Just for a moment, drop your opinions. The world will survive without them for a little while. This is a spiritual practice, is it not? Drop your opinions and feel the freedom, the ineffable clarity, the boundless expansion. Do this not just for yourself, but for the whole entangled field of consciousness. Even a moment of inward silence is of great service to humanity.
Wake in the whisperless prayer of listening. Out in the blossoming plum a sparrow breaks her vigil to praise sunbeams unborn, unfallen. April morning mind hollow, free from yesterday. This could be the last morning, a crack in the glass of singing. What would you do? Go barefoot into the garden. Recognize the gardener by his garment of silence. When you touch the hem of his shadow, and he demurs, don’t believe his gesture: cling! Yearning turns darkness bright. That which bruises must be alive. Secret wine from his gashes. Ease out of pain into something more fragrant, the swollen lily of the present moment, exposing her cup of golden dust. Now the God in the sparrow's heart sees you. On tremulous strings the music rises to your throat from a throbbing hollow in your rib cage. No words, only the instrument of your body, floating on its river of distant stars. What would the stars say? What would your lyric be if your breath turned to sod, and all you had was a voice? "I love, therefore I Am."
"Be a wanderer." ~Jesus, Gnostic Gospel of Thomas
"The grail knights thought it a disgrace to quest in a group. So each entered the forest where there was no path, and where it was darkest."
~La Queste del Saint Graal, 13th C.
Up until the age of seven, I wandered. Then I began to buy the propaganda of my school. The teachers insisted that if I wanted to grow up I had better get life all figured out, and learn to be a success. Of course, they were just passing along to the next generation their own fear of failure.
Took me the next half century to realize that they were pretending. Absolutely every adult I met was pretending to know. Over the years I too pretended, and played the role of knower. So that I could be a successful do-er.
Now I know that I don't know. And the more I don't know, I know who I am. And the more I am, I do. Because it is not the do-er who does, but Being.
If you've found the true path, congratulations: please don't guide me. If you've found the movement that will finally save humanity, congratulations: please don't sign me up. Because what I have found is the courage to wander again.
I have abandoned the compass of technique. Now I enter the ancient forest precisely where the trees are unfelled. I have no desire to super-impose any map of consolation over this unfathomably green mystery.
Meandering like a bee, I'm glad for any honey I can selve from the unselved sweetness of the sacred garden. When good and lost, I no longer move toward the center: I am the center, wherever I may stumble or stand. It's when I join the movement that I get stuck, and stop moving.
You and I rest by a spring in the forest. The spring is our gaze. We drink from each other. My sparkling ignorance encircles you, and you are at home.
The blossom of Correct Teaching withers away: we are the fragrance that remains. Just by admitting we know nothing, we sigh together and breathe life.
Letting go of our search, we meet each other where we get lost, and arrive at our destination.
Photo: Took this in the Carbon River rain forest near Mt. Rainier.
Christ all eyes and then dissolve. Dissolve the soul into the body, the body in the soul. Everything is made out of wonder. In the marrow of emptiness is a diamond light that precipitates from no-thing - the pith of each atom in your flesh. Those who make a distinction between transcendence and embodiment are like infants crying for milk. Now stop crying and drink. The silence of I, the silence of Thou: exactly the same. A resounding absence of word or thought, yet containing the intimate mystery of relationship. This silence is your Being, but because it is boundless, there is always more of it to become, to dissolve into, and thus a perpetual otherness in the depth of your heart.
Painting, Mary Magdalene by George De La Tour
While it is still dark
and the stars are still singing,
listen, listen
to this ancient breath,
this ancient breath.
While it is still light
and moth wings pulse
on the rim of the lily,
listen, listen
to this ancient breath.
At dawn and evening
meditate,
listen to the unborn light.
Hear evening fall.
Receive this ancient breath.
At dawn and evening,
meditate
on the one who pours the Milky Way
down your spine,
this ancient breath.
The one who comes
at midnight
on silent wings
like the moon, like a hummingbird
to the garden of your heart.
Beyond the far
faint music of the galaxy,
listen to the darkness, friend.
Listen to the silence
of this ancient breath.
Listen, cleanse your soul.
Wake the sparkling grace
of the present moment.
Bow down, bow down
to this ancient breath.
Listen, listen
with your whole body.
Shatter your crown on the earth
and spill a trillion stars.
Bow down, bow down.
So’ham, So’ham,
this ancient breath, this ancient breath...
"There is no Other." ~Ramana"Love thy neighbor as thy Self." ~Jesus"Every wave of love returns to the ocean of the Self." ~MaharishiWhy did we turn s-e-l-f into a four-letter word? As if there were something wrong, something self-centered, something greedy and small about the Self, when in fact the Self is a center that is everywhere, without circumference, an ocean of grace that swells in the stillness of love, a generous radiance that illuminates all creatures with the bliss of the Uncreated.
When we insist on a distinction between the "activist" and the "contemplative," between serving others and delighting in the presence of God, we break the universe in two. Understanding this is a hard truth, for it dissolves the pride of the do-er. Yet it is a soft truth, melting the mind in the heart.
There is no greater act of "social justice" than dissolving. No greater service to the other than merging I and Thou in the radiance of the hridaya, at the center of this body. Then we taste the nectar pressed out from the union of Shiva and Shakti, subject and object, even in this world of pain. We touch the reality: our hearts are not separate particles, but a single field of hopelessly entangled energy. Melting the heart is the purest seva.
Friend, did you come here to figure everything out, or get amazed? Did you come here to solve the countless problems of the future, or to dance with the ineffable grace of the present moment? A tight little bud has everything under control. But it has no idea what a flower is. To the bud, blossoming is a catastrophe.
He would be 106 today. I still overflow with gratitude for the silent whisper of his gift, grace-fresh this morning as it was at my initiation, 55 years ago. When one is ripe, either with yearning or pain or both, the Guru enters your life to nudge your true nature awake. Then you taste the sweetness of what was always already here. The Self outshines all its shadows. The Guru doesn't give you a new philosophy or religion, but a direct experience of God in the radiance of your heart, nearer than breath, more intimate than thought. The Guru doesn't come to be your therapist or fortune teller, your surrogate mommy or daddy. The Guru has one sole purpose in your life: to pour the stars down your spine, and ignite the boundless splendor of pure consciousness. Happy birthday, ancient Friend.
A small group of us were sitting with Maharshi in 1972, marveling at how graceful meditation is. We asked him, "Who created the teaching that meditation requires effort, concentration, control?"
Maharshi laughed and made up a little parable right on the spot: "The wave asked the sea: could I be like you? The sea replied: it's easy, just settle down!"
So much harm has been done in every religion by the teaching of concentration, control, and effort to over-come the body with the mind. This obsession with spiritual effort stems from a sense that there is something wrong with me, an essential sinfulness, a journey I need to take, some distance between me and my source.
But a wave does not need to go anywhere to merge with the sea. No distance ever exists between the wave and the water. At its peak the wave may appear to be an individual, but at its base, every wave is already the whole ocean. Therefore, no energy is required for a wave to return to its resting state. As the wave returns, in fact, energy increases. The practice of meditation is not an effort to rise upward: it is a settling down to rest in the simplest state.
Meditation is not concentration, but de-concentration. When the wave settles into the sea, it does not become more concentrated, but gracefully expands into boundlessness.
*
Returning to the sea, a wave makes a gentle sound, sizzling cool, fresh over sand. As mind settles back into Source, there is a faint whisper: the sound of the finite dissolving into the infinite, the sound of the mantra.
The Rig Veda declares: Adau bhagavan shabdha rasahih. "In the beginning, God manifested as sound." Likewise in Biblical tradition, God manifests through sound, through the Logos: "In the beginning was the Word." Modern quantum physics confirms the ancient vision. In the vacuum at the source of energy there is an internal vibration of "virtual electrons and photons." Physicists call this internal self-resonance "fluctuations of the vacuum."
The mantra, in its subtlest form, is this very resonance at the heart of creation. It is not an ordinary word. The mantra is part of that primordial sound through which the vacuum generates particles of matter, that primordial Word through whom the Creator speaks creation.
Real meditation is not an attempt to rise above the physical body. Meditation is listening to what the body actually is: infinite spiritual energy. For every photon and atom of the body is permeated with this same creative sound. The mantra given to us by the guru at initiation is just a vehicle for the mind to settle down into the cosmic Word that eternally pulsates in divine silence, waves merging with the sea. We experience the mantra-wave in its subtle form by the grace of the ocean. As that grace draws the mantra's sound inward to silence, the individual mind merges with divine mind, and the body is infused with the energy at the source of creation.
The sea whispers in the wave: so the Almighty whispers in every particle of this body. Seen through the Eye of transcendental deep meditation, there is no distinction whatsoever between God and Man, Heaven and Earth, Consciousness and Matter. We taste the divine in every atom of creation.
In the words of Jesus, "If your Eye is single, your whole body will be full of light." (Luke 11:34)
*
When I was young, someone taught me that God is far above and difficult to attain.
Someone taught me that I must leave my lowly flesh and journey upward until, at the last day, after immeasurable striving, I will reach heaven. Someone told me that I can only be with God when I die. Someone told me the goal is to become like an angel, or an ascended master. Someone separated heaven and earth, higher and lower, spirit and body. Someone lied.
Whoever those teachers were, their time is over. Hierarchy is over. Spiritual striving is over. Now is the time to awaken a simpler truth: God is not the end but the beginning.
What yearning for God is made of, is God. I am a wave in the ocean of divine love, and God dances in every ripple of my being. God hums divine music in my body. God is my zero. Any number of steps I climb only take me further from Source, for Source is at the bottom of the stairs.
A real Guru does not say, "Strive upward! Take a long journey, and you will one day reach the kingdom!" A real Guru says what Jesus said: "The kingdom of God is already within you... My yoke is easy, my burden is light."
Sink into God before you rise up. Kneel upon God before you take the first step. Then God will be with you wherever you go, whether rising or falling. This is why we bow: to touch God below, at the bottom, in the beginning.
Jai Guru Dev.
"Above all things, love silence." ~St. Isaac of Ninevah
Listen to silence. The silence of pure listening is love. Attraction of a subject for an object, a lover for the beloved, is only love's shadow. Before any subject or object arise, before Creator even speaks the Word, "Let there be light," pure love trembles in waves of the primal sea, the quantum vacuum.
The darkness of love is the color of silence. Sink into this voluptuous darkness. To attain the light, you must ascend, but to embrace divine darkness, you need only fall. Give up the work of rising. Let gravity be your prayer.
"Now the earth was formless and void" (Genesis 1:2). Be the formless fertility of emptiness. Be where light is born, a seed dropped into the mothering furrow. Let gravity be your prayer.
You must ascend into light, but you need only sink into darkness. Give up the work of rising. Be where the light is born, a seed dropped into the mothering furrow of silence. The absolutely ineffable is the womb of all.
The Black Madonna dwells at the core of every proton in your flesh. Prayer is no metaphysical work of the mind, but a chthonic sensation of the infinitesimal Ayin Soph in the heart of the electron that flashes through a synapse in your brain. Yet this self-effulgent dot of no-thing is the same black whole that throbs at the core of the galaxy. Light emanates from every empty center, the quantum entanglement of quark and star. The empty center of love permeates all matter, and the total universe of information is stored in silence.
Awakened silence releases a silken spore, a thread of grace that passes from the your sacrum through each tear on the rosary of your spine. A subtle glistening root ignites your cerebellum, illumining the cortex with arboreal fire. Is your nervous system not the Tree of Life at the center of the garden, the Burning Bush that Moses saw in a cloud of Unknowing? Let that radiant cilium, born from total surrender to the dark, dance through your backbone to the soft spot in your crown, raveling you up into clustered galaxies.
Silence weaves through the hollow of all that whirls, threading each particle, each mote of Mother Matter, to a star. Savor this silence in deep meditation, or walking through the December forest, where berries burst in the void, wood and stone suffused with compassion, dreamless seeds awake in the loam, murmuring, "April, April come..." Nothing ever dies here.
Let distance dissolve in the splendor between your breaths. Ever returning to your inner solstice, let the sun be born, Winter upon Winter, cradled in your chest. This is your labor of grace.
At the end of your exhalation, there is a dark and infinitesimal pause. The is where worlds are formed. Here, creation is centered in a sparkling singularity, the crystal of divine night. Listen to the silence. Your listening is love.
Photo: Spencer Butte, OR
Dear Freddy, happy birthday, you are not one moment old!
Today the laws of nature break themselves laughing.
Your behavior is totally unacceptable, but You are perfect.
May the blue sky fill every synapse in your squirmy brain.
Sing this poem til the hummingbirds return.
Who’s the old magician gazing up at you
from the well of the unborn, mumbling zeros
with no 1 before them?
How do you both enjoy the same fresh fruit
on an ancient tree, the ripening
of Now?
It took the cardamom seed ten thousand years to attain
supreme emptiness, but you got it in your first inhalation.
Distant galaxies fall through the soft spot in your skull
like rebel angels.
May you ever return to the font of howling
in your Winter body, where shivering wounded wolves
curl up to heal in blood-stained
snow.
May you ever smell April melting in their fur.
That is how near your heart must ever tremble
to the heart of the animal.
And may the terrible hunter, Time, never come here.
Slice the lips of the persimmon void,
spill luscious seeds of poetry with no creator.
The nectar of your foolishness ferments into wisdom.
How does it happen, Freddy?
You must have been playing with your breath again.
You must have been secretly touching the name
of the Goddess under your breastbone.
You are hopelessly disobedient, but that is why I love you.
When I wrote my commandments on stone,
you became the stone, pulsing
softly,
exuding seven planets and a moon.
I am You, but never reveal the secret.
Just mutter the runes and call
them poems.
Fill viridescent darkness with worlds of pearl,
like the sweat of sweetness on a plum.
Tell how you crush the hollow places into juice.
How amethysts and emeralds fall,
jagged and burning from your eyes,
reflecting the starlight that has not arrived.
But don't say too much, Freddy. Just tell
whether it's all yearning, or gratitude.
Balthazar's legs were stiff. As his servant pressed the animal's powerful neck low to the moon-washed desert sand, the old philosopher slipped from his kneeling camel. More nimbly than their elder, Melchior and Gaspar dismounted without assistance. A porter led their camels to the palm grove for water as the three pilgrims spread their caftans for an hour's rest.
They reclined in silence, the respite of a long night's journey. While traveling had constrained them into an acquaintance not unlike friendship, the three maintained that mutual aloofness native to men of rank. Until now, the three had known each other only as fellow, nay, even rival masters at the Academy in Baghdad.
Old Balthazar was a Persian mathematician who had studied at the temple of Pythagoras in Italy. Having traveled the civilized world, even as far as Tibet, he was lauded as the great Magus of his generation. Leaving hundreds of disciples at the Academy, he had departed with two fellows and a handful of porters on this desolate desert crossing, which he insisted was "his final pilgrimage." Balthazar was chiefly famous for his mathematical description of angels, especially his Geometry of Hierarchies, which proved that the constellations were ordered by "a will toward beauty."Dealing as it did with the latest theories in science, Balthazar's work attracted Melchior, the princely young Egyptian alchemist, now his fellow traveler. Melchior had entered the Academy in Baghdad, not as a student of the old master, but as a rival philosopher. Their pilgrim party was completed by a prodigious Hindu Brahmin named Gaspar.Gaspar's journey began in a monastery at Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where he had studied with the greatest disciple of Shankara before secluding himself in a forest hermitage at the Ganges' source. There Gaspar wrote his astrological proof of Advaita Vedanta, devising a mathematical foundation for the Upanishadic sutra, "Ano raniyan, mahato mahiyan: One atom of the smallest is greater than the greatest." Using the new science of calculus, Gaspar proved that atomic configurations of human anatomy reflected the patterns of heavenly constellations to form an inter-dimensional continuum from micro to macrocosm which ultimately defined the physiology of a single, cosmic, human body.
Melchior, the Egyptian, wrote a commentary on Gaspar's thesis, suggesting that Gaspar's "cosmic anthropology" implied a teleological end, the birth of a "star-atomed man," an event which would mark the attainment of Selfhood by the cosmos. Two years later, when Melchior's thesis finally reached India, Gaspar responded with astronomical calculations proving that such an event would, in fact, occur in the present generation. Their metaphysical dialogue across the continents, from Alexandria to Rishikesh, finally drew the Egyptian and the Indian together in Baghdad, at the school of their elder, Balthazar.
"I wondered if my scroll would reach the West in time to warn you that the Birth was immanent," said Gaspar, disturbing the stream of milky silence that poured like some etheric nectar from the glistening stars. Relieved at the opportunity to discharge what was smoldering in their breasts, the three fell into a soft but heated discussion.
"My calculations led to the same conclusion as yours, Gaspar!" said the Egyptian. "Your treatise was the finest addendum to Plato's Timaeus in a hundred years, truly! But, if I may say, your original argument failed to include the critical last step. You brilliantly demonstrated how the galactic macro-equations resolve into the mathematical image of a human body. But the Cosmic Man will not be a person, fully aware of himself, unless he experiences the limitations of a human birth, on a material planet. The principle is even stated by your philosopher, Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras: Consciousness is fully awakened only by the taste of its opposite, through the contrast of boundless intelligence with a finite body. There must be an Incarnation!"
"That was implicit in my equations, Melchior! Not to imply that I was first, no," Gaspar thumped his Brahmin palm against the sand, "but I had already proved it!"
In Egypt," Melchior insisted icily, "we proved it too." He paused for Gaspar to imbibe these words. Then he continued, "Your theory, sir, belongs not to India alone, but to the planetary atmosphere. It is in the air. Elders at Alexandria speak of these mysteries. I hear the same from Corinth and Antioch. 'This is the hour!' they all whisper. Of course, the common people don't know anything about it: except these locals, the Jews, who expect to get some sort of King out of the affair. But in the temples, in the academies, all agree. We dwell at the turning point of Time. Isn't that right Balthazar?"
The quiet old Persian smiled. "Even in Rome there are such thoughts."
"Rome!" the Indian chuckled. "If they know it in the city of wine and roast pig, then the odor of revelation must be in the air!"
"That is true," Melchior continued seriously. "Thoughts like these do not arise in the personal mind, but are gleaned by the brain out of prevailing elements in the ether. Now, because more mercury than sulfur predominates, due to a lessening influence of Mars, and from Jupiter a greater degree of...."
"My fellow pilgrim," Balthazar interjected as graciously as possible, "Just look up at these stars! It is more than chemistry that descends upon this world. Surely, you remember why we are here."
They looked up into the color of silence, deeper than black, where clustered stars pulsed like a candelabra over the banquet table of the earth. In fact, the stars appeared unnaturally close and intimate. A shudder passed through the three mens' bodies, a strangely familiar tremor: as if the very night, the silver outspread sand, the almost tangible anticipation of secret mysteries revealed, had been awaiting them here for ten thousand years. Their hearts were absorbed by an intensely serious joy.
"An angel has come upon us," Balthazar whispered.
"These atoms of air," muttered the Egyptian, "salts, crystals, don't you see?"
For a radius of nearly five meters around them, some ethereal pressure created a mellifluous golden cloud in the cold desert night. Within this sphere, the substance of space itself seemed thicker, rippling in violet undulations. Sparkles infinitesimal as photons danced around their faces, throbbing against their brains with subliminal ringing. Melchior trembled because he thought they had discovered some fantastic new chemical in the desert wind, while Gaspar kept glancing nervously at the crescent moon, fearing an uncalculated eclipse.
"What are you looking at Balthazar?" whispered the Egyptian.
"I'm listening," answered the old man. "I think it is speaking to us."
As if the infinitesimal atoms of the atmosphere were tiny crystal bells, the silence chimed. Shivers of moonlight precipitated into viscous strands, using every ambiguity of flickering star, every strain on human attention, to seduce the senses to a vision of celestial lineaments: two eyes, floating jewels of moonlight; brow of liquid silver spilling down to pearly cheeks, nose, lips; now the whole human countenance crystallized from transparency at that verge where consciousness consents with space to manifest a burning violet flame of both matter and spirit, circumscribed by streams of ruddy hair, falling on a purple robe of luminous pulsation, revealing the whole stature of a warrior, a warrior with diamond gaze over six feet tall, arms outstretched where he - or was it she? - descended upon the desert sand.
From the dreamy suspension of his intellect, where the weary monologue of thought had ceased awhile, Gaspar was startled by a stinging gust of wind. It was not at all clear to him how long he had been gazing into the angel's face, which now evaporated into the usual, though somehow more intimate, resonance of starlight. "Balthazar," he whispered, "did it speak with you?" There was no answer.
Melchior, meanwhile, mumbled about some conjunction of Venus and Neptune, "Or Saturn perhaps, yes, I think it was Saturn," until his logic trickled off into luminous silence. The other two stood up, wrapping their caftans against the breeze, and hastened toward the camels that waited among the palms.
Gaspar asked the Persian again, "What did it say? I know that it spoke to you."
Balthazar sighed, "I fear, young friend, my reputation exceeds me. I have not grown pure enough to attune to their sound."
"Was there any sort of.... word?"
"It is not a hearing as we know it, Gaspar, but a resonance of the nerves in our bodies with very small waves of light."
Melchior, with tears in his eyes, caught up to them, pulling on their sleeves. "Forgive me. I have not wept since I was a child. I have never... It was so new... Was it real?"
Balthazar laughed heartily. "My brilliant alchemist, is the gift of tears not proof enough?"
"But certain conjunctions could cause..."
"Yes, Melchior, certain conjunctions are necessary to shape the occasion, the chemistry of the air through which it manifests a body. But have no doubt: it was God's messenger."
Melchior was quiet for the next hour, having discovered a more important element in his own tears. Balthazar led the way, searching the sky, then pointing over the land, until it seemed they were crossing not only the desert of sand but a mirror of stars. The Persian explained that, though he could not hear the angel's voice, he could feel its will: not as thought in his mind, but as pure sensation in the heart.
"Where is it leading?" Gaspar asked.
"To the place of the Birth," the old man answered. "The angel has infused into my heart the image of a valley. We must leave the plateau and descend."
At the last caravansary, Balthazar asked a local porter who had joined them for this leg of the journey, "Are we nearing a valley?"
"Yes, master. A few furlongs to the southwest the desert descends into a fertile vale."
"Then we shall go southwest," said Balthazar.
"If I remember," added Gaspar, who loved maps and studied them at every stop, "it is toward the town which locals call The House of Bread."
"Beth-Lechem," said the porter.
"Then we go to Beth-Lechem," said Balthazar.
Their modest caravan journeyed on in silence, camels rolling gracefully across the dunes like boats on a moonlit sea. Eventually, Melchior said to Balthazar, "Sir, you surely reached the same understanding as Gaspar and I. When did you conclude that there must be a Birth?"
Balthazar measured his thoughts quietly, stroked his majestic silver whiskers, then spoke. "I have not published a treatise on these mysteries, as you have. I decided to keep them to myself. My research, like yours, indicated that the cosmos was approaching its moment of Self-Awareness, when the Spirit of Wisdom must suffuse her light into all creation, from the furthest galaxy to the tiniest particle of dust on my boot sole. This world, every speck of it, must be soaked in pure Love.
"I concluded that the uncreated cosmic Source could only complete its act of Self-knowledge by becoming one of its own creatures, confined in mortal matter, vulnerable and human as any of us. There was the mathematical necessity for a fusion of opposites at the center of an infinite cross. That center must be an actual place in time."
Gaspar nodded and Melchior said, "Please go on."
"My calculus proved that the vectors of probability would converge in a mathematical singularity, whose symmetry must cast a reflection into every finite particle of matter. Evolution wills each Alpha to recapitulate the Omega; each dust mote in its moment of time to encircle the whole of Eternity. Please excuse this language. It's too dry, too technical to convey the elegance, the astonishment!"
"O no sir, please go on," whispered Gaspar.
"I mean to say then, when such an event occurs in God, it occurs in a human child: first in one, then in every human child. In each of us, there will be a kind of birth, the birth of a new faculty in the soul, something beyond knowledge, beyond reason and intellect. A splendor, yes, a splendor will shine in our hearts."
"The Light within!" Melchior interjected. "Our masters have hinted at it, though dimly."
"Exactly, Melchior. Until now, only a few have experienced this Light: Gautama known as Buddha in Gaspar's land; perhaps Plato and Master Pythagoras among the Greeks; and Hermes among your Egyptians. Ah, but now! When this Birth occurs, the divine spark will ignite all of us, both teacher and disciple equally, master and slave alike. Hierarchies will vanish.
"The change will not be instantaneous. After the Birth, it could take two thousand years for this event in time and space to ripple through all human souls. And yet, a thousand years are but a breath. One thing is certain tonight. We are about to step into an immense transformation. We are beginning the second half of eternity."
"But why here? Why now?" marveled the Egyptian.
"Why not?" the Persian answered.
"The design is intelligible, after all," said Melchior.
"Intelligible, yes," repeated Gaspar. "And yet, there is something very wonderful about it..."
The wise men swayed to the rhythm of their animals. Theories spent, minds weary, they allowed a leading to emerge from the earth beneath them, from sand to hoof to scent on desert breezes. Their metaphysics had threshed out the limits of the possible. Now they humbly intuited the truth, and let their genius bow to their hearts. Perhaps for the first time in their lives they tasted the sweetness of inner silence, the silence of a mind that has plunged beyond its capacity to know. They let their camels lead them.
Behind them, the eastern horizon was a turquoise brush stroke. Cooling to a royal purple, the sky arched westward where bright stars still shimmered in the night. The camels descended over the crest of a valley. There, a tiny village nestled in palm clusters. Then a meteor sliced out of the dawn and disappeared on the dark horizon ahead.
"That was a finger pointing the way!" whispered Melchior.
"We don't need maps any more," Gaspar added, speaking mainly to himself.
The younger men looked to Balthazar for confirmation. He pulled at his beard and gazed upon the valley. "It is certain," he said.
"How can you be certain?" asked Melchior.
Balthazar stared at him, then turned and swept his arm over the valley. "Look!" he commanded. Their eyes gazed more deeply, though their minds could not comprehend.
At first glance, the haze enveloping the village appeared like any lowland mist at dawn. While each foggy patch seemed placid, a more patient look revealed strange vibrancy in the limpid air. Incandescent swirls precipitated into vanishing human shapes. When viewed directly, these aerial creatures were nearly invisible, dissolving into the very consciousness of the observer; but when suspended in peripheral vision, they lasted as luminous outlines, and conveyed more than light. They had emotion. Though many of them smiled with a vacuous, not quite human beatitude, others seemed grave, even anxious, with pursed lips and contracted brows; and some were wringing their hands, weeping.
The three men felt as if they had stumbled into a great catastrophe in another world, a world suspended in the nimbus of this one, whose ethereal inhabitants desperately awaited the outcome of some terrible trial.
The village of Bethlehem slept on under this cloud of celestial turmoil, only a few lights flickering where a mother sat up with a feverish child, or a watchman dozed at the gate of a Sadducee's home. The camels led their riders quietly through the streets, descending to an inn at the far edge of the town, where the valley gently spilled into its vineyards. They ambled around to the back of the building, where a courtyard opened to an unkempt pasture, at the end of which was a stable: hardly a true stable, but a lop-sided shed built at the entrance of a cave in vine-clustered boulders. A few sheep and one ox huddled nearby, sleeping through the frigid hour before dawn.
By now, Gaspar and Melchior were convinced they had come to the wrong house. They believed that the camels were drawn there by the animal scent, and were simply looking for a feeding trough, which of course was perfectly true. But Balthazar seemed certain, so the others followed.
They dismounted. A bit indignant after his long long journey to such a common place, Gaspar the Brahmin whispered, "Is there anyone here?" Pointing to the cave, Balthazar unceremoniously stepped among the vines, parted the blanket that veiled the entrance from the chill night, and disappeared within. Melchior just stood there, marveling at the suchness: a sheep fold in a thicket of grapes. Yet he sensed that, here at last, ineffable dignity imbued the ordinary. A holiness too simple to comprehend infused the timber and the nails. He bowed and entered.
Gaspar hesitated. After all, he was an astrologer. Had all the guidance of the constellations led merely to this? Drawing the dusty blanket aside, he paused to look back across the rooftops of the village, gently bearing its freight of sleeping humanity eastward, toward the desert plateau whence he had descended, already gleaming in dawn's light. "Perhaps this veil conceals a hidden temple," he mused. "And when I part it, a new Mystery will flood the world. My wisdom will be old." Involuntary trembling shook his body, but only for a moment. "What becomes of knowledge when the heart is free?"
Inside, Gaspar bumped into a donkey, its breath misting the silence of cold stone. Bleating in the dark, two sheep glanced restlessly at him, then settled back into their reverie. Gaspar stopped, puzzled by a golden gleam spilling onto the hay from the feeding trough, where someone must have piled fiery coals to keep warm.
He saw his two friends kneeling among the animals. Melchior was staring with astonishment into the trough. But Balthazar was gazing at the woman, a great smile softly lighting his beard. She huddled in a faded blue gown, her eyes cast downward. She was at ease in the presence of such renowned philosophers, unashamed by the adulation, her eyes demure yet bemused, with a weary contentment, as if nothing in the world could ever surprise her again...
Gaspar crept up to warm himself, still uncertain what they were supposed to be doing there. Only then did he notice, at the bottom of the manger, a tiny face gazing from impossible flames.
______________________
Originally published in 'The Friends Journal', Philadelphia,
December 15, 1986.
No
need for a pilgrimage to Machu Picchu,
or a hike on your knees to the Black Virgin
of Rocomador.
Just become empty and grow full.
You are the path.
You
will not find Her at the source
of the Amazon, or a snow peak lost
in clouds on Mount Meru.
Traveling Eastward toward the dawn
will get you no closer to the sun.
You
need to float
down more intimate rivers,
the current of this inhalation
deep into the ancient forest of your alveoli,
where
the Mother of waters dwells
in a hidden valley between your nipples.
Cancel your plans for the journey.
Stay
Om and sink into your marrow,
that quicksand full of lost gold.
Explore secret corridors
in the vine-tangled palace of your bones.
Let this exhalation carry you
to earth's highest summit,
six inches over the soft spot on your skull
where Shiva reposes in his cavern of crystal harps
singing with no sound,
that
one still sleepless diamond eye
swirling with all the stars.
Light a thousand candles on
the chandelier of your pituitary
hanging over the ruined ballroom
in your ancient brain.
You are the jungle that swallows
every attempt to civilize
the wild glory of the Serpent Queen.
You flower in reptilian splendor,
your
pollen cup swollen
with every poison, every medicine.
Now
ripen in the sunbeam of Presence
that shines neither outward nor inward,
but swirls with namelessness
in the stillness of your unborn heart.
Let the stalk of your spine be clustered
with
Wasai root, Tawari bark,
breath upon breath of Chacruna leaf,
galaxy of galaxies of crushed begonia.
If you have the courage to let go,
spiraling
waylessly down
the staircase of your vertebrae,
a green and terrible world of
ineffable beauty will undulate up
to meet the kiss of your descending
footsteps. Do you need a teacher?
Follow the one who has already fallen.
Follow the glistening track of the snail
across
the vast Caladium,
Her body is the color of moonlit wine.
Grow full, become empty,
You are the path.
