Uradiance

  Your inhalation is a fountain of moonlight and bewilderment. Your exhalation, long and sweet, so gentle you hardly notice how it becomes the sword of love, the destroying fire that slices and burns away each chain of thought that bound you to yesterday. Whoever gave you this breath used it to weave nests for the stars. Now give thanks, then take off your shoes. Get mud between your toes. Dance for no reason. Photo: the full moon tonight. I caught God painting watercolors in the dark.

  What has fattened and ripened in the sun of your presence is not my mind but my emptiness. The frail and bittersweet petals of thought, belief, memory and desire have all opened, fallen, scattered in the grace of this breath. Now I am the sky where your glory shines. Which means I am the very dark that enwombs you. O Lord of creation, you only exist because I am nothing.

Listen! Swallows, tree frogs, unborn children singing, "Thank you!" The rainbow weeping, running its colors into one pure light around your flesh, and even the light whispering, "Thank you!" As you drift toward sleep tonight, remember flecks of gold on a broken tea cup, remember the ancient glow in her eyes, discarded roses, fallen feathers, slivers of crystal in a mossy stone, the bones of a rabbit that crows left in your sunlit birdbath, all mingled now in a taste of the inward kiss on your darkening brow. What are they murmuring? Simply listen. Use the silence you've been given just for this. "We are what is listening. We are what is looking. Thank you for breathing us into the world."

These are your pearls of great price, one at the crown of your skull, and one in your chest, one piercing your navel, and the last one, dark and vast beneath your feet - I think it is the earth itself - each with a tiny empty hole at the center where a silken thread might pass through when they are all aligned in the necklace of meditation. And what is that thread of pure light flung from a distant star impaling your body to the groundless dark? I think it is a breath. But do not call it your breath, for it is a gift from above and from below, a gift from all to all. Now you must learn to be kissed.  

What is the greatest service you can give to humanity? To shift into alignment with your Self. This is atonement, at-one-ment. This is attunement, harmony. You are the tuning fork, and the cosmos resonates to your hollow core, as to a bell whose rim encircles the empyrean. Stars fall into alignment with the center of creation when you come into alignment with your own heart. Pierced by the axis of your backbone, this dervish galaxy wheels around the wound where your rib went missing and your longing for God arose. All the whirled finds healing in the emptiness between your heartbeats. Because the sphere of eternity has no circumference, its center is everywhere. Therefor you are the center when you choose to Be. Place your body in this moment and listen to the milky way settle lightly as a gossamer veil upon you. Let your chest contain the night, stirring trillions of stars into the nectar of this breath. With the sound of an ocean wave dissolving on phosphorescent sand, dissolve your...

 

A raindrop shaking the forests and mountains. A brittle leaf sketching indecipherable runes whose meaning could save us on the surface of a still pond. If you only knew the way the Father finger pens the Book of the Impossible, this moment would not be other than it is. Just to be alive is not enough, it is more than enough. You are mud, after all. Your doing is the shimmer of mirage in the stillness of the sky. This breath caresses a velvet meadow in your lungs, making silver lilies grow on tributaries of blood. Do you really imagine it's all a reward for your tilling and sowing? No, friend, it's a gift from the same Lover who planted the sun in your heart.

Inhalation creates, exhalation adores. Some say, if your body is filled with fire there is no need to pray; I say your body is a prayer. Strike a breath against your flesh and see how you die in feathery sparks. A nerve is a river, a cell is an ocean filled with frolicking swan-like gods. They never fret about how many believers they might gain or lose. All they do is thirst and dissolve. We think our lives are short and theirs are long. But every instant is an eternity for them. The distant galaxies are their shadows, tattooing your skin with living beams of uncreated light. There's a candelabra hanging in the mansion of your brain; set it ablaze! This is how St. Francis saw Jesus in the banquet hall of his pituitary, and why he told us to look at the one who is looking. When will you realize that each breath is an angel whose kiss of trembling silence entwine the flames of night around your spine? In the sepulcher of your vertebrae, the Lord of Stillnes...

The Inner Light is not an abstract concept or a figure of speech, but the substance and energy of which the world is woven - the fiber of bliss, the fabric of consciousness itself. At first the Inner Light seems abstract and "spiritual," while the world seems concrete and "material." But in the end, consciousness is more solid than a diamond, while the outer world of fleeting images can only be called "real" in a relative sense, since it is all changing, impermanent, and momentary. The world is like images on a mirror. The mirror is solid, not the images that flicker upon it. So consciousness is absolutely adamant, while the world it perceives is like a mist. What was background is now foreground, what was foreground now background. The radiant diamond of transcendental bliss-consciousness now outshines the fleeting shadows of the material cosmos. Creation all happens in stillness, just as a mirage dances in empty space. One's body walks and works and ...

  "The Akasha-Tattva is the subtlest field in creation... The people who reside there, their bodies are celestial bodies made of all light: that glow which you experience in meditation." ~Maharishi, 1959 It is a delusion to assume a duality between transcendence and the body. There are not two different paths, the path of transcendence and the path of embodiment. They are one, and our birthright is both, co-entangled as wholeness. To see an ultimate difference between transcendence and embodiment is only our experience at the gross level of perception. It is not the perception of wholeness, of Brahman. When, through deep meditation, we take our awareness to the subtlest field of our nervous system, we experience a glow which is both spiritual and material. Transcendental awareness is the radiance of the essence of matter itself. And matter is the vibration of consciousness. Resonant threads of pure awareness weave the subtle body, and with that vibrational structure of living...

I would not give grief up for the world. It reminds me I'm awake. Tears burn, remembrance hurts, the pearled necklace of the years must break into jagged shards of distant light. The worm of emptiness eviscerates the rind, turns sweet to bitter bite, and all that was my gold is gone: The little one whose tawny fur I still smell, clutching Santa Claus with all his stuffing out in paws ragged as tufts of butterbur. Now I cling that toy all night, as if there is some magic rhyme in memory, and sympathy in things. Yet on my grieving heart there waits, without a murmur of the dawn, a comforter with patient wings - the silent server, time.

You yearn for her kiss and send a candle floating out across the river of night, mystery of Diwali. These are the waters of pure awareness. This is the flame of your true nature, perfect joy. And the kiss you seek is the union of burning and stillness one breath presses softly on another. Embrace the dark. Give birth to fire. Let your own heart bestow Grace.  

Fill your mind with moonlight, pearl it in a breath. Become the place where restless lovers touch and find quietness, this deer park in the heart. Twin flames mingle, fiery and cool, serpents entwined on a blossoming tree. Inhalation marries sighing. Seven emeralds drop into golden stillness, leaving not a ripple. This passion the Sun feels toward the Moon, the pulse of your blood, full and empty, a swan alighting to kiss a swan on mirror water. Call it prayer. Which one is the animal soul, and which the Lord of the Garden? Bear love with pangs of longing,  and love will give birth to you. "Hamsa" means swan in Sanskrit, yet it is also the Upanishadic mantra that is the sound of the breath, "Ham" meaning "I am," and "Sa" meaning "He," or God. Painting of Guru Dev and the Hamsa Swan by Frank W. Lotz.

The luminous fool never gets tired of three things: drinking wine from his own breast, reaching the goal with the first step, and running his fingers through electric fur. This is why he prefers the company of animals to angels. Now get good and lost and you'll wind up at his hut, where you'll knock on the door and he'll answer, "Who's there?" You'll say, "It's Me!" and he'll reply, "Go away, there's no room in here for Me!" So many more righteous lifetimes you'll spend praying, fasting, giving alms to the poor, until one day, weary of your goodness, you'll wander back and knock again. "Who's there?" " Nobody." The door will open and he'll hug you with fierce joy, uncorking your heart to share a sip of that dark vintage you've been aging in your chest since the birth of light.

  You, my friend, and you,      and you, my friend,           and you are golden petals unfolding      from a flower in the void           where I fell into the honey      and drowned like a bee.           It doesn't matter who  you are,        the intimacy just           gets deeper. I taste your eyes,      I enter you            again and again to extract      the luscious Many           from the One.

Stay wild and local, small and green. Love needs no government. The power that guides you is unseen, unfathomed and unspent. You are the sovereign of your heart, a miracle of chaos. So blossom in the holy art of presence, welcome loss of all the light that you desire, then burn, just as you are, a darkness at the root of fire, the black hole in a star. Unto this moment, gently go. Be path, not follower. Mere footprint dust, so fallen low, your home is hollower than God, whose absence breathes You whole, yet more than One, entangled in the silk threads of Two, your chrysalis unspun, wings already warming in the Sun. Image by Art Féérique

  Do not seek the counsel of one who answers all your questions. Seek the silence of one in whose presence no questions arise, whose fragrance draws you to the nectar of the blossom inside you. Scatter the mind's pale petals on those bare brown feet. For every step you take toward the Friend, those feet have taken ten thousand steps toward you. What, then, is the sign of the true Teacher? Since the moment you receive the light of his eyes, the breath of his word, the touch of his stillness, everything you ever sought in a Guru outside you, starts bubbling up from the wellspring in your own chest. This is why Jesus says, in John 4, " Whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, those waters will become in them a spring welling up to eternal life." Later, in John 14, he says, " If you love me, follow me; and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Comforter, who will never leave you. " Now what is the difference betwee...