I Keep Returning

I keep returning to the naked revelation that Truth is not an experience, Love is not an experience, Beauty is not an experience. Truth, Love, and Beauty (Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram) are all names for the clarity, the nakedness, of awakened space, where every experience comes and goes like a veil of clouds.

This awakened space is emptiness with no boundary, untouched by its content, an ever-virgin silence expanding forever in the splendor of dynamic stillness. This very quality of ceaseless expansion is ananda, which means bliss.

But bliss is neither joy nor sorrow, for joy and sorrow are experiences. Bliss is the field, the ground, where experience occurs. Yet miracle of miracles - and there is no explanation for this grace - emptiness refers to itself, perceives itself, and is aware.

To rest in this lively expansion is not an escape from the world, for it contains the world. Nor is it a case of  "spiritual by-passing," for pure awareness already embraces whatever could be by-passed.

How could I possibly escape or transcend what floats inside me like a vanishing rain cloud, leaving drops of wonder and gratitude on my cheeks?

So generous in her unbounded gesture of stillness is all-mothering Ananda that she cherishes, forgives, encircles and heals all trauma. The past is swallowed up in Presence.

There is only one hope for peace on earth. Meet here, in this space. This is not an appointment. I do not mean tomorrow. I mean now.