When you deeply
rest in Being,
your own presence
is your dearest friend.
Breathe from this place.
Fall asleep
here.
Create a new earth
from stillness.
Your Dearest
Breathe Peace
In a season of lengthening shadows, let us not just pray for peace, but breathe peace. Breathe peace from the heart of Being. Let us not resist the dark, but embrace it with our groundless depth. I say again, darkness is not the opposite of light, darkness is the womb of light. Be a golden leaf. As you pass through a thin sacred threshold of Samhain, remember that in ancient Eire this holy time was the New Year, the beginning. Time to bathe the dead in tears of Presence, and bear back the bones of your Autumn ancestors into seeds of Spring. A time for weeping, and a time for laughter. But between, and ever between, a season of silence.Painting by Henriette Wyeth
Did Jesus Save The World?
Did Jesus save the world from war and pain? Did Buddha save the world from lust and exploitation? Did Krishna? Did the Prophet? Of course they didn't. And neither can you.
In fact, Krishna appeared right before the dawn of Kali Yuga. Just after he departed, this world descended into an age of chaos and destruction. The great avatars and spiritual masters do not come to save the world. They come to awaken You.
You came into this world alone. You will leave this world alone. And when you awaken from the dream of your mind, you will awaken alone. So you can stop trying to be a bodhisattva. If you touch the hearts of two or three other people along your way, and help them awaken, that is very good work. But it will happen without trying. Your right hand won't know what your left hand is doing.
For Jesus didn't say, "Wherever two or three million are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them." He never played the numbers game. He said, "Wherever just two or three are gathered..."
It is childish and magical thinking to suppose that our "collective consciousness," our group meditations, our full moon or solstice sat-sangs, our global gatherings to open the portal of planetary alignment, will transform earth's destiny in a quantum leap. The world has its own karma. It will not be saved en masse. That's why Jesus said, "my kingdom is not of this world." And, "I give you my peace, a peace the world cannot give." The world has its own destiny. Let it be.
You are not of this world. You are Christ Consciousness. Does this message make you angry, or does it make you free? It's just truth, whether it makes you angry or free. You are in the world, but not of the world.
Your fate is spun from consciousness, not earth, air, water, fire. You weave your garments from the elements, but your naked essence is pure awareness. In the heaviness of the elements, in the whirl of the opposites, you can be joyful and light, because your essential nature is already free.
Can you simply Be, without your ego's need to change others, or to make them "better?" "Better" according to whose definition? The greatest conflicts on earth are fueled by different tribes defining "better" in different ways.
Do you pray for peace? Or can you accept the hard truth? When you "pray for peace," when you pray to change the world, your prayer arises from a place of lack, a sense of incompleteness, where the ego needs to be in control, to make the world conform to its own notion of what is "better," what is "right." The prayer may pretend to be holy, but it is not actually healing, because its energy comes from discontent, disapproval, and disharmony.
To bring real peace, let us stop praying for the world, and just let it be. Rest in the heart, and see the world from the wellspring of compassion, where all the opposites have drowned in silence. Then our very seeing will be a fountain of healing. Just that seeing is prayer. Just breathing from that center, is prayer.
Arms spread on the cross of the human body, we hug the cosmos as it is, without needing it to change or conform to our politics, our religion, our metaphysics. Reposing at the center of our crucifixion, we whisper with Jesus, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." Truth is, we really have no other choice.
Out of this unconditional embrace, this boundless hug of what is, just as it is, perhaps a sigh of harmony will emanate from the heart, to make the stars tremble, and caress every atom in the universe with love.
Friend, you cannot save this world. But you can be a blessing.
October Twilight
"You will find more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from schoolmasters." ~St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Don't veer from the razor's edge. The grit of your bondage is the gravel path to liberation. In slivers of sensation, you are the unwounded witness.
Be instantly enlightened through whatever you deeply observe. Pass through frog croak, wand of fading lavender, Autumn musk of deflated tomato in the ruined garden. The portal to the miraculous is this toadstool.
The merest soundsmell touchtaste glitterblink is your Guru's countenance. Whatever jagged fringe appears before you this very instant is the Mandala of Supreme Awakening.
If you're old enough, read the purple hieroglyphs carved on the back of your hand. Love glows from husks. Be starlight through a brittle leaf, a quivering nipple of blue chanterelle.
Notice how ferns remember to bow, how your naked attention illumines a rotted hollow squash, the broken apple bubbling in a sunbeam, inscrutable runes of the worm among the fallen.
Avoid abstraction. Be the witness of fire in a synapse. Feast your eyeball in a berry-flame of pyracantha. Through a dew drop on the spider's web, enter the temple of intergalactic diamond emptiness.
In a dimensionless seed, the black nectar of your heart dreams otherness, and feels alone. Imagines a distance where “here” longs for “there.” Feasts on the dark matter of solitude, the Milky Way, silken-rapt in a sizeless ayin-soph.
Bow your nose, iris, fingertip, tongue. Eternity is over, you're ready for a moment on earth. Genuflecting in the moss, let a silent tear encircle ten thousand cedars. It is important to find this tear and weep.
Upon the spiral staircase of your spine, wondrous Night, bejeweled in numberless suns, descends into your body as a breath of prayer, and you remember why the vast puts on the veil of the small.
The grace of entropy, forms ever-perishing, photons ever-perishing, your bone marrow, brain cells ever-perishing, your stories ever-perishing. But the Ever is deathless. Jesus said, "If you want to meet God, taste a piece of bread."
And here you are. October twilight, the odor of silence. Your exhalation is the sky. You hear a heron shriek, flapping over withered cattails. Your heart erupts with the laughter of the void. The poignant guffaw that created the world.
A single drop without circumference streams down your cheek, bathing your mother, your father, all your relations, for seven generations past and to come, in waves of astonishment. It is important to find this tear and weep.
Poetry Reading from Strangers & Pilgrims
Honored and grateful to announce the release of my new book, available at all major book sellers, with Sue Ellen Parkinson's beautiful cover painting of Mary Magdalene, to whom I dedicate these poems. The book explores the liminal space between word and silence, poetry and guided meditation. Perhaps the story of how I met the Magdalene would be of interest to readers, so I share it here (Link). This book will make a fine holiday gift for a loved one, and for yourself. Thank you, Saint Julian Press!
Wayfarer, isn't it time
to depart from the kingdom
of the old story?
Time to begin your journey
over the ocean of surrender.
Yes, this body is a frail boat,
but its mast unfurls
a vast sail, filled
with your Beloved’s breath.
And whether the night is
clouded or clustered
with stars, you move
through waves of sleep
and waking
under the boundless dome
of a Mother's silence.
Travel gently over the earth,
not as a landlord
but a pilgrim.
Stay a little while
like an honored guest.
The only way to get Om
is to leave this place a little
better than you found it.
4 a.m.
An empty circle of flying white
drawn in the sky
by no master of the brush.
Bright hole in blackness.
A silent gong
that awakens me at 4 a.m.
with a sound that comes
from the hollow in my bones.
Explain to me again
because I am very thick and stupid
how your being angry and depressed
about the world
improves it.
Explain to me again
because I am very thick and stupid
how taking sides in the conflict
solves it.
Explain to me again
because I am very thick and stupid
how blaming one tribe
while absolving another
brings clarity and understanding.
An empty circle of flying white
drawn in the sky
by no master of the brush.
Bright hole in blackness.
Explain to me again
why it must not be each one of us
who takes responsibility
for creating the world
and shining over it.
My Spiritual Discipline
This is my spiritual discipline.
I give myself permission to eat
whatever is delicious.
I act my age: not even
one moment old.
with the perfect stranger.
Every morning
I breathe away the dream
and gaze inside,
smiling at the radiant mirror
of my heart.
Then I go out in the world
to embrace my seven billion lovers,
satisfying each one
with a feast of light, a taste of wine
from the barrel of foolishness.
Painting by Karen Fleschler
Bones of Heaven
We do not move
from here to there.
We do not grow
from this into that.
Ever at rest in the changeless
chaos of love,
we only
awaken,
seven billion minds
dissolving in one tear
which we call the heart,
this drop without a center.
After the dream we find
no vital distinction
between a petal and its fragrance,
the grape skin and its nectar,
moldering tar
of our ancestor's body
and a fiery diadem.
This is the law.
Things become more precious
when they get crushed.
The bones of the earth
are the bones of heaven.
The 'O' of your prayer
has no circumference.
Therefore it is perfectly
silent.
Water color by Andrew Wyeth
Ocean of the Mother's Love
Who led us to believe we must dissolve our "separateness," destroy our little "i," and merge with a flatline of "non-duality?" That's a lot of work! It's the work of the mind, chewing on itself, creating concepts. "Separateness" is a concept. "Non-duality" is a concept.Ah, my whole physiology thrills to say it! "As the drop merges with the ocean, the ocean merges with the drop." Is this not a mother's nature? Your mother became your body. She infused every particle of you, every breath of you. She poured her ocean of love into the droplet of You, and made your identity hers, and gave you her name. So pray, meditate, surrender, merge into the ocean of Mother Divine, and Mother Divine will merge into You.Do you really believe that after all these trials, these lifetimes of searching, you will disappear in vast empty space? No, dear friend, You shall not disappear. Emptiness itself is an illusion. The no-thing-ness of deep space bubbles over with the Mother's milk, foaming with worlds.
You shall be a diamond in her crown, a pearl at her throat, a ruby on the rosary that dangles between her breasts. And this is how every other Person must appear to you - a unique jewel adorning the Mother. We are all crystal epiphanies of her abundance. Each of us is the Oneness, selved as a Person, tinctured with the whole ocean. Each wave is nothing but the sea, but this does not mean the sea stops playing in its waves.The instant turning of kaleidoscopic love clusters the shards of the universe into an incomparable singularity. This turning is You, the next turning, Me. Both of us contain each other, and the whole.Surrendered to the love that enwombs the stars, You are no longer just a little "i." You irradiate the cosmos. You don't need to rise above your Being, but sink into it. Love yourself. Isn't it time to remember this commandment?Love yourself. This is the forgotten law from which even the first commandment arose. For how can you love the Lord your God if the ocean of God's love is not already inside you? And how can you love your neighbor as yourself if you do not love You?At the center of your chest, where exhalation dissolves and inhalation has not quite arisen, there is a dark well of surrender. Vedic mystics call this dimensionless point the Bindhu. Jewish mystics call it the Ayin-Soph-Or - the dot of no-thing from which all creation shines.
Countless galaxies whirl out of your unbreathed unborn stillness, the Milky Way pours from this secret wellspring in your breast, and every star in the cosmos is imbued with the sweetness of your own peculiar light.Don't wait another moment. With this very breath, love yourself!
Nasa Webb photo, Eagle Nebula
Angel of Gravity
Be an angel of gravity.
Dance like a mountain
on a cloud.
There is nothing to understand.
You are absolved from trying
to figure it all
out.
How do you free your heart
for love?
Hug the opposites.
They are just grains
of pure space.
Don't be so heavy.
The New Land is one step away,
a single breath.
Now wiggle your toes.
You are already there
at the end of the path,
the beginning.
Let Autumn Come
Let Autumn come.Thin down, hollow out.
Give away your fruit to wanderers.
The world is ripple and reflection
on the wet black stillness
of what cannot be known.
Things that really matter
slip between your thoughts,
dark energy,
almost everything.
Photo by my daughter Abby
Navratri
Blessings to all as we begin this sacred feast of Navratri, the 'Nine Nights' of Mother Divine. May the rains come. In the Vedic calendar, this is the most sacred time of year. When we feel inner discord and disharmony, the discord reflects into our world. We feel anxiety and anger and despair, and think it is the world that arouses those feelings in us. We mistake the effect for the cause. But the truth to which humanity must awaken is this: "Yatha drishti, tatha srishti": as your mind is, so your world appears. We need to begin by healing ourselves in order to heal our world. How can I do this myself, when I myself am the problem? I need the grace of Mother Divine, the love of God, and the help of my Teacher for this work of healing and transformation. I am a brittle leaf without the life-giving sap of the Friend. That is why on this day I pray to Her: Heal and purify us, Mother Shakti. Inspire us with songs from the trembling silence of your vina, Mother Saraswati. The husk of our life may be hard, but the inner fruit is sweetness. O Mother Lakshmi, from the bright womb of your darkness, let beauty be born. Jai Guru Dev.
You Will Never Find Peace
You will never find peace, because you are peace. You will never wake up one morning to discover that the politicians have made peace on earth, because peace is not the nature of this world, or the politicians. This world is the field of conflicting opposites. And that is precisely why it is the place of liberation, where we come for awhile to discover, "I am not that, I am not this, I am not that, I am not this," until we can finally say, "I Am." Liberation won't happen in paradise, because heaven has no opposites, and it's too dreamy up there. So we come to this world of warring opposites because this is the only place to awaken. We are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Yet while we are here, we illuminate the world. This is why Jesus says, "My kingdom is not of this world." "The kingdom of heaven is within you." "My peace I give you, not as the world giveth." For the whirled cannot make peace. YOU are the peace in the midst of the whirled. You are not one of the opposites, ever polarizing energy for and against. You are the opposite of nothing. You are love. You are the whole light filling the whole darkness. You fill the darkness because you do not resist it, you do not struggle against it. You allow the darkness to give birth to you. This is the way of Jesus. This is the way of the Magdalene. A glow illumines the forms in a stained glass window, but the glow does not come from the glass, it comes through the glass. You are not the glass. You are the glow that illumines the world with forgiveness. And the sun is your heart.
The Rest Of The Story
Rest your story
in the wordless heart.
A blue moth settles
on the unburst thistle pod,
a blackbird
a blackbird
on the quivering cattail,
this exhalation
settling in the fragrant petals
of your next breath,
down where the pollen is.
Rest your story
here,
in quivering silence.
Photo by Laurent Berthier
Photo by Laurent Berthier
Sabbath Work
This is the work
of the Sabbath.
All creatures flowering
out of themselves, a rose,
star pollen galaxy,
blue-green egg
in a well woven nest,
the little earth
in its swirl of distances.
This the work
of the effortless.
A prophet does not see
into the future.
A prophet sees
deeply
into the present
moment.
'Rose Petal Landscape,' by watercolour master, Marney Ward
Meeting the Magdalene
A true story of grace and transformation, originally published in the Quaker journal, 'What Canst Thou Say.' I share it again for the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, which begins at Vespers on July 21._____________________In all wisdom traditions, she is here in the anahatta chakra. Her secret name is the Unstruck Sound. She personfies our yearning for divine Beauty. For Longing and Beauty ceaselessly merge, separate, and merge again. This is the eternal pulse in the whirling heart of the universe. Radha yearning for Krishna, a Sufi's ecstatic dance with Ruuh, Magdalene longing for Jesus: all creation is a likeness of their lila, the divine play of "bhedabheda," which in Sanskrit means, "two, not-two." Dear friend, do not be troubled by this resonant play of reflections. Just rest between two breaths, and become the mirror... I know there are many of you who embody this same rhythm of longing and union, who yearn for Divine Beauty. So I share this story of my quest with you.
In the early 1970s, I was a pilgrim. Not to India, but to the Medieval shrines of Europe, seeking the heart of Christian prayer. I'd spent several years exploring the wisdom of India with my guru, Maharishi Mahesh. I told him that I longed to know the mystery of Christ. I was not a Hindu.
"Be a Christian," he said. "Take this meditation into the Church."
On my pilgrimage, I visited Vezeley in central France. In the crypt beneath the church is the pilgrim's shrine to the Magdalene: there I discovered that her tomb was nearby. I had no idea she was buried in France. For the first time in my life, I prayed through a saint. "O Mary, mother of devotion, guide me to the heart of Christ!" I wasn't even Catholic.
Much later, I learned her mythic story. After the crucifixion, Mary Magdalene boarded a ship bound for Britain with Joseph of Aramethea. On the coast of Provence, where now is the port of Marseilles, Mary disembarked while Joseph continued to Britain with the holy grail. Secluded in a cave in the hills of Provence, Mary became the first Christian mystic.
But as I wandered on, I forgot about my prayer to her. Several weeks later, in the pilgrim church of Conques, I met an old priest with whom I shared my quest. We did not discuss Mary Magdalene. We spoke of Gregorian Chant and the old traditions. I asked him if he knew of a monastery where the old way of Gregorian chant was still practiced. Mumbling about a tiny Benedictine priory in the south, he scribbled a note which said, "Bedouin, near Carpentras." I stuck it in my wallet.
A month later, bound for Italy, I got off the train in Marseilles by a sudden intuition. I took another train to Avignon, where I reached for the crumpled note in my wallet. "Bedouin, near Carpentras." Carpentras was a three-hour bus ride into Provence. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "Be a wanderer." I had no idea where I was going. I had truly become a wanderer.
In Carpentras, I hitched a ride toward Bedouin, which was fifteen miles further into the countryside and not even on the map. No bus, no train stopped there, few cars. I had to walk the last few miles. The village dozed in golden light. Poppies and lavender danced in the fields. Granite hills shimmered in waves of noon-day heat. Everyone in Bedouin was napping: not a soul about town! Was there a priory near-by? A single old man I met didn't know. I started to hike.
Covered with dust and sweat, I walked for hours past meadows baking in the drone of crickets. I came upon a run-down farm where a young British couple leaped through the long grass with butterfly nets. They told me there was no priory near-by and they said that everyone in the region was as crazy as they were. By evening, I was back in Bedouin. With desperate faith, I tried one more country lane at the far end of the village. The sun was an orange candle on the purple hills. I ambled another mile, through apricot groves and a flock of goats without a herder. Then, around a bend, I saw a dome.
It was an ancient Romanesque dome of well-fitted stones, near a farm house and cinder-block dormitory, tidy gardens, no sign at the gate. From the domed chapel came a sound as timeless as the longing in my heart: Gregorian chant.
I knelt in gathering darkness where nine young monks chanted Vespers. An oil lamp flickered from a niche in the granite alter. Carved in relief upon that stone was a woman, wild and naked, long hair covering her breasts. She held the oil lamp in her stone hand and gazed at me.After Vespers, the monks greeted me in silence and beckoned me to supper: vegetables, cheese, lentil soup and bread without words. Then the prior, a young priest named Father Gerard, returned with me to the chapel, where we could whisper despite the rule of silence. In stumbling French I told Pére Gerard of my quest and he invited me to stay.
"I don't even know the name of this place," I said.
"C'est Le Prieuré de la Madeleine."
Pointing to the woman in the alter I asked, "Who is she?"
"La Madeleine." It was Mary, and this place was hers. Only then, after weeks of wandering, did I recall my prayer at her tomb. "Her cave was in these hills," said Gerard. "This shrine was built for her in the ninth century. She was the first Christian monk. And you are just in time."
"For what?" I asked.
"Her feast."
A Catholic feast begins with Vespers at sundown. My saint had guided me to Magdalene Priory precisely at Vespers on July 21. The next day, July 22, was The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene. As Tolkein wrote, "Not every wanderer is lost."
For months I worked in the apricot groves, sang the daily Latin Hours, rose for Vigils at 3 AM. There was hard work in the gardens, but the real work was prayer. In that ancient dome, before the soft granite gaze of the Magdalene, I prayed for hours each day, using the meditation technique with which my guru had graced me. The stillness inside me grew boundless, then vibrant, then dazzling. I tasted the light at the center of the soul, where the tiny bud of "I" dissolves into the blossoming "Am" of God. Yet I still longed for a personal connection to the Infinite.
Suddenly, doubt shattered my devotion. Can I unite with Christ through a meditation practice from India? Impossible, impure, even adulterous! I vowed to give up meditation and adopt the Jesus Prayer. I would only use the name of Jesus as my mantra. I tried several forms of Christian practice, but none united me with Christ like my guru's subtle sadhana.
Then came the breakthrough. With a single breath I sighed into realization. I saw that the conflict was not about East vs. West, but intellect vs. experience. God cannot be thought, for God is. I must surrender my intellect, and plunge into a darkness without concepts, a silence without thoughts. From this emptiness, love is born: light from darkness, Christ from the Virgin's womb.
Meditation deepened and softened, softened and deepened, until my longing was fulfilled. I realized that my bija mantra, the subtle Sanskrit sound heard in meditation, was really an echo of the one divine Word, the Logos "through whom all things were made" (John 1).
This Word pulses through every ancient language of prayer: Sanskrit, Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, the chants of the Amazonian rain forest. For the Logos is the resonant field of silence: pure consciousness vibrating in a singularity, a seed syllable at the root of creation, before sound condenses into matter. As one Spirit-Breath gives birth to all material creatures, so all languages are born of one Logos, and all prayers return to one God.
Gazing into the abysmal intimacy at the heart of creation, I beheld the face of the Beloved. Yet I saw no form, for Christ's features are dissolved in light, and that light is the fruit of darkness. When two kiss, they are one. They no longer see, but the Beloved is nearer than the lover's own heartbeat. One, yet two, we fall in love with Love.
Then I understood the Song of Songs, "For your lips are sweeter than wine, and your name is perfume poured out!" I tasted the vintage beyond perception, sweetness beyond naming. The person of Christ was essentialized in the sapphire radiance at the center of my soul.
"Taste and see that the Lord is good!" cries the Psalmist. O seeker, trust in the authority of your own experience. For we are led by the heart to understanding, not by understanding to the heart.
____________________________________________
LINK: on 'Kenosis,' to read along with this memoir.
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