Uradiance

Today is Independence Day. Tomorrow will also be Independence Day. I wave the banner of the present moment. I pledge allegiance to no flag, no nation. I pledge allegiance to no tribe or party. I pledge allegiance to no bombs bursting in air, I pledge allegiance to silence, to a day of prayer. Patriotism is rebellion, rebellion is joy. Cast down the mighty, the masters of war. I pledge allegiance to the poor. I pledge allegiance to hemp and sod. I pledge allegiance to the unnamed god. To the moon and tide, to sun and wind and what I cannot know, to a light that contains all colors, to the rainbow. I pledge allegiance to no belief but an heirloom tomato seed, a living coral reef, the wisdom in a weed. When the fireworks last too long after midnight, and sulfur lingers in the air, I pledge allegiance to the huddled deer, the stray dog in the street, the shivering sparrow in a bush, the veteran cringing in the heat of his most ancient fear. I do...

In our sacred land there is one most holy day each year, holier than Christmas or Passover, holier than Diwali or the end of the Fast, holier than the Fourth or the Feast of Mary Magdalene. It's the day when every rule is broken, the past is drowned in forgiveness, the difference between festival and meditation gets washed away by laughter and tears. It's the day when we gaze namelessly into the eyes of rival tribesmen and fall in love with thieves on crosses. Every prison cell is opened this day. On this day we smear our faces with chocolate and drink red wine. On this day we close our ancient books and dance with valor among the ruins. Clothing is optional. Everything is optional. There is only one law: "Love and do what you like." The word “no” cannot be spoken. But this too sounds like a rule, so some folks just sing “no” all night in holy defiance. Other days of the year get soaked in the cream of this day. God walks on earth this day...

  Let’s not exchange one hierarchy for another. We don’t need mediators, channelers, or “middle-men.” No need to depend on “ascended masters,” Pleiadean star beings from the fifth dimension, or tiers of angelic messengers. All those are stories from the past. What we need is more direct and simple: alignment with the Christ, who in the final analysis is the I Am in your own heart.  Just listen to the silence within you. You yourself are the channel. You channel God. The real ascended masters and intergalactic counselors are entangled in your physiology, nearer than your pulse. They are the moonlit glands in your own brain - pineal, pituitary, amygdala, hypothalamus - beaming neuropeptide soma juice to your frontal cortex, so that you may open your eyes and create the new earth by SEEING it. Be the seer, not the seen. Mary Magdalene is your very breath. The Milky Way is the nectar she pours down your backbone. Your own heart is the garden where Jes...

  Guardsman , take off your uniform. Priest, take off your chasuble and stole. Take off your dhoti, swami, and shave your beard. Take off your high heels, lady of the night, your silver slippers, princess. Take off your border security badge, swim back and forth across the Rio Grande, rescuing 12-year-old's from exile. Anarchist, take off your Guy Fawkes mask; that too is a uniform, a doctrine. Tear off every stripe, insignia, every medal of honor or dishonor. Erase the capital letters after your name. We are climbing into one burlap sack now, to be shaken together and spilled out in no particular order, nobody first or last. Then we'll brush our teeth with birch twigs. We'll harvest mushrooms from the forest floor. We'll go skinny dipping, not in the Ganges, not in the Jordon , but in a freezing alpine stream whose name is its own underground gurgle, murmuring down from the white breasted mothering snow. And when we...

  Before the invention of thoughts we sang ourselves to sleep.The day melted back into humming, the humming into silence, silence into a breath of the Beloved. Of course the stars were not yet born, and the moon was still inside you. Lay your head on my shoulder now. Listen with all your heart, and I will teach you nothing. A Vedic text declares: “Adau Bhagavan Shabda rasahi: in the beginning, the Lord created the universe through a stream of sound.” I know you have a very subtle esoteric sadana to practice, but before you meditate, don’t forget to Hum. Om is too stuffy, just Hum like a bee. Hum beyond thinking, shattering the chrysalis of your intellect. Hum through every atom of your body, every photon of your light. Humming will strengthen your immune system, and dissolve your weary mind, so that above is below, and without is within. Hum the catastrophic dissolution of all dist...

They say the world is a mirage compared to the samadhi void. I say even the void is a mirage compared to Shyam, whose flesh is sky-brilliant sapphire. He ambles through lusher gardens than enlightenment, where pundits and yogis cannot enter, for you must pass the flaming sword of the gate keeper, which lops off reason and makes you a fool. His wine is love stored up in a hidden wine skin, the passion of emptiness, the breast from whose hollow scholars never drink the milk of darkness, having forgotten how to weep transcendental tears of longing... Which after all are the ordinary tears of a hyacinth in February wrapped in its seed, the tears of a chrysalis congealed in dreamless bewilderment, who cannot conceive of wings, the tears of the full moon resting in the new moon. The reed has nothing at its core, but that's why it can sing. Just so, the love which has no object receives the inbreath as well as the outbreath, both lover and beloved.  Why do you look for love...

I am confused this morning. Yogis say the seat of the Guru is in the forehead. Zen masters say, the belly. My favorite poet points to the dizzy place, the laughing heart. But he is crazy. I think the Lord's throne is everywhere. Each cell of my body is a temple of bewilderment. Conversation requires words, communion insists  on silence. A silence where Lover and Beloved  kiss, whisper, listen. Are they two? Or is there one secret name for both? This blessed morning all I know is, Love has emptied my mind and filled my chest with a holy confusion. Photo: Laurent Berthier

  Listen friend, in a world of illusions, this is real! The soft blue light of Krishna that illuminates your mind in deep meditation is Shyama Sundara, the personal yet boundless inner sky of pure Beauty, whose nature is love and whose body is your own Consciousness. When the mind is completely still and empty, the heart awakens. Then a rose-gold radiance infuses the divine expanse,and this is Shri Radha, emanating from an infinitesimal bindhu in your chest. She is the very substance of your yearning. Yet yearning for God IS God, just as a beam of dawn is one with the sun. When the violet flame of Krishna and the rose-gold beam of Radha unite in your heart, they form a jewel, a crystal chuppa, which is what the early Christian Gnostics called "the Bridal Chamber." The Sacrament of the Bridal Chamber is the wedding of Christ and Magdalene, Krishna and Radha inside you. This is an interior union of the solar and lunar energies in the spinal Tree of Life. Imagining that Jesu...

Whatever causes the rose to open, whatever causes the moon to rise, what makes breath perish  in stillness,  then return, whatever causes the earth to roll slowly over in her downy black quilt, what causes my eye to linger in yours and pours one heartbeat into another, churning the wine dark and sweet, what draws me to notice each tear on your face, is the scent of joy that lures me to drown in the Causeless.

When you discover that each breath is nectar and the space between your heartbeats is the silence between stars, and the one who encircles you with unfathomable compassion is inside, and the luminous hollow of each nerve in your body echoes with the sound that created all things, then you are rich. You need nothing. You can begin to live in the empire of moonlight,  the sensation of dew on bare feet, the glut of honeysuckle,  the sparkling transparency of this perishing moment. Photo: Laurent Berthier

King Oberon and Titania, rulers of the faery kingdom, are having a delightful lovers' quarrel on Mid-Summer's Eve, just to keep waves of polarity at play, the dance of opposites in the ocean of midnight. Elves, gnomes, tree sylphs and undines frolick among the toadstool rings in the scent of rowan and hawthorn. I'm pretty sure this is an accurate vision of the elemental revelry we would actually see, if we cleansed the doors of perception and stopped judging the world through the lens of our concepts about it. Do you want to change the time-line of our planet? Then spend more time here, right where you are, touching, healing the earth with soft barefoot steps in the wet grass. Listen more deeply to silence, until you hear the stones beneath you praying. Regard each hummingbird as a divine messenger. And always remember that nothing has to "mean" anything. As soon as a creature “means” something else, it’s being is diminished. Why should anyth...

  "Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. Couldn't you keep watch with me for one hour? he asked." ~Matthew 26:40 At precisely 4:22 A.M. my work is listening: a thrush in darkness, a frog in the wetland. Their duet. No, it is a trio. The silence between the notes is also music. At 4:22 A.M. I need the earth and every creature to be only what it is, signifying nothing more; so that I may keep watch, witnessing my strange, familiar, lovely, terrible world, my sorrow and pain, my aloneness and unspeakable wonder; so that I may embrace it all, forgive it all. Don't you need your life to be unequivocally as it is, right now? I promise I will not improve you or reform you, because you need it to be 4:22 A.M. Yet I will stay, if you like, and keep watch with you. I vow not to be your "life coach" or "spiritual teacher." I vow not to interfere with this moment, this unique opportunity for you to embrace the total sum and...

I am a Neo-Tantric  Nyingma  Holy Mountain Nondual Sufi Meditation Master. My depth of un-knowing is legendary, my wisdom of no-mind unrivaled.  My myriad followers seek ecstatic miracles and outrageous healings.   Each morning, they attend my satsang, though few of them are human, in any sense that you would understand. But of course they're all people, since every electron is made out of love.  M y body is the temple. The soil is my sangha. Thousands  of mitochondria gather in the domed cathedral of a single cell to  chant the Omkara, maintaining the  homeostasis of the whole planet, joined by   trillions of microbes from ancestral corpses in the loam, and  subterranean fungi star-catchers entangled in a single cilium, whose name is Legion, whose kingdom is blackness.    M y ceremony of stillness draws  hummingbirds, tree frogs, a family of Cooper's Hawks who live in the woods just over my dilapidated fence, itinerant N...