Uradiance

The yearly celebration of Guru Purnima approaches, the Full Moon of the Guru (July 27), determined by the Vedic calendar as the full moon in the month of Ashadha, which is always in our month of July. This is a good time to explore the mystery of the Guru, about which the West has a deep suspicion and misunderstanding, although anyone who studies the Christian Desert Fathers or Jewish mystics will find a similar reverence for the spiritual master in the West too. Here is the secret: The seed of the Guru already lies buried in the silent core of your heart, just waiting to be sprouted by a ray of the divine sun. Yes, to be ignited by the word, the touch, the glance of an embodied Teacher. When you are ready, the Master will come. And he, or she, only comes for one purpose: to ignite the Guru Tattva, the Guru principle inside you. A real Guru is not your surrogate mommy or daddy. Not your financial adviser or marriage counselor. Nor a friendly ghost seated o...

Meditation is the opposite of concentration. Meditation is not focusing on a point or an object, but de-focusing, expanding, and filling all space. Let Grace breathe you. You are the empyrean. You are filled with galaxies. Wander. Every point you touch is the center, and there is no circumference. 

The truth is, it is my anger that makes me angry. I don't need to "get my anger out." I need to get into my anger. I need to penetrate its outward form, the form of my "enemy," and find out what that energy is really made of. When I have the courage to do this, I discover that my anger is not the one who makes me angry. It is I. My anger is a furious knot of energy in my body, which my mind has turned into an image and projected onto someone else. And the media feeds me with plenty of images on whom I can project my anger. If someone bothers me, it is really my mind that bothers me. But what if I refuse to cling to the mental image? For tomorrow the image will be different. Tomorrow there will be some new social, economic, or political outrage. I will replace last week's outrage with today's, and today's outrage with tomorrow's. But the same anger will be there beneath the image, percolating out of my solar plexus. One thing is su...

Your mind knows  there is only One. Yet your heart falls in love with Love itself. Dear friend, don't be confused. Radha yearns for Krishna. Sufis ecstatically dance with Ruuh. Magdalena longs for the beauty of Christ, the unstruck sound in her own chest. Everything you see is a likeness of their lila - a photon, a galaxy, a fallen soul. Each arises from that pulse in the heart of the void. You will never explain this shimmering world of reflections, this play of bhedabheda - two, not-two. Just rest between breaths. Become the mirror.

How did our culture develop such a prejudice against the Self? I think it's time to stop turning s-e-l-f into a four-letter word. Why not celebrate divine selfishness? Which isn't self-centered at all, because the Divine Self is so vast, it can find its center in another. For when I see everything inside me, only then can I "love my neighbor as my self." Yes, even my "enemy." The quality of intimate friendship pervades the cosmos, because nothing is outside my Self. How could I wish harm on another, compete with another, hoard wealth against another, envy another, bear arms against another? There is no other. This is the ancient relationship between the mystical and the ethical that Jesus embodied. It is the meaning of Resurrection: the death of the separate ego, and the rising of Christ-Consciousness. Just so, in the Upanishadic tradition of India, the three "mahavakyas," or "great declarations," express the vast ex...

I took off all my garments, layer by layer. I took off my bodies, one by one, from the gross to the subtle. I took off earth, water, air and fire. I took off my body of breath. I took off my mind. I took off my intellect. I took off my soul. Then I stepped into the black bath of emptiness, sparkling with uncreated stars. This is why I ask such questions: Why do you assume you have an outline? Why do you assume you have edges? Are you not a field without circumference, interpenetrated by countless other resonant fields? The fields around peoples' hearts? The field around the earth? The field of the solar system? The field of the galaxy? Are you not washed in Otherness? Are they not all your Self? I think that, after all, this entire universe is contained in the still eye of a falcon, searching the night for movement.

Watch this breath entering your nostrils, your throat, your chest. Is it you who makes this breath happen? Did you create your breath? Breath is a gift. What did you do to deserve it? Nothing. Notice this, and be grateful. But perhaps your mind is trying to 'do' something. Just observe how this is. See the humor and absurdity of it. Then come home to your breath. Receive a breath, and give it back. Smile deeply. This is worship, isn't it?

Let your own chest teach you to pray. Rest the mind in the heart. Greet your next breath as a golden flame of silence consuming every thought. What burns you completely away, you become. Photo: I took this at Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square PA.

त्रयम् एकत्र संयम Concentration, subtlization and transcendence (dharana, dhyana, and samadhi): 'Combining these three in meditation on one object is Samyama.' ~Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 3.4 What is the relationship between the subtlest particle in your body and the stillness of the space it whirls through? The resonance that is the very form of the particle is not other than the motionless vacuum in whom it vibrates. The vacuum is pure consciousness. Experiencing this makes you lighter than air. An eddy of emptiness in a stream of silence, flowing eternally to the place where it always already is. Your body is subtler than a veil of moonbeams disappearing at dawn. Knowing that you are woven out of boundless space is illumination. This is not metaphysics. It is an infinitesimal bindhu at the tip of your finger, the gristle in your cheekbone, a dissolute kiss, the ayin soph of dust in a ray of sunlight. The dance is its own purpose. Ther...

This morning I awake  in thrush-pierced silence at dawn. For one gracious instant just before yesterday plunges its blunt imaginary blade back into my empty heart, I see quite clearly that we've all drowned. For countless aeons we've been floating in a sea of beauty called 'this moment.' One breath bows to another. Blue sky fills my chest. Then I forget, because I remember the weight of the dream. Some morning, may I never remember. And may I never forget to stay awake.

Emptiness has such strong loving arms, why are you afraid of falling?

Cleaving emptiness, become a razor of listening so  radically present   that the supreme adventure is your next breath.

I am beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that, when we die, the Lord will greet us all with one question: "How did you like my cooking?" Then we will realize, some of us too late, that we weren't here to complain: we were here to eat. And share the meal. We were here to chew and savor every flavor and aroma of the Lord's table, from the hors d'oevres to the pasta dish, main course to dessert, each with its own wine. God is especially proud of vineyards. The irony is, those of us who thought it was hip to renounce the Ten Commandments of the Bible, proceeded to invent a thousand far more puritanical commandments about food. Then we packaged our gastronomical neuroses in politics. Most of the world's poor are happier than we are. They're not burdened with the luxury of inventing another Thou-Shalt-Not for every mouthful of precious food. They feel infinite gratitude for a morsel of bread or a single berry. That kind of gratitude is...

There is a genuflection that ends at the feet of the master. But there's another bow that sinks into the ground, dissolving the difference between 'He' and 'I,' above or below. This darkness shatters the forehead with light. This bending pulls you through every maelstrom of loss down to the abysmal wound of awakening. This grief is more intimate than joy. Death is only the sheath of a blue and beautiful blade. You learn to bow like this from the exquisite gesture of the moon. Your Guru is a tree, an endangered lion, a dying coral reef, the sound of the frog who lives in the geranium pot. Your Guru is a butterfly wing settling on a lapis hydrangea. Your Guru is the muffled mourning of a daughter for her grandmother's soul. Why not genuflect to every weed along the path? Make it blossom with the comfort of your mindful gaze. And wherever you go, bid "namaste" to everything that perishes.

What threads the hollow of each moment? Passes through the heart of stars, joining galaxies like blossoms in a garland, stringing sun and moon to earth's unspinning core? One thread binds all - the pearl in your navel to the emerald in your chest to the diamond in your crown, finer than dew-silk yet brighter than a bolt of summer lightning. Through one thread hums the silent echo of the lion's roar at the moment of creation. This is why, when you whirl, you feel the stillness of the heavens in your body. With one thread, one breath, friend, you have connected everything.

I invite you to place your attention on the gentle sound vibration, Om Namah Shivaya . This universal redeeming mantra purifies the breath and heals the nervous system, the senses, and the world perceived by the senses. The flow of these syllables through your breath enlivens the five elements of your body and the whole earth around you. Om-Na-Ma-Shi-Va-Ya: "May divine purity pervade earth, water, fire, air, space and consciousness." Each syllable purifies one of the five elements in the body. Na - earth at the root of the spine; Ma - water in the abdomen; Shi - fire in the solar plexus; Va - air in the chest; Ya - prana at the throat; Om - the space in the forehead. The bindu or dot written above Om is the space just above the crown of the head. In that silence space, akasha , all energy merges in the source. No need to concentrate on these centers, or on the syllables. Simply chant the mantra, then let it ripple away into silence. The blessing of the mantr...

  Hatred is toxic, even when it is disguised as our politics, or our religion. Hatred is anger stuck in hopelessness. Of course, anger can be useful and creative, as long as one has the inner process for transmuting that energy into sparkling clarity and presence. This is true spiritual practice - the alchemy that moves our energy from the intellect into the body, and quite literally, from the head to the heart. But when anger gets stuck in the head, it becomes disease. The earth doesn't need our dis-ease. The earth doesn't need our heads, full of political and religious outrage. She needs our feet to dance.

"Christ" is the resonance of pure Love emanating from our awakened Silence. Jesus was a simple man without a theology or belief-system, who spontaneously acted from the radiance of his Heart. He didn't have a plan, or know what he was going to say a moment before he said it (Mat. 10:19). Yet in that moment, the living Silence spilled from his lips in words of fire. He was immersed and surrendered in the ocean of Love. For Christ, the radical act is simply to be present; the r evolution is to breathe. For when you are truly aligned with the Kingdom of God within you, every breath is the Holy Spirit. Through the flowering of Jesus, Christ became a unique and personal fragrance that still permeates the earth. Ever so human, like you and me, ever so divine, like you and me, he is imperishable all-pervading Friendship. Christos, Buddha, Shiva - it matters not what name you use. The resonance of unbounded Being through a finite form is the human work we...

All day long if you let it, the space around a thistle, a moth wing, your eye heals everything that it contains. Photo by Laurent Berthier

There are events, and there is a narrative that threads events into a story. The event and the story are completely separate. Each moment is a luminous whole, truly existing as a world. But the story threading moments together exists only in our mind. Mind brings story from the past, superimposing it onto the world. In doing so, mind imputes motive to others, and constructs a "destiny" out of time. But we can de-link the event from the story: one of the supreme functions of meditation. Letting mind become silent, we can let the narrative dissolve. Then we see the event clearly, just as it is. We can bathe the moment in the light of compassion. In this way, we are present to each moment, present as love, without imputing motive to others, or pretending that we know what is destined. This not only makes us more available, it saves our mind from the burden of painful delusion. It is above our pay-grade to know the destiny of the world, and to judge the m...

I only began to relax into wholeness when I learned to embrace the impure along with the pure, seeing that they are both made of exactly the same energy, just as the petal and thorn are pervaded by the same sap. This was the hardest lesson, and the easiest.