Uradiance

I've been giving short  heart-to-heart talks on Christ and the inner Friend here on my website Uradiance, on Youtube, sometimes on facebook. These talks feel very present and personal to me, like I'm talking one to one with You. It's where the crest of the wave of continuing revelation takes my surfboard now. What shore I'll crash on I don't know. Seeing the chaos of this fractured world through the lens of Christ, the transparency of his Grace, suddenly reveals that all is happening according to plan, and the world doesn't appear crazy anymore. But its not the plan of the human intellect. Some people think I'm becoming too "Christian." If that makes you uncomfortable then just gently "unfriend" me and it will make room for new contacts. Its OK. Yet as I see it, I'm really not very Christian at all in an orthodox sense. Christ is not someone to be abandoned by the New Age, but updated with a new understanding. The update of the ...

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...

  When you are dying,  you will be confused   by the din of silence like 10,000 waterfalls gushing out of your core, drowning the noise of the world. And as you sink into that lovely thunder of white water, you'll try to remember what it was you needed to do in the world. "There was something I needed to do," you'll say to no one else. It will be like trying to remember a dream, a dream receding as the sky recedes when you float down into the green crystal deep. Then, in a moment, a moment that has no edges, like a plum blossom bursting its shell of snow, you'll remember what it was, what it was you were supposed to do in the world. You were supposed to be happy. To breathe gratitude for no particular reason. That was it. That was all.

  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...

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