Uradiance

       Don't wait for the light. Breathe in darkness until it becomes                      the glow inside you.           Have faith in the power  of hollow things to bear fruit.                     This is the season of Grace.           Learn from the withering Autumn sunflower how                     to empty yourself, and scatter           a thousand Spring mornings.          Photo by Massimo Daddi

  Your work is grace,       my work is opening. Light doesn't care where it shines.      Your work is radiance, my work is polishing the mirror.      You pour, I overflow. Breath-milk spilling on the lingam,       awakening stone. Seeds of desire have been offered and cooked      but the nectar of yearning still gushes from the broken stem.       Famished, naked, Spring wanders into the garden.       I listen to melting snow. Windsong in plum bud twigs.      Feral rose among thorns, this empty grail, patiently awaiting the bee knight.      I pay attention to the least and smallest who burst free,      because that is what happened to my heart. ...

 This poem is included in my new book, 'Nectar Of This Breath,' and is also included in the new anthology published by Riverpaw Press, 'Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic,' in which poets document the experience of the Covid 19 crisis over the past two years.

  My spiritual path has been a journey of gazes, the eyes of the Other an infinity sign leading me back to the Self. Gaze of friend or perfect stranger, gaze of lover and teacher, gaze of the animal guide, gaze of my infant daughter, mother, wife, gaze of my gaze. Yet through these sparkling corridors of darshan, there were three gazes above all others that took me to the highest peak, where Dante stood with Beatrice, to see the empyrean through her eyes. The first Great Gaze was the gaze of a fawn. My wife and I were just married, walking through a Maryland corn field. We came upon a newborn deer. We could only spend a moment there, for the mother doe was stamping the ground furiously at the edge of the forest. Just for a moment we gazed into the bluest eyes I ever saw. Only my daughter's blue eyes come close to that bejeweled Shakti. The word that comes to mind is "familiar." The eyes of that fawn made the entire animal kingdom a clan of cousins...

Do you look for the source? Perhaps you Are the source. A blue sky radiates from your chest, clear and boundless, where shines a brilliant sun, about three inches in front of your heart, the size of your thumb tip, yet containing all the light and energy in creation. This is the sun of pure love, effortlessly, infinitely concentrated in a bindhu, one drop of devotion. Invisible threads of quantum entanglement connect this transcendental jewel to every star, every intron yet to be expressed in the DNA of the unborn, every mushroom spore in the cosmos. These silken love-threads are the strings of the vina that Sarasvati plays in her lap as She sings the names of God. But what is your name, friend? Your name is listening... listening... while your breath ever so gently rises and falls, polishing the emerald at the center of all Flesh. This is the true work of breathing.

First I thought it was the voice of Jesus. Then I thought it was the voice of Krishna. Then I thought, perhaps it is the voice of the Goddess. Now I know it is the voice of my own Heart whispering, "Dear one, when your wave breaks on the shore, you are so broken you forget you are the sea. As longing, pain, and union, longing, pain, and union, you rise and fall in waves. Please do not forget, when you arise I love you. When you break I love you. When you return to the depths I am there, waiting, as Love."

Inside your shell, something soft surrenders to the dark moon pull. You are the pearl formed by infinitesimal gashes of sand. One last sharp stab pries open the mollusk of your consciousness. In an inky stream all the sorrows of the world stream out of your chest. Now you can bathe in the ocean of joy.

    There is probably no linguistic relation between the words "sin" and "cynicism," but to me the sin of the post-modern age is a vicious unrelenting cynicism, where it is more important to be hip than to forgive, more precious to be offended than to reconnect with your heart. I do not know if the Easter mystery redeems me from "sin," nor do I care. But I do know that the vigilant, ever-immaculate silence of Mary irradiates the dark, and the love of Jesus shatters the chrysalis in my chest with wings of wonder. They save me from cynicism. And it is this which empowers me to celebrate, to forgive, and be joyful.   Someone said to me that this was a nice painting, but "a fiction." I said, I have never seen more truth than this painting: the real power of the woman, the real vulnerability of the man. This picture was taken by the photo-journalist of our collective unconscious in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Yemen, in Honduras, just this morning. ...

It is 3 o'clock on Good Friday. My density is made of emptiness. At the center of each photon is the ayin soph, a black hole that recycles all the light in the universe. And at the center of this cross is the Being that has no opposite. There is no higher or lower, left or right. Where past and future kiss in sweet annihilation, the self is crucified, silence solidified into diamond no-thing-ness. 'O Lord, why have you forsaken me?' This is the prayer of the One who finds no other.

When you meditate, stop all this reaching for the sun. Bodies of joy don't fly. They are weighted down with jewels of emptiness, pearls of compassion. Gravity is the prayer of the fallen, who rise through surrender, sinking deeper than the ripples where small fish feed and thoughts nibble your toes. I mean to say, you must drown in groundless silence swelling with waves of solitude, all names swallowed up in the ocean of Unknowing. Don't count your breaths. Here, one inhalation lasts forever, one sigh brings you Om. When you emerge from these waters, dripping starlight, waders on the shore will whisper, "Who is that glistening leviathan of unalloyed night?" Then you must sing to them about the treasures of the deep. Image by Stephanie Laird

  Meditation can be very dense right now, like plowing through rock. It's not You. It's the spectrum of the galaxy our solar system is passing through. And on the grossest physical level, that density expresses itself as war. Yet density is just a high concentration of very powerful particles bombarding you with radiance, purity, and love. It feels dense if we are not up to that vibration. So keep meditating with infinite forgiveness. According to Bell's Theorum, now proven by experiments in physics, every particle expresses the whole field, and is connected to every other particle. So as the fire of meditation lightens the density of a particle in one neuron of your brain, you lighten the density for all sentient beings. Embrace the darkness. Embrace the stone. It will melt all by itself without your work. The density is made of breath, the breath is made of infinitesimal crystal bells ringing out the energy of silence. The silence is made of light. The light is made from ...

  Rest where the question does not arise. That is the answer. Let the mind descend into the heart. That is the solution. Was there a problem? Eddies of thought are the dance of silence. Yet a gentle harmony was already here, a weaving of invisible roots before the greening. The fragrance entangled in the loam. Let falling down be your ascension. Discover that you are the ground. Last year's thousand spent and weary petals returning to your seed. Now you are the cause of Spring. Painting by Di-Li Feng

What does Sabbath mean? Literally, in Hebrew it means stop and rest. Stop and rest because there is only one place worth going, and you can never go there. Your mind can't go there either. You won't even be able to imagine arriving. All going must dissolve if you want to find that place. For thousands of years seekers have looked for it, but they always failed because it's a place that can't be sought or found. Thus the wise have said, give up the search. Where could it be? Right here of course. The place where you always already are. So stop, and rest. Sink into the Being that has no opposite.     Sabbath Queen by Elena Kotliarker

Happiness has nothing to do with the modern cult of the smile. It comes with an unconditional embrace of sorrow, revealing that even our shadows are woven of light, with threads so subtle they can only be seen through the eye of a broken heart. Have you embraced your tears? Have you honored your grief? Have you entered your wound? Upon the sand grain's grit and chafe is rounded the pearl of joy. Painting: Mixed media, Marie Laparco

  I asked Love to guide me and Love said,  I don't want you  to go anywhere. I asked to see the face of the Beloved and Love became a mirror shining from its own emptiness. So I gazed into myself until the light became too bright  for any self at all. Then I asked Love  to carry me up to the diamond pinnacle of devotion. It was priceless, naked, empty. Love said, bow down. So I plunged my nostrils  in the compost. And that how is I got  invited  to this feast of worms.     Painting my Cathy Morrison

                 Palden Lhamo, Terrifying Protector Aspect of Goddess Tara    Toxic masculinity. Toxic femininity. Toxic blame. Toxic forgiveness. Toxic Christianity. Toxic Buddhism. Toxic angels. Toxic whores. Toxic capitalism. Toxic socialism. Toxic mind. Toxic body. Toxic the woke. Toxic the enlightened. Toxic Jesus. Toxic Krishna. Toxic the compost that nourishes new life. Toxic the afterbirth that feeds the imbecilic loam. I am toxic. Thou art toxic. We have infected each other. Even our garbage is woke. Even our garbage is made of pure consciousness. Every toxic substance is composed of that which is pure. All is toxic and all is pure. Nothing is poison. When I penetrate the toxin of your gaze I see only the demon of your beauty, Palden Lhamo, Kali Ma. Sacred the placenta. Holy the mulch.  Holy the broken grail and blood spots on linoleum. The Goddess of detritus. The Goddess of cheese. ...

 

Real meditation id not a 'spiritual by-pass.' It does not by-pass our pain. Meditation penetrates into the nectar of pain. Meditators don't rise above pain, they surrender to its core. At the center of pain is the flowering of boundless energy. The same sap pervades both rose and thorn. The rose is happiness, the thorn is sorrow, the sap is bliss. Ananda isn't a passing mood or a temporary emotional state. Ananda is the juice of pure existence. It glows in the dark. Transcendence is not above, it is the hollow in the seed. Even in a time of quiet, our solitude ferments into upheavals of rage and despair. One student said, "I can't wait to get to the other side of this anger!" But when we try to wrestle down our anger with our mind, we only churn up more wrathful thoughts and images from the past, or from the froth of the media. Mind, through mind, will never get to the other side of anger.   My teacher once said, "Blessed are you when you are c...

               Cybele, Earth Goddess It's OK to pray to the Divine. But be sure that, once in a while, you pray to your body... "O my Body, forgive me! I listened to almost everyone but you. I need to spend more quiet time with you, just hearing your voice. Perhaps it is only the sound of your heart, or your breathing, or the secret thunder of your underground rivers of blood. But those are the voices of true prophecy, those are the heavenly messengers, nearer to me than my own name. "O dear Body, I remember when we were very very young, there didn't seem to be two of us. I was you and you were I. Your rolls and buns and loaves of pudginess were scrumptious. Your nakedness was like a peach, you were tasty as wild oxalia, mushrooms on the forest floor. Your compost was sweet and strong, a mixture of lilies and poo. You could do yoga just rolling in your crib and burping. You taught many wise old people to laugh ...

  We made love in a thousand ways before we had bodies. We had other bodies. We went star-tasting in the dark, wore mouse robes, burrowed in alfalfa, thawed from high crystal places into torrents, transporting flowers to the valley, spilling lupine, aster, spores of Indian paintbrush. Mingling florescent subterranean cilia, we came up pungent mushrooms, learning to be present as our own medicine. Now, distanced by fingertips and mouths, by words we cannot speak because they might break open and bleed out our silence, we bravely drop the veil of mind, inventing new ways to awaken the one pure thousand-gendered flesh that has no name. We dance inside the bud, cocooned in what will be torn apart by wings that yearn to make rainbows. Infinitesimal holograms of sky, we scent the storm, the peculiar fragrance of whirling, while suckling our amethyst roots, we taste again the stars. Photo: I took this on my favorite hike near Mt. Rainier

Layam vraja, "dissolve now." ~Ashtavakra Stars dissolve into a rose. A rose dissolves into stars. Ask Danté. The solution is dissolution. What dissolves? Separateness.  I am not my skin color. I am not my tribe. I am not even my gender. I wear these veils and garments, just as I have a red shirt or a Yankees cap on: but they are not my Self.  Nor am I my political party, my nation, or my religion. And I am not my ancestors. These are my marvelous incidents, but not my essence. The core of my existence is prior to labels, identifications, masks. Yes, I enjoy wearing them, dancing in them, playing in their forms. I need not renounce them, because they were never really "mine" to begin with. In deep meditation, these forms dissolve like the dreams they are. Then I Am.  In deep meditation, the core of existence reveals itself as the One who cannot be divided into races, tribes, religions, parties, yet who plays in them all as light playing in a kaleidoscope. The...