Uradiance

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?