Uradiance

           Verse from my book, 'Savor Eternity,' collage by Rashani Réa

Those who are embodied need no concept of "embodiment." Let us meditate in the body, through the body, dissolving the duality of consciousness and matter. Taste the glory of this human physiology, whose edgeless flame trembles on the wick of the sushumna nadi. Let the Milky Way pour down our spine with every breath. Each proton in an atom of our bone is threaded to its native star. Each cell of our flesh is a well of Transcendental Consciousness, irradiating the cosmos. We know that the neurons in this brain, this heart, this solar plexus, are not merely conductors of consciousness, but are made out of consciousness, as the shape of a wave is made out of the formless sea. And we know the Truth about God and Flesh not by thinking, but by its flavor. Why else would the Hebrew poet sing, "Taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34)? Why else would Christ invite us to the banquet, saying, "Take, eat, this is my body (Luke 22)? Photo by Kristy Thompson

  Why waste your life believing  that the constellations are above and the earth below, only to discover too late, too late,  that sunlight gushes  from the pores of your skin? Why travel from here to there?  All journeys are over  but the deepening of now.  Your heartbeat is the shaman's drum.  Don't move: be moved.  One treasure is left to find:  the radiance you already were  before you started the search.  Feel the nerve in your body where dancing begins. Let that tremor spread among the galaxies. Science and religion are no longer required when you capture the sun  in a synapse of your ancient brain. A fountain of something like starlight rises up your spine, spilling over, showering the earth with burning seeds of wonder, gold as the stuff in Mary's womb. Now drink up the rest of this day. Bask in yourself  and squander the Kingdom! Spring is an intuition crinkled in cocoons:  your laughte...

  There is a space beyond this need for wings, or the wings inside wings. Stop arriving.  Just know you are  always here. Through a broken fence the plum branch has been reaching all Winter for the blossom it already held.  Once known, the fragrance  does not need the petal. Majnoon went mad in the forest imagining that the daughter of the King was someone other than his own soul. This poem was painted with the light of the full moon on the bone ceiling of my emptiness. If you know who drove Majnoon crazy, you are truly my Friend!  

September now. I hear petals weeping, singed with their own fire. I hear seeds grieving lost goldenrod and mountains gliding home on clouds. I still follow the glistening pilgrimage of that old summer snail across the hosta leaf. But I gave up world sorrow for the hidden pain of love, gave up charity and pity to gaze into your face, where I find everyone. With a single inhalation, I bind and heal the wounds of rich and poor, oppressor and victim alike. My brain is busy with forgiveness. Heart murmurs of gratitude in both chambers, the empty one susurrates “thank you” to the one that pours,  then offers back the ancient gift  of grandmother’s blood. My temple is the ruined garden, my alter the sky. We hold satsang in the wetlands, the frogs, blackbirds, and I. When in doubt, I take off my shoes and walk barefoot in wet grass at midnight, un-naming the stars. There’s really no other way to get through this miracl...

With the tincture of awareness moisten the soft ragged cloth of this breath to polish the grail of your heart until the golden emptiness itself becomes wine. Thirst for this thirst and drink. There is plenty. Be quenched by yearning.     Photo by Kristy Thompson

  You didn’t come to this planet to worship a pair of sandals or a white robe. You didn’t come to this planet to be for the party of the left or the party of the right, to be a Christian or a Muslim, a Black or a White. You did not come here to get angry with reflections in a mirror, or get drunk on disasters that never quite happen. You came to be dumbfounded by a dust mote, to be torn in pieces by laughter and pain, then made One by the tang of a berry on your wild tongue. Why waste another moment arguing for or against, when you could slip back on a soft-as-moonlight  beam of breath into the radiance you are?

Transmute the pollen of sexual yearning to golden soul honey. Make flowers luminous and cause all gardens to share one light. Balance the world on your hips and move them the way cocoa beans ferment. Be how the tongue gets sweet without sugar. How all the Gopis love the same Bridegroom yet each kisses him chastely, in her own unique faithfulness. How heaven bubbles over into earth, the sap fused with its petal. On the borderline between your body and its aura there's a marketplace for atoms of delight. The contraband is innocence, the price, surrender. Jesus was a bee-keeper, Mary a maker of mead. So you should keep this secret and store up radiance.

  "Jesus said: The person who drinks from my mouth will become like me, and I will become that person. The hidden things will be revealed." ~Gospel of Thomas, 108 "Miracles" are natural phenomena occurring in energy at higher rates of vibration, energy levels which physicists have simply not yet mathematically described. When we say "vibrations of energy," what is the energy that vibrates? It isn't any "God particle," any "thing" that could ever be perceived by Consciousness, because it is Consciousness itself. Our culture will be transformed, and the curriculum we teach our children in schools will be utterly changed, when physicists finally learn to include Consciousness in the equations they use to describe the world. Until then, the masses of humanity, including the majority of so-called "intellectuals," will continue to suffer the delusion that the material world is somehow separate from the one who perce...

  Why waste your life believing that the sun is above, the earth below, only to discover too late, too late that starlight gushes from every nerve just at the spot in your body where dancing begins?   Why travel from here to there? All journeys are over but the deepening of now.   Your heart beat is the shaman's drum. Don't move: be moved. One treasure is left to find: the light you were before you started the search.   Spring is an intuition crinkled in cocoons: your laughter can do something about that. Ferns make fists all Winter, waiting for your deeper breath.   Forget everything you’ve been taught and take some responsibility! Fall on your face in the blackest soil among the murmuring golden bulbs and confess, “This is all incomprehensible!”   Lay claim to the Kingdom of Wonder. Fall down, fall down. Touch heaven with your knees.

You had a dimple of tenderness on top of your skull when you were a baby. Then bones closed over and sealed you in, safe from the whirl of night, its whispering invitation to dissolve. But in some of us the portal didn't close. The silken sap that oozes through our vertebrae gets spooled back to its galaxy. Our breath is a broken rosary of crystal planets spilling into an empty glass. Each sigh is unconditional surrender. A black hole tethers our attention to no thing. The glittering gyre of darkness reels us in, dragging our roots toward fire like upside-down roses. Yet our wounds connect us, letting beams of moonlight in. And when we break wide open, one endless ray flows through all bodies. Don't be hasty to harden your bruise and proclaim yourself a healer. Bruises are windows. Be an opening, not a knower. I know that it’s voguish to say you are of the earth, but for those who have no choice, only half a...

"I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass." (Walt Whitman) For Whitman, the bottom line was poetry. Whitman, Keats, Shelly and Wordsworth spent quality time mindfully loafing. Out of their moments of non-doing came sublime literature. For Jesus and the poets of the Bible, the bottom line was prophecy . Fasting in the desert, they also fasted from work. But their vision changed civilizations. Even scientists practice periods of intentional loafing. Einstein's theory of relativity had its inception in a daydream, when he imagined what it would be like to slide down a beam of sunlight. In our corporate culture, the bottom line isn't poetry or prophecy, but profit. In many American cities, you can get arrested for loitering. Daydreaming is considered a waste of time. Loafing is no longer a respectable spiritual practice, but a threat to monthly production quotas, and the national GNP. What happened on BP's...

One breath gently rends the veil between the vision and its nerve, who you are and who you thought you were. Just pay a little more attention to what flows in and out. A new creation begins the moment you stop blaming others. They are not responsible for this body, which was whirling, glittering in distant stars before you were conceived. Now walk softly on the planet, not like an owner but a guest. If you don't know how to become hollow, how can you be filled with music? Photo by Neil Dickie

How are "self-help" and "self-control" working out for you? For me, they are illusions. "I" am not very helpful to "me." I can no more control my life than a falling leaf controls the breeze. But I can surrender. I can sink. I can fall into the Grace of the Divine. As I get older, I plunge deeper into the sap, traveling down the stem, drowning in the seed. There I explode into a scarlet blossom of death, the one you see in your garden. I am the wine you love to smell in those invisible breaths of pollen. I make the medicine drip from berries in your pineal gland. It clatters down a string of pearls in your vertebrae toward the place your songs come from. What kisses happen in the jasmine pistil at the center of your hypothalamus? I have seen them. They set off thunder under your breast bone. I know what the sound of unseen wings in your heart means, and how often stars make wishes on your fingertips. I scent what inebriates the wind...

Collage by Rashani Réa

I don't need you to change me. Just help me become who I Am. It is good and it is very good to feel precisely what I am feeling. The cloud of grief, the downpour of despair. I dissolve in healing rain. There is no darkness left to penetrate. I am all night. Then may arise   a liquid sliver of the sun on the jagged edge of mourning. This is how a bud breaks open, spilling beauty from its wound. This is how a chrysalis frees the golden moth from its season of uncertainty. This is how your tear becomes the sky. Photo by Laurent Berthier Collage by Rashani Réa

  Pilgrim, isn't it time  to depart from the kingdom  of fear? Time to begin  your journey over the ocean  of surrender. This body is a frail boat, but your vast sail  unfurls before the breath  of the Beloved. Whether the night is cloud-swollen or clustered with stars, this is a journey  of safe-keeping. You move through waves of dream and sleep under the boundless dome of the Mother's silence.

Embodied dough. Lump of anger moist with of grief and pain. Not gluten-free either. Stiff beaten marrow, cold sourdough folds of muscle and cruor. Knead it, punch it down. Let it rise. Punch it down again. Expand into a brown-gold beam of dawn permeated with the breath of wheat fields. Cook over coals of gratitude until the fragrance melts your heart and fills the temple of your bones. You are baked. You are the golden loaf. As long as you share this body each crumb has the flavor of the whole sun. You didn’t get in this oven to be a lump of dough, to stay sticky and heavy with anger, grief, and trauma. You’re here to get kneaded. You're the ancestral recipe for good bread. So punch it down and let it rise again, filled with an exhalation of thanksgiving. And when it's finished say, "Take, eat, this is my body, the golden loaf given for you, clustered with galaxies, buttery with stars." Then tear yourself into...

 The plight of the spiritual ego used to be "holier than thou." Now it's "more traumatized than thou." But the plight is exactly the same: mind identifies with the story of its precious "me," instead of resting in the nature of pure awareness, which has no center to call me and no circumference to call a problem.

Good gardening is midwifery. Don't be afraid to finger the root, testing nerves of mycelia, sending thumbs along the bone of Spring, blindly probing the dark, guided by a spasm of bulbs, turning the breached child toward its world.   Don't be afraid to tap absences, black holes where fur sleeps, curled in a dream of moons, seeds hunker in secret white heat, or to probe among the buds where beaks weave twigs into a whirling stillness for the egg. Be your own ember. The sun might disappoint you.   The destination is gray stuff in cocoons, neither wing nor worm. You pretend to know the conclusion, but the journey dissolves in crepuscule, a deer path winding back into the green gloom of wildness, a labyrinth, with you forever standing at the center, lost.   It's been raining all day. Feral poppies poke red dwarf stars from vigils of loam, enchanted by the grief of sky. What is your knowledge compared to ...

  Go back to the shock of your birth and just accept it without forming a concept. All suffering arose from the attempt to form a concept to explain the explosion of the universe.Go back to that moment, but this time don't invent a mind of shock like the one you invented before, and before, and before, all the way back to the beginning of the dream, the dream that is only a reaction to the unendurable astonishment of your birth. Have compassion for this mind you formed as a reaction to the explosion of consciousness. This mind has been contracting the cosmos into a limited idea in your head ever since that first moment. Now go back, T'shuvah, return. That is the only religion, the only prayer, the only path. Forgive yourself. Then don't react anymore.  Kiss the rose of creation, bury your nose in its fragrant madness. The flowering of the cosmos has no purpose, no direction, no plan, no design. "Design" and "purpose" are concepts projected ont...

Through the wickless glow of your bones,  stars confess their unendurable longing for you.   Child of primeval catastrophes ,  your protons were born of furious distant love. Now you rest in the ancient lineage   of the present moment. But you already knew this.  Have you not survived the withering   crossfire of your father’s blood? Didn't you learn everything   from your mother’s shadow? Fall softly through the blessed void,   a quivering braid of honeyed wine   splashing into a dark chalice.  Yet you've come for a violent salud. How many times must one grail break against another, before you remember that this smoldering in the soul is your flesh? Find the moonless hollow of eternity  pulsing through each bead of time. Come and starve for ten thousand years,   then get drunk on a buttercup.  Remember your name in the murmur  of desult...