Uradiance

The Vedas tell us, "Yatha drishti, tatha shrishti: as is your mind,  so appears your world." Now is the time to see your world  through the eye of the heart. Meditate on the diamond  at the center of the golden rose in your chest.  (Photo by my dear friend, Kristy Thompson)

When I see the world through my mind, I superimpose "meaning" on everything: categories, labels, comparisons, values. I measure one creature against another. I layer the gray map of my thoughts on the ineffable green earth. But when I dare to behold the mysterious glory of What Is through the Eye of the Heart, this chatter of naming and labeling ceases. My restless mind no longer divides past from presence, inner from outer, the miraculous from the ordinary. The Eye of the Heart is a diamond lens of silence, where double vision ceases. There is no separation, yet each creature radiates sovereign uniqueness. Not one is "like" another. What happens in this clarity where nothing symbolizes, nothing means? All is as it is, beyond confusion, shining with ineluctable suchness. I am simply as I Am, with no noun after the verb "to be." And every creature I meet, even a worm or a pebble, is Thou. What happens? A new earth.  To behold the world as the radian...

Leave the kingdom of Should and settle in the land of Not Knowing, where the wise have broken their wine cups stumbling, falling in astonished laughter. Where pairs of opposites grow on a single vine and lovers squeeze amrit from thorns. Be done with searching for who you already are. With begging for what you have. With beating your breast like a weary pilgrim who can't seem to find the journey’s end in this footstep. Be done with gurus  who won't whisper in your ear, “enlightenment is a sacred joke.” Friend, don’t be so serious about God. You might miss her scat singing. You might miss the wayless playfulness of extinction. If your teacher isn't a trickster, you’ve been tricked! The truly uncivilized  master of meditation will lead you off-trail into the wilderness of your heart. Painting by Susan Sedon-Boulet

Our work is to rest in the Heart. This is deep action. Keep the Heart open, like a window. Not that something flows into us, but a rainbow of beauty and power flows out, angels and elemental spirits weaving our beams of un-created light into a New Creation.  Softness of the heart is courage. Reposing in openness is our true nature. What creates and gives birth is not to be anything or anybody, but simply to Be. There is no "timeline" from here to there. The "shift" is not an event in the future, but a shift of awareness into this moment, this body, this breath. Below is one of the pages, a mandala from the book. It is very simple, yet it contains more than meets the "I." The back cover is also below: click the image to enlarge. Here is the link where you can order the book from Rashani's website. Of course it's also on Amazon. https://www.rashani.com/booksandjournals/p/rest-in-the-heart  

Almost all channeled information, astrology, psychic reading, or prophecy, is about  the past or the future. But Truth is never in time. Truth is Presence. 

Who knows what fills a sparrow's tiny chest at dawn? Who knows why a smile alights on your lips with wings of faithful uncertainty? Or why this tear, condensed from the distance between nameless stars, suddenly blurs green earth with gratitude? Don't tell. Use music. Each of us must learn from the ringing of broken things in the heart that happiness has nothing to do with being sure. Feathered air descends upon your breastbone from the soft spot nested on your crown. Your exhalation, A silent tongue of fire. No path led you here to this impermanence of mothwing and wild anemone, mountain aster and Indian paint bush seeded by breezes beside a meandering snow-melt stream. The art of lingering. The art of disappearing. Don't tell. Use music. There is no death in this meadow. A radiance in your chest contains me. A radiance in my chest contains you. We are a circle with so many centers even Christ gets dizzy....

  How many times must I hear Buddha say "breathe in, breathe out," before I can do it myself? I got tired of being spiritual so I came home, built a fire, made coffee, took out mother's cup and ran my fingers over its hair-thin crazing, threads of brown in blue. But mostly I came home to you, a hug of fur on fur. I got tired of being spiritual, so I came home to Being. Photo: still life in my kitchen 

I have located the glow of pure silence. It is your face. I won't tell anyone. They will have to find it beyond oneness, beyond light, when their lips touch yours. I am not a jealous person. Love has a trillion faces but there is only one kiss. NOTE: " There is some kiss we want with our whole lives , the touch of Spirit on the body." ~ Rumi

Your heartbeat is the mantra, the two-syllabled name of the Friend. Here is a short morning meditation on your heartbeak. Don't look at my silly face. Just close your eyes and listen. 

     A profoundly simple instruction is re peated verbatim in the Shiva Sutras, the Vijnana Bhairava, and the Orthodox Christian Philokalia:  “rest the mind in the heart ."  The alchemy practiced by cats, Taoist masters, and breast-sated infants. There's no difference between purring, chanting "Om," or gurgling “Mama”   in the democracy of the heart. Y et it's really not a practice at all, but the surrender of practice, where doing yields to Being.     Rest the mind in the heart. If you want to stay safe, you might regard this as a method of relaxation or stress management. But if you are an adventurer, you'll let it be the portal to a New Creation. The Heart is not just a beating organ for aerating your blood, but a doorway.  At an ancient temple , you  could only pass over  the threshold after removing your shoes. Shoes represented the beliefs and assumptions covering pure consciousness. You had to remove the dust on your feet...

Life is too complicated for me to understand. I can't keep track of my atoms, or number the cells in the tip of my pinkie. I can't even see the quarks dancing in my eyeball.  At night, when I'm sleeping, who breathes me? Who beats my heart, and how much do I owe them? Who orders my neurons to fire in synchrony when I laugh or cry? In the morning, who shouts at my pituitary, "Less water, more fire!" I asked a scientist to explain it. He couldn't measure the light-years stretching through a single carbon atom. I asked a priest, but he just mumbled in some lost language full of M's. How do you expect me to balance my checkbook when I can't even figure out who performs the miracle of this body? Image: Self-portrait of the mad zen master Hakuin  

       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 ...

"Let Jesus be your breath." ~St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain   Let Jesus be your breath. He is the Door that is always already open. The frame has a shape, but the passageway is empty. Let La Ilaha be your breath. The arrow floats back to the bow. That is how true warriors win battles before they begin. The whisper of Hu dissolving  crystals  into sweetness. Let Kali  be your breath, searing your midnight nerves into bolts of lightning. At dawn, the sound in your chest is a forest full of exultation about nest-building. Fierce flowering  may appear  to be  a universe outside you, but its roots are golden pathways leading through your body  toward one seed of death, one intimate drowning.  I, a wave in the ocean  of Am.  The All-Pervading,  encircled in a drop. No distance, no pilgrimage. This honey bee can't fly, his feet are so weighty with umami galaxies ...

    Every "channeled" message I've ever heard is information. Do we need more information, or more Presence? The information comes from above, from "out there." It comes from another, not from the Self - an intergalactic visitor, an angel, an ascended master. And the information is usually about the past or the future. But when awakening happens, it is not information, but love. And it happens in the present moment. Through all these messages from beyond and above, where is the Presence? Do we need more information about the past and the future? Or do we need to rest, now, in the silent bursting of the heart? When you rest in the utter simplicity, the ineffable stillness, of your own heart-center, Being ripples through the whole planet as dark energy, enfolding the earth in love. And it all happens in the ocean of the Effortless. Now channel who you Are. Photo:  Bahman Farzad

You asked me to drop every concept of 'Other' and 'God,' so I did. Then I abandoned ‘Trauma' and 'Embodiment' too. Love is not a story. Now I sink into the infinite physiology of light, my true flesh. This stillness in my chest is an unbroken pour. It doesn’t flow from 'there' to 'here,' but quivers in the void, a braid of black lightning. The taste is beyond name, thought, and breath. I call it sweet wine, but that is the language of fools and lovers whose tale has drowned in silence. I will never know who tilted fullness toward emptiness and made the starry rim of this cup overflow with a wonder no longer called 'me.' But I still say 'thank you, Friend.' I still ask, 'Was there a journey in that pour? Or have I always already arrived at the Tavern of Awakening?'     Painting by Mahmoud Farshchian