Uradiance

In the coming year, you may not bring world peace, but you may bring a healing light to the person right beside you. Walk gently. Go joyfully. Keep returning to your heart. That is enough.

Shabbat Shalom. Peace of the Sabbath to you. In Hebrew, Sabbath means "stop!" So I tried to stop my mind, but I couldn't. I'm sorry. Forgive me. I can't stop. I let my mind wander among the stars to the rim of the nebula, beyond blackness, always moving toward Uncreated Wonder. When I arrive at any Edge, I jump off. What a holy Fall! Perfect meandering in all directions at once is meditation. The mind that gets lost in the infinite is called The Heart. The absolute stillness of chaos is born of non-resistance, which has nothing to do with concentration. It is just the opposite: the grace that is out of control. Let your un-diagnosed adult ADHD attain the Sabbath rest. This is Divine Love. You arrive here by caring, but not trying. Now get on with the silent, fragrant, thousand-petaled explosion of your emptiness. Photo: Hubble photo of "Star-Forming Region 30 Dorodus"

Only an embodied being can experience transcendental pure awareness, because the disembodied are too entranced, having no contrasting experience of the material world. This is the inestimable value of a human birth. For it is only through the contrast of spirit and matter that the Self can awaken, and it is in this earthly body that we experience the paradox: both matter and spirit are made out of the same essence, which is pure Awareness. Awareness is not thought, but thought arises and dissolves as the content of Awareness. Awareness itself is ever free from concepts and images. Awareness is unbounded, self-effulgent, shining with crystalline light, whose nature is ananda, bliss. In the mirror of pure Awareness, this entire creation appears as an uncaused reflection that is not composed of anything else. Nor is awareness a product of material particles interacting in the neurons of the brain. Quite the contrary: material particles are vibrations of pure Awar...

Aristotle said that God is "The Unmoved Mover" (ὃ οὐ κινούμενος κινεῖ). Aristotle was actually describing the Witness, who is more inward to us than our very mind, ever silent and awake, shining through us in the midst of the busiest activity. The Unmoved Mover is pure Awareness. When I was hanging out in Trappist monasteries in France we sang this ancient Latin hymn, 'Rerum Deus' by St. Ambrose, at interludes between hours of manual labor. Ambrose based his conception of God here on Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. 'O God, creation’s secret force, Thyself unmoved, all motion’s source, Who from the morn till evening ray Through all its changes guid’st the day' When Raphael painted Aristotle's Unmoved Mover on the wall of the Pope's apartment at the Vatican in 1518 (pictured above), he portrayed God as a woman, setting the wheel of the zodiac in motion. In the Biblical tradition, this Unmoved Mover and ever-silent Witness o...