Uradiance

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...

Seeing the chaos of this fractured world through the lens of God's 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.  St. Simeon wrote, "one who is blind in relation to one thing, God, is totally blind in relation to everything." C. S. Lewis said, " I believe in Christ as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."  Through the clear lens of Christ, I see things I was too afraid to acknowledge before. I see not only the hallowed radiance that envelopes every dust mote, every morning glory, and every electron of matter, I see some hard things too. I see that there is evil in this world. If I don't begin there, I stumble blindly. I see that my human ego dwells in a perpetual state of self-destruction narcissism, which Christians call "Sin." If I don't diagnose the illness, I will ...

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.

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. 

  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. Just ask...

  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.

      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