Full Moon: November

 

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.

Fat and Ripe

 

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.

What They Are Murmuring

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."

Pearl

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.

 

Return

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 mind into radiant darkness.

Love is the flowering of silence. Therefor no "I" needs to make an effort, no "doer" needs to impose its will. Grace happens.

In the ancient tribal awareness of Israel, before the oral tradition of story-telling got written down and codified into a book of laws, the concept of "sin" was completely different than what we have inherited through medieval theologians. The word for sin in Hebrew was "hatah," which literally meant "missing the mark," thus being "off-center."

When I'm off the mark, the trajectory of my life does not return to its center. In Hebrew prayer, this turning around / turning within / returning to center / is called "Tshuvah." If my heart never practices returning, Tshuvah, "i" wander in exile from "Am," just as Israel wandered in exile from יהוה, the One Who Is.

And because I am in exile from myself, everything around me feels unbalanced, out of alignment. This all-pervading sense of missing the mark is "hatah," the existential state of Sin. It the post-modern world, we no longer believe in it. Yet it is the nameless floating anxiety that makes us ever restless, desperate, and resentful of others' happiness. It drives us to seek happiness in all the wrong places, and seek "justice" by judging others, trying to fix them instead of healing ourselves. Anxiety is just another expression of my misalignment, my dis-ease. And the outrage I feel at the world's injustice is really the projection of in-rage: anger at myself for being so out of tune.

One who has tasted even a moment of alignment knows that our true nature is happiness. And what is the sign that one is not in alignment with true nature? We resent the happiness of others. Then our politics, even our "spirituality," is based on resentment.

If we really want to bring the world into balance, we can begin by aligning ourselves with the source, the fountain of joy that pours from our own heart's core. Drink from the wellspring of Sat-Chit-Ananda: Energy, Awareness, Bliss. Sat-Chit-Ananda is not a philosophical concept, a belief, or a mere mood, but the very substance of consciousness, out of whose threads the universe is woven. Sat-Chit-Ananda is what "i" actually Am.

Effortless attunement with my own heart sends waves of harmony throughout the resonant fields in all creation: the field of each atom, the field that springs with celestial Buddha worlds, the wisdom field of the ancestors, the mycellium field beneath the earth's loam, the vast entangled beauty-field of the void. To resolve my Self resolves the cosmos, and dissolves the separation between inner and outer, between spirit and matter, between God and humanity.

Beauty is the blossoming of stillness. This workless work happens at the subtlest quantum level of energy, just where waves of pure consciousness vibrate the vacuum into particles. To heal the world, just settle down until you breathe the glow at creation's source. Settle the churning waves of this hurried, hapless, angry mind into the fullness of the ocean.

There is no need to depart from this moment, from this body, from this breath. Simply rest in their alignment. Let the drop of "i" return to the sea of "Am." Tshuvah.

 

 

Enough

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

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 Stillness reposes like crucified wind.
His Magdalen consort is the algebra
of undulation.
At the end of time, they entangle and conceive
a new earth in violet waves of possibility.
A single sigh in your body ignites them:
this is how powerful you are.
Through their joy, the endless past
evaporates into the fragrance of this moment.
Therefor to speak of the future is always a lie.
Now is the wedding! Don't sing
about ashes that no longer taste like bread.
That gardenia-scented tryst is over.
What lingers is the whisper of regrets
on a smoldering pillow of bones.
All I mean to tell you is, have a little gratitude.
Let your lungs truly taste this air
and your heart will drink the wine of heaven.  

The Inner Light

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 plays in the world, but one's awareness remains at rest in the luminescence of perfect peace, pure joy, and boundless compassion. This transformation comes not by the do-ership of the mind, but by the grace of the Teacher. Jai Guru Dev.

Akasha-Tattva

 

"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 consciousness the gross physical body is informed. The glow we experience in deep meditation is not an illusion conjured through visualization, imagination, or belief. It arises as the actual energy of the nervous system when awareness is in its deepest state of rest, of silence. Regular meditation every day cultivates the nervous system at this level of deep rest, so that the body can experience itself as what it is: the glow of divine light.

This luminosity is not just a touchy-feely mental concept or emotional glow. It is the real energy we are made of, the light of glory ("kavoth" in Hebrew), both physical and spiritual, both non-local and localized in every particle of the field. It is the illusive substance called "soma" in the Vedas, produced in the neurons of the brain as divine nectar, a celestial neuro-transmitter. You don't get this juice from mushrooms: you synthesize it by repeatedly, devotedly, day by day, taking your own physiology into the state of samadhi.

This space, the Akasha-tattva, contains distant worlds and galaxies. Yet it is the intimate blue sky of pure awareness within each brain cell. When we awaken this transcendental level of our own physiology, we return to our source to dwell perpetually in the first moment of creation: the space of the heart, where God is always saying, "Let there be light." Jai Guru Dev.

You have allies.

You have friends.

There are others like you

in passion and purpose

just beyond the outskirts of our city

lying buried in mass graves.

They must be remembered.
They must be breathed.
Even those who have become
the dust in your pores.

Your work is to recite their names.

Begin now by whispering
ever so gently

mine.

 

 

 

I Remember Willy

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.

Diwali

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.

 

Hamsa

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.

Luminous Fool

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.

Honey In The Void

 

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

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

Wellspring

 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 between the Father, Jesus and the Comforter? These are not separate persons, but deepening experiences in the devotee. The Father is pure consciousness, the ground of our Being and the absolute stillness of the Self. But our mind, with all its troubled worries and doubts about the past and the future, overshadows that Self-luminous Ground. We confess that we need help. That is when the Guru shows up our life.

Jesus is the outer earthly form of the Guru, whose touch dispels our wayward mind and awakens the Self. But that experience of the Teacher remains stillborn, and merely external, until we surrender to his true work in us, the coming of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.

In Biblical languages, Spirit means breath: "Ruach" in Hebrew, "Pneuma" in Greek. Intimate as our own breath, the Guru-tattva arises inside us as a flow of bliss and ineffable wisdom. We no longer depend on the outward form of the Master, for we have connected our lips to the grail of the Friend inside. Through all our worldly actions, we rest in divine stillness, and breathe the Christ. This is not symbolic language. It is quite literal. And what vibrates through each breath is his Spirit, his Shakti, the Goddess.

The greatest gift one can give to the Guru is this: stop clinging to his outward form, and start breathing his Shakti through the core of your heart. Then live and breathe that gift to others. And wherever you walk on the earth, walk lightly, greeting God in everyone. Jai Guru Dev.