Field

“Hridayeh chitta sanghattad drishyas svapa darshanam:
One who merges the mind in the Heart perceives this world
as it truly is: a projection of consciousness." ~Shiva Sutras

Consciousness is not the product of chemicals interacting in the brain. Quite the opposite: the chemicals in this body are vibrations of consciousness.  Every particle in the body is a resonance of pure consciousness, even as consciousness remains unbounded, all-pervading, and infinite.

Consciousness contains the stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the space beyond, yet consciousness is completely contained in the hollow of each atom.

In the words of the Upanishads, Om Tat Sat, Tat Tvam Asi. All this is nothing but That unbounded consciousness, and you are That.

When human beings learn to enter the heart and experience the omnipresent Self, they automatically recognize the Self in others too. Warfare ends. But until then, there is no progress in civilization, no matter how "scientifically advanced" we become. New technologies may develop, but we only employ them to divide and conquer, perpetuating our Stone Age materialism, just using more sophisticated stones.

Until we awaken from within, humanity remains stuck in what Thomas Hobbes called, "the war of every man against every man." We are bound to rival and fear one another, because we imagine ourselves to be separate and finite, when in truth we are all radiant pulsations of pure consciousness, incomparably unique resonances of each other.

We really need to grow up and abandon all this petty quarreling.

Innate Yoga

The science of Yoga - which is infinitely more than a sequence of physical postures - is a systematic attempt to recover the inseparable wholeness of consciousness and creation, that each of us practiced spontaneously when we were One.

Yoga was innate before the mind invented the traumatic myth of a separate "I," standing outside the cosmos. And soon after we invented the lonely "I," we invented a lonely "God," standing above and beyond the cosmos: because the lonely "I" needs a friend to talk to. But as entities who are independent from the continuum of the present moment, "I" and "God" are both imaginary.

Who can say when this traumatic separation happened, shattering the whole into "I," "God," and "World"?  Perhaps it happens when the infant was weaned? Yet it happens to us all as our inevitable "fall from grace," producing a tragic rigidity in both body and mind. Our body's rigidity reinforces "ahamkara," the "I"-thought. And this "I"-thought reinforces the rigidity of the body. The more we cling to fixed concepts and beliefs in the mind, the more tense the body becomes. True believers - either religious or political - are the most tense bodies of all.

The practices of Yoga are a response to this perpetual cycle of contraction and rigidity in mind and body, our "fallen" condition. When we bring expansion and space into the contracted places of dis-ease, we recover our Original Ease. We remember the grace of Innate Yoga. Let your own breath be the guru of your body, and let your own body be the guru of your mind. That is how a mind become a soul, and a body becomes the incarnation of the Spirit.

Your body and soul are the Lover and Beloved whose wedding has been sung by the greatest poets of the world: in the Song of Songs, the Gita Govinda, the ecstatic poems of Rumi and Mira Bai. Who did you think they were singing about if not You and your paramour, your body?

As mind expands body relaxes; as body relaxes mind expands. The link between them is the pulsation, the "spanda," of breathing. Yoga, then, is the embodied breath of life without mental or physical rigidity.

Yoga literally means "union" - the state of at-one-ment where "I," "God," and "the physical world" dissolve into inseparable wholeness, one vibrant continuum in which there is no gain or loss, only a whirling stillness.

The essence of Yoga is simply to breathe the divinity of awareness through the divinity of the body. It sounds too simple. Our mind wants to believe in something more difficult, full of strain, work, overcoming. Our choice. If we prefer, we may choose a thousand more lifetimes of strain, work, and overcoming. Or we can start now to awaken the miracle of Awareness, in the Body, through the Breath. Which is the real meaning of the Christian "Trinity": God, embodied in the Christ, through the Spirit.

Usually we breathe in the body without awareness (God), or we think in the mind without a body (the Christ). But when we link body and awareness through the breath (Spirit), mind becomes a field of diamonds, breath the nectar of eternity, and flesh the grace who remembers how to dance.

A talk on SoundCloud: LINK

Photo: Freddy about one, before the traumatic
separation of  'I,' 'God,' and 'the world.'

Hridayam

The most transformational event in a human life is to open the eye of the heart. Any small anxiety can instantly shrink a brilliant intellect to the size of a splinter. But the space of the heart is so vast and deep, it swallows even the fear of death, and dispels a storm of anger with one gentle breath.

Opening Hridayam, the heart's eye, is not only an inner experience: it is the Springtime of the world, touching countless seeds of otherness with rays of divine Beauty.

Don't ask "what shall I do?" You are called to the work of seeing, through the eye of the heart.

A Message

Woke this morning with these words to share with you. I don't care where they came from, or how you react. I just know I am to share this message and that is all...

"Each moment, wherever you are, there is only the bliss of wholeness. But the mind gets in the way. Let this mind become clear and transparent, like a polished lens. Then see: there are absolutely no problems anywhere. There are just situations arising and dissolving in wholeness. Dance with them."

Matins

This morning, Lord, my work is your Being.

We are made of action, word, and Presence. We may generate our own words and actions, but our Being comes from God. American culture honors action, especially busy-ness. We honor words too, often the loudest ones. But least of all do we honor the silence of Being.

Some people affect the world through their deeds, some through their words, and others through their Presence. This culture rewards words and actions, but seldom do we reward or even acknowledge the power of being present.

This is why we need the Sabbath. Not only a day of the week, but a regular time of day, at dawn and sundown, when we settle into deep meditation. Then the body rests from action, the mind rests from words, while the heart reposes in stillness. This is a radical act, an act of re-creation, when we return to the silence that was there before God said, 'Let there be light.'

Lord, if I make my work your Being, at least for a few communion moments, morning and evening, let the wine-stain of your eternal beauty spread through all the fabric of my day. And let the ordinary of each moment be sweetened by your eternal Presence.

Picture, Mary Magdalene in the garden of the Resurrection,
in the Mission Church of Santa Barbara

Elder

Jung believed that old age is characterized by a "contraction" of one's forces. This is disappointing to hear from such a man. He must have depended too much on his intellectual powers alone, and lacked a practice of meditation to transcend the mind.

In growing "older" there need not be contraction, but the possibility of deeper expansion, unimpeded by the delusion that one's identity should be constantly confirmed by winning battles. Then there can be meteoric inward growth, even unto intergalactic spaces, because one gives up the need for external signs of affirmation.

Elderhood is an invitation to fully embrace your personal madness, now understood to be merely God, in the unique diamond singularity of the Self. Let your bold disarray be the secret harmony of the empty space between this world and the next. Be intimate with the Bardo.