Uradiance

The sign of life is pulsation. 'Spanda' in Sanskrit. From Spanda comes our word 'expand.' That which expands must also contract, must pulse. That which does not pulse cannot play, cannot live. Pulse is the nectar of creation, and the wine of health. Atoms, hearts, moments of time, cycles of history, worlds and galaxies, all bubble up and dissolve as the pulse of the Infinite. Music is the pulse of silence, dance is the pulse of stillness, art is the pulse of the formless. Spirit pulses into Matter. Shiva pulses into Shakti. If we are going to pulsate and live, we must not only know how to act, but how to rest; not only how to swell, but how to be empty; how to listen as well as speak; how to be dark as well as radiant. We learn to rest between the pulses. Between our days. Between our moments. Between our heartbeats. And right in the midst of busy lives, to be so vulnerable that we can fall into the gaps and silences, coming Om even for an instant, which could be an in...

Some say you are not your body. I say your body is an ocean of suns whose ancient light is only now arriving. I say the fiery dark abyss devouring time is the well of your next inhalation. And if you and God won’t rendezvous in a crow-footed wrinkle or a liver spot, flesh petals on a stem of thorns in this aching fallow-fallen meadow, how will you taste the bloom and fade of lips on the heavenly Christ Rose? Sink into one molecule of skin. Gaze through crazy windows of a quark on photon moons in supernova nuclei, threading your ancestral darkness to an unborn star. Beyond astonishment, be pollen floating in a beam of what sees, the glory of loam (I say you are) this body, descended yet risen from loss, from yearning so chthonic no god could fall this low, never having tippled the sky in a chalice of dust, an atom of the dead. The ringing of bells you hear is your own exhalation, a carcanet of diamonds, hollow as the w...

  Consciousness vibrates between i and I. As the infinitesimal particle yearns for boundless space beyond the rim of the galaxies, i expand into who I always already Am. This play of awareness, as both finite and infinite, is ananda, or bliss. Bliss is the pulsing paradox that i am ever expanding into my Self. The "way" is not a straight and narrow line, but a pulsation. This so-called "spiritual journey" has the rhetorical structure of a joke. Christ's parables, Zen teaching stories, and Sufi tales all have this trickster paradigm, with a punchline intended to shock me into Presence - a more expansive awareness of where I already Am. Moving two steps forward, one step back - sometimes one step forward, two steps back - is a dance, not a path. Situations test me and keep me growing: they only seem like "imperfections" or "failures" because I imagine a place beyond, where Being is somehow better than being right here. Y...