From The Dogs

You don't need to be a rosy-soft new age angel in order to meditate. Don't need to sip liquefied kale, live in an ashram, or be politically correct to tap the infinite Source.

 

Don't need to be someone better, higher, purer. Don't even need to be someone "else," because there is no one "else" for you to be.

Here's the heresy. The fundamental dis-ease that cripples our culture is the toxic anxiety of striving to be more enlightened. It is the very effort to be more than we are that divides us from ourselves.

Wake up and find the courage to be incomparable. Call off the quest. The beginning and end of spiritual practice is to rest the mind in its own broken heart.

Align with your jagged edges. Tune into the rough, unpolished, sparkling joy that haunts your numb places like a fungus, the frightening ecstasy of your uniqueness.

You are a hologram reflecting every other creature in the mineral, vegetable, animal and angelic kingdoms. Yet All is arranged as You for one brief turn of the kaleidoscope, one instant in the crystal pandemonium of the Goddess, never to be equaled, never to re-turn.

The cosmic symphony would not resonate the same harmony without your own piercing perishing love-cry, without You at the core of the singularity. This world doesn't need another Gandhi, or Jesus, or Guru: it needs You.

Whatever enlightenment may be, it is more like falling than rising, more like collapsing than getting it all together.

So fall into your own rhythm: this is perfect stillness. Collapse into the grace at the heart of your own chaos: this is perfect peace.

I did not learn this from the gods. I learned it from the dogs.



Photo: my two best friends, Emerson and Finn