Tavern Of Awakening

From our new bi-lingual book, 'The Tavern Of Awakening,'
soon available in German and English, with Mindfulness
Meditation Teacher, Otto Raich (https://raich-trauner.com/)

Don't take the gift of Darkness for granted.
Let her have her way with you.
Ascend through a bolder falling.
Her womb is immaculate silence,
a void moist with stars.
Yet she who cradles them all
has become your inhalation.
Haven’t I told you there is wine
in the silence between thoughts,
joy and sorrow mingled in one cup?
What will you call her? Shakti?
Shekinah? Miryam the Magdalene?
Names dissolve in the nectar between
waking and sleep.
Gently blow out every mental flame
that wants a word for things.
Listen to what cannot be spoken.
Take on the color of silence,
the jasmine scent of emptiness.
Night is the uterus of fire.
Gaze into seeing.
Even the Creator asks, “Who am I?”
This question strikes sparks
against the abyss.
Now leave your secret chamber,
walk boldly over the earth,
crystalizing distance into stillness.
Savor the sting of vanishing atoms,
the glitter of dark matter in your bones.
From the well of your loss
streams a luminous beauty
that bathes all sentient creatures in hope.
Friend, don't bother to understand.
Not-Knowing is the space of compassion.
All night, be breathed.

__________________

Nimm das Geschenk
der Dunkelheit nicht
als selbstverständlich hin.

Lass sie ihren Weg mit dir gehen.

Steige auf durch ein kühneres Fallen.

Ihr Schoß ist unbefleckte Stille,

eine Leere, getränkt mit Sternen.

Doch sie, die sie alle wiegt,

ist dein Einatmen geworden.

Habe ich dir nicht gesagt, dass da Wein ist

in der Stille zwischen den Gedanken,

Freude und Kummer vermischt in einem Becher?

Wie wirst du sie nennen? Shakti?

Schekinah? Maria von Magdala?

Namen lösen sich auf im Nektar

zwischen wach sein und Schlaf.

Blase sanft jede mentale Flamme aus,

die ein Wort für die Dinge will.

Höre auf das, was nicht ausgesprochen werden kann.

Nimm die Farbe der Stille an,

den Jasmin Duft der Leere.

Die Nacht ist nicht die Abwesenheit der Flamme,

sondern der Schoß der Flamme.

Blicke in das Sehen.

Selbst der Schöpfer fragt: „Wer bin ich?“

Diese Frage zündet einen Funken

am Abgrund.

Nun verlasse deine geheime Kammer,

gehe kühn über die Erde,

kristallisiere Distanz in Stille.

Genieße den Schmerz verschwindender Atome,

das Glitzern der dunklen Materie in deinen Knochen.

Aus dem Brunnen des Verlustes

strömt eine leuchtende Schönheit,

die alle fühlenden Geschöpfe

in Hoffnung taucht. Freund,

mach dir nicht die Mühe zu verstehen.

Nicht-Wissen ist der Raum

des Mitgefühls.

Die ganze Nacht, sei geatmet.

Sky

There is a blue sky in your heart. Before you take the next inhalation, before you have a single thought, gaze into your radiance. 

Not a cloud moves here, and no horizon limits the space of your purity. This sky is before the beginning. Some call it Christ-Consciousness. Some call it Krishna. Some call it Buddha Nature. It is vast compassion.

Deeper than silence, deeper than sin, more inward to I than Am, the sky of the heart forgives all, embraces all, witnesses even our birth and death with joyful equanimity.

This space is the infinitesimal bindhu between breathing out and breathing in. Yet worlds arise here, and dissolve without a sound, without a Word of creation. Here is your true home. You never really left.

To return, surrender this exhalation. Feel the silence for one vast instant. Be one, but no one, annihilated in an inconceivable stillness.

The same sky in every heart, you in I and I in you. Our lives enfold each other like azure petals on a single flower. This is the end of loneliness.

Before you leave this earth, please, at least for a moment, become aware of the blue sky within you. This moment will send waves of joy to all your ancestors, for seven generations past and all the unborn for seven generations to come.

Curl

Curl up in your own fur
until you feel your true nature
of immortal warmth.

To embody what you already are

may be the deepest prayer.

Beseeching God for strength
confesses weakness.
Making affirmations of abundance
expresses lack.

Asking for health resists dis-ease.
Why not just be sick?
Let the chaos of chameleon grace
have her way with your bones.
Isn't the universe mothered from a void?

Owning your poverty, expand
into the majesty of nothing.

Let your vacuum ripple with wealth.
All you ever wanted is nearer
than the throb of your jugular.

Refuse to change Suchness into Should.
Welcome bending.

Hug your flesh.

Nestled in that sinless crystal of
Original Warmth,
where words return to one
impeccable seed of silence,

these fragile sacraments

tremble from your body, the world.

A thrush egg in a hemlock nest.
A whispering brook of snow-melt
under a dry mountain meadow.
The pale moth of your grandmother's hand
released from your fingers.
All that seems to die,
then greens with nectar again,
all that murmurs and purrs
with uncreated light, emerges 
from what Is.

Our Mother Who Art In Gaia

Our Mother
who art in Gaia,
brown as loam, nameless as rain,
may your presence be a golden void,
the absence of the search.
Let your family dwell here as a circle,
not a kingdom,
where spirit and body, heaven and earth
mingle in small sacraments
of compost and compassion.
Be the breath we take,
the bread we make each day
with our own wrinkled hands.
Let our prayer word be “Enough.”
For you are the weaver of galaxies
into nests for young planets,
and you sing the whole sky in a robin’s egg.
In you we are always home.
Dissolve the veil of judgment,
dispel our illusion of impurity,
so that we may immerse one another
in your bodily fluid
of abounding goodness.
For thine is the roundness
and the brokenness
and the healing.
Amen.


A page from 'The Fire of Darkness'
with mandala by Rashani Réa: See books below.
The Arabic says, "Heaven lies under the feet of mothers."

Look

Look for imperfections, you'll find them everywhere. Now let a little astonishment in, it's all one trick of diamond light. Don't be deceived. Be a wet sparkling dogwood blossom. Be last night's moon in blue April morning. Be formless forest moss-mist risen into periwinkle crepuscule. Nearly distilled to aubergine, condense into a raindrop, fall again. Patter through a canopy of alders. Return to your cedar root birth wound. Lie down among virescent stretchmarks. Here. Of water the earthwise wheel ever turning, and the stillness through whom it rolls,  wonder be not fooled. You are always free.

When You Get Tired

 

When you get tired of
following commandments,
follow the aching
in your lost rib.
A throbbing will lead you
to the land of entanglement,
where there is only one law:
you must be both Lover
and Beloved, two
dallying on a swing
inside breathing.
You'll find the ancient garden
where holy rivers kiss,
the Ida and Pingala,
in a valley that roams
through the core of your body,
a path without a way.
Of course this is only
foreplay, rehearsal
for the real consummation,
the melting of God
deep in your bones,
beyond light.
This rare kind of love-making
has its midnight and its dawn.
Your addiction to stillness
and serenity ends here,
in a turmoil of dark energy,
the most ancient wine.
The flavor of naked awareness
is like musk fermented
in a seed before it is touched
by a tremor of sunlight.
The loam of your belly is fertile
and warm as a burial mound.
If you think you can survive
without Radha's yearning
or the loneliness of Ishtar,
will you ever become the flute
that rests on the cowherd's
half-parted lips?
Enter the tomb of Tammuz
to rub hyssop on his feet?
Press nectar from a stone
high up where white clouds sting,
those tears of regret for the life
not lived, merely examined?
Now it is time to leave your
mountain cave, dear friend,
and search for a womb.

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

Scale

            Vatican mural by Raphael, Lady Justice, 1512

I decided to weigh my imperfections in a scale against any faint perfection I might find in my soul, expecting my sins to outweigh my goodness substantially.

So I set on one side all that is imperfect in me, which I soon found to be everything that has form. For all forms shift and perish. My body and its deeds, every cell and molecule down to the least photon of light is insubstantial, impermanent, and therefore tainted with mutability.

Then, determined to set on the other tray what little perfection I could find, I looked into myself. And I beheld nothing perfect. Yet this perfect no-thing was everywhere!

Perfection, I saw, must be unchangeable, motionless, unbounded Being. Only vast emptiness is perfect: only the void, the vacuum of space. Yet quantum physics shows us that this vacuum is the womb of every form. All creatures are unbalanced equations that decline and fall from the null set of pure mathematical symmetry, each composed of vibrant abstract probability-waves, desperately seeking to re-balance themselves into that perfect zero...

I beheld the unfallen diamond-hearted emptiness of this perfect zero filled with galaxies, yet pervading every cell and each particle of my body. For the space that outdistances the stars is the same space stretched out between each atom, yes, between the electrons in the atom, between the shimmering quarks inside a proton!

And I saw, at the very source of my seeing, a Void awake with Self-delight: the boundless Being of my own pure consciousness. I understood, beyond knowledge, that this alone is perfect.

Then I turned to my imperfections, that riot of changeable forms and deeds, and I condensed them into a thimbleful of stuff. But what stuff? I condensed these forms even further into a mote of dust. But what was the dust mote made of? Further I distilled it down, until my imperfections occupied only a dimensionless point, a bindu, אין סוף, utterly weightless!*

I compared this infinitesimal no-thing on one side of the scale to the infinite perfection of empty space on the other, and I perceived that they were equally weightless, and in fact identical. 

Imperfection is less than a pinprick in the fabric of the universe. Perfection is omnipresent and eternal. Imperfection dances as a mirage of mere form in the stillness of perfection, without conflict or difference. 

Therefore, a pure blue sky pervades the fabric of my flesh, down to the least photon. I am pure. I am stainless. I am eternal. I can find no imperfection. And if this is true for a hopeless sinner like me, dear friend, how much more true is it of Thee?
______
* אין סוף: "ain soph," in Hebrew Kabbala, the point of infinite No-thing from which  יהוה generates the light of the universe.

* Bindu: In Sanskrit, the dimensionless and silent point from which Om emerges to create the universe as a stream of sound. 

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