Shivaratri

I offer this hymn for Shivaratri, which means "Night of Shiva," most sacred of the Yogic calender. This night celebrates regeneration out of darkness, through the union of Lord Shiva and the Goddess, consciousness and its beloved body. Devotees stay up all night chanting the divine name to purify the mind, the nervous system, and the earth.

 

Calling this place your Heart does not make the way clear.
It is nearer than that, closer than our lips when they meet 

like an arrow of wine striking the vigilance of a ruby.

Every spark from this wound is a poem about our hidden fire. 

Remain awake in jasmine-scented darkness, sleeplessly singing 

Shiva's name, your very breath his paramour, the Goddess Shakti.

Evaporate your blood into the night, chanting "Shivo'ham!" 

Let this sound be a medicinal thorn to remove the deeper thorn 

of wanting. Shakti's sigh alone cannot find its alphabet. 

 

Jesus and Magdalene meet and touch, first gently 

in the garden, and later with flames in your solar plexus,
where love's only song is a sky of boundless listening. 

 

Above the moon-bathed neem and champa leaves, 

the kunj heavy with heart-mango, swirling supernovae pause 

like sudden intuitions in the mind of Shambu.

 

God is as shocked to awaken in You

as You are to awaken in God.

Stop pretending any of this is outside your body! 

 

All these galaxies, gardens, and lovers dissolve 

in the glittering blackness beyond your belly button.

Meditation begins when prayer becomes its own answer.

The diamond of breathlessness is both empty and full.
In prayer, you ask the Christ and all his heavenly hosts

to reveal your destiny, your duty, your work. 

 

But in meditation, Christ and his hosts entangle
their cilia with the neurons of your thalamus, 

weaving the hyphae of their soma through your flesh.

 

They ARE your destiny, and You are their anatomy.

This very breath is your mother tongue, 

more ancient than the Torah or the Vedas. 

 

Let your exhalation be a milk-offering, 

poured upon the lingam of your own spine.

Let your praises inebriate the Earth. 

 

You are the oblation, and You are the flame.
You are the ghee, You are the nectar,  

You are the green fire of Spring.

 

Don't stop pouring, don't stop perishing into love-sparks! 

At dawn, drink from the breasts of El Shaddai,
Who is both bride and bridegroom;

 

Who wields a lethal trident with three prongs,
Consciousness, Matter, and Bliss,

and whose five elements are the syllables,
Namah Shivaya!

LISTEN to a reading of this poem. Artwork: Ardhanarishvara, the male-female form of Shivashakti, from isha.sadhguru.org

Ancient Jar

Someone spilled the ancient jar of light.

It can never be stored in the temple again.

 

Don't try to keep your master's teaching in a can.

Bottled and sealed, even the freshest beans go limp.

If the Dharma gets packaged in plastic

and shelved at the ashram,

you'd better check the expiration date;

it has to say 'Now.'

Someone spilled the ancient jar of light.

It can never be stored in the temple again.

The vitamins of God dissolve in silence,

but they nourish your body in action.

For every breath you take,

give one to the poor.

And who are the poor? Look around you.

Everyone is poor.

Someone spilled the ancient jar of light.

It can never be stored in the temple again.

Each pair of eyes is thirsty for your gaze.

Your smile is nectar.

'Enough' has no meaning unless it is shared.

Fresh, with no container.

The Mother never gets hungry.

Her breasts are busy with lips and milk.

Someone spilled the ancient jar of light.

It can never be stored in the temple again.

A Single Gesture

 

"The one who descends is the very one who ascends higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe." ~Ephesians 4:10

Sophia, the Wisdom of the heart, cannot be known by knowledge. She is known by the power of intuition, the ecstasy that stills your breath. She alone is the unfathomable source of healing. Isn't it time for you to burst like a spore and take root in Her?

The glory of the heart swallows up the illusion of distance, exposing your intimacy with galaxies whose light is only now arriving as your body. The constellations, those animals of wild night, are your internal organs. Countless suns thread silken rays of love into the atoms of your flesh. Here is your miracle: the golden splendor descending from the stars is the very energy ascending from the womb of dark matter, nourished by your ancestors' bones, entangled in the sacred dance of mycelial loam.

From star-beings to mushrooms, countless messengers illuminate you, weaving themselves into your beauty. Does it matter what you call them: Devas, Heavenly Hosts, Totem Animals, Anunnaki, Chanterelles? Is the archangel Gabriel more glorious than a hummingbird? They bathe you in an infinite caress, both heavenly and infernal. Ascent and descent are a single gesture of respiration. You embody the sky. You are the song of dust. Breathe as one, not two.

What is not real must be shaken, so that what cannot be shaken may be revealed. Now is the time to inherit your glory, and depart from the kingdom of fear.

Photo by Amy Gallagher

Mission

 

You have a mission of green

on a thirsty planet.

Don't become a cynic.

Your task is the grace

of a fallen raindrop,

an opening bud,

a thrush at dawn.

Be a fragrance in the breeze.

Don't waste time becoming anyone

but a Lover.

Do beauty with your hands.

Breathe peace.

Give people hope

by insisting that this moment

is enough.

These are simple words, friend,

but they were born of many tears.

Water color by my friend, Marney Ward, who illustrated the cover of my new book.

Given

 

Tonight I am telling you

10,000 secrets

in a single word:

Surrender....

All right, friend,

now that all the others

have put "surrender"

in their scented box

and run away to sell it

at the Ashram of Perpetual Hope,

I'll share the true secret...

There was never any need

to surrender.

You were already

given up

the moment this Breath

created you.

 

Now She returns to swim

through your marrow

like a dolphin

in a wave of stars.

 

The earth bows down

to press her mouth

on the clear blue sky

between your eyebrows.
The sun gazes up into your face.

 

Grace

Existence is grace.

Breath is gratitude.

When Jesus said,

'I have overcome the world,'

he meant,
'I have surrendered.'

The night is about to pour

her swirling chalice of stars

into your chest.

There is no radiance, no joy
not already bottled
 in your tears.

A raindrop shakes the earth

and a ray of morning sun

pierces the Winter sky,

an annunciation

to the virgin silence

of your heart.

O friend, just being aware

is abundance.

All you need to do

is stop complaining

and say thank you.

Three Questions

I petted Schrödinger's cat.

But it was dead.

Would it be dead

if I never petted it?

You cannot answer this question

until you turn

the particle of you heart

into a wave.

Breathe both cats,

living and deceased.

The iron Buddha in my garden,

is it half covered with snow

or half empty?

The question doesn't even arise

in silence.

Nor does any other.

Now answer this one.

Did the race of reptilian shape-shifters

that controls both political parties

descend with the Anunnaki

from an alien star-system,

or did they arise from the hollow earth

in the sporification of
eight billion angry opinions
about nothing?

Discuss.

Here is an article from Scientific American on the implications of Shrodinger's cat for quantum theory: LINK

Collapse

 

Overnight they collapse - facebook, twitter, instagram. Replaced by the next technology, making our cell phones and computers irrelevant, just as the walkman and boombox, the record player, the am-fm radio, and the typewriter attained holy obsolescence in a day and a night.

The new social media requires no hand held, lap top, or electronic device at all. Neither does it require fiber-optic cables or satellites to create the illusion of an immaterial cyberspace. The new social media consists of micro-holographic quantum time crystals, scintillating out of the void.

These infinitesimal holograms enter our bodies through the breath. We imprint them with our genetic signature, then breathe them out again. Others breathe us just as we breathe them. In three days, everyone on earth has inhaled the quantum signatures of all humanity. In the words of the Veda, "Vasudaiva kutumbakam: the world is one family." Thus we imprint each other. There is no independent self. As the Christian scripture says, "Panta 'hen Pasin," All is in All.

Which means that, sinking our awareness into a single atomic crystal through a single neuron of our brain, we can enter a holographic chamber as real as any three dimensional ballroom in Atlantic City, or Bali, or Buenos Ares. We can meet whomever we chose, enjoy a glass of wine with them, or chant kirtan in a three-dimensional sat-sang. All we need to do is 'tag' the people we want to be with by calling their names, very quietly, praying them into manifestation. Instantly, if they accept our telepathic call, we are utterly real to one another, without moving or leaving our bodies. As Lao T'zu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, "Without leaving my hut, I know the whole universe."

When I call on my friends this way, I don't choose to meet in a restaurant, an ashram, or a beach-side resort. I invite them on a walk in the misty fern forest, right here in the valley where my sternum dips beneath the curved hills of my diaphragm. We step softly on the earth, or whatever soil is made of in a hologram. For after all, matter is just waves of pure mathematical probability in the dark delicious night of the soul. 

We press our naked feet into green giving quivering moss, and pause in a ring of moonbeams. It doesn't take our axons long to root down through the loam, regenerating our neuroplastic buds, grafting our butterscotch flagella to the tangled mycellium of the chocolate underworld, until we forget that we were ever men or women. For we become mushrooms again, annihilated, unselved in a Tartarean landscape of chromatolytic kisses, springing up as nipples, penises, tongues, frolicking in starlit meadows of schizophyllum commune, covered in the spooge of amethyst deceiver and synaptic milk sap.

Will we ever get out of this place? Are we actually here? Is there anywhere else but this embrace, that has always already happened?

Photo: beautiful schizophyllum commune, from Boredpanda.com

Podcast: The Poetry of Astonishment

Well now I know what a "podcast" is because I was on one, talking about poetry and sharing some from my new book. These two guys, 'The Philosopher & the Monk" are such delightfully unpretentious down-to-earth wisemen from Long Island. They were so much fun to talk to!

 

Between

To me, Imbolc is such a powerful mystery of time because it is like the space between thoughts. If there's nothing I need to think about right now, then I just stop thinking. Start listening. Listen to the music of awakening seeds, the whisper of creation bubbling out of silence all around me. The wordless breath of the Creator is a subtle thunder, more healing than any thought I could possibly think in this moment.

The Writing Process

My sister asked me to describe my "process" for writing. I had never thought I had one. But on thinking about it, I decided to share these words, which I will also share here...

On this beautiful feast of Imbolc and Saint Brigid's Day, I am finally getting to reply to your thoughtful inquiry. It is hard to answer because I do not trust any process or formula for writers. Each must find their own way to the grail by entering the thickest, wildest, most pathless part of the forest.

For me it would be a sacrilege to "discipline" myself to sit at a regular hour and make myself write, for that would mean I depended on my own will, and my own mind. But poems flow from the divine Otheress, and She taps your heart in unexpected moments, usually between waking and sleeping, which is the space of meditation.

My poems, those that have any kind of energy at all, begin with the faintest impulse in the heart (not in the head) at the end of a meditation period, or in the middle of the night, 3 a.m., or just upon waking in the morning, the moment before the mind of yesterday falls back into the brain like a sack of ashes. It feels like a gentle flame, pre-cognitive and pre-verbal, just a compulsion that says, "Write this!" Then it forms itself into a few words, a phrase, and that is the first line. And then it springs from that seed.

A verse of the Veda declares, "In the beginning, the Lord created the universe through a stream of Sound" (Adau Bhagavan shabda rasahi.) Which is to say, "In the beginning was the Word." Too bad we in the West have intellectualized the meaning of Logos, because as quantum physics shows us, the universe really is a condensation of waves in the vacuum, vibrations out of silence, it is all music, it is all sound. So poems begin in the heart-chakra (which in Sanskrit is called the "Anahatta" or "Unstruck Sound") as waves of silence imbued with love. And as you keep listening, the waves become words.

But then the work begins. Sometimes I will take that seed and turn it into something much longer, with a lot of work in it. But sometimes the best should be left as it falls, as it occasions, right out of the heart onto the page. Sometimes it is left as it is for a longtime, a year or more, then rediscovered and worked into a poem. Sometimes it is overworked and I wish I had held onto that first draft, which was the best. In the words of French poet, Paul Verlain, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

All I can finally say is that poetry comes from the breath of the Creator, which is his Holy Spirit, his creative Mother-principle, the Shekinah, or Goddess Shakti. I can attribute poetry to no other source.