A Silence Roaring With Joy
You
are not here to save the world. You are here to discover that you are the
world. You are compassion. You are healing. In you the mountains are lighter
than the sky. Don't try to understand this. Just fall in love with yourself in
every pair of eyes.
However you may worship, whatever work you do, take a breath of the newborn
light that is never one moment old. No blessing at all if you cannot bless
yourself.
Your mission is to green the earth. There is only one way to do this, and only
one commandment: Be Happy. Not with intemperate temporary laughter, the smile
imposed from outside, but with abiding joy that unifies all energy in
wholeness, from within.
There is a peace where every turbulence can happen, with no demand for
resolution. The entire history of the cosmos has already occurred in the
tranquility of joy, where storms of chaos bubble up and subside without demand
for correction. In the energy of the unbounded, nothing is finished or
perfected. Things are purely and wondrously as they are.
The universe calls you to the subtler work, the radical revolutionary work of
happiness, un-earned and un-deserved. Joy is the energy of creation. You lack
nothing. What is your mission? Radiate this joy from your Hridaya, the cosmic
sun in your human chest.
Your vocation is simply to shine out of sacred darkness. Overflow your ripe
wide-open heart. Let works of justice and mercy spring up without
premeditation, with no ideology. Thus Jesus taught, "When you give alms,
don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." And a Buddhist
sutra says, "When the Bodhisattva performs an act of service, there is no
concept of service."
In your solar plexus is a fire that burns on the inexhaustible fuel of
astonishment. This flame needs no purpose, no meaning to feed it. It feeds on
the prana-rich atmosphere of the present moment. Happiness kindles itself. Just
to repose in this truth ignites its own fire. Permit joy, and it happens.
There are many paths, but we all walk with the same Friend. Meeting the
Friend, each of us sees that our own way is just one beam of the Friend's
shining face. Before creation, when no form yet appeared, the countenance of
the Friend illumined the golden void.
Exuberant nothingness ever expands, inwardly and outwardly, without
circumference. Through the frictionless perpetual pulse of the uncreated,
boundaries arise and dissolve as waves in the vacuum. Inwardly, they become
concepts. Outwardly, they become forms. Yet names and forms, manifesting in the
mind or in the world, are a shimmering mirage in still desert air. The nature
of the boundless, pervading all names and forms, is bliss.
Of course, this unearned self-arising happiness is a disaster for your mind. It
is your mind's undoing, outrage, and humiliation. But, dear one, please
understand, what annihilates your I creates your Am. A catastrophic explosion
of worlds swirls from the black hole at your core. From the groundless depth of
this moment, from the poured-out libation of this breath, the empyrean of the
Unborn awakens, and you fall into the kingdom of original Presence.
Scripture says, "It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the
living God." The living God is joy, prior to creation, prior to thought.
Without taking a single step, you arrive. What is there to do but dance? Yet
your dance is the spiral of God, spinning infinitesimal quarks and immeasurable
galaxies.
Repose in the space where a nebula has no more, no less significance than a
neutrino, every breath is a spindle whirling stars from threads of energy finer
than a spider's silk, and each exhalation presses the nectar of delight from
the fruit of emptiness.
Pure existence seems abstract, yet releases a jasmine fragrance. Savor the
scent of divine Being in every creature. The honey is already made. No-thing
radiates every-thing from the molten core of your surrender.
Inhale for no purpose, full of gratitude. Exhale for no reason, releasing
compassion. Don’t bother to be for or against, liberal or conservative, atheist
or believer, scientist or mystic. These are only labels, concepts, apples
hanging on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Rise above the
opposites, dissolve them in bewilderment, eat from the Tree of Life.
Be no one, and do it well. Beyond each fork in the road that leads to left or
right, there is always a third way. It will never have a name. It will never
have an opposite. Drown like a bee at the flowering center of silence, a
silence not faint but feral, roaring with joy.
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Hear a reading of this prose-poem: LINK
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