Uradiance

There is a hug so ancient and round, so empty and deep it has no name, a hug that absolved the moon and stars before creation, a hug that encircled you before you were conceived, when the whisper of your soul had not been spoken. A hug that clasped your form when mountains were inside wind and wind was the sap in a pine, and the blues of the sky had not gleamed from your pupils, and the sun had not yet burst its golden seed in your heart. Why have you forgotten to hug yourself this way? Why do you shrink from the honey that was already poured before your cells were shaped to contain it? Don't you know that you cannot embrace another until you hug each centreless electron of your own flesh? Sink into the sweet dark well of your body, the abyss of never having needed to be forgiven. You think this is foolish? It's what angels fell here to feel. Run into the garden this very moment, whatever the weather may be. Immerse in the sting of wet grass. Spread your arms and hug the horizo...

The present moment is not the tick of a clock, a disappearing point of horizontal time. The present moment is an ocean with a deep vertical dimension you can probe in meditation as you descend from the mind into the heart. The image here is Doré's illustration of Danté's Paradiso, as the poet gazes into the empyrean of the present moment, and beholds the lineaments of a human form within the divine Formless.

        No more pilgrimage to Machu Picchu. No more chugging droplets of rainbow poison from the spine of an Amazonian frog. No need for a selfie in front of the Great Pyramid or standing with your Druid clan under Glastonbury Tor. If you want to meet Mary Magdalene, you don't have to enter the Grotte de Sainte-Baume, or stroll the beaches of Provence searching for her Gospel in an ancient jar. She is waiting for you in your chest, between the rise and fall, the flowing out and in. Why jet off to the ashram in Bangalore to chant electric bhajans and bow down to a robe, a beard, a pair of sandals? These journeys are over. That quest was a dream. Now it's time for a cosmic re-set: bow down  to your next door neighbor. Stay where you are and find what’s always been inside you, luscious, velvety, melting, gold, the forgotten Creamsicle of self-forgiveness.  Taste, close your eyes, murmur “Mmmmmm.” Here ar...

If you want to bless the earth, practice listening. There is another heart beating inside your heart, a rhythmic silence calling, "Don't even answer, just breathe love." Your sabbath prayer a pulse of stillness, secret chamber of darkest sweetest blood where lovers meet and build a hut of vines out of your body. Let this garden spring from your loam into golden bewilderment. Image: Persian Miniature by Bahman Farshchian

      The dust mote on your little toe is a portal to the space beyond the stars. A drop contains the whole ocean. There is no photon of light or electron of matter not clustered with distant suns. Those who insist, "I am not this body," have never descended into this body, or discovered the golden infinity it is made of. Matter doesn't delude us into smallness, mind does. Cloud concepts melt in the blue sky of wonder. Become what you behold. Let nothing intrude between body and breath, nothing between breath and Being. This No-thing is a silver thread that shines from the soles of your feet through the hollow in your chest, to the crown of your head to a distant quasar. Worlds form and dissolve like dew pearls on your web of nerves. Don't let technicians make you feel like a marionette dangling from a zodiac. The planets are dangling from you. And those gentle beasts, the constellations, grazing in the circle of eternity, obey the faintest tug of your be...

          I share this painting by William Blake because it gives life and overflows with peace. Gaze into it. Go beyond theology, beyond concepts, and sink into the radiant depths of divine Imagination. Use art for healing.  The painting is of the Death of Joseph, husband of Mary.  Jesus and the Holy Spirit, feminine emanation of Jesus, are ministering to this wise, strong, humble father.  As I study his long prophetic poems, like 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem,' I'm amazed by Blake's very personal relationship with Jesus, and the child-like innocence of his faith. He believed that Jesus IS the divine Imagination, whom we can meet and love in our own creative vision. "Imagination is the divine body of the Lord Jesus, blessed forever!" For Blake, Jesus was not a symbol of some higher consciousness, nor a mere social reformer, but a living Person who dwells at the subtlest level of feeling and perception in the heart. Jesus ...

  The Sun bows to the Moon, trembling stars in a Spider's web, the Grail of Presence poised at my lips between out-breath and in. Golden harvest Wine spills over the rim into Darkness, the genuflection of time, when the Mother receives us through the fiery portal of a ruined Rose, her silent footsteps pale mushrooms of Midnight. Let Autumn come.   Art: The Divine Feminine, gouache on board by Tino Rodriguez  

There's a secret in this madness. Everything is breath, a toadstool Spirit-blown like glass, a moss-furry stone the supreme Being because it merely exists. On the wing of a housefly a thousand verses of Rig Veda, but you need to look. The shaggy golden shelter dog infested with celestial messengers. And you next inhalation the intimate name of Lady Sophia whose whisper only lovers know. How does Mount Fuji float on a cloud? How do a billion stars rest in your open palm like a black moth? It happens through the science of astonishment. The sun and planets in free-fall, caught and held by some colossal stillness. Be a pilgrim, then you'll understand this secret madness. Let the radiance of your destination illuminate your starting place before you take the first step. Let the space between the beginning and the end be a single exhalation. What stands in your way is seeking. Polish the earth with you...

             I've just read Milton's Paradise Lost for the third time. But this time I did not spurn it as obsolete mythology. I honored it as actual history. Dynamic inner history, happening on subtler planes of energy and consciousness, in the causal realm behind the surface of the material world, where a very real struggle takes place between angelic and demonic powers.  I know how old fashioned it sounds, but in my dotage this reading of Milton explains the drama behind earth's theater much better than the smug materialism of Marxist economics, Freudian psychology, or sophomore sociology class. The astral conflict in the subtle realm backstage can no longer be contained inside us. Now it overflows into the plane of our sensory experience. In Shakespeare's words, "Hell is empty and all the devils are here."  The moral relativism of our intellectual class is impotent when trying to explain why seemingly stable people suddenly perform...

  It is the latest form of the old myth. Mephistopheles wants to make a pact with you: sell your soul and upgrade to AI. Whether you call the demons archons, aliens, or global elites doesn't matter. They want you to believe you will be left behind if you do not boost your neuro-physiology with Artificial Intelligence.  They will try to convince you that you can become much more powerful with a fiber-optic brain. They will offer you various modalities to do this: mRNA enhancement vaccines, addictive cell phone apps, hypnotic guided meditations downloaded into your neurons from cyber space. At some level you will be asked to surrender your free will to an AI assistant. Lots of science fiction has already predicted this, but now it is happening: a chilling Orwellian mockery of true spirituality, and true friendship with the Inward Teacher. The competition to control AI is motivated by our fear, our sense of separateness, and the insecurity that drives us toward a temporary ru...

    Time and space are now granulated to infinitesimal quantum particles of eternity, each particular moment containing the entire past and future, each particular quark encircling the most distant galaxies in its aura.  What was once conceived as far in time or space is not a breath away. If we try to force our new multi-dimensional bodies into the old paradigm that we've inhabited for aeons,  the paradigm of mass in space,  we feel disoriented. For that space no longer exists. Mass is pulverized by consciousness into wave-particles of bliss.  Likewise, if we continue to conceive of time as linear, requiring a metaphysical leap from this time-line to a better one, we are paralyzed with confusion. For the vector that moved from past to future has been ground into the grace of discontinuity.  Now we center in a timeless flowering of possibilities that can feel like chaos unfolding in all directions at once - as close in time...

Now that it's September, I want to thank blueberries. I want to thank peaches, cantaloupes, cherry tomatoes and corn on the cob. All summer long while we griped about the Republicans, you were lying there in baskets, blue eyes silently watching, blinking back tears. Some of you were whole crimson sunsets in my hand. I'm not sure what antioxidants are, but thank you: I know that you were full of them. I loved your fuzz, buxom peach, your sass, blackberry. I loved your smile, honeydew, halved and split as we slobbered together. Local strawberry, just one of you gushing on my tongue was almost too much to bear. Next summer you could do a better job of staying under three dollars a pint; otherwise, no complaint. How erotic you are, plum, lounging in a sunbeam, your crimson still-life, your sweated drops of fever! You should be ashamed the way your waves imploded on the beaches of my mouth: well, it was a scene! But thank you. I also want to thank some of you flowers: begonia,...

Wisdom is the sad sweet thing that falls upon a pilgrim who comes h ome, only to discover that it's all the same, whether one goes forth on the endless journey or remains at the beginning. Did you leap at the voice that said, "Now is the time to start your quest and find the holy place?" Or did you listen to the wordless whisper, barely a breath, that said, "Stay and awaken right where you are!" Image:  from Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei

        You are not here to blame, to judge, or to be "right." You are not here to save the world. Many have tried to save the world. They are gone yet the world is still here.  You have come for a greater purpose: to align with the golden sun of Beauty shining from the core of your chest. That is the Christ.  Resting as inner alignment allows your outer form to manifest the gift of personhood. You are not a collective. You are not a group identity.  You are here like a raindrop to make the world more beautiful by giving the Sun an exquisitely particular place to dance. You are here to embody the ocean in a tiny bead.  Nature longs to hear your local note, single in her all-pervading symphony. Without you, the harmony would not sound quite the same.  O Friend, align your body, breath, and mind with the Sun in your heart. Relax into radiance. Your gift will arise without effort, gentle as the next inhalation.  Many...

Don't tell me how embodied you are, or how hard it is to be an empath. Just feel the full moon flow through every nerve. Taste the birth of stars eight million light years away in the pulse of the blue vein in your bare foot. Let your blood atoms jangle like Radha's tiny ankle bells. Rivers of darkness flow through you, flames of flesh too wild, too lovely to name except in the language of tears, or the stab of breath  quickly taken, then slowly surrendered. Nothing blinds you  but your mind,  busy naming things. Just for tonight, let your religion be astonishment.

Can you bow like a broken necklace scattering your brightest tears? All other yoga postures Simply remove the stiffness. To bend is the first freedom. Don't just bow to the master, bow like a bee to a grain of pollen. Genuflection of a thirsty panther by a water hole at sunset. Snow melting into mountain stream laughter. Bow down to the croak of a tree frog in the jasmine vine at midnight. To the plums of September thumping the ground, showing you the way to fall, the way to split open and offer your juice. Bow to the silence of the doe who, after all, is eating your roses. Bow to the wail of the newborn American whose mother crossed over the border last night. To your own breath and the secret name in your heartbeat, bow down.  Fill the hollows of your body  with the blues of the sky. Bow so completely that you shatter your crown and sow the earth with stars.