Uradiance

Never Send an 8 Year Old to Sunday School I haven't really learned anything new since that radiant Spring afternoon when I was eight years old. After a beastly morning in Sunday school, I ripped off the stifling necktie and suit my parents made me wear to church, and put on musty jeans with a ragged tee-shirt, running barefoot into May weather. The sky was an immense robin's egg. Giant puffs of cloud tumbled slowly in the sunbeams, shimmering green on the grass, then gold in the wheat field all the way to the woods dotted white and pink with dogwood blossoms. I gazed up into endless blue and, in the same instant, felt my feet rooted on the cool earth. I saw the essence of every religion from the dawn of history in that epiphany of earth and sky. And I knew it. I've studied them all for half a century since that moment, yet I've never found anything but a variation on that vision of ineluctable suchness in a schoolboy's heart. "So this is what th...

Dear friend, this little 'me' is only a string of memories, held together by a fear thread. But in reality, there is no thread. The real Self - the one who speaks in the Gita through Krishna and in the Gospels through Christ - is just radiant awareness, which is always now. This radiance is You. Now turn your radiance around 180 degrees. Gaze into your infinite luminosity, your immaculate subjectivity. Let your Self shine groundlessly alone. Explode like a diamond without edges. Don't worry, the little 'me' will continue to burst up and dissolve, moment by moment, like bubbles on the sea. What will cease to exist is just the work of threading them together into a necklace, a choker! Now play. No, don't even play. Let the ocean play.

1. Put it under Donald Trump's pillow? 2. Go back to sleep and un-trigger it? 3. Play Mozart and lie in the bathtub for hours pretending it isn't there on the wall above your futon? 4. Name it. But what if its name is Legion? 5. Google instructions for exterminating it. But what if all you find on line is this meaningless poem? 6. Rouse yourself to action and resist, bravely turning a wine glass upside down on top of it, slipping a stiff sheet of paper ever so gently under its horrible legs, while tremors of cowardly despair run up and down your esophagus? 7. Now you have it trapped in glass, like the specimen of an ancient pestilence. But then what? Let it run out of oxygen, shrivel up and die? You could flush it, yes, but what if it lives and even multiplies under your house, its myriad progeny emerging through your pipes and spigots? 8. Tweet out a picture of it. Let it go viral. 9. Call your neighbor, whom you have never spoken to, the retired...

In the form of the mind, our karma goes out into the world and gets stuck in the web of time. But the Self passes through this net without getting caught. Beyond the mind, the Self is neither diminished nor increased by living in the world. There is no future or past in the Self, for whom the world is like a glorious and terrible mirage. The Self is pure awareness without an object, slipping out of all chains, either of iron or gold, pain or pleasure. The motion of turning and returning like a wheel from life to life is only an appearance in the stillness of the Self. It is the world that comes and goes, not the Self. Repose without effort in the Self, who is a tiny spark lodged in the core of your heart. Yet instantly this spark ignites and consumes the entire universe like a ball of cotton. Repose without effort in the Self, by whose sun-like golden splendor you will be replenished, and will replenish others, until there is no other. Painting by Kay Larch

  I don't take a breath. Breath is given . Inhaling, breath flows into my body as Mother's grace. Exhaling, I offer it back. So effortless is this process that I take it for granted. But breathing is profoundly Eucharistic, a two-fold sacrament of grace and offering . From effortlessly breathing in, I learn how to receive other gifts, like food, shelter, warmth, and love. From breathing out, I learn to give it all away. Shall I hold my breath so as not to lose it? Am I afraid to share my breath with the world? Breath is given on one condition only: that I ceaselessly give it back. If Divine Mother provides each breath, why would she not provide all other necessities? It is only the mind that blocks her grace, inventing the thought of lack . "Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can a woman forget the infant at her breast?"(Isaiah 49) She never asks whether her child deserves milk. Milk just flows. Yet I imagine I must prove myself worthy of Divine Mo...

If I could go back anywhere in time, meet anyone, naturally Jesus would be high on my list. I’d be on a dusty path in Galilean noonday heat. He’d be sitting in the meadow with a handful of workers eating figs from a sack, sharing his bread, the land owner waddling up in his white caftan, red in the face, shouting, “Now look here, these men and women aren’t for hire!” Jesus offers him a fig, saying “Asalam aleikam,” then stands up and walks over to me. He doesn't speak, just smiles, but his eyes are full of welcome. And that is all I need... Of course I'd want to visit the garden of Vrindaban too, at the end of the previous age when human bodies were still more like moonbeams than bone. It would be midnight. I hide behind a tulsi tree, watching Lord Krishna dance with the cowherd girls. I linger and gaze only a moment, yet that gaze becomes a dark well from which I drink for ten thousand years… I wouldn’t mind visiting the steps of the Acropolis either, back when that cri...

The answer is to be radically yourself. You are incomparable. You were created to resemble no one. Polish your face with the breath of uniqueness. Only when you sparkle in your own unadulterated suchness are you One with the cosmic mystery. Don't bow down to the Master because you want to imitate him. Bow down because the Master demonstrates how to be infinitely irregular, crazy, and unlike anyone.

The worst hack ever. This is much more serious than defective chips in your iPhone or Russians hacking into your PC. This is the Final Hack. They can get into your DNA. They can infect your program at the level of your ribosomes. Once they get in, they take over your personality and tell you how to vote. More likely, they will use your coding to create an alternate You, one who is immune to senility and ADD. Meaning that when you go before the judge and he asks, "Which of you is real?" your doppelganger will answer much faster, and remember stuff about you that you can't. The government will choose the new You, and the old they will send to an interment camp to do slave labor packing Amazon orders. With good behavior, you will be let out to run free paper routes for the Washington Post. They have already taken over Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, and Melania Trump. Now listen. There IS a way to protect yourself. No, there's no patch for your pro...

For my birthday, my daughters gave me some "edibles." Those of you who don't live in Washington or Colorado may not know that edibles are cannabis candies. Perfectly legal. Unless you are a Republican, in which case you believe in our Attorney General who says, "People should not smoke marijuana." Unfortunately, though I ate three of these little demon chocolates, I didn't get high. I didn't even get the munchies. Maybe that's cause I always get the munchies. But these hip products, sold at designer pot stores by sales girls who could be marketing cologne at the Nordstrom cosmetics counter, bear no resemblance to the stuff we smoked at college in the 60's. Oh yeah, that was a life or death experience. My room-mate, Bob, couldn't find stereo speakers big enough to contain his head. First, the weed was not commercially available in convenient candies, cakes, and oil inhalers. If you wanted to get high, it had to be illegal. You h...