Uradiance

  God spoke to me this Sabbath morning, or maybe it was a hummingbird. This is what her invisible wings inscribed on the air. I don't want Union, I want Nearness. Love is Two melting into Zero, so much more than One. No philosophy but play. The world is not saved by your political opinion, arguing for or against. The world is saved by your blessing. And how do you bless? You smile, not from your lips, but from your chest. You breathe, knowing that everyone on earth is breathing this golden breath. By the way you walk, the way you sit, the way you recline, then rise to stand again before the faithful sun, the way you wield your grandfather's hoe, your grandmother's cup, you demonstrate to friend and foe the majesty of merely Being. Photo: Penn State University News

     “Rest the mind in the heart"  is a profoundly simple instruction r epeated verbatim in the Shiva Sutras, the Vijnana Bhairava, and the Orthodox Christian Philokalia.  The alchemy practiced by cats, Taoist masters, and breast-sated infants. In the democracy of the heart, there is no difference between purring, chanting "Om," or gurgling “Mama.”  Yet it's really not a practice at all, but the surrender of practice, where doing yields to Being.     To stay safe, you might regard resting in the heart as a method of relaxation or stress management. But if you have courage, you let it be the portal to a New Creation. "Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation; old things have passsed away: behold, all is made new." (II Corinthians 5:17) The Heart is not just a beating organ for aerating your blood. It is a doorway. You  could only pass over  the threshold of an ancient temple after removing your shoes. Shoes represented the beliefs an...

What will you do with the sky blue sapphire in your brow?  What will you do with the radiant pearl of grief and joy in your throat?  What will you do with the golden flower of the sun in your heart?  Walk gently over the earth, giving them away to everyone you meet.  

   This must be the answer. The milky way is your breath. You are made of  starlight from so far away, it only now arrives in your body. Barefoot  in wet moss,     you gaze into the glitter of midnight  unnaming  the creatures. Full moons float on an ocean  in every cell of your bones. This wild and holy silence is your only religion. It is called, "Bewilderment."  Having been veiled, you  unveil,  and having  dreamt, you  undream  the past and future. Opening your palms,  you hold  the sky, all its worlds so  weightlessly delightfully  uncertain and possible.  At last you have something  to give. Photo: Wally Pacholka

     Become irrelevant. Then you can dance. Become useless. Then you can observe, unobserved. Threatening no one, you are a secret agent of the Most High. Not understanding what in hell is going on, you gather the intelligence of the unknown and reveal the prophecy of silence. People don't notice your body, its pebbles and chinks where spiders nest, its deer trails spiraling nowhere, the dandelions growing from your cracks. Your mansion crumbles and you become a field of grass too low and green for storms to knock down. You wither to wisps of brown. A forest mother weaves you into a mat for her baby. You are so finely woven, you hold water for shepherds who watch under the stars. And when you have truly become nobody, the Goddess breathes you. You are filled with light even while your flesh is sleeping. Photo: Shepherd in the Dolomites, from The Guardian

Breathe out, sink into your heart, enter the Bindhu of eternity where worlds are born.  Breathe in, be filled with starlight from your belly to your crown.  Where did you think creation happened? Up above? Out there?  No, dear friends, it happens in your chest.  I would suggest, rather than looking at my silly face,  you close your eyes and let this happen as a meditation inside you.

    "Take back your sovereignty. Bathe friend and stranger alike in the radiance of your heart. Stay centered in the boundless simplicity of your core, and don't let your mind be infected with the negative energy of warring parties. The chaos happening on the surface right now just belies the cleansing in the depths. Old stories and corrupt institutions must collapse to make way for a new earth, whose energy will be generated through the Heart, self-organized through the Intuition. Let empires break up into small, autonomous, bio-regional republics. This is not the end but the beginning." Finn spoke these words to me in beams of silence this morning. My teachers are not ascended masters or intergalactic spirit guides. My teachers are hummingbirds, frogs in the wetland, midnight owl wings, coyote howls. The wild and gentle gaze of the Friend.

       Anything that can collapse is not who you are. You are what cannot collapse, because it was never built. It was never babbled by the mind into a many-storied tower. Governments collapse. Political parties implode. Dollar bills suddenly blow away, empty and worthless. Overnight, world teachers, ayatollahs, popes and gurus lose their hypnotic charisma. You open your eye, even your own personality collapses, the persona you called "me," dissolving like an angry nest of fleeing hornets from your chest. You fall down crying like a baby on the kitchen floor, strangely relieved, wondering what ever happened to "you." Good work! Keep falling! Right through the linoleum, into the worm-dark loam where stones breathe wisdom in chthonic stillness, ancestral waters spring from blue crystal silence at the core of the planet, and you plummet all the way into the womb of your heart. Which is my heart. Which is our great great grandmother's heart. Which is the unshakable ...

  “In this silence there is a strange warmth, a soft light in the heart that is not of thought. It is not an idea of God, nor a vision; it is simply being, without name.” ~ J. Krishnamurti "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. Hesychius of Jerusalem " If I create from the heart,  nearly everything works;  if from the head,  almost nothing."  ~Marc Chagall "The soul's ability  to nourish itself  lies in the heart."  ~Aristotle "Exhalation goes out,  inhalation comes in.  At the stillpoint where  they merge,  one enters the space  from which Creation comes forth  and into which it is absorbed. The supreme Goddess,  whose nature is to create, constantly expresses herself  as outbreath and inbreath.  By resting awareness  in the space of the heart,  between t...

   "Glorify God in your Body." ~1 Corinthians 6:20 Spirituality is not the renunciation of the senses, but their refinement to the subtlest of all sensations: God. God is the most sensuous of delights. Meditation refines sensation through quietness. Our spiritual practice cultivates finer perception until taste and smell sense the flavor and fragrance of pure Being; sight gazes into the light shining from Divine Darkness; touch feels the inner caress of breath, the gravity-hug of earth through the skin; hearing listens to the hum of silence, which contains the music of galaxies. Subtler than these five sense organs is the sixth, the mind. Meditation refines the mind just as it refines the other organs of perception. When the restless mind settles into quietness, we transcend thought, no image limits awareness, the bliss of emptiness overflows, and reason relishes infinity. Subtler than mind is the soul, I Am, yet the soul is also a sense organ. The soul ...

 

I used to think there was a macrocosm out there, and a microcosm down here. I used to think, "As above, so below," like, there was a difference. I thought there was inner and outer. I thought there was a feminist spirituality and a masculine spirituality, an indigenous tribal way and a European way, an Eastern soul and a Western soul. Everything seemed very complicated, and multi-dimensional. And I was always choosing sides. But I was looking through the shattered lens of egoic mind, and seeing with double-vision.   Then I relaxed into who I really Am, breathed down into my chest, and began seeing through the clear lens, the single Eye of the Heart. As Jesus said, "When your Eye is single, your whole body will be filled with light." Human beings all live in one homeland, one kingdom of God. We are all born here, in the land of the body. We may appear in eight billion different colors, but there is only one human race. Each one of us contains the mothering energy...

There's a priceless diamond inside your chest. Why stop to buy trinkets on the steps of the temple? They are for tourists and pilgrims, but you live here. The door is always open. Step into the darkness where you were glowing  before your first breath and the silence hummed your true Name before you were conceived. Rest in your original body. The one with edges is just a shell.  The real one has empty hands, half-parted lips about to sing,  bare soles covered with soot   from other buildings, burnt and fallen, an eye that never sleeps shining between two wells, the fountain of laughter  and the spring of tears. Here you have a boundless heart  inside the one that beats. This shrine isn't holy,  or secret, or hard to find. Nothing carved in marble. No priests, no experts. It's a place where your  guru appears as an ordinary person. Where everyone whispers, I Am, ...

Don't be so deep. Spend a meager moment frolicking on the surface of things. Some say you're the ocean. I say, be a wave, a bubble of foam. Skip across a thousand crests like a sunbeam. Moth-dance on my lips and eyes, figure me with little kisses. Be pollen on the window, not the glass. Expressionist bird droppings on a marble terrace. Your soul defined by blemishes and crow’s feet. A vintage golden earring in the trash. Pay more attention to what's thrown away. ‘Away’ might be your motherland. When you dust off Great  Aunt Gertrude's teapot, become the dust. Or a snowflake dissolving on the first plum bud. Holding the void in your head, trying to merge with nothing, makes you heavy. Be a blade of grass. What's wrong with thingness? Sumi-e: Sakai Houitsu, Late Edo period

 In this conversation, may we dare to touch on the question of the  incarnation of Christ? Not as a doctrine but a gift to the human heart,  the ultimate expression of divine Friendship.  Pictured here is our new  book, 'Rest In The Heart,' with my poems and the wondrous mandala- collages of Rashani Réa, soon to be published. 

We may dispel almost all conspiracy theories by applying the principle known as Hanlon's Razor: "Do not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity." However, I do subscribe to one conspiracy theory, and you may feel free to borrow it. For billions of years, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, and the gravity of each gazing star, and every hydrocarbon, chloroplast, or photon of sunlight in my breath, yes even the shy colors of the meadow, celadon and sage, have conspired to gather my atoms toward this moment, now, where the only choice is to fall on my knees in sparkling moss, spreading to wind and sky my arms,  useless though they be as wings,  and to confess: "I don’t know what the fuck is going on!" Only then am I capable of praying:  "I'm sorry. Forgive me. Thank you. I love you." This is how the whole universe conspires to fill my heart with perfect joy.

    God has given me a practice, the beginning and end of every path. Rest the mind in the heart, breath scattering stars. God has given me a discipline. Receive just what the moment brings, want nothing more, learning to say, 'Enough,' the one-word prayer of ineffable gratitude. Here is a secret. It's not what God gives me each moment that makes me rich, it is this prayer. * A poem from 'Strangers & Pilgrims'