Uradiance

When you get tired of following the commandments,  follow your aching into the fountain  of desire . Here in  the heart  there is only one law: you are both Lover and Beloved. This is not a serious  relationship. It only lasts a moment   again and again. You are playing  in an ancient garden, leaning on a  swing  inside breathing. Your inhalation ,   a serene  obsession  beyond all thirst. Your exhalation ,   what fills silence with lyrics  only fools can sing. In the science of love, there is a midnight and a dawn. If you think you can avoid Radha's  loneliness,  you will never become the flute that rests on Krishna’s   lips. If you think you can survive without yearning, you will never have enough. Listen to the secret.    This longing for God is God.

  Be a lion, not a sheep. Let your serenity roar. You are entering golden times. Pierce these clouds of gray and shine. Take your sovereignty back. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. The term, "second coming," never appears in the Bible. It was invented by Justin Martyr in the second century CE. The scriptural term often confused with a second coming of Jesus is "parousia." Para means supremely full. Ousia means being, participle of the Greek verb "to be." The coming of Christ, the Parousia, is the supreme fullness of Being. Why wait for it? Jesus said, "You Are the light of the world" (Mat 5:14). And he said, "The works that I do, ye shall do also, and even greater than these" (John 14:12). Be your own ascended master. Ascend to the seventh heaven on your inhalation. Rest in the boundless heaven of stars just inches above your crown. Now descend on your exhalation, incarnating Christ in your solar plexus. Pulsate...

  To encounter your higher self in the soft spot  at the crown of your skull is to meet the Christ. To befriend your soul traveling on the highway  of your vagus nerve  is to hug the Buddha. To behold your image and likeness in the mirror  of the Spirit, shining boldly  from the pineal gland  inside your brain,  is to become your own  Guru....  This is  liberation from God,   for the sake of God, by the grace of God. Gaze into the gazer. Ignite the formless radiance of the sun in every cell of your body. Pour the milk of unborn stars down your spine,  polishing the amethyst  of a boundless sky between your heartbeats. Isn't it time  to shake off the illusion   of “higher” and “lower”? You've been longing for the kiss of the Beloved.  It won’t happen after you die,  som...

  I came only for one reason, to tell you the Creator is a radiant golden sun rising in your chest, and this very breath is a Goddess dancing in the wilderness of your flesh. They meet in the Bridal Chamber, a scented ineffable stillness where He pours Her into your grail of darkness. The nectar overflows, nourishing the garden of names, your body. This selfsame vintage spilled into Mary's womb, sending out  tendrils and leaves on a trellis of bone. Did you imagine this fragrance would end at the edge of the meadow? Did you imagine the rootstock at the center of your vineyard was­ a reed that plays no melody when the wind blows? This is why you are hollow, friend.   The sound is magnified by caverns of silence and blood deep beneath your breastbone. Your music makes the world green again. ________________ Listen to this poem on YouTube HERE Image: Garden of Eden by Jan Brueghel the Elder

Something's not right. You can't quite get the world to conform to the story you tell about it in your head. You could repair what is wrong if you could just get your mind to download properly, copy and paste it onto the energy of ineluctable dandelions springing from cracks in the asphalt, rubble in the bomb crater, old men living in tents under the highway exit ramp. The problem really isn't the world but your thoughts about it. The story you tell in your head is never quite the same as my story, or the story told by the other party. So there is conflict, and suffering, even if our stories are about salvation, justice, equality, the perfect marriage, the cleanest environment, the path to enlightenment... Happiness never happens if we glaze the planet in the slather of our commentary. Joy is a dance of photons swirling in the chaos of silence at the heart of now. Let the story and its teller disperse like fine morning mist. Allow the creatures to clarify themselves, becomi...

A true story of grace and transformation, originally published in the Quaker journal, 'What Canst Thou Say.' I share it again for the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, which begins at Vespers on July 21. In all wisdom traditions, she is here in the anahatta chakra. Her secret name is the Unstruck Sound. She personifies our yearning for divine Beauty. For Longing and Beauty ceaselessly merge, separate, and merge again. This is the eternal pulse in the whirling heart of the universe. Radha yearning for Krishna, a Sufi's ecstatic dance with Ruuh, Magdalene longing for Jesus: all creation is a likeness of their lila, the divine play of "bhedabheda," which in Sanskrit means, "two, not-two." Dear friend, do not be troubled by this resonant play of reflections. Just rest between two breaths, and become the mirror. I know there are many of you who embody this same rhythm of longing and union, who yearn for Divine Beauty. So I share this story of ...

In the World Religion course I teach, one of the alternate journaling assignments I give students is a chance to explore the Prayer of the Heart, or "Jesus Prayer." I introduce it with a guided meditation which is on SoundCloud ( LINK ). One student gave a very innocent, sincere, and yet profound response which I think is worth sharing: "I didn’t really plan to try the Prayer of the Heart more or less just try to give experiences about my divine path as a Christian. It kind of just happened one night when I couldn’t sleep while recently on vacation. Everything felt off. I wasn’t sad exactly, but I felt this heavy thing in my chest I couldn’t explain. Like I was tired in a way that rest doesn’t fix. I was scrolling on my phone just to avoid thinking, but nothing helped. I felt stuck in my head. "Then, out of nowhere, I remembered this short prayer I had the assignment on: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' "I don...

To meditate is to enter the convergence of all pairs of opposites. This is the bindhu , the ayin soph , at the center of the Cross, a black hole where polarities collapse in a burst of self-annihilation. It is at once the supreme loss and the supreme luminosity.  To be crucified with Christ is the infinite negation at the heart of the world, where creation explodes from emptiness, light from darkness, life from death, the subtlest particle of matter from the quantum vacuum. Positive energy flows from negation, creation from the un-created.  Only when consciousness is naked and freed from every thought can one enter this needle's eye at the center of the Cross. Belief, memory, and imagination must be abandoned, along with the me who thinks, remembers, and imagines. In deep meditation, loss is unbounded. No-thing remains. Emptiness is absolute. The word absolute comes from the Latin ab ( away) and solvere (to loosen).  Absolute , loosen...

    Some long to hear a “channeled message” from Mary Magdalene. But Mary Magdalene doesn't channel words. She channels tears.  Her tears do not drop down from above. They well up from an unfathomable dark spring inside you.  Are they tears of pain or tears of joy? Is there a difference? You must choose. They are your tears now. Perhaps all tears are made of her bittersweet myrrh.   Mary speaks no message from the past, no message for the future. She is the message, gazing back from the radiant night of the mirror I AM.  Mary is not an archetype. She is a Person. She is not a symbol of some deeper truth. She is Truth. And her wildest passion is for you to become Truth too.  Mary is the vessel of Divine Silence. Without a sound she pours more wisdom through a single breath than 10,000 verses of scripture could contain.  Ascended masters descend...

  Bewilderment is a form of grace. When you are bewildered, your mind gives up and sinks into the heart. To rest the mind in the heart is the beginning and end of spiritual practice. This practice is very subtle, but not in the least esoteric. What is the cost? The only price is your whole Being. Feel the warmth in your chest, like the memory of a first kiss. Feel the bee-wild nectar of the hum where all mantras, all names of God, arise in silence. Let your breath arise there too. Ever so softly, inhalation flows up as a cooling flame through the back of your throat, behind your eyes, into your crown - the tender fontanelle that made you so vulnerable and open when you were a baby. This breath is permeated with awareness. Therefore it is completely self-awakened, yet there is only breath, and no thought. When the breath of wonder is full, it radiates into the stars above you. And just as softly now, you breathe out. A glittering mist of Shakti, the energy of the Goddess, pours down...

Mother is a verb. Am. Ma. Anyone can. Mother a stranger. Mother me. Cherish the womb of a deeper silence. Give birth to your own heart. There is so much outrage in the world! But the primal outrage is the separation of "I" from "AM," the sense that I have fallen away from my own boundless Being. This is the real cause of our world-anger. It's actually in-rage, not out-rage. All the pain we humans inflict on each other reflects the pain of separation from our source. Yet the separation is an illusion, a dream. "I" have not fallen because there is really no distance between "I" and "AM." The source is nearer than my next heartbeat. As a mother bears her infant, so "AM" gives birth to "I" with every breath. The ancient Madonna archetype expresses this insoluble bond of love, uniting the ocean of Ma to this little wave, this little "I." The irony is that I become truly selfless, not...

  "You yourself are even another little world and have within you the sun and the moon and also the stars." ~Origen of Alexandria, 1st C. The difference between creator and creation is important to the theologian, but lost on lovers. One proton of your dear one's body contains the information of all the galaxies. The cry of a sparrow keeps a black hole from engulfing the sun. "Are you saying that this flower is God?" Absolutely, I say that this flower is God. "Blasphemy! The boundless transcendental Godhead cannot be contained in your lover's flesh!" On the contrary, I say that a robin's egg encircles the blue sky, and a daffodil is the body of God. "What kind of religion is this?" This is anu vrat, the ancient yogis' vow of an atom . Agree to find God in the tiniest particle of creation. That is why the Upanishads declare, Ano raniyan mahato mahyan : One atom of the smallest contains the greatest. ...

  Can you choose anything but this moment? Accept it or reject it, that is the only freedom. You think you decide on a future but when the future arrives  it's a strange land. Of course you can always postpone  the present and choose  the past. People make up stories every morning about last night. But that’s a waste of tomorrow. Hug the dragon of presence. Welcome this ancient wingéd fire-breathing Now with open eyes and a wounded heart. Decline it and you suffer. Be reasonable, you can’t refuse because you're living it! So where’s the problem? Choose what Is  and you're already free. This is how a flower grows. How a drop of dew dissolves on the purple clematis. How an aging gazelle offers the pulse of his throat to a hungry lioness. Don't worry. We're all evaporating into photons,  whirling back into stars,  yet some prodigal lightheartedness  keeps  creat...