Uradiance

  By dawn, the wind had fled, leaving a ruffle of  night-weary Canada geese in the wetland. Pearls of moss on stone. Jagged bolts of dogwood etched softy in the sky. Plum buds releasing their grip on themselves. A silent white boat drifting over me. Is it the same moon that floated over grandmother’s garden before I learned to measure  months and years? Child (I say to myself) it is never the same moon. It is never the same mind. When the heart is free from thought, I hear the burst of onion-scented snow drops. Nothing urgent in the conversation of tree frogs. All they mean to say is a thousand good mornings. I sip the green tea of What Is, mindful of the ever unfolding moment whose trembling we call time. Some causeless force distills my senses into healing tears, pure love’s transparency, a love not of or for, staining the empty silk-screen of awareness with this wabi-sabi world suspended in Spring mist. ...

Again I say, this is the time of the great shaking. One of the terrible blessings of Kali Yug is that what may be shaken falls away, so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Our personality is shaken. Our emotions, minds, and bodies are shaken. Now, thrown back into what is never shaken, we drink from the unquenchable wellspring of pure consciousness. Tapping the nectar of hridayam, the silence of our heart's core, from there we sing the causeless music of the unstruck bell. This is not a time of crisis, but opportunity: an invitation to distinguish the changing from the unchanging. Our spiritual journey is not to rise, but to fall. And fall not far. Simply descend through a breath of Grace from the mind to the heart. Let the Friend guide you to the hidden treasure of your Self. We do not discover the Self in the angst of division and blame, but in the fragrance of unity. The scent of this flower is uniquely your own. Yet in your trembling core of stillness is the wedding of Shiva...

You are not in time. Time is in you. You are not a tick of the clock.  You are the Witness of past, present, and future.  

      Just for an hour on a Spring morning, give up being right. The earth won't disappear. You will. Not being of the world refreshes the meadow. Just for an hour, lie fallow. Or even for a breath allow the golden swamp cabbage, the shy forest trillium to fill your absence with joy. Be irrelevant. Let snowdrops flower without you.

           "Savor every inch of breath in your body." ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar One inhalation is incalculable abundance. This breath, an influx of wonder, brings more revelation that the Bible, the Qur'an, or the Vedas, because it is their source. Every inspired text or prophecy springs from the silence where this breath is born, and to which it returns. To delight in this breath is the end of war. To delight in this breath is the end of consumerism and craving. When you savor this breath, your needs are few. When your needs are few, you exploit no one. You walk softly over the earth, tasting every step in the present moment, the green in the moss, the murmur of a tree frog. Walking this way, you are free. In a very innocent way, you can live simply, sustainably, without preaching, without political parties. Wherever you stand is holy ground. Remove your shoes. You do not take this breath, you receive it, and just to breathe is worship. For the span...

You have a mission of green on a thirsty planet. Your task is the grace of a fallen raindrop, a plum bud opening in snow, a towhee at dawn grubbing through moss for scattered stars.  In late Winter, be first among fragrances. Disdain the cynic. Release a gleam of April from your loam bulb. Don't waste time becoming anyone but a Lover. Breathe peace. Do beauty with your hands. Hope with your eyes, giving a portion of your light to strangers. Insist on no other moment but this one. Simple words, my friend, but they were born of many tears. Photo: Rolalaloves.com 

This morning our meditation is to hum. No Om, no metaphysics, no esoteric tantra. Just hum. You did this when you were very young. Maybe listening to your mother's heartbeat. Maybe pressed against your father's chest. Feel your voice resonating in your skull. Feel your music gonging the bowls in your belly, your hips, overflowing. More quietly now, feel your own voice ringing every cell. More quietly now, hear it chime your atoms, every photon a moan of light, a final M of silence. Now you understand. The hum was already there, oscillating your molecules. The hum was already there, spilling starlight from a proton. The name of God already there filling empty space beyond the rim of time. You were dancing to this music before you were conceived. You were singing this song, this song was singing you before you breathed. All was forgiven, given before, by Grace. Joy was given before creation....

   Three baby steps to liberation. One. Give up the outrage. Drop it right now. The only reason we hold onto outrage is, it's delicious. We love it, even though it makes us miserable and obsessed. So we pretend that our outrage has great moral justification. But justice never arises from hate. So just drop it, right now. We can do this. It is a choice. Two. Drop the opinion. We think the world won't survive without our opinion. Really? Can't we see how small and frantic our opinion makes us? Now just let it go. Vast consciousness has no opinion. Peace has no opinion. Three. Drop the mind. Let awareness sink into the heart. Rest in this beating organ of humble service. Feel it, don’t think it. There is no thinking with the heart. Just let it be a silent open wound.   Now we can breathe. Breathe through the heart, as we were meant to. We did this when we were babies. Breathe the whole sad tender world into the heart. Like a flower, like a fragrance. Th...

I didn't reject my heritage, I updated my Christian software. New Age seekers don't need  to reject Christ, just get reacquainted by shifting from the intellect to the heart, from the  way of the theologians to the way of the mystics.

No need to tell you my Guru's name. No need to show you his face. Just come a little nearer my heart and you will catch fire.

"One who merges the mind in the Heart perceives this world as it truly is: a projection  of consciousness." ~Shiva Sutras. "Let the mind rest in the heart." ~Philocalia 

  Knowing gets in the way. Just surrender conceptual thinking, but very gently, with tender affection for this useless mind. Then rest in the surge of energy that comes with being merely awake, free from thought. Countless invisible suns fill your blue sky. You don't need energy, you Are energy. You are the vast energy you wasted in trying to know something. Now all that energy is available as wonder. Past and future dissolve in the silent explosion of Being, because they were only thoughts. Now, waves of delight vibrate from your body into each blade of grass and lump of soil, causing microbes to shiver with grace and galaxies to tremble with joy. Yet you haven't actually "done" anything.  Simply surrender the effort to know, to hold a concept in the mind. Even if you only "do" this for an instant at dawn, your whole day will vibrate with energy, the energy released by your awakening.  At first light , open your eyes and simply see, with the clarity you a...

      On the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, I confess that I am "the first among sinners." Why? Because all that I see and all that I know is apprehended through the shattered lens of my own ego, distorted by the mind that superimposes its shadow, and blurs its own vision. The world appears to me just as my mind is. So the Yoga scriptures declare: "Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: as the mind is, so the world appears." The profoundly realistic Christian vision of Sin is precisely the teaching of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. We do not see the true divine creation around us, we see only the projection of this mind. The problem of human living becomes: how can we learn to see through the eye of the heart, an eye freed from the gray clouds of thought? Jesus called this "the single eye." He said, "If your eye is single, your whole body will be filled with light." But most of us New Agers have nought but disdain for the notion of Sin....

  Sharing some tender and wondrous stories about being with a true Guru, who is Nobody.

  Almost everything that comes out of certainty is ruthless, rigid, and authoritarian. Those who are certain of their truth are very dangerous, whether they're coming from the left or the right. I feel more at home in the satsang of the Uncertain, than in a party of true believers. Almost everything that comes out of Uncertainty is creative, fresh, newborn. This is as true in physics - the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - as in metaphysics. February daffodils, their yellow wounds of promise. Anger, a fire that is almost always about something else. The irony of mist, that lovely gloom. Saying goodbye. Uncertainty does not mean ambivalence, self-doubt, or indecision. It means response-ability in the present moment, for only Presence resolves the polarity of opposites. Our willingness to rest in Uncertainty engenders a profound and humble alchemy. The state of "I don't know" is the womb of revelation. Image: Rashani Réa, from the book of my ...

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.

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.

      Rest ever so gently now guided by a scent of myrrh from the tower of voluptuous silence inside you. I speak of the Magdalene, that stairway of spiraling night in the frailest bones of your spine. No, do not ascend, but go down into the sacred underworld of your body. Penetrate the dark energy of absence and find a mysterious sepulcher in every pebble, every stone hollow as your own throat, a cup of Christ's blood in the first Spring flower. Taste the bread of the highest world in a plum bud. Her Spirit flows not from above but out of the sod into your naked feet, consuming your marrow in a green flame that undulated in your hollows before there was light. Now gaze through your vertebrae into a trillion stars. Or are they reflections in a deep well? Stillness knows no distance, no above or below. Let this breath be a kiss like the kiss of your father on your mother’s belly before...

When your gaze first plumbs  the sky-blue pool of love,  this melting diamond of ten thousand galaxies gazes back with the beauty of a face,  the face of the Friend, intimate, familiar. Then must you dare to drown  in Beauty itself, beyond the countenance,  beyond the gaze. This is courage. First you sip from an image, a likeness, then you drink a little more from the mirror of creation and sip from the imageless, inebriated with longing, no longer looking for that Face, but from that Face. This the secret,  yearning  is the very wine it thirsts for. But who is the sommelier? Jesus? Gurudev? Mahéshvara,  the Lord of creation? Dear one, you are the wine  and you are the cup.  You are the Alone and you are the Friend. You are the beginning and the end of the pilgrimage. Between your crown and your chest, legions of angels ascend and descend on the stairway of one silver breath. Tonight there is a wedding, it is yours. You are the Bridegroo...