitality and creative action spontaneously arise, driven not by ideology but love. This is freedom: simply radiating your own truth without wasting an instant comparing yourself to others. Truth, radiance and bliss do not come from another, from heaven above, or  from the world outside. Truth, radiance, and bliss only come from one place: alig...

Do you understand the vast distinction between a Master and a Teacher? If you hear about a Guru please don't ask, 'What does he teach?' The Master assigns no lessons. He is a professor of Nothing. His lectures consist of silence between the words. Passion in the tremor of stillness. When a secret admirer leaves a fragrant blossom at your bedside, Do you learn anything? Or is there simply a storm of sweetness in your chest, a deepening hollow in the trough between heartbeats? The Master has come too near to be known. Presence is a gift. He is the gift buried in the gift.

"Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow." ~Mat. 6:28 Jesus wants you to look at a wild poppy. Really see the lake, the mountain, the silent explosion of stars, the eye itself, orgasmic torrent of pixels charging your dark amazement with waves of sparkling probability. Avoid names. Un-thing the creature with pure naked beholding. Watch boundaries dissolve into bliss particles of the void. Enter the wilderness of your lungs where out and in breath merge. Where the world and your soul meet like lovers in a kiss. Where Bodhisattva mind evaporates in sky blues, no cloud. Walk in the meadow of groundlessness. Let each bare stinging footstep awaken sleeping seeds. Have the patience of Winter, the body of Spring. Because the dead poet Jesus wants you to really see. His gift a wild poppy throbbing in the moonlight of vast awareness. ~Photo from incolors.club

While trekking through the high sage desert, I found Christ trapped in a ruined Church, shattering the stained glass windows, rattling the prison bars, pounding on the door from inside. Chains and shackles of dogma bound his wrists and ankles, more terrible than any nail wounds. "You, you have the key!" He shouted, "Open the door!" He was pointing frantically at my mouth. "What key?" I asked. "Your breath," he replied. So I breathed through the keyhole of that ancient door until it opened, whereupon Christ became a rare white mother raven with a wingspan that stretched to the far horizons, East and West. She rose into the sky, carrying the moon and all the stars in her beak. She grasped the earth in her talons like a mouse. Spiraling outward to the end of the ages, then circling back to the present moment, she perched on my shoulder by my left ear and whispered, "You, you are the Christ too, filled with my Holy Spirit....

The amethyst of pure attention shines in no-mind, lit by its own grace. Without a thought breathe forth galaxies in distance that appears to be outside you. The gift of the One: two lovers in a single jewel, twin chambers in your heart, pulsing empty, full. Surely you must weep, for this is the purest prayer. But doesn't each tear encircle a mysterious otherness? No intimacy is deeper than solitude. God draws very near to those who are alone.

Stars have a secret. They are always falling into their orbits of glory. They do not attempt to fly. Darkness itself is their wing. If you don't believe me you are still trying not to sink. Plunge more deeply into the womb of night and you will draw very near to the radiance of your Birth.

My Introduction to the new book of poems and collages by Rashani Réa and me, which is available this Spring. It is entitled, 'The Fire of Darkness: What Burned Me Away Completely, I Became.' Art, like beauty itself, is a cauldron of opposites: light and darkness, Winter and Spring, the Warrior and the Mother, the political and the contemplative, the swirl of chaos and the stillness of the center. Only in vain do we seek victory against our antipodes. For that very battle feeds the polarity and divides the One. The answer is always wholeness. My poems are a cauldron of opposites too. I cannot speak of the triumph of light, for that would disdain the creative potency of the dark. I cannot deny the spiritual power of the Warrior, even though he is born of the Mother’s womb. The best Mother is also a Warrior, and the best Warrior is also a mother. And just as my poems refuse to divide the wholeness, so the art of Rashani Réa embraces divine paradox, and gives birt...

  I don’t believe. I don't believe in my heart, yet it keeps beating. I don’t believe in my hand, yet it stirs honey into tea and washes my grandmother's cup. I don’t believe in the taste of an heirloom pear from a tree my father planted, it is so sweet. I gristle my fist around his original hoe, and learn silent bending from a gracious willow without believing anything. I don't believe in the hummingbird asleep on a lilac twig, head cradled on her own emerald breast. Or in the silken cat slipping through her element of moonbeams. I don't believe in your eyes, yet their gaze obliterates my confusion. Empty, empty of every belief, I can listen to the sound   of falling stars in my body, like snow, God’s breath brushing my breastbone .

Someone said, "You need no other." But I do. I cannot light the wick within me. I am lit. From the instant I was planted in the flesh I needed someone for my milk and tears. Even the absence that encircles the moon, the stars, is curved by a Mother's inscrutable care. Aloneness created us to love. Before first light, the thrush waits blindly to feel that same pull: the jasmine breath of my listening. Here's the mystery: we do not thirst for the One, but the Near.

In the Beloved there is no "should," no rule to obey, and no one to follow down any path. There is only melting. I was butter, now I am ghee. The pain was deep, but all that was burned away was not me. Can the earth leave its orbit around the sun? So I cannot take my gaze from your face. Who would call this bondage? The formless sky of love has become a crown of thorns and a garland of roses while remaining empty and blue. Invisible sap looks crimson  in the drunken poppy. You are the hollow of a baby's palm holding me like a ruthless talon. Of course I could endure the Spring without looking at a single flower, then boast, "I have liberated myself from Beauty." But I would rather drown in your blossoming eyes because they drown in me. We are dead bees in each other's goblet of raindrops, slaves of the pain of sweetness. I gladly wear the chains of my Beloved which are made of pure light, because ...

Breathe in everything at once and be the royal master of creation. Then become poor in spirit when you breathe out. If you won't let loss play with abundance you will never be a lover. A blood-red poppy drops its petals, dives back into the seed, meets the spark of frozen solstice in the blackest loam. Take root in your grief where the Sun is born. Dark energy encircles us all like the womb. Spring up through a bolder falling. Who knows if, tonight, you might not finally embrace the fierce beauty of your own beaten heart? Painting by Father J. Battista Giuliani

Please make mistakes. In your latticework of wounds you look more broken and beautiful. A trellis of cracks on the mirror gives intricate wings to your reflection. One appears as many there because we dare to stumble and drop the crystal trinkets of ourselves. Surely, love grows vines on the arbor of our shattering, and we make wine of sorrow. That's why we listen in rapture to those who have been crushed. The secret is to soften the gaze until the splay of your fault lines becomes a rose. How falling becomes you, and turns you gold! When you think you are whole, you wander like a hungry ghost far from the marrow of your breastbone, where the elixir is hidden, unpressed. But when you've been torn beyond repair, the breath that was too soft to take comes home to heal you.

   Originally the word "courage" meant love, from the Old French, based on the Latin word for "heart." But our hyper-aggressive culture of insecurity has separated love from courage. Keeping the heart open without judgment is love. Keeping the heart open to the pain, without shielding ourselves through judgment, requires very great courage. Love is the highest form of courage.

In the beginning Raven Ma said 'Listen!' and never spoke another Word. For there is no creator but your vigilance. Let the world be born from a frog croak, the scrape of a twig against your window, the breathing of a baby in the dark. Even on a moonless night the diamond clarity of your emptiness illuminates the forest, mountain, and sky. Do not squander the gift of silence. Being awake is its own reward. You will find no name for the place where the sun comes up inside your chest.

  Dear friends, instead of teaching me all that is wrong with this world, why don't you teach me how to dance?

I offer this message with love. To hear it, please, just for a few moments, let go of all you think you are, and follow this breath down into your chest - a brief and effortless journey to the listening heart. Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world... for I have overcome the world." And he said, "The kingdom of heaven is within you." More than ever today, we need to hear Christ's secret of sanity, for all of us have reached a mental health crisis, our minds overwhelmed with images of world-sorrow - in no small part due to the media. But you are not this world sorrow. Anger and angst are passing clouds. You are the Sun. The world is the flux of opposites, sparkling in a gown of tears, whirling in a golden robe of laughter. And those opposites are ever-balanced and paired, in grief and hope, pain and joy, darkness and light. But the nature of the world is not your nature. The world has its own nature, and you cannot change it. Not even Jes...

The Christ bud swollen, glowing in the womb of your hopelessness. Your yearning a now that scorches the future in the fire of bewilderment. How shall You, the Beloved, come to Me? How shall I, the Beloved, approach You? As a winged gazelle with an inhuman smile of ominous benediction? As a leopard with sapphire and diamond teeth dripping the fresh blood of your innocence? As the forest of sighs, greening silently around your loss? Perhaps as your very next breath? Waves of stillness in the heart. Because I am, You are. Because You are, I am. Crush us. Put us in the blackest jar. What shall our fragrance be called? 'My Ravishing,' 'Pillage of Otherness,' 'Musk the Lover Left at Dawn.'

  We met in the moment before creation. You left crescents and stars all over my body, wounds that would see, eyes that would never be healed. My longing turned to fire. What burned me away completely, I became.   Now I am your swirl of gold in blackness. The purple bruise of solitude brings tears of joy. Swallowing distances, nothing is more intimate than silence, the full moon pressed on my forehead, your kiss. 

"Taste and see that the Lord is good." ~Psalm 34:8 All creatures are broken vessels overflowing with goodness. God tastes the goodness in all of us, and longs for us to taste it in ourselves, to taste the deliciousness we are made of. The cosmos is nothing but "Tova," the goodness of God, vibrant in myriad flavors, dancing in myriad forms, sometimes painful, sometimes sweet, sometimes dark, sometimes bright. This is why, at the dawn of creation, "God looked at everything he ha d made and, behold, it was very good!" (Gen. 1:31) You can argue all you want for the existence of evil, and you can choose, if you like, to make a cult of your woes. But there is really nothing else for us to be made of but the goodness of God. Our atoms consist of subtle particles, which are made of even subtler particles, but the subtlest particles of all are pulsations of divine goodness, waves of Shivananada. Creation arises from silence as a d...

Does a sunbeam get entangled in the lace beauty of the dragonfly's wing? When spider weaves her most intricate web across the night, does she ever trap a star? Be more and more like the ripe moon hanging from an apple branch. Let your heart irradiate the world, without getting caught in its stories. Those tales of enchantment and yearning, conflict and loss, past and future, are not about you... Your work is Presence. Pour out something careless and carefree from the Well of Silence in your chest. Bless all creatures with the un-created light that gushes without circumference from your groundless center, where a terrible and holy love burns through every veil of separation... Consider, friend, that what transforms the dust, the air, the sea, the moon beyond the motion of the sea, is not how much you do, but how deeply you penetrate this ancient now with love.

The sky doesn't try to expand. It is effortlessly infinite. The sky doesn't mind clouds passing through it, or need to clear them away. They dissolve as they come, but the sky remains clear and blue. And the emptiness of the sky is not a negative quality. This emptiness is its purity, its beauty, its dignity. Now there cannot be more than one space. The space of the sky and the space of awareness are one and the same space. Your awareness fill the sky, overflowing the rim of the furthest galaxy. And the sky fills each atom of your flesh, overflowing every neuron in your brain.

I give thanks for this breath. It is really all I need this moment. And the more I give thanks for this breath, this fountain of bewilderment, the sweeter and deeper it flows through each cell of my body. Then I know it is the breath that wove nests for the stars, and set them singing in stillness. Thank you, Lord, for this breath. It is yours. Painting by Laura Diehl, DeviantArt

Beauty is the nuclear silence in your groundless core, where surrender and rebellion are one and the same. Surrender to wholeness. There is no escape. That is the victory. Refuse to be divided. Immersed in the vigil of unbounded bliss, rebel against any force that would diminish or entice you to choose one view against its opposite. For it is never that one side is enlightened and the other is ignorant: ignorance is the antipathy itself, the separation of wholeness into polarized opponents. As ancient Gnostics taught, the Pleuroma, the Fullness, appears as a dance of sygizies, paired opposites in endless sexual play, bursting with dynamic creativity. But when we identify with "this" rather than "that," we lose the equipoise at the center of the cyclone, and cease to be the dynamic whole. In the words of the New Testament, you are not one against others, you are "panta 'hen panta," all in all. Of course there are choices, but they...

When he appeared to them after the resurrection, Jesus simply breathed on the disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." Withered husks fall away, but there is sparkling sweetness within. Forms perish, releasing the imperishable flame of essence. Every breath is a kind of body, containing a soul of starlight. Through the grace of this breath, you can pour divine shakti, the power that created the universe, into each cell of your flesh. This breath can transform pain to b eauty, rising from your belly to your crown, and back down to your chest. Rest here, in the radiant new life. Let withered husks fall away. The beginning and end of all spiritual practice is to rest the mind in the heart. You are the flame. You are pure love. Photo: In Assisi, by Ingrid Henzer

  "Resist not the evil one... Love your enemies." ~Master Jesus Jesus did not speak these words for our enemy's sake, but for our sake. He came to save us, not from our enemies, but from ourselves. Yet his words of healing make us very uncomfortable. Ironically, the deepest comfort of the mind is having an enemy. The sensation of resistance against an other makes our ego feel alive. The ego is most at home when it has an enemy. Each of us might ask, "To what extent is my identity formed by resistance against an other? Who would I be if I had no enemy?" To encounter the other in a love that has no enemy, because it holds no resistance, is the purest political action, more radical than any ideology of the left or the right. For ideology does not inspire action, but re-action, using the other as a stereotype to confirm our belief. The most radical act is to be present. Presence is the revolutionary breath of love. In this destroying fire,...

BLESSINGS OF DIVALI Election day in the U.S. is the sacred night  of Goddess Lakshmi in India. Jai Ma! Haven't I been whispering this again and again to your ear? She is the undulation of silence, the serpent in your heart. She is the dancer in your stillness who takes off veil after veil until Shiva and the Self are one. She is the wisdom of Unknowing who became a womb for Jesus. Draw nearer now and listen! She humbles herself to become the invisible body of your next inhalation. She is the empty seed at the death of a sigh, the dark sweet moment between breaths when countless galaxies blossom and dissolve in your chest. Draw nearer, even nearer now. She weaves everything that Is from the energy of pure delight. Your yearning for her beauty is a flame that floats on the river of her yearning for You.

Transcendence does not mean going somewhere else. It means staying right here and dropping the mind, with all the conflict and duality it projects onto the world. Transcendence does not mean becoming more abstract, but more solid - becoming a still flame of Presence that burns a hole through time. Transcendence is so concrete, so present in fact, it draws others into the flame, burning away the conflict in their minds also. When we practice transcending the mind and being present together, as satsang, then love is possible, because there is no ideology, no political party, no agenda but to celebrate community.

She created the earth, then entered your body as this breath. Therefor savor her undulation , from the azure pearl adorning the emptiness above your crown, to the coral flame devouring pungent boughs in your valley of yearning. What is an exhalation? A trellis for surrender, the ever-expanding muteness of your gratitude. Give up searching for a word. Bewilderment is not uncertainty. Wonder is not a question. What will blossom from your grief is a sweetness with no hint of Winter or Spring, steel tears of daylight, or musk of voluptuous just-forgotten dreams. The flavor of One cannot convey the perfume of her presence. The scent of Two overpowers it. The name on the bottle was Catastrophe, but it cannot be purchased now. You have broken it, and bathed in the tincture of loss. Don't you know that your silence is hers, the womb of stars, the hollow in every seed?

 My soul said to me: "Why do you mistake the nature of the world for your own nature? "The nature of the world is conflict. It has always been so, and always will be. It is a field of opposites in polarity. And this is the only place where you can awaken your Self to gain freedom, beyond the pairs of opposites. "Gradually, you learn to see the conflict as a dance, an inevitable play of light and shadow, until the dream itself awakens you. "Then you taste your true nature, not as philosophy but direct experience, and know that your nature is not the nature of the world. "Be still, and know that your I Am is God. You are freedom. You are joy. You are the peace that passes all understanding. "You are not here to perfect the world, or even to change it. For the nature of the world is change itself, imbalance, imperfection. "You are here for a nobler task: to wake up the Changeless in the midst of change, the Boundless in the mi...

New ideas don't come from old ideas. They spring from emptiness, flowers of silence. Therefor the wise confess, 'I have no idea,' and become Masters of Wonder.

We wonder why everyone is so stressed. But many of us would not know who we are without a conflict in our mind. This conflict is called "I." Democrat against Republican, socialist against capitalist, woman vs. man, black vs. white, vegan vs. omnivore, the enlightened vs. the ignorant - many of the most conflicted claiming to be non-dualists. Maybe the answer is never one side vs. the other. Maybe we could rest the mind in the heart. Maybe we could all go meet in Rumi's field, under the stars, beyond ideas of right and wrong. How do we get there? Listen to the silence. Trust this breath. Take off your shoes. Photo: taken on my full moon walk

The universe has an infinite sexual attraction to itself, and this magnetic crush is Shakti, creation's secret bliss, ecstatically pulsing from hollow awareness into the dance of countless relative forms, then sighing back into stillness. So Shiva dances with the Goddess in the eternal silence of the Self, yet this ever-ripening void is, paradoxically, the perpetual orgasm of the cosmos. The wedding is just getting started, I'll have another cup of emptiness!

Be grateful for the gift of Mantra. Mantra is a Sanskrit term meaning, "vehicle for the mind." The term combines "mannas" (Sanskrit for mind) and "tra," (Sanskrit root of the suffix, "tron"). As an electron is the vehicle for electricity, so the mantra is a vehicle to carry the mind inward, through subtler strata of energy, until awareness merges in its silent source, which is unbounded universal consciousness. A living mantra cannot be learned from a book or picked up in a casual conversation. Then it is just a hollow shell, an echo. The mantra must be ignited from that very inner source to which it guides the mind. It must be a "chaitanya" mantra, a living seed. This ignition happens at initiation, under the auspice of a guru. Westerners give little credence to initiation, as there is no correlate for initiation in modern culture. But once there was. References to mantra initiation abound among both Christian and...

Jesus, You taught no religion, no politics. You abolished every commandment but love, which is the ruthless law of softening the borders, melting the boundaries between the eye, the gaze and the other. When you live like this they arrest you because you are an anarchist of joy with tears of fire. They crush your heart like a dark red poppy until your fragrance fills their garden. Their own children forget them, yet remember You. Their children's children become wanderers, searching for that flower whose savor still makes them tremble. Finally You return, not as the other who is seen, but the one who dwells in the dark before knowing, where in-breath and out-breath merge. Now the crushing is complete. It was You who ground us and You who were ground - the gift of the winemaker to the grapes. Photo of blessed Assisi by Ingrid Henzler

"The path to the Self is subtle as the edge of a razor." ~Katha Upanishad Let perception take you to the edge. What happens where the blade is sharpest and thinnest? The blade becomes the very space it cuts through. Edge is emptiness, emptiness is edgy. Sharpen yourself until you become edgeless. When the mind is so concentrated it wanders throughout the cosmos, the wanderer arrives at home with every step. What is the significance of this? Focus purely on what you love, even if it is a tiny blue violet, and you fill the entire universe.

Melt into your longing. Longing is Guru. Longing is Shakti. Longing is the very breath of the Goddess. Longing is made of what it longs for. Photo by Aile Shebar

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