Don't Let Them Disperse Your Soul

 

In a civilization that has nearly exhausted itself, one sign of weariness is the denial of individuality. Please don't buy into the propaganda that says, to become whole, you must drown your person-hood in the collective.

Don't doubt your uniqueness, your voice as a free moral agent. Whether of the left or the right, authoritarian ideology wants to level you into the mean, to undermine your singularity. Levelers herd you into racial, gender, and tribal identity groups, the better to submerge you in their programs of bio- or socio-engineering. They even use new-age "spirituality," appropriating concepts of advaita (non-duality) or the device of the sangha, to dissolve the particular into the general good.

What they don't want you to know is this: good is never general, only particular. Your soul is a dancing hologram. You are a one-time-only turn of the kaleidoscope. You may reflect the cosmos, but the configuration is yours alone. You are this wave, enfolding the whole ocean. Speaking for innumerable winged, scaly, wounded and four legged things, trillions of microbes and spoors, you nevertheless speak in your own voice, unlike any other.

Incorporate ancestral genes, both human and non-human, host multitudes of the unborn in your body, irradiate the stars; yet you alone are the sparkling center of an infinite web of sparkling centers, each all-one. The universe could not be the same without you. So be eccentric as you can. Dance wildly on the rim of creation. The edge you explore with all your heart can only be the center, and the cosmos your comfort zone.

In proto-galactic clouds of nebulae, on numberless planets, through mineral vegetable animal eons, consciousness strove to embody your song. Now you sing for multitudes, but the voice is yours. Don't let the levelers drown your Word of creation in their ambiant white noise of politically sterilized speech. OM is not group-think. OM is the primal verb whose infinite declensions burst into a multiverse, a chorus of individual voices. Don't let them disperse your soul.


Painting by Mahmoud Farshchian

No Obligation

Of course the outraged are outraged that you are not outraged. But in truth, you are under no obligation to be angry. And though they are certain the world will not survive without their angry opinion, you are under no obligation to have an opinion about anything. Opinions arise and dissolve like clouds in the empty sky. You cannot grasp them, so why try? To realize that you are not under any obligation to believe in your thoughts is the dawning of freedom. Why should you insist that they are “your” thoughts or “my” thoughts? They just arise and dissolve in vast awareness. A thought is just dark energy, billowing out of the void in the axis of a neuron. You came here to be astonished. Bow your head and pour the ideology out of your skull. Your beliefs will compost next Spring’s kale. To be green and useful, the uncreated light of heaven must pass through the belly of an earthworm. You came to meet your friends in Rumi’s meadow, out beyond opinions. Bring an empty cup. In the field of the effortless, small miracles with blue petals spring up, smelling like the stars.

Food (Dedicated to the Late James Lovelock)

Mineral people are plant food. Plant people are animal food. We animal people are food for worms. Worms and maggots are microbe food. Matter is divine. The top of the food chain is not man, but microbe. Microbes are embodied angels who merge into vast infernal networks of holy mycelia. The mycelium network is the soul of a living planet. The planet is an archon, a goddess. Her spirit is the breath of a mushroom. Irradiate the stars with your body. We're all food.  

James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Theory, dies at 103 LINK
Chalk mandala by biology teach Caryn Babaian LINK

Letting Go

 

The teacher said,
"Let go."

So I let go
of the teacher.

Now there is no one

letting go and nothing

to let go of,

morning sky

empty and blue,

the teacher a chickadee
in the cedar by my window.

Booster

Breathing in, from the belly to the galaxies above you, breathing out, from your the spiraled emptiness on your crown to the groundless abyss of beneath your sacrum, where the world is born, one breath of wholeness boosts your immune system. Gratitude for a butterfly on a blossoming weed in your backyard boosts your immune system. Stroking animal fur, and savoring it's warm feral fragrance, boosts your immune system. Walking barefoot on wet moss at dawn, feeling joy at another's success, hugging this moment, just as it is, boosts your immune system. Now fall into your flesh, landing softly in each cell. This too is medicine. Vaccinate your blood with the blues of the sky, the song of a sparrow, the daily practice of amazement. Proclaim sovereignty over your own body.

 

Photo: Indeed, a butterfly on a weed-blossom in my backyard.

Secret Work

 

 

Collage by Rashani Réa, my co-author on several books, see below

The Fool at the Edge of the Well

The Master became a Fool and started to babble. He was sitting on the edge of the well of joy. These are a few of the things he said before I slapped him on the back and knocked him in.

No one is to blame.
Perfection is a mistake.
Being right is an obstacle to truth.
To bow is liberation.
To feel the wound at the heart of joy is devotion.
Surrender is the only victory.
The goal is not to be independently wealthy, but to be independently happy.
What is happening now is never as important as what is happening now.
Be a cause, not an effect.
You were not created in the image of a beggar, but in the image of a creator.
The chaos around you is just your old skin sloughing off:
you are a rainbow serpent of wisdom.
Throw out the voice that loves to argue, meet the one who loves to sing.
God hears all prayer as music without words; the names don’t matter.

The Lord is ruthlessly forgiving; how much love can you endure?
Let every moment be consumed in apocalyptic fire; now is the end.
The only discipline you need is awareness.
If you would hasten the sunrise, dance in the dark.
The deepest form of humility is to become the master of your own gift.
There is no first or last place; it is better to create than to win.
Answers drown out the music singing from the heart of your question.
The purest religious act is to abandon your point of view.
If you could do it all over again, you would not do it differently;
so just do what you are doing, there is no alternative.
When you feel certain that the world is in the hands of evil forces,
consider the mother of all conspiracies: your own mind.
The opposite of light is not darkness, the opposite of light is whining.
If you need a reason to be happy, you have not attained perfect foolishness.
God never descends from heaven; God wells up in tears from your body.
Meditation is intimacy with every particle in creation.
When you know that you are space itself, all distances dissolve in love.
What is love? The nectar between your thoughts.
At the still center of the smallest act of kindness, creatures melt back
into their creator.

Burning

God is ruthlessly forgiving.
Can you stand her fire?
Let this burning have its way with you.
Ferment your ashes.
There is nothing that cannot be changed
into wine.
Now drop these small weapons
of fear and resentment.
You are only a sheath.
Love is the sword.

Around The Conflict

Around every conflict is a stillness, a silence, an awakened space containing more energy than the conflict. Instead of contracting your identity and becoming part of the conflict, enfold it. Take a breath, expand a little, become the solution.

You are not the earth. You are not the moon. You are not a star. You are space. You are not the dolphin. You are not the shark. You are not the tiny phosphorescent plankton. You are the ocean. You are not the terrible or lovely image in the mirror. You are the mirror.

All forms appear and dissolve in that mirror, yet leave no mark, no dust. That is your formless clarity. The mirror reflects all motion without being moved. You are that stillness. Even the heaviest object becomes lighter than air in a mirror. You are that weightless presence. 

The emptiness of the mirror can embrace the most distressing forms, the most terrifying forms. This is Kali. She is not anger. She is the unconditional compassion that pervades even forms and feelings of anger, terror, violence. Kali is the triumph of clarity over dullness, the Self-radiance that outshines even the darkest image.

What reflection appears when a mirror faces a mirror? When you gaze at your Self? Nothing. As Shelley wrote, "The deep truth is imageless." So we look right through what we've been looking for. 

The most beautiful face of God, the darshan of the Guru's glance, the very gaze of the Beloved, is but a fading glimmer in our boundless transparency. Our own mirror-like essence is ananda, bliss.

No experience we could ever enjoy through our senses, our feelings, or our thoughts, could be more luminous, more luscious, or more fascinating, than to rest as the unimaginable radiance  of the imageless Self.

Countless galaxies pour into the cup of eternity, spilling over the rim of time. Who is the wine steward? Where are the stars distilled? They gush from the core of your heart.

 

Sword Of Manjusri

 

The emperor recited his own royal merits,
then asked the wanderer what merit he possessed.
Bodhidharma replied, "mu."
The emperor asked what knowledge he taught.
Bodhidharma replied, "mu."
The emperor asked what meditation he practiced.
Bodhidharma replied, "mu."
Mu means "nothing."

Therefore throw away your rosary of shoulds.
It is costume jewelry.

Have the courage to slice off thou-shalt-not,

right at the throat with a single stroke

of the blazing sword of emptiness.

If you call the whirlpool of stars in your heart,

"the soul," it becomes the shadow of an echo.

If you call your oceanic succulence "the flesh,"

it turns to stone, dark gravity of otherness.

And the sky where our bodies evaporate

into each other’s bittersweet mist?

If you name it "love" we are riven in two.

Out of hoarse silence rains a voice of cinders.

Use your scriptures for kindling.

Toast the commandments in the fire of your chest.
Nothing is buried under these ashes but more ashes.

After the conflagration, fresh green gestures 

of careless caring spring up

with a fragrance distilled from lost roses 

that grow in the compost of your bones.

Journey's End

  

The journey is over at this end of the rainbow.
The distance from here to there is only hesitation. 
You arrived before the pilgrimage began.

Erasing the thought, I am seeking, dissolves
at least three million light-years.
Andromeda floats on the jelly of your iris.

We're all star-clusters petaled in one calyx,
colors of the garden prism'd through a hollow seed.
We’re answers in the silence where
no question has yet arisen. 

But if we don't take time to gaze deeply,
we just call it now,
this holographic quantum bijou
emitting rays of past and future.

Pay a little more attention to the bling of suns.
Yatha drishti, tatha srishti.
As you are to yourself, so your world appears.

Between pistil and stamen, a trillion
pollinated nebulae.
Between I and Thou, a musk
so gold and pungent it drowns the drone,
arousing the distant queen. 

Don't be one or two.
Grounded in diamond uncertainty,
behold the earth undaunted, shouting flowers,
brewing, thickening her honey
in the cauldron of Zero

While inside your chest, breath kisses breath,
and a fragrance of Unknowing 
calls the bees home.

 
Water color by Marney Ward

To Rest In The Heart

 

Bewilderment is a form of grace. When you are bewildered, your mind gives up and sinks into the heart.

To rest the mind in the heart is the beginning and end of spiritual practice. This practice is very subtle, but not in the least esoteric. And no one should have to pay for it. The only price is your whole Being.

Feel the warmth in the chest, like the memory of a first kiss. Let your breath arise there. Ever so softly, your inhalation flows up as a cooling flame through the back of your throat, behind your eyes, into your crown - that tender fontanelle that made you so vulnerable and open when you were a baby.

This breath is permeated with awareness. Therefor it is completely awakened, yet there is only breath, and no thought. When the breath of wonder is full, it radiates into the stars above you.

And just as softly now, you breathe out. A glittering mist of Shakti pours down through each cell of your flesh, from your crown to your toes. One inhalation, one exhalation, observed in the astonishment of grace, cleanses the mind of stress and wakes up every particle of your sacred physiology with healing light. The moon makes love to every chromosome.

Why are you here on earth? To incarnate the breath of the Holy Spirit. She who was the playmate of God at the dawn of creation (Proverbs 8:22ff), She who sent galaxies whirling in their circle-dance, has come to dwell among your atoms as this very Breath.

Be infinitely gentle with each particle of your existence. Be wild. Be wildered. Miracles transpire in the realm of the Effortless.

Photo by Laurent Berthier

Patiently Waiting

  

Here in your garden 

is a patient waiting.

Cool morning air,

caress of golden 

sunlight, and a breath

of mist in-lit with pearl.  

A presence patiently

enveloping the bud

of the peony,

an expectation in stillness,

awaiting the burst, 

the annihilation,

and the Beauty.

Does it happen in 

a moment or a day?

Is it like the burst of

clustered galaxies

over countless eons seen

in an ever-present past?

Why would that even matter

if Beauty is always 

already here?

If it happens, has happened, 

continually waits for itself 

to happen?

And you can't make

it happen, whether in 

a moment or a day,  

because you are simply

the witness, 

the bewildered One 

who, prior to thinking, 

prior to feeling, prior 

to knowing "I Am," 

is perfect stillness,

radiant silence,

love unbudded and unbound, 

patiently waiting

beyond duration,  

enfolding what you

must become?

No the mind can't do 

a damned thing 

 to make it happen, 

despite all its efforts 

to validate the "i" 

as a do-er separate

from the world, 

despite all the useless 

chatter of belief and blame.

And if there is a "path" 

it must be simply this: 

letting go of the chatter,

because the silence

is already here.

What you will become

is already here.

Prior to seeking,

prior to the Way,

you are held, you are

encircled and sphered 

by the sky, the mist, 

the climate of Beauty,

who patiently waits

for you to burst, 

to end, to begin,

to happen.



'Light-Filled Peony' by Marney Ward

When To Bow

 

Why bow before a white 

silk dhoti and a pair sandals, 

to one who sits on a golden dais 

garlanded with roses and gladiolas? 

Thousands perform padanamaskar, 

shattering their brains on his bare toes.

But that finite human form is only

the reflection of something 

infinite inside you, something 

that bursts open in your solar plexus

and flowers beyond light.

The one you worship out there

is not the Guru - not unless his gaze

awakens the music in your silence,

his whisper tastes of nectar 

in the space where your breath stops, 

his shape dissolves into the stillness 

at the core of your heartbeat. 

The real Guru is within.

The real Guru is within.

Let that one awaken this one.

Then bow.

Photo by Kristy Thompson

Awareness Breath Pain

 

What makes you feel renewed when you're hurting?

Merging awareness with breath, and breath with sensation in the body, dissolving the mind into your wound 100%, without resistance, without even naming it "pain," whether the wound be anger, grief, or yearning. This is the alchemy of Direct Touch, which transmutes hurting into free energy, into ananda.

Prompts For A Poetryoga Playshop

 

Abandon every program and routine.

There is no sequence of postures.

Valiant as an ancient oak,

crooked with compassion, stand

in your wizened spiral of limbs,
swaying in a breeze of exhalation.

Let your body rise, fall,

circle silently, a starry firmament

between your nipples.

Boundless space between

the ligaments of each bone.

Muscles washed in pure attention

moving from their ocean wheels,

each galactic cell of flesh

a Wordless creation

of the infinitesimal.

Don't even listen

to these instructions.

Books come from no-mind,

bodies from no-thing.

Slow down into a sphere

propelled by no-destination.

Vast micro-movements

inventing themselves

in molten golden stillness.

Now it is you own dance.

From the fountain in your crown

to the om in your toes

hums a hollow nerve

where breath becomes

the sap of a lightning bolt.

Bees feast here, making

honey of your sorrow.

Let blue fire incinerate your mind.

How could a single thought arise

in spaceless bewilderment?

Kali will guide you.

Reason not required.

Your backbone is her scepter.

The creatures around you are sparks

thrown out of a burning neuron,

the axis of your soul.

They're all inside you of course,

the song of the wood thrush,

the tangle of devil’s claw,

sunbeams frozen at this end

into mountain tops,

vagabond comets, crazy angels

gazing over the rim

of entropy toward

a horizon of derelict light

curved into this dewdrop

on a blade of alfalfa.

Words like “You” and “I,”

"He" and "She,"

have been scorched into silence

by the Lord of Wonder,

whom we no longer call annihilation

but The Whirling Shaykh.

Whether we cry Allah! Shiva! Elohim!

doesn't matter any more.

The stream of tears is enough.

All that remains is a swirl of cinders.

Grasping the enormity of the disaster,

we know that we cannot control

this laughter that creates the world.

This poem was published in the Empty Mirror Journal.
It has actually been used as a guided movement meditation
in a poetryoga playshop. The photo is by Peter Lik.

Spanda (स्पन्द)

 
Fierceness is not the only path.
Anger is just one flavor of fire.
There are other ways to become authentic,
as when a hummingbird loses herself
in a sip from the honeysuckle fountain,
or a barn owl drops the heart of a mouse
down her owlet's yearning gorge.

Or merging with spanda wherever you are,
that which expands and contracts
yet remains like the sky,
the breath of boundless space delighting
in the gasp of an atom,
This!

If you would become a lord among fools,
penetrate the flame.
Immolate your lungs in the divine shadow.
Darkness is not the opposite of light
but the womb of light.
It is good for those who get lost in colors
to hear this again and again.
Pierce the black hole of un-knowing
and mother your own nebula.

Both sun and moon ascend through infinite night.
Stars are brilliant, yet savory
is the blackness between them.
Her rays cast a sparkling path
across the waters of your mind,
and his golden beam, through morning mist,
caresses the bud beneath your bruises.
Who can say a woman is more gentle than a man?

Tremors of Shakti in Shiva's stillness,
throbbings of Tamuz in the uterus of Ishtar,
all of Christ in a single tear of Mary.
Your mother and father are sacred serpents
entangled in the tree of your spine.
They tempt you with their fruit,
yet the fruit is you, the whole garden is you.
Take, eat, this is your body,
that which expands and contracts
yet remains like the sky.

Why make war between woman and man?
Perhaps there are eight billion sexes: what then?
Conflict is a choice, one ripple
in the ocean of choicelessness.
You could choose dancing.
You could dance for no reason.
You could dance because one becomes two,
waltzing with the dragon of your own rainbow.

Now spin and whirl.
There's a ballroom at the center of your brain.
Your pineal gland is a chandelier
containing the stars you thought were above you.
For the sake of the children,
please don't go back to sleep.

Self-luminous your Being, clear and empty,
whether you wake or dream.
Penetrate the flame.
In the cloudless sky of now, be the lord of fools.
Drown all other pronouns in "Thou."
You have a rendezvous with someone
prior to light, earlier than darkness.
Friend, your whole life pulses
from this joy.


Art by Pooja Bhapkar

5th of July

Yesterday we had a neighborhood cook out. Everyone brought food. There were no enlightened diets, just the delicious casserole of each other. It never occurred to anybody to take pictures. You can't take a picture of Presence. We were completely happy just eating and laughing. It was a party because there were no parties. No politics. No fireworks. Nobody said grace, because everything is grace before it arises. Only afterward did we realize that this was a miracle, the ordinary miracle that is always available. And it was liberation, because freedom is just being a neighbor. Independence is entanglement. Breathing in, there is awakening, with no "I" who needs to awaken. Breathing out, a vast hug that does not need to be given, because it already encircles us, enfolding the bodies of friends, city parks and streets, the distant hills, the intimate ancestral stars. We float like stunned dust in the silent explosion of gratitude.

Watercolor by Yvonne Hemingway

Pledge

I pledge allegiance to no flag.

I pledge allegiance to no nation,

no tribe, no party.

I pledge allegiance to no bombs

bursting in air,

but to the silence in a day of prayer.

True patriotism is rebellion.

True rebellion is joy.

Cast down the mighty, the masters of war.

I pledge allegiance to the poor.

I pledge allegiance to hemp and sod.

I pledge allegiance to the unnamed god.

I pledge allegiance to the moon and tide,

to sun and wind and what I cannot know.

I pledge allegiance to the rainbow,

to the light that contains all colors.

I pledge allegiance to living coral.

I pledge allegiance to an heirloom tomato seed

and to the wisdom in the weed.

I pledge allegiance to the unborn

curled in their mother's sea of trust.

I pledge allegiance to the dust.

I pledge allegiance to all winged

and swimming children of the earth,

to creatures that crawl or come out at night,

to all my relations who wait to take birth,

to brothers, sisters, four-legged and two.

I pledge allegiance to you.




This poem is in the new book, Nectar Of This Breath