"There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of spirit on the body." ~Rumi"O let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth... for your love is sweeter than wine, and your name is perfume poured out." ~The Bible, 'Song of Songs'
“Jesus loved Mary Magdalene more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth." ~Gnostic Gospel of PhilipBeloved, if you understood this mingling of mouths, you would not fear the spirit or the body. In pure meditation, they taste alike. After all, in kissing, one is two and two are one. The full moon is fierce sunlight, cooled in the mirror of a caress. Breaking foam is the dance of the immoveable and fathomless sea. Your heart on fire with me, my heart on fire with you, we need not grasp for form, we need no fuel to burn. These are not lust flames, but petals on a white peony. Just let it burn! Healing without destruction. What do you want, Friend, what do you really want? Moments of passionate forgetting, or one eternity of breathless splendor?
Don't mistake this for a love poem,
or an end of life poem,
or a poem about mouths of flesh.
This is a poem about a kind of prayer
in which darkness burns up our eyes,
our faces forget themselves in mirrors of fire,
and the metaphor is death:the touch of widening selves.
Unlike plum blossoms bursting in moonlight,
our opening never closes.
Knowing and unknowing, nakedness
and the wearing of wine-stained garments,
secrets we whisper and secrets we keep:
all one kiss obliterating lips, body, spirit.In this form of prayer, I am your wick,
you are my flame, we are tongues tasting
God, scorching the earth and sky with song,
annihilating even annihilation...
Then we rest like weary knives, sheathed
in each others breathing.
Blossoms don’t open themselves.It takes a sunbeam to ignite the rose.
I was asleep until you placeda ruby on my chest
of Spring in a Winter garden.So’ham, So’ham, So’ham...
One breath pours wine intothe burnished cup of another.
Some say that this is justa sound without meaning.
I say it means the Magdalenehas met Jesus
in the Bridal Chamberof your heart.
This little poem is from from my book, 'Wounded Bud' (see below). I offer it for morning meditation on the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber. What is the sacrament of 'the Bridal Chamber'? For early Christian Gnostics it was the final initiation into the mystery of the Heart. It is in our own heart that Shiva and Shakti, Christ and the Magdalene, Divine Masculine and Feminine, unite as the Self, wedding the lunar and solar currents of prana that wind around the spine, called Ida and Pingala, in one radiant choral silence. That is why the heart chakra is called 'anahata,' the 'unstruck sound.' It is in that depth of meditation that the mantra, the divine name, dissolves into a vibration of continuous luminous creative energy bubbling up from divine silence. This is the sound, the Logos, that creates the universe. As a Vedic text declares, 'Adau Bhagavan Shabda Rasahi': in the beginning the Lord manifested the whole universe out of a current of sound,' which echoes the first verse of the Fourth Gospel, 'In the beginning was the Word.' This experience of union in divine love, not out of body, but in the very physiology of the heart, is the essence of Yoga.
The 3rd Century 'Gnostic Gospel of Phillip,' found in the Nag Hammadi scrolls, declares:"In the Breath of Christ's Spirit,we experience a new embrace:we are no longer in duality, but in unity....All will be clothed in light when theyenter into the mystery of this sacred embrace....What is the Bridal Chamber,if not the place of trustand consciousness of the embrace?"Painting: 'The Bride' by Dante Rossetti
The racoon pauses
before my statue of Kwan Yin.
Still, near, barefoot, I smell
the musk, and know by the ancient
cinnamon scent in Autumn air
that Earth was just created
a moment ago.
Nothing that is real ever strives
to be other than it is.
Under the weight of grace
I lower my gaze, noticing
the color of the fallen,
how they forget their trees,
to bleed and surrender
the soul of gold to living loam.
There is no greater miracle
than becoming ordinary.
It give wings to your tears.
Painting by Rebecca Latham, collage by Rashani Réa
The false prophet proclaims a general truth, but God whispers the fragrance of a rose: this rose. A honey bee isn't interested in genus or species: the madding sweetness of this blossom is what he desires. Nor is the artist inspired by flowers in general: she must paint this incomparable azalea.
With general truth our minds swell up, assuming the abstraction to expand us and make us smarter. But a mind turgid with beliefs is neither clear nor useful. It is a gray intellectual thicket that prevents real empathy, real presence. The general truth, in fact, may make us smaller, because it confines awareness to a conceptual box which our ego must argue and defend.
We do not live in general, we live in particular. When we taste this sensation, this perception, this very breath with sparkling awareness, it may be a portal to the infinite, a singularity unbounded. Which is why saints, Zen masters, and fools have attainted liberation by the flash of a plum blossom in the moonlight, or the sound of a frog.
Don’t take a walk,give one.Barefoot or shod,pause everso briefly as you pressto the ground.Hikers of switch-back trailscall it the rest-step,which is a kind of meditationat the heart of going.The planet can feelthis lost harmonyof the body and its breath,pathlessly meanderingthrough trillium silencein the dangled gazeof columbineover glowing moss,
careful not to tread
on cream drops of
paschal flower,
caressing the loam
yet never quite arriving.
This way,
you won’t disturb the marmot
at his prayers.
My photo: a marmot praying, Mt. Rainier
We’ve spent a great deal of our spiritual life denying, bypassing, suppressing the night inside us. Now we need to return to the black hole, the dark heart inside the bright one. Are there not two chambers, one empty, one full? Learn from the moon.
In the bleakest midnight of the soul, as C.S. Lewis found, we can be “surprised by joy.” Suddenly we rediscover the sun in the heart of grief, we relax into grace, the gift of mysterious unbidden happiness. We savor a warmth which is the very nature of our blood, the good smell of fresh baked Bread in the midst of Winter. Be forewarned, when you bypass the darkness, you bypass the light!
Each breath received contains dark energy. Each breath offered contains more starlight than the Milky Way. Why favor one or the other?
Have we vested so much energy in our trauma that it became our identity? Night the new hero, light the new villain. “Holier than thou” replaced with “darker than thou.” “Happier than thou” replaced with “more traumatized than thou." Yet both may be forms of spiritual pride.
The gift of true vulnerability is given in a groundless place beyond light and darkness: the radiance of the void. These stumbling words come from one who has felt thunder bolts of agony, piercing, yet illuminating, the unfathomable bliss of night.
Photo by lfaesthetic on Tumblr
We are each a hologram of all, containing the microbiome of earth, stars, galaxies, the DNA of butterflies and pomegranates, in a uniquely personal configuration. The hologram called You and the hologram called I are infinitesimal turnings of one kaleidoscope, each expressing the whole rainbow mandala as no other ever has, or ever will. The universe "groans in travail" to bear us as ineffable singularities.
The exquisite beauty of the individual person is the jewel of evolution. Those who deny it have allowed their politics to lead them into the Cult of the Collective. But the collective and the personal are two aspects of one hologram. Individuality does not deny the collective, but embodies it. An individual is the personal song that rises from the chorus of the fungi, bacteria, and elementals of the biosphere. The Person does not stand apart from the Whole, but is rather the fulfillment, the very soul, of our cosmic collective purpose.
Mandala by Caryn Babaian
The mind sees a world in crisis. But the crisis is the mind. If we see through a shattered lens, everything appears shattered. Let us heal our sight.
Have you ever meditated on your eyes?
We are always streaming through our eyes. But do we ever take a few moments to rest in our eyes: not flowing outward toward the world, nor inward toward the mind, but resting in the liminal space, where seeing is empty, without seer or seen?
Through the portal of the eye, the energy outside presses in as a dancing chaos of light. Simultaneously, through that same gateway, we project our mind outward, organizing the light we see, superimposing onto its radiant chaos the forms that correspond to our desires, anxieties, and old stories.
The mind exits. The world enters. Yet we never notice the space of the doorway, the transparency of our own eye. We don't linger to look at what is looking.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "The eye is the light of the body. If your eye is single, at one, your whole body will be filled with light." We like to abstract Jesus' sayings as moral concepts. We make mind-trips out of his words, instead of experiencing their roots in the spiritual heart of matter. But what if we took Jesus' words as instructions for meditation on the body, in the body? What if we became "single and at one" with our own eye?
Now, instead of streaming through your eyes, stop and rest in them. Remain in the space of pure beholding, without beholding any-thing. Sink deeper and deeper into the hollow cavern of your eyeball, neither going outside to form a world, nor upstairs to process light into thought. Let your eye be "single," resting in the clear emptiness of its own window.
Be utterly effortless. Notice the relaxation in the facial muscles, which we unconsciously strain by our seeking. We have been translating this strain into the world we see. Now, resting the eye in its own luminosity, the strain melts away, because no outer form need be imagined. This relaxation spreads through our whole face, creating a natural smile, and then through all the muscles of the body. Are we relaxing our world too?
As we feel this relaxation in our muscles, we feel peace in the mind, because there is no need to form concepts and mental images. As the "single eye," mind melts into its original nature, the pure blue sky of awareness without thought.
On the subtlest level of sensation, where light-waves become photons of flesh, we feel the bliss of an edge-less expansion, permeating the body, vibrating beyond the body. For when light rests in itself, new light is created, sparkling through the vacuum of awakened space.
At the sub-nuclear level of energy, finer than the quark, what is our body actually made of? Particles of bliss. And what are these particles of bliss made of? Pure awareness, ever expanding in stillness.
Awareness itself is the substratum, the continuum, that permeates the cosmos. And awareness effortlessly, ceaselessly expands because, at the finest level, it encounters no boundary or resistance. We are here, and we are everywhere. It is this paradox of dynamic expansion in stillness that we experience as ananda.
A few minutes of meditation relieves much stress, and transforms the way we see the world.
Very light of very light, vast cathedral dome of sight, self-illuminated mosque, starry empyrean of the eyeball: kneel here. Rest awhile. Venture neither out nor in, and every cell of flesh will bow down with you.
Repose in the bliss where seeing blossoms before anything is seen, and your whole body will be filled with light.
__________
If you prefer to listen rather than read, you are invited to hear this on SoundCloud: LINK
Grandmother Spider created the universe. She wove her web and when it was laced with dew, she flung it into the air and the dew became the stars. Each day as she re-weaves her web, she re-weaves life and creation. Grandmother Spider is also known as the Keeper of Words. As she wove her web, she brought language to the people. ~Crystalwind
I am Tawa the Sun.
But who created me?
Spider Woman did.
She is the darkness inside light.
These are her instructions....
Untangled from your
silken theater,
play the weaver's game.
I will teach you.
Let beggars and presidents,
anarchists and kings,
cling to threads of desire
while you simply witness
the glistening.
Don't be a bead, a diamond,
a tear on a gossamer net.
Be the black between.
Fling your heart into orbit
around stillness and become
the untethered gaze
that sees from every star.
Find a naked lover beneath
The veil of your breathing,
The musk of your flesh
anointing her emptiness.
Your body becomes her.
She looks lovely in you.
Let every photon of your bone
bathe in the glory of its origin,
and each electron collide
with the darkest particle
of its other self.
What if the path doesn't lead
to the next moment,
but deeper into this one?
Let loss be the illuminated door.
The eloquent don't speak.
They catch the full moon
in their quivering web
of silence.
Painting by Susan Sedon-Boulet
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 philosophical distinctions,
even the
molecular membranes
that guard your bureaucracy
of punctilious neurons
from the amphibious tongues
of fire
that tease up from your
steaming amygdala, yes,
dissolving even the firewall
between "inner" and "outer,"
as the algorithms of your
heart
force you to surrender,
to collapse in the cyber-void
at the center of the iris
with no eye, erasing
all your files, all
the documentation
of your misdeeds,
until you simply gaze
into what gazes.
Photo: Kristy Thompson
Locate the jagged fractal softness
of your body in mine, mine in yours,
atoms honed to silence by the blade
of our gaze. Be the same emptiness
I Am, but muskier. Not the absence
of desire, but a wanting with no I,
an ever-expanding erotic hologram,
copulating with myriad liquid likenesses.
We are ripples and fragments of fire,
frolicking on still dark water. The moon
is doing it, but even she is the reflection
of some other light. Love frees us
from the truth. Let's be dolphins,
green chimeras smiling, beat, beatific,
playful
in a sea of lies. Even the name
of God is a lie, poised in the parenthesis
of zero. Which is why we must be fearless
petals in a hurricane. You yet believe
in roots, in stems? Halfway through
this indecipherable life, this poem,
you yet believe there might be something
called its “meaning”? Are you sure
it's not some atavistic hieroglyph, the seal
on a temple door that no one can open
but a priestess with the face of a cobra,
black belly of a famished panther,
rune-veined dragonfly wings that,
like the poem itself, tell nothing, eyes
like broken vases spilling emeralds
into the beams of your shadow?
This is not literature, it's a seduction,
one thread in my ode to untruth,
this web of terror and beauty, the lies
that make the world possible.
You never claimed the title of Guru. You had a more important mission: to initiate seekers into the most intimate relationship of all, betrothal to the Beloved Within. Therefore I can only surrender and dissolve.
When anyone tried to worship you as Guru, you turned away and bowed to your own Guru, who represented the timeless lineage of the Shankaracharya tradition, the stream of wisdom flowing down from Lord Narayana and the sage Vashishta at the dawn of history. You did not call me to worship a form, but to drink the formless nectar of bliss poured through the ages, into the grail of my own heart.
When you initiated me, you gave me a gift much more profound than a personal guru. You gave me an immediate effortless connection with Being, the source of creation. A personal guru may be a comfort, a soothing consolation, but your gift was more precious by far: the practice, the Sadhana, to taste the Divine as direct experience, without an intermediary.
You personally introduced me to the Creator of All, who became in a single fiery drop of silence, falling into the ocean of love with the whisper of this breath. You bathed me in the all-pervading luminous foam of Ananda, softer than space, gentler than emptiness. And somehow the vastness of heaven crystalized into a diamond more solid than the earth. I can only surrender and dissolve.
Where is this Chittamani jewel, this diamond hologram of unbounded consciousness? On an alter, in an ashram, in the red dot on the forehead of a saint? No, it glows in the hollow of my yearning heart. It is you, it is I, it is God.
In your gift I fall asleep, witnessing the birth and death of a trillion stars. They swirl around my stillness all through the night. In your gift I wake at dawn, witnessing the dream of the world. Morning gleams through vanishing mist. But I am no longer the mist, I am the sun, a teardrop of devotion without circumference. In your gift of graceful meditation, I no longer look for this place, I look from this place. I can only surrender and dissolve: in you, beloved Friend, in you.
Therefore I do not worship a white robe, a pair of sandals, a string of rudhraksha beads, seated on a dais surrounded by thousands of chanting devotees. Such guru-worship may be a pleasant distraction, but it is like trying to warm yourself with a melting candle, instead of central heating. The One whom I adore is unspeakably more intimate: the Guru-Tattva, the Beloved Teacher who dwells in the very core of my soul.
And because you dwell here, in this small hut, in this secret cell of prayer, which is my own frail human body, I meet you in the glance of every stranger, every face etched with tears, the eyes of a hungry child, the sound of a cricket, the golden fur of a shelter pup, lips of a lover, petals of a wild poppy, green shadows of the ancient forest, cry of the owl at 3 a.m., ever one yet never lonely.
O Master of my rising falling chest, you gave me so much more than a personal guru. You gave me the ineffable eternal radiance of my own Self. That is why I can only surrender and dissolve, only bow and whisper, "Jai Guru Dev."
On certain afternoons
the radiance of things
just as they are, requires
no politics, no ideology.
First it rains,
then the sun comes out,
the warming and cooling
of the globe, the rising
and falling of my diaphragm.
Both Winter and Summer
I am free, no more important
than a morning glory.
Most of my DNA
I share with a mouse,
infinitude with gnats.
Endangered herds stampeding
through earth’s wounded valleys
I gather into my marrow,
protecting vast swaths of rain forest
with a single breath.
I'm certain that a weedin its stillness is awake,
a blossoming forget-me-not.
Rooted in listening, I also flower
with no seed of thought.
The loam is my Being.
Wonder is the incense of my heart.
May my fragrance expand
beyond all gardens.
Come, you lovers of late Spring,
the gates are never closed.
The rain-disheveled azalea
will not begrudge your insouciance,
nor the rose your burning fingers.
Let each dare to whisper
in your own tongue,
"Smell me, I am wild!"
Water color by Marney Ward.
