Uradiance

      Silence is the unmanifest mother of creation. Where silence deepens, songs germinate. Where darkness falls, seeds of fire spring out of nothing. The silent sorrow in your eyes echoes ancestral conversations. When I gaze into  those quiet drowned mansions, you are unspeakably present.  High along a snow-melt stream, starry alpine flowers babble their golden secrets. Blurt it all out! Whatever you mean  begins as crystal silence  on distant peaks    within. Image: taken on my favorite alpine meadow hike, Mt. Rainier

 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. 

   "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

 

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'

  The broken heart is not "broken."  Breaking is its nature.  Nothing needs mending.  Just dissolve the thought,  "I have a broken heart,"  in a breath of silence. This is the healing that has  always already happened.  Do you call the flower a broken bud?  Do you call the gushing spring  a gash in the earth? Or the door  to the wine cellar, emptiness?  The wine is love. Descend.  Give your wound a new name.

                        Contrary to popular theology, God isn't very interested in our suffering, or in our stories of trauma and victimhood. We invest so much energy in these stories, yet they keep telling themselves more insistently, without healing or resolution. Why? Because what we focus on just grows louder in our life. The truth is, there are wondrous souls who carry more pain than you or I will ever know, but they don't preach or whine about it. Their eyes gleam with Presence. Their bodies radiate forgiveness. Their hearts are drums of courage. And for every traumatic event in the world, there are 10,000 acts of kindness, of gentleness, which the media will never record. The Divine attention is not attracted to our suffering, but to the fearless humility of a tender heart. God listens when we sing, not when we complain. Mother Mary enfolds us in her lap. Christ pours out beams of joy, healing grace, and ecstatic e...

The Biblical book of Revelation tells us that a “new heaven and a new earth” will be created. This actually refers to your awakened mind and the transmuted energy of your body. The very quality of your awareness will be clarity, light, and joy. Little thinking will be required, as most problems will be solved by your intuition, on the subtlest level of feeling. The alchemy of your perception will transform the earth around you into a new state of matter: the state of Glory. You will have a glorified body, but you won't need to die and go to heaven to embody it. You create the Resurrection body now by raising the vibrations of your energy to a higher frequency. This is the purpose of art, music, chant, breath-work, service, and meditation. But it is essential to stop paying so much attention to your trauma and your outrage. What we focus on only increases in our life. Investing energy in our trauma does not heal it. Focusing on anger only feeds its fire. To begin releasing ...

Everything in this world is a message from that one. And where is that world with its  towhee  song, first scent of lilac, slow wise pulse of ancient stones? Deep inside your chest. That is where the wings  of a hummingbird churn this blinding sunbeam into billions of love atoms. Where you breathe in forests, meadows, mountains, clouds, the desolation of Gaza, the playground littered with Fentanyl and infected needles. And you breathe out the friendship  of the Beloved. Is this not your duty? To create a new earth from the flames that pour from your wounded heart? Image: wallpaper from Stockcake

    You are not lost. I am not lost. We are right here. Each of us exactly where we need to be in order to wake up. Here, in the stillpoint at the center of chaos. Or did you want to go back to sleep for a hundred more lifetimes? No, here is the only place where awakening happens. Here is the "holy place" which Jesus spoke of.* Here is the centerpoint of the Cross where all the opposites converge - heaven and hell, pain and beauty, male and female, past and future. You cannot awaken at a Yoga retreat on a tropical island, or on a seventh dimensional world with the ascended masters, because that is not Where You Are Right Now. And you cannot understand this chaos with your intellect, your politics, your endless conspiracy theories. "Figuring it out" is not why you were born on this planet of opposites. You were born to practice a much deeper alchemy: to discover that this confusion is not who You are. Deeply truly witnessing the chaos releases you from ...

  You make honey  by doing even less than nothing.  When you act, no one honors  your tranquility,  the part of you that  merely listens to the silence  inside silence, where  the music of creation comes from.  Your grace is the fragrance of wu wei,  the pollen of emptiness.    You prune away thinking and drop concentration in with the compost.  If you make the slightest effort, it all becomes philosophy.  So you sink into the furrow beneath your breastbone and use this breath the way your ancestor used  her hand-carved hoe. Sap condenses on your forehead whether you breathe in or out. The lightning in your spine hums more softly than orchids.  With no names but the bee-mad  sound of invisible wings, your pistil and stamen bend to kiss without the slightest breeze.  Only souls that buzz understand this. They have sweet  sticky feet like yours. The shameless way you glut your...

The radiance glowing from your chest contains more energy and intelligence than all the AI data centers technocrats could ever build. Rest there. Return to the kingdom of your heart. Real intelligence is never artificial. It is You. The survival of humanity depends on whether or not you have the courage to take your sovereignty back.   Image: by Rashani Réa from the book of poems and mandalas we created together. LINK 

Nothing is pure that has not fallen. Be an apple petal on a stream, a pale seed in the mother-brown furrow, a spark of the iron hammer on the lock of the prison door. Be lamb's blood on the lintel, and the silent footstep of a slave escaping in haste at night. If you cannot stay for one hour, stay for one moment and be whole. Nothing crushed in these green shadows fails to rise. Be the glut of a rain drop on the mouth of a lily, the starry wine that pours into the hollow grail of this body. Breathe Christ through your broken places.

Burn marks on this fragment of ancient scroll indicate that much  of it was destroyed by fire before it could be hidden in a jar of honey.         "No need to ascend. Just keep falling into Grace. You need a new name for the heart.  Call it the wound  at the center of the world.  A new name for love. Call it the courage to breathe,  to breathe through the wound.  Savor this inhalation, it is the Holy Spirit,  your anointing. Here on earth, taste each photon of flesh as infinite light: this is my Resurrection. Welcome all into the radiance that shines from your chest: this is my Kingdom. Crucify my otherness, glorify me as your Self.  What is suffering? To cling  to the ever-perishing outward form. Be risen from the tomb of the past into the garden of this moment. When Magdalene reaches out her hand, let her touch you. Bathed in dawn, don't wash off the smell of loam and roses. I taught th...