Hacker (To All My Friends On Social Media)

 

If you get a friend request

from God,

don't accept it.

She is a hacker.

She will infect your cell phone,

your iPad, your camera

and everything it sees,

including your own

reptilian brain 

with a viral buzz,

a neuroplastic musk

that melts all boundaries

and fine distinctions,

the molecular membranes

that guard your bureaucracy

of punctilious neurons

from amphibious tongues of fire

that tease up out of your

steaming amygdala, yes,

even dissolving the firewall

between "inner" and "outer,"

until the algorithm of your

own heart forces you

to surrender, to collapse

into the cyber-void

at the center of the iris,

to erase all your files,

empty your memory,

and simply gaze

into what gazes.

Photo: Kristy Thompson

Season

 

     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

The Works of April

 

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.

Austrian Copper Roses by Georgia O'Keefe

'World Without Us'

 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.

Journey of Gazes

 

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. I felt welcomed and warmed into the planetary community. Ever since passing through those faun eyes, I've seen one and the same Soul in animals, angels, and human beings, a single Spirit gazing out through myriad facets in the diamond of God-Consciousness.

The second Great Darshan was the gaze of a dolphin. My young family was spending a week at the Jersey Shore, in Avalon. It was late June, solstice time. Every morning I would go to the beach at dawn, practice Sudarshan Kriya and meditation, then swim a mile down the coast in the rising sun, out beyond the breaking waves. Swimming quite a distance from shore, I suddenly saw an enormous shadow-form sweep silently beneath me. My heart shuddered with primordial fear of the deep, the unknown.

I stopped and looked around. I was completely alone. Then a face emerged from the water about three yards in front of me, with perhaps the most intelligent and benign expression I have ever beheld,  a smile of respect, parental care, and benediction. A gaze of unconditional love enfolded me, and filled me with the certainty that I am protected, both on earth and among the stars, by a much more advanced and ancient race of Friends.

The third Great Gaze of my journey came at a meeting with my Teacher at a meditation course in Nova Scotia, more than twenty years ago. That was the moment when I knew I really had a "guru," because Nobody is my guru. Let me explain.

Courses were small and intimate in those days, and on the final night I managed to visit alone with him in his room for more than an hour. At one point toward the end of our conversation, I asked, "There is so much chatter about who you are, that you are one of the great avatars or world teachers from a by-gone age who has returned to us. I need to know who you REALLY are!"

So he showed me. It was very simple. He said, "No, no, no. I am Nobody." And he meant it. Then I gazed into his eyes and saw pure Presence unveiled, no name, no story, no expectation from the past superimposed by the mind. Truly, I looked into Nobody's eyes. Nobody is my teacher. Nobody is my supreme authority. Nobody is my Lord.

That gaze: twin galaxies in-spiraling toward the formless source of creation through billions of light-years. Wells of eternity where I fell inward and outward at once, like a thrown pebble, like a lost meteor, in the motionless explosion of a dark sparkling rose of infinite circumference. This was the flowering of divine love. Golden petals gently, silently exploding from the empty stillness of the Self we all share. And gazing into each other this way, we make peace.

Jai Guru Dev. 

 

 

Photo by NASA, Helix Nebula

 

 

 

You Are The Source

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.

The Light That Shines In Darkness

 

"Stars were thought to be the principal and most important component for life to thrive… till now. Researchers from Harvard university explain that radiation coming from Black Holes could do the same." ~Resonance Science Foundation,

 

"The light shined in darkness, but the darkness could not overcome it." ~Gospel of John, Prologue

 

We can Be the light that darkness cannot overcome, by being the darkness in whose womb the light is conceived. Then we comprehend not only Christ, but Mary.

Useless Advice

I unplugged my outrage meter

and threw it into the fountain of love.

Next morning a child discovered it

encrusted with emeralds and pearls.

Then the experts arrived.

A professor from NIH proclaimed,

"This is junk science."

A Pentagon Intelligence Officer declared,

"It came from a sunken Nazi submarine."

“Back-engineered alien technology!"

muttered the restless ghost of Nicholas Tesla.

But Hafez the bartender gave me better advice:

"If breathing won't clear the clouds away,

assume they're part of the cocktail.

Mix them with bitters and orange rind

over the crushed ice of loneliness

and sip them all night long."
Then Rumi whispered in my ear:

"You must abandon every concept

of better and worse if you want to discover

the ten thousand uses for the useless.

Pollinated by a rogue bull comet,

be mute as a rose shouting back at the sky

in the lost language of the heart."

All right, Mevlana, that's what you say.

But what do I say? After all,

I'm writing this poem! I say,

"Learn to ride your donkey backward

if you want to find the true Way.

Traveling Westward, gazing East,

command the sun to rise, singing,

Follow me old fellow, follow me!

I'll lead you to Summer meadows

and Autumn afternoons.

On Winter evenings I’ll show you

how stars are born from sacred darkness.”

You laugh? Don't get too educated, friend.

Let's just say there's a fifty-fifty chance

your eyes create the light they see.


Water color by Marney Ward

Breakers

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."

Earth Day Prayer

 

 

For just a little while,

un-imagine the outline of your body.

Who drew that?

Erase it gently.

Your skin wasn't sketched

with a fine-tipped pen.

It exploded

from erotic non-binary pollen

inebriating suns whose fire

has not yet reached you

with the fragrance of holy confusion.

There's one solution to our dis-ease,

melt the frozen heart.

The sickness is having edges.

Let your vestigial fur be a desert of sage

where species that have disappeared

still roam and have babies.

Let your bones be mountains and hills

hidden in the mist of the microbiome,

your veins and arteries rivers and streams

transporting barges of exotic half-fermented fruit

and orca-painted war canoes

paddled by protozoan shamans.

The insect kingdom buzzes through your diaphragm

cross-fertilizing forests in your alveoli.

All possible genders frolic through your hollow places.

Your breath is the sky.

Each proton of you sparkles with its distant star,

each cell of you a hologram

steaming with the musk of possibility,

archangels still tangled in the algebraic chaos

of your afterbirth.

You say you are awake, but do you even know

that dawn is balanced on your fontanelle,

the moon in your loins?

That you grasp in fungal mud between your toes

the ancient Annals of Gaia?

What is the biosphere made of? Names.

Names woven of quieter names.

Your marrow remembers them all

when your coccyx hums with a mother's sigh.

Give suck. Relieve the teat.

Let all twelve planets circle your breast

like a clock with no hands.

One inhalation is eternity, one sip a miracle

of fire and wind, soil and ancestors.

Now breathe out and say, "enough,"

as you might murmur a prayer.

Silence is unbounded

yet with flesh, clustered

galaxies of no-thought

spun from wonder-light.

Fierce witness of creation,

what more can you do?

You can listen to the ripples of "Ahhh...,"

the unfinished Amen

of your whispering heart.

Lost in that sound is your true name,

God's name,

which cannot be spoken

because the work of singing

is never over.

Wetland restoration mandala drawn in chalk by biology teacher Caryn Babaian

The Sensuality of God

When God speaks to us, God uses everything - plants, animals, humans, dust. God uses all creation to kiss us daily. Spirituality is not the renunciation of the senses, but their refinement to the subtlest of all sensations: God herself. God is the most sensuous of delights.

Nor does meditation reject sensation. Meditation refines sensation through silence. Our spiritual practice cultivates finer perception until taste and smell may sense the flavor and fragrance of pure Being; sight may gaze at the light shining from Divine Darkness; touch may feel the inner caress of this Breath, the hug of earth's great breathing upon the skin; and hearing may listen to the hum of Silence, which contains the music of the galaxies.

The sixth sense organ is the mind. Meditation refines the mind just as it refines the other organs of perception. When the restless mind settles into stillness, thought is transcended, no image limits awareness, the bliss of emptiness becomes full, and the mind relishes Infinity.

The seventh and deepest sense organ is the soul. The soul, "I Am," is not the opposite of matter, it is simply at the other end of the spectrum. Matter and spirit are one continuum of divine energy, from the dense to the subtle. The dense is the incarnate glory of the subtle, and the subtle is the healing nectar within the dense outer form. The "soul" is the fine end of this continuum, the subtlest of the senses.

When, through meditation, the soul becomes "poor in spirit," it inherits boundless wealth. In the heart of silence, the soul transcends its soulness, flows beyond the root of its individuality, and enters the seed, Christ. This loss is rich indeed. For when the droplet becomes the sea, the sea becomes the droplet. Now Christ is the Self of the soul.

In ancient India, this exquisite affair was represented by the love-making of Radha and Krishna in the garden of Vridavan. In the Biblical tradition, it is the union of the Bride and the Royal Bridegroom in the Song of Songs, which is why the Song of Songs has always been the favorite Biblical book of Western mystics. It is at once the most sensuous and spiritual of poems.

When we enter into this marriage, all our senses feel the transcendental kiss of God, who has created the body and its neural pathways just to lead us back to this wild garden in the heart, where the seed is born.

God is the cosmic sensation, the passion of a soul so voluptuously in love that her sensibility transcends all boundaries. God whispers to this soul, "You are the garden, I am the Spring." And the soul sings, as the Bride in the poem, "My beloved is mine, and I am my beloved's. Come into your garden, and feed among the lilies."


Art by Rene Bull, 1913

Shell

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.

Easter

 

 

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. And yes, her sorrow is all-pervading, as her joy is all-pervading, because sorrow and joy are both flavors of her all-pervading love.

Detail from the Pieta by Bouguereau, 1876

 

 

Just Help Me Become

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

Three O'clock

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.

Bodies of Joy

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

Dense

 

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 particles of darkness. And each particle of darkness is empty.

What is empty is vast, unbounded. What is unbounded is free. So your density is tightly packed solidified freedom. And when you penetrate the density, it dissolves into Grace.

 

 

Image from Resonance Science Foundation

Rest

 

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

Sabbath

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

Wildflower Yoga

 

There are 196 verses in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
Only three of them deal with asanas.

No one teaches yoga to a flower.
Learn bending from her stem,
the supple power of green no hurricane can crush.
Breathe from the seed.

Abandon every sequence and routine.
Your body is a river of postures
flowing toward the ocean of repose.
The petals of your flesh unfold.
The sparkling zephyr of this breath
come to rest like a feather on your belly.

After all these years of practice, can you
give up your poses and move merely
to the rhythm of begonias in October?

Rooted like a weathered oak, valiantly sway
to the seasons of inpouring and outpouring.
A starry wheel rolls out of your chest, the axis
of our galaxy poised between your nipples;
your muscles bathed in the ghee of attention,
ligaments dissolving in the golden void.

Can you dance with the Beloved
even when you are alone, your spine
Kali’s wand, your pelvis her boat,
laden with its cargo of moonbeams?

From the baby’s soft spot in your crown
to the sap-dripping sacrum, runs a nerve,
down whose hollow liquid lightning hums,
a silken thunderbolt all the way Om
to your toes.

What Goddess spins your flesh from threads
of pure perception on her glistening whorl
of stillness? Keep it soft, friend, like
the mystery of gristle in a fontanelle.
This is the door you leave by, made whole
by lost drops. Your eyes tell beads of gratitude.
And the fierce silence of your breathing
is the Mother's name, protecting you
from shadows of false light.

Dear one, there are intricate miracles
of awakening woven in the sinews
of your quivering heart, each neuron
tangled to a certain ache of sweetness
in the meadows and the woods, each proton
twined by love's silk to its native star.

Let your body happen. The dance is yours.
Learn bending from her stem, the supple
power of green no hurricane can crush.
Micro-movements invent themselves,
majestic spirals of molten grace.
Breathe from the seed. No one
teaches Yoga to a flower.

 

This poem has been used at poetryoga workshops as a guided movement meditation.


 

Happiness

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

Follow This Breath

The Unborn call me.

Come! they sing.

"How shall I come?"

Follow this breath.

Walk barefoot in the night

until you find a mushroom,

the toe of Dionysius

buried upside-down in loam

where He suckles

at the planetary teat.

"But where shall I, who am no God,

find this nipple?"

Return on a breath

to the center of each proton

in your body.
The milk of the underworld

is black and sweet.

And the jolt of arriving

right here! in your own flesh!

is the electric flower

of the universe.

Now the Ancestors call me

from the bruise of dawn

on the first day.

Come! they sing.

"How shall I come?"

Follow your inhalation.

Yes, I hear angels of fire,

air, water, and stone.

Come, they sing,

fall into your diaphragm,

your abdomen, your loin.

Sink into the blossom

of annihilation

through the gravity

of this breath.

 

Somewhere even deeper

inside me than I am,

stars extinguished long before

their light has reached this world

whisper my electrons

out of emptiness.

Galaxies whose distant

magnetisms whirl

the sun in my sacrum

call me to taste
a timeless respiration that evaporates

the dream of distances.
Come!

"How?"

Ascend on this breath!

 

This is why I sink, I drown

in the wilderness of the interior.

Where the soul cannot go,

I rise by uncloaking.

Within my rind is the ocean

of what, once rotted, ripens again.

Within this ocean is the fragrance

of mind, flavored with the silence

between thoughts.

And within this darkness is the fire

of eternal chaos,

the bliss storm.

 

"And what is within that nectar?"

Death.

Go there to be born.

Go there each morning,

and every sunset.

"How?"

Follow this breath.

 

Stay, endure, embrace the pain

of your hollow places

and be whole.

Gather the flames

of numbness from your marrow

like sheaves.

Harvest the seed of tears.

Crush your unbearable disappointments

to an umber chrism the color of skin.

Spread it all over.

Spread it all over the earth and moon.

Bathe in the secret musk of what

you already are.

Chalk mandala by biology teacher Caryn Babaian

Feast

 

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

Mad Musings Of April Sunlight

Mad musings of April sunlight caught in a raindrop. I cannot help but overflow. Be warned: you will not find any victim here, or any "other" to be angry with. Only blasphemy.

 

In Mark 3:29, Jesus says that the only unforgivable sin is the sin against the Holy Spirit. I have always wondered what he meant by that... Until I realized that the Spirit is none other than our own pure consciousness, the Self. 

 

To say "God" is to other my own consciousness, to carve an idol out of thought, a graven image of my own golden Self. And as "I" create this separate "God," the "I" who creates that God becomes a separate Adam, an ego. Then the ego indulges its melodrama of otherness, its soap opera of victimhood. 

 

I call myself a weak and fallen sinner. I feel unworthy to receive the tidal wave of Grace that eternally pours from the Self, back into its own Self-awareness. When I other the Lord, I deny the boundless ocean of Love that has for all eternity been the very nature of my own heart. How could "I" have ever been separated from that Love? 

 

What is Sin? The Biblical word is "hatah." It literally means, in Hebrew, "missing the mark." Living off-center. Separation from Self. 

 

When I say I am a weak and fallen sinner, I sin against the Spirit. I am really calling God a weak and fallen sinner. I am distancing my mind from the radiance of my heart. 

 

No "me" was ever impure. No God ever exiled "me" from the Garden of the heart. Yet this mind surely tastes the bitterness of exile. How did this happen?

 

This mind exiles itself with a single thought, "I am unforgivable." This mind wears self-judgment like a chain, then throws that same chain on others. 

 

Yes, I am "fallen." So what? I fall into the ocean of grace. I fall into groundlessness, and it is a soft landing. I fall delightfully deeper and deeper into Love, into the dark nourishing well of my bottomless soul. 

 

Perhaps you are wondering how such foolishness arose in me on this April morning. Well, after all, it's Easter. Time for a taste of resurrection. So I was walking with my dogs, glancing into tulip bulbs after the rain, sipping the wine of wonder. I gazed into this apple bud, and slipped into the abyss of perfect annihilation.

 

It's all my Guru's fault. My heart melted the instant I gazed into the blossom and saw his face. My Guru is intimately present, intensely personal, in the form and color and fragrance of these perishable petals. When I gaze into the merest blossom, I come Om. In the sacrament of the commonplace, through the miracle of perception, Love frees me from form. This is death, and this is resurrection. Now the Beloved can take any form. I think the Beloved is a golden mote of pollen on the stamen of the present moment.

 

 

Photo: my teacher blossoming on a twig.