Beholding Everything With Wonder Is Our Vast Spiritual Practice

"Meditation happens when all the efforts are dropped." ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Though it sounds too simple for our busy intellect, the purest meditation is merely to Be. Not trying, doing, ascending or attaining, but allowing the world's rainbow mirage to flash and dissolve. Let star foam froth the ocean of the effortless. Repose in vibration, vibrate in repose.

Why control your mind? Its nature is playful disobedience. So what if it wanders to the corners of the cosmos like a pin-ball? So what if it frolics, tantric tantrum of a child in the sandbox? Just let it wander where it will. Mother is watching over. This restlessness is swirling in her stillness, like the stars. The Mother is your own awareness. You are not your mind. Be the Mother. Be the Witness.

Beholding everything with wonder is our vast spiritual practice. Yet there is no act of practicing. 100,000 galaxies expand and overflow the rim of Laniakea. Some try to tell you, "You are here," pointing to a dot on the edge of one small galaxy in that chaos of bliss. But they are wrong. You are not a dot. It's hard work to concentrate yourself into a dot! It requires a do-er, and this effort is the very definition of dis-ease. You are not the do-er. You are space itself, ever expanding, embracing all possible dots and points of view. The miracle is not any thing in space, but space itself. Space is awake.

Even the farthest vacuum beyond the event-horizon is your own awareness, more intimate than the pulse in your jugular vein. Listen to the symphony of quasars filling every cell of your body with the hum of divine darkness. This is the music of the Vedas resonating in your flesh. Hosts of angels sing in the hollow of a quark.

No need to ascend or descend. No need to transcend. Transcendence is already the prior nature of your awareness. Transcendence is the effervescence of neuro-peptide nerve fluid, bubbling chocolate fire in your amygdala, sapphire radiance in your pineal gland, zinging thunderbolts of Shakti through light-years of cerebral cortex into the fathomless blue pool of your forehead. What energy are all these phenomena made of? Wonder. What is wonder? Pure consciousness.

We all seem inebriated with the glamour of a personal Savior, the meme of a spiritual hero. He or She may take the form of a deity, a politician, or a rock star, but it's all the same quest for a surrogate mommy-daddy, a Jesu-Elvis-Buddha who shows up like the Lone Ranger to make everything all right.

In the newsfeed of our mind, we lose ourselves in such memes and idols all day. And the idols that we carve out of thought are far more seductive than idols of silver and gold. Our subjectivity constantly bleeds out into these objects, in a ceaseless hemorrhaging of consciousness. But true joy, the bliss of ananda, only happens when we let go of idols, stop clinging to thoughts, and let our attention collapse into its source, igniting the divine radiance of the Self.

The Self is infinite intimacy. Therefore you will never be able to know the Self through a meme, an image, or a name. You must cultivate an intimate relationship with the Unknown.



Photo by Kristy Thompson