Uradiance

 "I" channel the vast wisdom of "Am." There is no higher source to be  channeled than your own radiance. Reclaim your sovereignty.  This is the teaching of the Christ.

Advaita flowers in the play of lover and beloved. Every perception is a deeper kiss. Just to be awake is a wedding. Why not really listen to a vireo at dawn? Why not scent a wild hyacinth and fall into original wonder? There was another world before this one. It is still at your fingertips. We don't have enough words to say "love," so we have hands. We don't have enough hands to do love, so we have tears. We don't have enough tears to feel love, but we taste silence. Not even silence is vast enough to contain love, so we surrender. The soft morning rain has ended. The broken sun trembles at every fern tip like a morsel of bread, a memory of manna for wanderers. Now the vireo through its own voice returns from that world to this one healing your body with a song.

  In the very unity of Awareness, the Other is present as Self-awareness.  The embrace of the Friend is already here. You are never alone.  (Image: Rumi and his Friend, Shams of Tabriz)

     At the center of every proton in each atom of your body, hidden by the smoke and mirrors of the quark dance, is a black hole that contain all the information in the cosmos, and Is. This infinitesimal black hole is precisely the same black hole that exists at the center of our galaxy, every galaxy. Groundless Yin. Dark energy between the threads of creation. Trough of your mind between thoughts. Hollow in a seed. This is the sound of the ocean in a conch, the virtual fragrance of the unblossomed bud of Buddha in your own heart. To fall into this brilliant abysmal darkness is meditation, which happens not through knowing but un-knowing. Therefore scripture says, "The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men" (1 Cor 1:25).

     Now a solar storm of beauty deluges the human heart. Distant galaxies are as intimate as the cells and molecules of your body. The ancestors gather round the fire in your chest. They are the very whisper of your deepest silence. The Friend is with you, even in the loneliness of midnight, even in the grief of the world. The linear logical mind cannot comprehend such Friendship, which does not come from outside, but wells up like a tear from the core of your being: the self-illumined radiance of pure consciousness. You cannot ever be alone, you know this now. Yet Divine Friendship seems so undeserved, so gifted, because it is not of your doing. This is why the intellect desperately resists the fierce onslaught of Now, experiencing the grace of Presence as a catastrophe, a loss. Old stories no longer work, because they try to place the cause before the effect, and the past before the future. You cannot build a bridge out of smoke. All there is, is the fire....

         “I heard a voice speaking to me: ‘The young woman whom you see is Love. She has her tent in eternity… It was love which was the source of this creation in the beginning when God said: Let it be! And it was. As though in the blinking of an eye, the whole creation was formed through love. The young woman is radiant in such a clear, lightning-like brilliance of countenance that you can’t fully look at her… She holds the sun and moon in her right hand and embraces them tenderly… The whole creation calls this maiden, Lady. For it was from her that all of creation proceeded, since Love was the first. She made everything…” ~Hildegard of Bingen  This is actually quite Biblical. In the book of Proverbs, chapter eight, Wisdom (Sophia) speaks as the divine feminine. She says that she was at play with God at the creation of the world and he delighted in her. She is the Shakti, the power of creation. Without her divine darkness there would be no l...

The breath you give is the breath you receive is the breath that whispered this planet into atoms, blew spirals of night into galaxies like glass and spindled out the flesh of your ancestors. We were connected by a dark sigh before we had names and our lungs are the bellows of the Maker. Don't waste a single exhalation complaining about the world. Choose beauty. The gift will not appear until you are grateful. Under snow, seeds listen. Are you singing to them? Why not? The softer your voice of praise the more they reach up golden cups of thirst and yearning. Here's the secret, creation happens quietly. Stillness swirls from inside out. You could be the cause of Spring. Photo from Issoantea

Clinging to light is not the way. Clinging to darkness is not the way. Winter is not an absence. Spring is not a destination. Lose your way in the Bardo between seasons and wake up wherever you are.

Let us explore how a prayer of many words becomes the prayer of "one word"  (monologistos). When prayer sinks from the linear thinking mind  through the breath into the Heart, a string of many thoughts distills into a  single divine Name. The painting is by Rembrandt.    

    To create an effect, every cause passes through the realm of the miraculous, which is the realm of the un-created. The miraculous is the discontinuity of the void, the empty space between any two impulses of energy. A galaxy or a photon, a breath or a seed, one who is dying or one who is being born, must perish and sprout again, perish and sprout again, from this space of discontinuity and re-creation. Your inhalation arises from this space. Spring arises from this space. Your heart beat arises from this space.  Quantum discontinuity evaporates the gossamer threads of necessity that bind action to reaction, cause to effect, melting the karmic mirage into a waveless transparency. This is the space of the shaman who performs miracles of healing or shape-shifting. The shaman breaks the chain of causation, entering the void between this moment and the next. The dew of causation dissolves, revealing the non-linear reality of clustered radiance, the v...

We all had tears of laughter in our eyes, shouting, "Don't speak the Word, don't create heaven or earth. Let's just stay crushed together in this unfermented juice!" It was no use. The Old Man cried, "Let there be light!" We all began fermenting. Everything's been tumbling downhill ever since, from  perfect order toward chaos.  Now we're a tangle of vines, both luscious and poisonous, beyond the broken fence. Our mouths are full of honeysuckle. Our ears are clover petals. I am lost in a bio-galactic meadow among pulsars of dew, gazing at a string of moons through a dragonfly's wing. We are dreams of light in each others optic nerves. Your otherness is as questionable as mine. Am I you or me? This field must be out beyond ideas of right or wrong. Here, Rumi wanders barefoot, half-tipsy with the wine of ambiguity. Come friend, drink from the bowl of my heart until it is hollow. Then drink even more. Let's both become the bot...

To taste the union of Lover and Beloved in every perception, to see the world as Beauty. Far from being an esoteric distraction, this is the solution to our problems. Whatever the political problem, it is never solved on the level where the problem arose, but at a completely new level of experience. Where there is beauty and delight, there can be no cruelty or exploitation. Every subject-object relationship dissolves into a subject-subject relationship. Then we "love our neighbor as our Self," as Christ said. Or in the words of Dostoevsky, "The world will be saved by Beauty." Yes, there is nothing more practical than Beauty.

What flows was once frozen, what freezes once was flow. Life and death are woven like raindrops in snow. The bone fire of old rams, the teat stream of the ewe, the glittering holograms of midnight stars in dew; a glance of full moon on a dark icy pond, the bright crystal rune of reflection, a wand of dragonwort touching its seed that sleeps under sod in hollows that bleed to bear a crocus god; white witchery of Imbolc that cloaks the frozen field, a shimmer-gift of fairy folk to salve earth's wound, unhealed; the brittle Winter sun my heart to pierce and thaw, and make my sap to run from furrows raw... O mover of the looms of time, dear Mother wise, sow roses in these tombs of light, my sleeping eyes. Image: Brigid's Blessing by Sue Ellen Parkinson

From brow to belly She leads you down a path of diamonds  crushed   mist-fine in midnight wind, each step love's hunger, which means you drop another veil. Now She’s nearer than your name, her long thin blade of stillness slicing the past from the future between heartbeats .  Her fingers caress your lungs so gently, so softly from within, you feel the faintest falling, as if  what held your breath for aeons finally releases its grasp. Until this moment you refused to enter the nave of your spine and take the wedding walk  beneath a dome so black  it must be the color of silence. Now you learn the terrible sweet journey of  pathlessness  from self to self. In a book with thin gold edges,   in temple,  mosque, and ashram, You searched for the Beloved, who wears no sandals, no white robe,  but the gossamer undergarment    of your next inhalation. The Paramour is a vine of roses on ...

Blake said, "We are put on earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love." Even if those beams are painful, scary, and feel like dying? Yes. By dissolving into the quantum sea of energy, which is love, we meditate, heal, and allow a new world to emerge through us. 

  Let all your pronouns dissolve in Thou. You are not a gender or a tribe, a nation or a race. You are the one who was born to gaze into my face, as I was born to gaze into yours. Our religion is a broken heart, spilling light out of darkness. We meet in the smell of food, giving thanks to the smallest creatures, the bee, the seed, the raindrop, learning from a withered Autumn sunflower how to scatter a thousand Summer mornings. ________ A poem from my book, 'Strangers & Pilgrims.' Illustration from The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayaam by Renée Bul

You no longer need a path to get back to the Beginning, to the Source of creation. Now you can begin at the goal. You are the Source. All paths flower out of your heart. This is not pride, but the fruit of emptiness. 

   We are most like God when we are uncertain, and draw no conclusions about anything. What is God's conclusion? Are we ever finished? Is there  an almighty stopwatch that rings and cries out, "All right, time's up?" What is the boundary of time or space?  Yet humans must invent the notion of a "Last Judgment" because we can't endure the boundless, the perhaps, the open-ended darkness of our glory. So we crave limits and border lines. We long for the end of time. I tell you, consciousness endures no closure, no final decision. Consciousness is ever-expanding. Will we look up in the sky to see a scoreboard telling us that our team won? This is the fantasy of the immature, the mind that needs linear thinking to construct final judgments. The mind needs conclusions, but the heart just keeps quietly bursting into the Unknown, flowering into Wonder. Image: Gustav Doré, Danté Gazes into the Celestial Rose

Don't wait for the shift to occur. You are the shift. Don't wait for the grand alignment of planets and stars. You are the alignment. You are not "in" the world or "of" the world. You are the world.    Feel the new earth. Feel it into creation. Do not will it or think it, but feel it. You are embarking on a whole new way, the Simpler Way, without a journey. Creation happens. The new earth manifests on the threshold of silence, like a faint ripple on a still sea. It happens at the  subtlest level of energy, which is the  breath of emptiness. Felt, not thought. Listened to, not spoken.    You no longer need to take up a "cause." You are the cause. You no longer need to impose an ideology upon others. That was like shouting at people from another room. Now just be present, sensing their energy, attuning to their frequency, gazing into their faces through the eye of your heart. Move them without joining any movement.   ...

  I cried, "Give me a meditation practice! Give me a spiritual technique! Something I can do right now to gain enlightenment!" The Friend answered, "You are already doing it." "I don't understand." "You're not supposed to understand," answered the Friend. "The mind has no part in this." "Then what practice am I doing?" You are born in a body on earth. You awaken. That is the practice." "What is the meaning of this birth?" "You are on a cross, crucified by a paradox, with no escape." "What is the meaning of this crucifixion?" "The marriage of opposites, which occurs on no other world, and in no heaven. This is why even the gods must be born on earth if they wish to gain liberation." "What is the center of this cross?" "The vanishing point between past and future, spirit and flesh, joy and pain, stillness and action, converging in your cruciform body, at the hea...

  Don’t teach, just marvel. Thread your words  loosely on  strings of silence. Never murmur to the edge of the page. When you rest  in this breath, nothing is ordinary. A fat summer fly still humming at your window pane. An old man in a white room still hoping  for a visit  from  his daughter. A rose-breasted nuthatch cocking her head, walking round and round the empty bird bath. Don’t teach, just marvel. Fill the stone circle with tears. Photo: Grange Co-op

When the old man in his forest cottage stirs honey in his tea, he is whisking the earth around the sun. When the mother is up at 4 a.m. rocking her sick baby, she is rocks the planet very gently on its axis. That moth you met on the mountain last summer, settling blue wings on a lupine, fanned the air just enough to bring snow this Winter, a promise of thistle blossoms in Spring. Now it is morning, time you bowed down to this ancient breath. The world is not saved by much doing. Image: St. Seraphim of Sarav

Let us continue the work and the play of Christmas, meditating every day of the year. Embrace the dark, rest in the heart, and give birth to the light within. Our work is to glow. ‪ Pictured here, the icon 'Our Lady of Vladimir,' 11th century, one of the oldest and most beloved paintings of Mary and Jesus. "The deeper part of the contemplative life takes place altogether in darkness, and in a cloud of unknowing, with a loving stirring blindly beholding the naked being only of God..." ~Cloud of Unknowing, 13th C. "Above all things love silence. Out of your silence will arise something that draws you into deeper silence. If you practice this, inexpressible light will dawn upon you." ~St. Isaac of Nineveh, 7th C.

Yoga scriptures of Patanjali define "samyama" as the last three "limbs" of yoga combined. This is confusing to many students because it seems like multi-tasking, doing three things at once: "dharana" (one-pointed focus), "dyana" (meditation, dissolving the intellect in the ocean of ananda), and "samadhi" (realizing pure awareness as the essence of creation.) In fact, the experience of samyama is one intuitive act, without effort. It means simply dropping your intention into the bliss of silence. Do you want to MANIFEST your deepest intention? Then plant your seed of intention in the dark soil of the UN-manifest, and leave it there, unseen, unknown, unspoken. Only then will your intention germinate, to flower in the light. Holding onto your intention, or constantly speaking it, only diminishes its energy, which is much more powerful when left in the silence of the seed. The womb of nature herself will gestate the seed in her own time, by...