Uradiance

  Meditation is not beyond the body. Meditation awakens the soil in your bones, the flame in every synapse, springs, rivers, tributaries of lymph and blood, the ocean of awareness in a stem cell. Each atom overflows with clear and starry space unbounded. Walk like a mountain. Sit like a cloud. Breathe like the sky. What pleases God most is Being what God is.

One of the greatest obstacles on our spiritual journey is the illusion that the Master is outside us. In truth, from the beginning of time, the Master has always dwelt within. The Master is the luminosity of our own consciousness, drawing us intimately into relationship with the heart, and through the heart, into intimacy with all sentient beings. The external Master meets us one day and gazes into our eyes for no other reason but to ignite the fire of the Guru within. The Mother hugs us until we hug ourselves. Then we are free. Then the Master is free. Meditation is simply a direct step to the Master's inner presence. I once heard beloved Mahesh Yogi say: "The impulse of the mantra that draws awareness to its source in transcendental silence, is precisely the same impulse that draws the disciple to the Master." The true Master is formless love. Formless, but not impersonal. If I cling to the form of the Master in my mind, I lose the deeper intimacy, ...

Who first convinced you that "something is wrong?" And who were You before you believed them? When we get this notion that, "something's wrong with me," we start looking for something wrong with others. Then something is wrong with the world. But before "original sin," there is original innocence. And That is who you really are. Your innocence permeates every particle of dust, every star, dissolving all distances in the silence between thoughts, the intimacy of pure Being. All is That, You are That. Om Tat Sat, Tat Tvam Asi. Where is the failure in your existence? The only failure is in trying to be somebody else. Where is the lack? You only lack awareness. But awareness awakens, pressed out and overflowing, in an instant of gratitude. Do you want to heal the world? Do you want to heal others? Then heal yourself by being You. That is the shift from illusion to reality, from darkness to light, from bondage to unboundedness. Asaatoma sat gamaya, tamaso m...

You wear your silence as a black silk gown, woven infinitesimal, every thread a letter of your lover's name. And your stillness is a trembling at the touch of those invisible lips. The motion of that kiss has no first cause, but a stirring in the groin of loss. You must dance naked as a flame without a wick to entice the dawn. It is not enough to be quiet and empty, because there is honey in each cell of darkness and the tomb is full of wine. If your meditation does not consume the moon, the stars, the pit in the swirl of yearning with a tongue of fire that tastes the subtle, ruthless, delicate blade of love between heartbeats, then you are not singing from the center of your desolation. It is not enough to be quiet and empty. You are still waiting for some God to say, "Let there be light." You must burn off all these veils and dance naked in the moment before you were born.” Photo by Peter Shefler

In the birth canal you were anointed with the microbiome, smeared and smudged with the mighty host of earth's bacteria. Your first breath hugged atoms of all races, all tribes into your blood, the flesh of stars, particles of the ancestors, atoms from the body of Jesus, the body of Muhammad, the subtle body of Kwan Yin, body of the first murderer and the murdered one. Every angel is jealous for that breath. 75% of your DNA you share with a fruit fly. And now you only need one more thing: to touch the silence of your Being. Descend into the uncreated intergalactic vastness beating at the core of your heart. Rest in the hollow seed of stillness that contains all right doing. A mere most humble and eternal gratitude. A quietness that does not make you a cosmic being, or a luminous ascended being, but a human being at last. Image from The Scientist magazine

I like to explore the liminal space between poetry and guided meditation, word and silence. LINK

Why not let Jesus beat and trample you with naked feet in the barrel of your heart, dancing to the un-struck music, sometimes a sea, sometimes a serpent's hiss, the sound a flame makes in a lamp, the dark body inside the bright one? Let an unknown angel be your breath, and you need no rule but amazement. Let joy and sorrow savor the same cup, just for an instant, and the taste lingers forever. You've been polishing the grail too carefully, the one you hid under a thorn bush in your rib cage. Sipping and sampling the wine of truth is not enough. You have to become what you thirst for. Once fermented, a grape can't return to its circle of perfection. Your wounds must trickle to a single pulse, and all your pronouns get crushed in "Thou."  The sparkling particles of your body suffer a burgundy annihilation, mingling with dust between the vintner’s toes. Nectar won't do, Jesus loves wine. Now rinse ...

(Listening Link) Consciousness has the structure of a joke. The joke is that I Am what I've been seeking. The unfathomable beauty of Being is so self-evident that the mind overlooks it in the very effort to see. The question is not who am I, but how can I give up the search? There are 10,000 ways. They are all effortless. Here are just a few... Evaporate your eyes in the blue sky. Get lost in the silence between thoughts. At noonday, breathe sunlight through your forehead, down into your chest, out through your belly. Fearlessly become the circle of transcendental embodiment. Run your fingers through the fur. Rest in the heart, the warm beating creature at the bottom of your well. No mind, no flesh, only Radiance. Listen to a faint sound vanish in stillness, then keep listening to That. Gaze into the gaze of another, your lover, your friend, your dearest stranger, until otherness melts away. Wide awake before dawn, dissolve into sparkling photons of darkness. Photo by Michele Burt

  Why say "Beloved" to your own existence? Why bow to the glory of the radiance You are? Surely, for the sake of love. Your chest is filled with countless stars, therefore you name your own beauty the Lord of Hosts. Your cosmos witnesses and humbly adores her own majesty. You long to Other your Self. Therefore serpents and angels, oaks and meadows, rocks, streams, creatures who run, or swim, or fly all shout a single pronoun: Thou! Do you want to understand why 1 + 1 = 0? Why emptiness overflows with dancing gods, voluptuous demons? Why silence roars like a hungry lion? Then you must burn to nothing in the fire of your own heart, until nothing remains but the heart of the Friend.

I can hardly imagine what to do when I walk in sun browned alfalfa, hearing the swish of horse’s tails, the buzz of their flies, and I arrive at the willow where we buried my mother’s ashes. Not knowing is the space of compassion. Let one gold ocean of breath be taken, held, and offered like a rimless cup that spills distant stars into the invisible. What are a thousand poems compared to the yearning of the shadow for its cause? Words are tears of silence. I keep returning to this meadow year after year, like the arrow floating back to the bow. I keep falling down to press my face into new-mown hay grass, fragrant, fresh with summer rain. Photo: the willow where my parent's ashes are buried.

Drop the veil of hope and wanting. Watch the sun pluck harps of frost fretted between oak leaves. Are you not surrounded by wise ancient beings of immense stature: cedars, stones, Scarlet Elf Cups, hummingbirds? You can hear the infinitesimal chime of stars in sparkling silence. Call it a moment of grace if you like, but grace is all there is here, where things are made of tinier and tinier miracles. And really, it's true, love overflows the rim of a dust mote. O mind, expect nothing. Plunge naked into the sacraments of ordinary time, this season between epiphanies. Of course the voice within goes on muttering "More!" But a fiercer listening, inside within, seeps like fresh water from an abandoned well. One breath bows to another, and you remember how to stand here amazed, then how to walk.

True lovers abandon this word, love. It is no substitute for a thud of plums dropping in the mist before dawn. Cocoons where leaves were. Invisible pulse in the furrow of November twilight where geese beat Southward. Scarlet moon-swell of berries. The elegiac coyote, the pine breeze, fallow sweetness of a naked garden, the grace of a whole afternoon without speech: no Word but what things are.

  A breath of Thou Art sweeps I Am away, and the heart becomes clear. A breath of I Am sweeps Thou Art away, and the heart becomes clear. Beloved, you are the clarity within clarity. So my breath is one, yet two, ever departing, ever returning. And so my heart is whole, yet containing twin chambers. O sparkling emptiness, who tastes the Self as Other! The moth folds her wings perfectly on a petal of blue lupine. The raven complains perfectly about nothing from a misty pine. A tear perfectly kisses my cheek for no reason. If you do not heal your own awareness, how can you heal anything you are aware of? The earth will be purified, not by politics, but astonishment. It isn't more work, but less wanting, that cleanses our water, wind, and soil. Thus we return to the crystal of no-thought. Our ambitions dissolve like clouds in a sky that was never not already blue. Look! The entangled filaments of creation pour out of your eyes, and the gold that glistens in that silk is your own ligh...