Uradiance

To be human is a gift. To be on earth is a gift, especially now, the worst of times, the best of times. The greatest gift you can receive is the gift of paradox. To spread your arms and open your heart in the cruciform gesture of early Christian prayer, the "orant posture," is precisely how a Lakota warrior stands in the Hanbleceya, crying for a vision, facing the dawn; and exactly how a Taoist warrior of peace, in Qigong meditation, stands tall, spreads her arms, and embraces the rushing winds of time. The gift of paradox is your flesh. Stumble akimbo, wildly widely hugging. Let East and West kiss in the chuppah of your heart. From your crown to your feet, let the lightning in your spine unite the North and South. Let shadows and suns from every end of the cosmos merge in your chest. Be the antipodes. When you cling to the light, you are lost. When you cling to the dark, you are lost. Don't be a fist, be an open palm. Heavenly beings envy your human birth. They ...

"There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest heaven. This is the light that shines in our hearts."  ~Chandogya Upanishad 3.13.7 "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ."  ~2 Corinthians 4:6 Both the Vedic and Christian traditions make the same astonishing claim: that the divine light embodied by the universe shines from the intimate core of our own hearts, as the light of Consciousness. This radiance is deeper inside us than our mind, yet it is the very energy from which the cosmos is created. Distance is illusion. I am wedded to the quasar ten billion light years from here, whose glow is my body. There is no such place as elsewhere.  I Am not estranged from the creation around me, and I Am never alone. Every blade of grass, sparrow feather, dust mote and star is a fiery golden...

 

  Beneath the veil of words is the face of silence. Under the fountain of ideas is the well of Unknowing. Bathe in the grace at the end of your breath, just before the next breath is given. Given, not taken. Rest in holy Darkness, creation's groundless womb. Be the night and you will give birth to stars. Can you hear what hums before mind arises, the song that transmutes each atom, each electron of your flesh, into the glorious light of the body of Christ? Why else are you here? Image: Rose window, Chartres

    I just found this little meditation written 15 years ago and thought it worth resurrecting... "All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness."  ~Sir Arthur Eddington, founder of quantum physics "Bread which fills the hungry, we utter over you the name of the Mother. Come, hidden Mother, unite with us in this sacrament which we celebrate in your name." ~Gnostic Acts of Thomas Many spiritual seekers attempt to rise above the body and transcend matter. But matter is "mater," the Great Mother herself, who among early Christian Gnostics was considered to be the Holy Spirit. In true meditation, we don't need to transcend the body, or rise above matter. We ARE matter. Instead of resisting what we are, we can consciously embrace our weight, our mass, our connection with the ground, and the sacred pull of gravity. Gravity is the grace of the Mother. Gravity centers us. As it pull...

If you breathe through the place where you already are, you will slip down the stem of this body and return to your see. You will meet the aboriginal Grandmother deeper within you than the sky, and the tribe of the first people will emerge from the loam. Some say an ant hill, some say a yoni between three blood-red stones.  You will remember how to play the drum of your diaphragm with dancing bones of love. How to pluck the antelope- horned lyre of your heart using fingers of the moon, and scent healing sage in the desert of your teardrop. We've spent so many lives becoming “you” and “me.” Yet there is no other power but the way we melt into  each other, and become rain. The way we are poured as one sizzled offering into a fire that heals the earth. Image: aboriginal painter Colleen Wallace

To A Born Again Christian Who Thinks I Am Headed for Hell... (I wrote this epistle almost 20 years ago and just rediscovered it. I think it speaks to us today). "The Kingdom of the Father is spread all over the earth  and men do not see it."  ~Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, 113 1. My dear friend, as you are concerned about my soul, I offer this reply. I offer it to all Evangelical Christians across this land who believe that religion can only take one form, a strictly limited one for sure, and intend to impose it upon the whole nation. I speak as a fellow Christian from a faith that grew right along side of yours, though you may not know much about it since the patriarchs of your tradition tried with great fervor and some success to stamp it out. I am a Quaker. The Quakers were one of the Non-Conformist churches of 17th century Europe who refused to embrace the creeds and confessions of Protestant orthodoxy. Quakers have no written creed. They profess that Christ is an Inward Lig...

There are 196 verses in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Only three of them deal with asanas.... No one teaches yoga to a flower. Learn bending from her stem, what the hurricane cannot crush. Breathe from the seed. Abandon every sequence and routine. Your body is a river of postures flowing toward the ocean of repose. Valiant and gentle as an oak, stand and sway in the breeze of your own exhalation. Mind falls like a feather on your belly. The estuary of your lungs ebbing, rising, as you listen to the moon. Inhale the night, the emptiness into your bones. Feel your ligaments dissolve into swirling galaxies, your muscles washed in awareness rolling out of the ocean in every cell. A goddess guides you now, thinking not required. Your backbone is her wand of bewilderment. Your pelvis her boat, laden with its cargo of unborn stars. No Word of creation but an infinitesimal murmuring, the Godspell of your body, every molecule a hologram of the heart. Fr...

Maybe the cosmos isn't out of tune. Maybe you're out of tune with your own broken heart. Let the sun take a Sabbath today. No flares, no drama. The stars recline in orbits of repose like elders on a summer porch in white wicker couches. The constellations wander whirling their parasols without going anywhere really. Look, it's happening again, just as it did one moment ago, the gentle flow of a silent stream you never slow down enough to float on. Right here, for a little while, there is no apocalypse, just a gentle revelation beneath your breastbone in the valley between breaths. Wash your doom away with gentle tears. It's not the end, or the beginning, just another day on earth, a world where every sparrow is an empath, every fawn an indigo child with star-splashed fur. Maybe this is the morning to celebrate your slightly bonkers yet uniquely kiltered bones, these fingertips, these eyes that let the...

It happened so softly,  you thought it was a robin's egg,  tiny, edgeless, blue.  But it was the sky in your chest.

An awakened heart carries the pain that others can't bear. A boundless heart weeps cleansing tears without knowing why. The gift of tears is a sacrament, revealing that your hridaya only appears to be a separate particle, but is actually a wave in the ocean of Love, subtlest energy-field in creation. A friend feels both love and pain. We are all connected in the field of the heart. We are all friends of the Friend. Photo:  Aile Shebar