Uradiance

No matter where you look, all you will ever see is the glow from your own chest. Is it covered with the stain of yesterday, the dust of tomorrow? Polish the window of the heart, dear friend. Pour out the light of your true nature. The rose does not go looking for a famished honeybee to feed. She simply rests in her center. Her fragrance accomplishes everything.   Photo by my dear friend, Kristy Thompson

  GLOW No matter where you look, all you will ever see is the glow from your own chest. Is it covered with the stain of yesterday, the dust of tomorrow? Polish the window of the heart, dear friend. Pour out the light of your true nature. The rose does not go looking for a famished honeybee to feed. She simply rests in her center. Her fragrance accomplishes everything.  

Suffering is the effort to contract the boundless into an 'i.' Why shrink awareness into 'my' awareness?   Whether in pain or pleasure, in solitude or in the marketplace, just stop contracting awareness.   The effort to enclose consciousness in a separate "i" strains not only our minds but our bodies. We show this strain in our faces, especially around our eyes. It cannot be hidden. We love to gaze into the eyes of children because their faces are so open, so free of constraint, reminding us of a time before our effort began, when "am" was self-sufficient, without "i."   We do not superimpose the ego onto awareness, as if it were something else. Ego is simply the futility of shrinking and confining what is by nature boundless and free.    Liberation is the natural condition. Therefor "i" is an unnatural act, a violation of divine law, and a self-inflicted wound. "i" is the Fall, the original sin. "i" is separat...

Through twilight's brief false February warmth your little green spirit guide is calling, "thank you, farewell!" as he makes his holy pilgrimage  from the dahlia pot on your back porch to a golden skunk cabbage in the wetland to join the amphibian chorus in pure terraqueus delight, one quaver in the emerald Sangha, rehearsing their old favorite for the April concert. O Dharma seeker, do not form a concept of True Emptiness, but empty your mind of all concepts and just listen, just listen! Then you might remember the heart sutra,  Earth's original anthem of Spring: "Love is Wiser than a Raindrop’s Kiss and Sadder than Sunrise in a Mist of Roses when You Are Nothing but a Frog.”   Photo: Kunito Imai  

  HEART SUTRA O Dharma seeker, why do you form a concept of True Emptiness, when you could empty your mind of all concepts? This is why you cannot hear your little green spirit guide calling, who in this spell of deceiving twilight, breath of February warmth,   makes his holy pilgrimage from the dahlia pot on your back porch to a skunk cabbage in the wetland, to join the amphibian chorus, where he sings in terraqueus delight, one quaver in the emerald Sangha, rehearsing their old favorite for the April concert. Friend, forget True Emptiness. Just stop thinking and listen to this! You might remember the name of Earth’s first anthem, the song of Spring: "Love is Wiser than a Raindrop’s Kiss and Sadder than Sunrise in a Mist of Roses When You Are Nothing but a Frog.”  

The crisis is not covid, climate change, racism, sexism, or capitalism. Those are symptoms, not causes. We simply forgot how to connect the soul to the body. Mind got in the way. The radical act is being present. The revolution is to breathe. The goal is singing for no reason. I learned this from a thrush at six a.m.

The Self is not selfish. One seamless breath mothers the world. Awareness is a womb embracing pain and beauty, ever unborn. Nothing actually happens. And nothing actually exists or does not exist: it is simply dissolving. This moment, containing earth, moon and stars, is like the reflection of a flame in a mirror just as the flame goes out. Mirror and image don't cling to each other. Enfolding the entire past and future, your emptiness is like a mirage floating on the clear desert sky. In that vast space, some spider-wise intelligence spins a web of consciousness whose single thread has no beginning or end. Are you the space or the silk? Perhaps space itself is woven out of that silk, and the silk is woven out of space. There can only be one problem: resisting what Is. Whatever exists, right now, its very Is-ness is perfect freedom. You do the work of redeeming, healing, and re-creating the entire cosmos when you unconditionally welcome all that happens as your Self. This is Love.

  You say you are a "mystic," but mere silence is not enough. You say you are an "activist," but mere action is not enough. You need to touch the non-doing at the first moment of creation, the motionless source of all that whirls. You need to feel the rhythm in the void, the wave-nature of your emptiness. Let the Word arise where one breath dissolves into another, so that you may speak God's radical authentic thunder, rooted in seedlessness. Let every sweet atom of your lethal dance spin out of the vacuum, beating the heart of the world. Painting by Mahmoud Farshchian

  “And they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” ~Hebrews 12   You have pilgrim eyes, the second sight of a stranger. The lens through which you see is the broken place in your body, which is the broken place in your soul, which is the world you see. And when you meet another wanderer, you break open even wider. You remember how she is the world in the shape of a wound, and see her through your own shattered lens. Which brings her into focus. Which is how you heal the world, not by long suffering some collective dream of global disaster, but by intimate encounters on the labyrinth way one pilgrim at a time, and by breathing through your broken place into hers.

I offer a new verb: 'to selve.' It means to finally be You. To be what you love, and love what needs doing, and do it as no one else can. No guru teaches you to selve, just as no parent taught you to walk. To selve, you must abandon the notion that the universe expects you to act in accord with somebody else's rules. Selvers follow no role model or mythic archety pe. They abandon the words "as" and "like." You cannot selve "as" anyone who came before you: neither Sakyamuni, nor Mohammad, nor the Guru, or Jesus. In fact, the great way-showers all selved. Then they taught, "If you want to know God, you too must selve. But you cannot selve as me. You must selve as you." Only in the present moment can y ou selve, and only in a state of wonder. When you do something beautiful and say, "I have no idea how this happened! I didn't do it!" you have selved. Selvers do not seek the "Self." If the ver...

Here's another secret of quantum strangeness from the annals of the quark. All events, as to their quiddity, are equally significant. The daring leap of a tree frog from the spigot of your garden hose, to her sanctuary in a pot of begonias, is as important as the birth of a new political party, or an earthquake in Brooklyn. The universe is not just as you see it, but as the frog sees it. Your attention magnifies a breath of August breeze into a hurricane; but for the frog, al l human catastrophes are as weightless clouds in a distant sky. They pass soundlessly overhead. Why do you assume that your chief concern should be mine? The liberal wants to convince me, the conservative wants to convert me. Neither allows me to create myself. But that is one task I can do better than anyone else. Let me follow the wondrous river of my own interest over all its rocks, through the rough waters of responsibility and consequence, and I will learn my lesson much better than ...

Now that it's midnight I'll tell you a secret. You are the candle, God is the moth. May your evening meditation weave the stems of Chandra Nadi and Surya Nadi, the lunar nerve and solar nerve around your spine, into flower offerings for your Guru. Tonight is Guru Purnima, full moon of July, full moon of the Guru. And who is the Guru? Not the one with 10 million devotees, or only 10. Not the one with a beard and white robe, or the one in blue genes. Not the one who is brown or the one who is white. Not the one who gives you a mantra, or the one who gives you a kiss.   The real Guru is the one who awakens the radiance of Guru-tattva, the Guru Principle, in the core of your own heart. Filled with that radiance, freedom, and bliss, you begin to see Gurudev in the eyes of every stranger, every foreigner, every shelter dog, every cricket. You scent the Guru at the center of the rose. And it is to this Guru who awakens the diamond Self that I bow down, offering my silent gentle teache...

If you call this whirlpool of stars in your heart "the soul," it becomes a shadow searching for echoes. If you call this ocean of succulence "the flesh," it turns to stone in the dark gravity of otherness. Shall you name it "love," this sky where our bodies dissolve like mist into each other? Then we are jolted in two, and out of hoarse silence rains a voice of cinders. Use your scripture for kindling. Toast the commandments in the fire of your chest. No more gold-enameled seeds, each containing a "should." Have the courage to slice off "thou shalt not" right at the throat with a single stroke of the blazing sword of emptiness. Nothing is buried under the ashes but more ashes. After the conflagration, fresh green gestures of careless caring will arise as a fragrance distilled from lost roses in the marrow of your bones.   Photo: Manjushri Buddha  

  I want to write the poem that slices your heart open and spills its wriggling cyclone of uproarious embryos into the periwinkle. I want to write the poem that convinces you not to commit suicide. I want to write the poem that turns your floor into the sky and pounds your chest harder than necessary with its CPR breathing mouth to mouth the poem that makes you cry the poem that makes you whisper "I don't know" I want to write the poem that is already scrawled in hunter gatherer runes on the cavern of your skull graffiti lining your womb milk -mantra you drank before you were born the poem who is a hobo living secretly in your body's subterranean drainpipes that carries old things back to the sea.

When I was One, it was just as complex and bumpy as now, I simply hadn't learned to label the differences, to see this and that as two, or estrange the diamond world from who I Am. It was the Wonder Continuum, lumpy but graceful as Om-made bread pudding. The scarlet rose of September would whisper to the February plum bud, "We are so lucky to be confused! Let's feel each other's barefoot roots down  where the mushrooms grow!" Each moment was a blessed Fall into delectable imperfections. I could taste smell touch squeeze the juicy viridescent stem of my Self, whose tiniest flowers are the stars. My bones were marrowed with molten gold. The vastness between heaven and earth dissolved in the hollow of my backbone. My optic nerve was twigged to a moon of Jupiter. Single syllable sighs erupted like Tibetan bijas from my reptilian brain. Burps and farts were starry spirals of bliss  that blo...

As you awaken, just before the mind of yesterday comes down like a net of stones behind your eye, be weightless, be presence without the fairytale about your fall into this world. Be how your soul looks in its own mirror, what gets you out of bed, trembling like a wild purple iris in the breath of dawn. It doesn’t matter at all what you will do for a living today. The priceless jewel is just living. It doesn’t matter at all how much money you will make today. Your body is more precious than sunlight, your sternum beaten from finer gold. Whether you feed the multitudes today, or only wash the dishes makes no difference at all. What matters is to plunge down the stem of this unfolding flower, and follow the moonlight in your backbone all the way Om to silence, melting your stone wound, dispelling the mirage of sorrow in the desert clarity, the empty sky of your heart. Don’t you know that you can save the planet just by being awake? Love do...

  If you want a bitter seedless life, just keep identifying your self as the victim. Just keep blaming others for your circumstance. But if you want your heart to melt into the impeccable splendor of the golden sun and illuminate the earth with courage, take off the cloak of your old story. Step naked through the portal of the present moment into a kingdom where darkness sparkles and silence sings, because there is no judgment, and fear is swallowed up in Love.     Photo by Alex Saberi

  When I was eight years old I bought five pet turtles with soft green shells, each of them no bigger than my thumb, from the basemen of J. J. Newberry's Department Store before it went out of business. One morning in early March, unseasonably warm, when I thought it was Spring, I tried to do something good. I did not know what good is then, nor do I now, but I wanted to perform a secret sacrament and return them to the heart of nature. So I took my five green turtles down to the creek in the woods behind my friend Wendy's house and let them go. I remember I could hold them all in the palm of my hand. I watched them swim away in the freezing water and thought they would be free. But I felt strange, I still feel strange, I still don’t know what good is, what nature is. Blessed Mary, Mother of God, have mercy on me. Holy Spirit, Breath of God, forgive me,   yet breathe me even now. ...

To exist is to bow. Each creature bows to another - the mineral to the plant, the plant to the animal, the animal to the human, the human to the angels and Eloihim. Summer bows to Autumn, Autumn to Winter, Winter to Spring. The moon bows to the earth and the earth to the sun. The stars remain in the majesty of their orbits and spheres by bowing. Of course, there is only one creature in all the universe who refuses to bow: the man. Humans think that, by clinging to their separateness, they are free, and bowing is bondage. Until our suffering brings us to surrender into the mystery of wholeness. Then we realize that to bow is liberation...   For many lifetimes I bowed to the one who shines above me with the splendor of ten thousand suns. The Christos, the Savior, the Avatar. Yet this was not the complete bow. It was an act of worship, and worship still implies some separation. There is still an "i" in this bow, bowing to an "other." Such a bow brings the aura of prote...

This Sabbath morning I breathe back to you the blame you heaped upon me. Then I breathe back into my heart the blame I heaped upon you. When we blame, we only give away our power. Now is the time for us to possess nothing but our own lives, to take back our power by blaming no one, not even ourselves. Forgiveness only happens in the present moment. This is how we create a new earth. I will not carry your wounds for you. You will carry your own until they pour starlight into my eyes and heal the blindness. You will not carry my wounds for me. I will carry my own until they pour moonlight into your eyes and heal the blindness. Jesus will not carry our wounds for us. We will carry our own wounds until they sing one flood of fire and the Lord of the Dance has eight billion bodies.     Photo: Hubble, 'Mystic Mountain' Nebula from Astronomy Now

  Why plant plastic flowers?  The fragrance of one silent rose  roars louder than a thousand suns. At night, candles appear to shine,  but where is their glory  when dawn breaks open the sky?  You waste your money  in the market place of spiritual teachers. Each of them has a little boutique.  But which one has a root or thread,  a lineage leading to ancient weavers?  Can any of them spin this world  into the weft of stars? Isn't it time to close up  these shops in you mind? Wander out beyond the maintained trail.  The wilderness is nearer than you think,  closer than breathing.  Go there, meet your oldest Friend,  the one who whispers your true name  after all those centuries of being faithful to forgetfulness.  Every time you said, "I believe,"  you fell a little deeper asleep.  Now is your chance to get lost and wake up. Find true darkness.  The Beloved will use your bones for kin...

The bold become themselves. There is a point in meditation, if it is true meditation, when you fall off the precipice of practice, into the groundlessness of your flesh. You can no longer resist your subtle sorrow, that which Buddha called Dukkha, the spittle mixed with matter that formed your embryo again and again. You've been carrying it for years, for centuries, the stuff made of stories about a suffering 'me.' It is buried deep in the rind of your body, but neatly packaged in the sterile cellophane called 'spirituality.' Now the time has come to crumple up the wrapper of conceptual thought and throw it away. Be vulnerable to yourself. Be a ruptured pomegranate with 10,000 soft sweet seeds. Allow your every distant ache, the brittle anguish of a trillion nerves, the secrets of grief, the worms of rage, the clogging undigested waste of blame, this whole discomfort you are, to erupt in one magnificent purple blossom of pain, fragrant with the gift...