Veiled

Veiled in silence,
O thinnest only bridal gown,
you suffuse my body
with your body.
Black as granulated diamonds
dancing inside me,
moving like a serpent
who has just shed her skin,
you are this very breath.
Whoever said your Kali-form
was terrible
has not really seen you,
or fallen victim to your
love-honed sword-wings.
Catastrophe of grace, you burn
and tear the wedding garment.
Your name means,
“Ruthless Lightning
in the Hollow of My Spine.”
Your name means,
“She Who Takes No Captives.”
But who among the living
knows your true name?
I pray in the language of the egg
where nothing has yet been born.
Let my flesh grow still as Shiva
that the night inside me
might comprehend your radiance.
Let my blood ferment into the wine
of Christ’s desire,
that I might murmur,
“Miryam, Miryam.”

Icon of Mary Magdalene by Lentz, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Songs of Willy the Poodle

1. O Master, when I throw myself on the ground before your sneakers, and turn over so cravenly on my back, do not think that I fear your anger. I just want you to rub my belly.



2. O Master, I gaze up at you all night, snuggling between your elbow and you chest. When will you awaken, so I can lick you in the face? You do not seem to mind when my flea escapes into your sheets. It is such a small thing, I do not even think you know it. 

3. Beloved Master, for three days I waited, pining away for you, staring at your empty parking spot with my chin resting on the window sill, every golden hair on my body wired for the sound of your Birkenstocks. Rick the plumber gave me a rawhide chewer, but I could not chew. Mom and the girls tried to stroke me, but I only moaned and sighed, and growled when they tried to touch the chewer I could not chew. My heart is so full of you, Master, I weep dark tears whose stains will never be washed away. No one loves you as I, no one in the universe. So why did you have to go to Pets-Mart and get a fucking cat?! 



4. Master, I am a Watch Dog. Does any other animal have "Watch" in front of its name? I bark rationally at suspicious noises. I don't wander around the house at 3 AM yowling like a neuro with ADHD. When you call, I come. I point my ears and tail abjectly downward to signify, "Not my will, but thine!" Some animals are so moody you can't depend on them to do anything but eat. You need not waste your time figuring out MY moods. I have no moods. I am pure submission, the incarnation of a singular passion, which is what every human secretly longs to be. And when nature calls, I go outside - unlike the little Siamese asshole who needs a litter box. 




5. Master, I must confess something. I am starting to tolerate Chester, our new lavender-eyed Siamese kitten - not just because he runs away, like the coward he is, when I fake the slightest lunge or nip the long and useless tail that he himself, evidently too stupid to recognize the rudiments of his own body, chases in circles on Mother's precious oriental rug, which is showing many signs of cat-wear - but because he enjoys wrestling. He often ambushes me unfairly from his perch on a dining room chair, hidden under the gable of the table top, and sinks his kitteny teeth into my throat. I flip him easily with my superior strength (we poodles were bread for war, and people should not forget it). I pin him on his back. I bite his neck in self-defense. Then he slithers out of my paws as only a cat can slither. Poodles never slither.

But what's fun is, we don't hurt each other. Somehow, Chester retracts his claws so they barely get tangled in my beautiful golden fur. I can't do that with my claws. To be honest, I really don't have any claws to speak of. When Chester bites, he doesn't bite ferociously. It's only a hickey love-bite, which is how I bite. Then we get tired and relax in each others arms and rest awhile. When I bury my head in the warm fur of another animal, I start to remember something mysterious from long ago, too simple to comprehend. I can't quite figure it out, but it's even better than sucking on my blanket. After we nap awhile, I chase him in a huge circle through five rooms, until he recedes back into chaos, burrowing amongst the hundred pair-less shoes in our weird family closet.

Master, I must admit that when you're gone I don't spend whole days sighing by the window any more. I wrestle and chase my new brother, Chester. I am losing weight. Thank you for getting me a friend.

Curl Up

 

Curl up for awhile
in your own fur
until you feel the nature
of your immortal warmth.

To embody what Is

may be the deepest prayer.
Here are the rules:
I am the cause of my pain.
I am the victim of my mind.
No one owes me anything.

To make an affirmation
for abundance
expresses lack.

To pray for strength

confesses weakness.

To ask for healing is to resist
dis-ease.
Why not just be sick?

When I own my poverty,

I expand into emptiness.
Isn't the universe born

from a boundless vacuum?

Not fearing the void,
I ripple with wealth.
I abandon striving and discover
pre-existent fullness.

Immovable strength
nearer than the throb
of my jugular.

Welcome brokenness.

Hug your body.

In non-resistance, unity.

In unity, healing.

This very moment, refuse

to generate conflict

by changing Suchness

into Should.

Nestled in wholeness,

little things begin to happen

majestically.
All that greens with nectar

and buzzes with life

emerges from

what Is...

Beautiful Lie

Non-duality is a lie. Duality is a lie. Creation is a beautiful lie, for the sake of love. There is neither one nor two. There is only zero. This. Only zero, empty and bubbling over with infinite selves, atoms, worlds, for the sake of play. The brilliant light of astonishment is all there is. This instant, the cosmos bursts into flower and dissolves in the brilliant light of astonishment, and the brilliant light of astonishment is the Beloved. Surrender and be held. This breath is enough. The bridal chamber of the Beloved is the very form of this moment.

Blessings of Kali Yuga

1.
A dream becomes more and more absurd until I realize, "this must be a dream," and wake up.

Because the darkness of Kali Yuga is my most ferocious, surreal and absurd dream, it is also the most auspicious time for waking! The Kali age is ideal for finding out who I really am. As things get weirder and weirder out there, I can more clearly see that this dream is so weird, it could not possibly be me.

The world of the senses is a projection of consciousness into density. For thousands of millennia, this projected dream has been so pleasant, I was perfectly willing to remain asleep, my consciousness absorbed in the dream. But in the age of Kali, the sense-projection ripens into its grossest expression, dancing wild, frenetic, as images of terror and beauty create a jarring contrast to the inherent tranquility of consciousness itself. It is the age of extreme contrast. Contrast is the key to enlightenment.

Perceiving the difference between the gross external world and my own pure consciousness, the Self awakens and is free. This is precisely why Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36)

Like a juicy gourd snapping effortlessly from the vine, I experience by Kali's grace the eternally joyful, inherently self-liberated radiance of my own true nature, distinct from the imagery of the projected dream. Then I cry with triumph and relief, "Neti, neti! I am not that, not that! I am this!"

2.
In today's New Age market place, I hear a cacophony of muttering about non-dualism. Auditoriums fill up with devotees listening all day long to "non-duality teachers," who keep repeating exactly the same thing. We all know who they are, and share their videos constantly on Facebook. But at the end of the day, what we have is a concept of non-duality, rather than a living vibrant experience. Why?

These non-duality teachers proudly assert that there is no method of meditation. Hence they are incapable of directing our attention to experience the light of the Self. They can only talk about their own experience. Thus all we get is abstract second-hand advaita, which is no advaita at all.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna clearly teaches a path of development and a method of meditation: two things that are anathema to the non-duality movement. Krishna directs Arjuna's awareness from sankya, to yoga, to bhakti, and finally to advaita. Self-realization must be the basis of God-realization (or Goddess-realization) and God-realization must be the basis of Unity. This sequence is not a matter of preference; it is inherent in the very structure of consciousness. The purusha must be realized as separate from prakriti before the two can be ultimately known as one divine energy in two polarized functions.

Krishna first gives Arjuna the teaching of sankya: the atmic self is eternal and imperishable, distinct from the ever-changing and perishable world. This realization of absolute duality is the only possible basis for the eventual realization of non-duality. There can be no fruition before the seed. The fuel must be refined before it is consumed.

Next, Krishna gives the warrior the practice of yoga. Yogic practice culminates in dhyana, transcendental deep meditation. In meditation, attention transcends the turbulent external world to experience the changeless inner Self. Only when Arjuna's awareness is distinct, self-evident, resplendent in its own diamond brilliance, can he begin to progress to the ultimate reality of advaita.

3.
When the transcendental light of the Self is realized, there is no further development of consciousness. All further development is on the level of perception.

Advaita unfolds in the subtle realm of perception, not in the realm of the perceiver. The celestial glow of pure consciousness enfolds, illuminates, and glorifies the object, until the perceiver beholds the object as none other than her Self. When she clearly perceives that the object is composed of her own Self-luminosity, the world dissolves into diamond-like awareness.

This is not a philosophy, not a concept to be grasped by listening to a video. One cannot suddenly get non-duality. It is a perception whose mechanism must be developed like any other perception: through subtle energizing and re-ordering of the nervous system, glandular system, and chakras.

Non-duality is not a practice. It simply happens when the time is ripe. But one can practice the yoga of meditation to ripen the fruit of advaita. If I plant the seed of sankya, and water it with the discipline of yoga, the fruit of advaita will eventually fall from the tree by itself.

Suppose this sequence of development is not followed. Suppose that, without first realizing the Self as eternally separate from the world, we could instantly leap into non-separateness? Then the images of the world, both violent and seductive, would overwhelm us, reabsorb our dim awareness, and we would get lost in the dream all over again!

This is why the lineage of the Guru exists, and why the path has been carefully expounded in the Gita, the Yoga-Sutras, and the Vedic shrutis. Only by practicing the path does one arrive at the place where it becomes pathless.

4.
Om Tryambakam yajah mahey
Sugandhim pushti vardhanam
Urdva rukamivah bandhanat
Mrityor mukshiya mamritate

"I worship One Lord in Three Persons (Creator, Sustainer, and Liberator), who presses out the nectar that sweetens creation and makes all creatures ripe. Just as the fattened gourd snaps effortlessly from the vine, so may my clinging mind, by grace, be freed from things that pass away, even as my heart rests in eternity."

I honor my ever-graceful teachers, Maharshi Mahesh Yogi and Shri Shri Ravi Shankar. I hope you will honor your teachers too.

Jai Guru Dev

Poem for Earth Day (April 22)

 

Everything in this world

is a message from that one.

And where is that world?

Deep inside your chest.

The song of the towhee.

The first scent of lilac.

The very slow pulse

of ancient stones.

How the wings of a hummingbird

churn this blinding sunbeam

into billions of love atoms.

When you breathe in,

breathe the Beloved.

When you breathe out,

breathe forests, meadows,

mountains, clouds.

Is it not your duty

to create a new earth

from infinitesimal sparks

of bewilderment?

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

The Work Within

Let Silence be the work within your work. For only what is immovable makes waves.

"Sitting quietly,
doing nothing, Spring comes.
Grass grows by itself."

This classic Zen poem is not about inaction. It reveals the dynamic secret of success.

Human "activism" has failed as much as human thought has failed to save the earth. So where is the solution? The solution must lie in a field that is deeper than either thought or action. The solution lies in the silent field of Being. Earth's healing comes from here, a source of power prior to any do-er, any "I."

Dive into the bottomless wellspring of Being. This very un-doing stirs waves of harmony. Here where the Uncreated pulsates as pure love, Silence re-creates the world. This is why we meditate. And when we come out of meditation, we can act boldly, because the infusion of Silence into the world continues through every word and action we perform.

It is such an exquisite paradox. Diving into a field that completely transcends mind and body spontaneously energizes thought and action. Awareness in the state of infinite transcendental Silence moves mountains.

May there be peace, on Earth as it is in heaven.

The Only Christianity I Know

"Meditate like Christ. He lost himself in love."

~Neem Karoli Baba

This is the only Christianity I know:

At the end of each breath,

the death of Jesus.

At the rise of each breath,

the resurrection.

What happened 2000 years ago,

what will happen at the last judgment,

doesn't concern me now.

The sound of a wood thrush

is the end of time.

I am a fallen creature

plummeting into grace.

From what should I be saved?

I was never lost.

Because I am awake

every dogwood blossom
is the Parousia,
the second coming of wonder.

My teacher is the one

who fills my bones with silence.

She who treasures my soul

as a pang of fire in her heart

will never let me go.
A womb that could enfold

the burning of Christ
can bear me.

The Sensuality of God

 "Glorify God in your Body." ~1 Corinthians 6:20

Spirituality is not the renunciation of the senses, but their refinement to the subtlest of all sensations: God. God is the most sensuous of delights.

Meditation refines sensation through silence. Our spiritual practice cultivates finer perception until taste and smell may sense the flavor and fragrance of pure Being; sight may gaze at the light shining from Divine Darkness; touch may feel the inner caress of this breath, or the hug of earth's respiration through the skin; and hearing may listen to the hum of silence, which contains the music of galaxies.

Subtler than these five sense organs is the sixth, the mind. Meditation refines the mind just as it refines the other organs of perception. When the restless mind settles into stillness, we transcend thought, no image limits awareness, the bliss of emptiness becomes full, and the mind can relish infinity.

Subtler than mind is the seventh sense organ, the soul. The soul is I Am, but it is not the opposite of matter; it is simply at the other end of the spectrum. Matter and spirit are one continuum of divine energy, from the dense to the subtle. The dense is the incarnate glory of the subtle, and the subtle is the healing nectar within the dense outer form. Soul is the fine end of this continuum, the most refined organ of sensation.

When, through meditation, the soul becomes "poor in spirit," it inherits boundless wealth. In the heart of silence, the soul transcends soulness, flows beyond the root of individuality, and enters the seed of Christ-Consciousness. This loss is rich indeed. For when the droplet becomes the sea, the sea becomes the droplet. Now Christ is the Self of the soul. So the scripture says, "No longer I, but Christ who lives in me." (Galations 2:20)

The Christian mystics spoke of the exquisitely subtle relationship of the soul and Christ as a love affair. Just so, in ancient Indian poets expressed this affair as the love-tryst of Radha and Krishna in the garden of Vridavan. In the Hebrew Bible, ancient Canaanite marriage hymns are gathered into the Song of Songs to represent the union of the bride and the royal bridegroom, which is why the Song of Songs has always been the favorite Biblical book of Western mystics, at once the most sensuous and spiritual of poems. Those who interpret the Song of Songs as mere sensuality, and those who interpret the book as mere mysticism, both miss the exquisite paradox. It is not one or the other. It is a book about the mystical sensuality of God.

When we enter into this marriage, all our senses feel the transcendental kiss of the Divine, who has created the earth and its sensory pathways just to lead us back to this place: the wild garden in the heart, where the seed is stored. For when God speaks to us, God uses everything - plants, animals, human faces, dust. God uses all creatures to kiss us daily.

Everything in this world is a message from God. And where is God? Deep inside your chest. That is why we must not hesitate to let the world radiate from the heart as the cosmic sensation of God, the passion of a soul so voluptuously in love that she transcends all boundaries.

God whispers to our soul, "You are the garden, I am the Spring." And the soul sings, as the bride in the poem, "My beloved is mine, and I am my beloved's. Come into your garden, and feed among the lilies."


Painting by Rene Bull, 1913

Election

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.

I voted for my grandfather’s bones

that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles

under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies

South along the shores of two continents.

I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring

of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,

and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken

by white men or brown, because it is written in star semen,
new moons, thistle sap and weevil hieroglyphs on prairie oak.

I voted for the ancestral bison scrawled on the seeping
limestone cavern of your heart.

I voted to erase maps, straight lines, right angles of the surveyor
and the conquistador, I voted for the sacred curve of rivers and hills.

I voted to wash away both white and black in a rainbow of tears.
I voted to keep the edges of the vineyard ragged and ungleaned
for the hungry stranger.

I voted for lonely pilgrims who wander in
the ambiguous land between male and female.
I voted for open borders between death and birth.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,

a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted flower for every

moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse

for every colony of maggots!

I voted for the mule that Jesus rode into the city,
proclaiming forgiveness of all debts,
who is the same mule Rumi rode backwards
into exile, gazing Eastward toward eternal loss -
that mule, I tell you, will be president!

I voted to compost and manure the floor of the Senate,
entangling politicians in hemp moss and honeysuckle,
turning the dome of Congress into an enormous
hummingbird feeder!

I voted for a motherland where politics dissolves
into folk music, story-telling, fermented cabbage,
totem-carved hoes handed down from mother to son
in the fire-side quietness of heroic listening.

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore

that cannot be erased, for it becomes the dust and rain,

and then a tree again.

I voted for the local, the small, the brim

that does not spill over, the abolition of waste,

the luxury of enough.

I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers,

more recess to cultivate play, more leisure, tax free,
more space between our days.

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence

and the price of a thrush song.

I voted for ten million stars in your next inhalation.

________________


A poem from my book, The Nectar Of This Breath
Chalk mandala by biology teacher Karyn Babaian.

Solitaire

"'From this moment on, now and for all seasons, I am released into silent restfulness, where time rests in eternity.' After saying these things, Mary settled into silence, for it was in silence the Teacher had spoken to her.”
~Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Silence in the spiral song
of the Townsend’s Solitaire,

axis that pierces all creatures
before the Word.

Silence between piano notes
drifting over the roses
from the house next door.
Silence of my hardly having spoken
to the lady who lives there
since the death of her mother.
Silence of mist over the bay

where sea lions bask and bark

on a buoy three miles out.
Black silence cleaved
by owl wings at midnight.
Silence over the battlefield

just after the battle,

where a hand rises, then falls,

a leg twitches in a dream of running.

Is there not a great silence,

a great stillness all around the battle,

even while it rages?

And here, whatever the hour,

a great silence in the cloister of stars,

the vast listening that awaits
your prayer?


Photo: Townsend's Solitaire, eBird

Rubric

 

Eat butter.

Go naked.

Break the rules.

Soften your belly,

soften your gaze.

Confuse left and right.

Hear the inconceivable concerto

of a white-throated sparrow.

Make one sip of wine last forever.

Stay drunk.

Don't explain.