The Shaking

It is the time of the great shaking. One of the terrible blessings of Kali Yuga is that this becomes so crystal clear: what may be shaken falls away, so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

Our personality is shaken. Our emotions, minds, and bodies are shaken. Now, thrown back into what is never shaken, we drink from the unquenchable wellspring of pure Being.

We find the infinite center of our hridayam, the silence of our heart's core. From there we sing the causeless music of the unstruck bell. This is not a time of crisis, but opportunity. An invitation to distinguish the changing from the unchanging.

Our spiritual journey is not to rise, but to fall. It is not far, but simply to descend, through a breath of Grace, from the mind to the heart. Find the hidden treasure and discover the Self, not in the angst of division and blame, but in the fragrance of unity. The scent of this flower is uniquely your own. Yet in your trembling core of stillness is the wedding of Shiva to Shakti, Jesus with the Magdalene, Lover and Beloved, the kiss of pistil and stamen in every flower.

The most fruitful work we can do, is to Be. Being is your lost quintessence, the dark matter of creation. When you send ripples of your stillness through field of your Being, you touch every creature who Is, and bring them healing.

Here is a mystery. You are the bud whose cup contains the pollen of the human family, gathered round the ancestral fire in your chest. A divine sun with eight billion rays shines from the imperishable blue sky of your consciousness.

This is no mere intellectual belief, or teaching of "advaita," it is a direct experience of that peace which is attained, not by political strife, but by tapping our Seed in the fallowed wilderness of meditation. Nor is this "spiritual by-passing," for here we enter the ground, the real, the changeless, in the radiance of the body.

We need not rise to this occasion, but fall. Fall inward. Collapse. Enter the catastrophe without resistance, and touch Being. Rest beyond the conflict of opposites like "suffering" and "happiness," "activism" and "meditation," "liberal" and "conservative," which are only concepts in the head. Return to the heart, where pain and beauty are the same terrible sweet energy, before it has a name. When concepts and beliefs dissolve, the field of eternal Being is remains, unshaken.

Dwell in the uncertain and call it possibility. Drink from the unknown and call it wine. Savor a breath of stillness through your most broken place, and call it bread. This feast is far better than a thousand right answers.

I am afraid. I am unsure. Yet I Am. And just to Be, is to be a survivor. If only for a moment, let me place no noun after this verb. Here is what the stars are singing about. Here is what the womb of boundless night is whispering: "I Am." Here is courage. Here is the heart.


Photo by Kristy Thompson