Uradiance

What 'matters' to me, I project into matter. What 'matters' becomes my world, either because I crave it or fear it intensely enough to manifest. But what if no-thing mattered? What would my world look like if nothing mattered but love?

Total commitment to what I truly love dispels sadness. The question is not sadness, or depression, or lack. The question is, do I know what I truly love? How to answer this question.... Dissolve the mind of other voices and descend into the heart. Find the diamond Radiance of Eternity, compared to which all adversities and temptations are dreams already fled. There is the bud of Beauty that the universe longs for me to burst into flower as no one else can. No one else! Be selved by God.

You are not called to do something great or important. You are called to do You. The universe would not be the same without your smallest deed.

Love is powerless power. In love we surrender, and in surrender we relinquish our power. Yet that is precisely when Grace flows in to uphold us and strengthen us with a power beyond imagining. Nothing is easier, yet nothing is harder. Why? Because we cling to power.

The mystical poetry of all spiritual traditions shares a common language and purpose. The same thread runs through the Biblical Song of Songs and Medieval Christian mystics like Mechtilde of Magdeberg and St. Theresa of Avila; Rumi, Hafiz, Rabia and the Sufi poets of Islam; wandering poet-saints of India such as Mira and Laladev. Their purpose is not just to entertain and pacify, but to rebel against external hierarchies of religious power, to restore our own divine radiance, and to re-open the gates of the Heart. Mystical poetry invites our nervous system, at the finest level of feeling, to reconnect the broken circuitry linking the cerebral cortex, through the hypothalamus and amygdula, to the cardiac plexus, which physiologists now know contains neurons and neuro-peptide transmitters as complex as the brain. This neurological path from mind to heart was intentionally broken by the priesthoods of religion - from the pharaoic priests in Egypt, to the Brahmans of I...

Behind most versions of "spirituality" is a flight from the Ordinary. Do I live from one High Feast to the next, fleeing from the Ordinary in between? From one appointment to the next, fleeing from dis-appointment? Disappointment is also revelation: a chance to return to the glowing heart of the commonplace, where I am always "in the beginning" with the Creator. All that is fresh rises from the ashes of disappointment, motherground of the commonplace. The Ordinary is the womb of creation.

"The sun shines for you today yes" ~James Joyce, 'Ulysses'   You were created as a sunbeam - have you forgotten? - not to dissipate in darkness but to spread light. Why not tell your story THAT way? The path of loss is the path of return. What sends you out draws you home. The whole dawn in a dewdrop, the stars that settle on a snail's back, the world in your retina: separateness is just the shimmering. Why argue whether the sun and its ray are one or two? You will just keep coming back here until it all melts like butter. (Summer Solstice, June 20, 2012) 

"Take no thought for tomorrow." ~Master Jesus. Worrying never relieves anxiety about the future, because the future only exists as a sensation in the body, arising in the present moment. Hypnotic mental images about the non-existent future spring unconsciously from tension in the solar plexus. By simply resting awareness in this sensation, as sensation, without converting it into the hypnotism of thought, we can awaken the freedom of Presence. All worry is basically delusional. When lost in the insanity of the future, just re-member the body. Sure enough, you will discover that the future is a pain in the now.

Our deepest and most intimate confession is not that we have sinned, but that we have been secretly longing, at the root of our existence, from the beginning of time, to serve the Master.

In an instant, by the grace of Awareness, the "I" with all its beliefs, desires, regrets and stories dissolves in boundless luminosity, and a thrill of bliss vibrates the entire cosmos, like a ripple filling a pond after the dropped pebble disappears. Have I been saved? "I" cannot be saved. Do I strive to save humanity? Humanity cannot be saved. Will we save the earth? The earth cannot be saved. Whether it dissolves in a moment or in ten million years, what is impermanent cannot be saved. All that is saved is Awareness, and Awareness is the savior. Dissolve everything into That, and bless creation.

  It's not enough for me to tell you that you have a beautiful soul. You are beauty. Every atom of your flesh is an awakening universe. Your breath, your secret smile in sleep, the tilt and sway of your ambling, the tingle of wet grass on your bare feet, your wrinkles and soft spots, the skip of your mortal heart, your moments of silence, your shadow, the mistakes you make, the things you leave unfinished settling just where eternity intended them, your sacraments of bathing and eating dessert, the landscape of your body rising and falling under the close and distant stars: beauty that can't be helped.

If you truly felt a zest for living, would you care so much about what you eat? About whether you get "liberated"? About what your astrologer says, or your life coach, or even your scripture? These obsessions arise from a sense of lack somewhere inside us. The lack cannot be filled by food, starry alignments, religious rules, or any remedy from outside.  Lack only dissolves when we observe it from deep inside, and hug it with awareness, filling our wound with compassion. This is the work of the Guru: not the external Guru, but the Guru-principle within. A true Master does not impose rules and injunctions from above. A true Master awakens the Guru inside, the bubbling spring that wells up in tears of gratitude, filling our emptiness with perfect Joy, which in the final discernment, is our own awareness.

How limited we are in believing that we must do something new, something edgy, something extreme to experience a glorious adventure. If we are awake, a glass of water is breathtaking, a dandelion miraculous, the eyes of a friend an infinite journey.

Our most important questions all arise from the same place and have the same answer. It's just the words that change. Yes creates no and no creates yes, so what's the point of asking? Just rest in the itch where the question arises, before it forms a word. There's a subtle pain deeper inside us than any question we can put into words. It's the nameless itch of  "I" ( ahamkara ). From this subliminal itch comes every spiritual question. It's always the same itch, no matter what words we hang over it. And any answer that comes from someone outside us is just a temporary salve. The old itch always returns. There is only one permanent answer that ends the pain. This answer never comes from outside. It arises from a place deeper inside than the question, deeper than the itch. Awareness never has any questions. Embrace the itch with simple awareness, which is your core silence, and simply continue to feel it without scratching, without asking, ...

It began as a gift, innocent and spontaneous. Then we tried to repeat it, and it became a technique. Then we tried to sell it, and it became a religion. Then we forgot the radiant simplicity we started with. Let us each dance to our own heartbeat, and remember the gift, the Radiance of original grace.

From the emptiness that traps us in darkness, to the emptiness of the boundless sky, there is just a breath. That is why those who taste the depths of depression are often able to surrender through it to that other depth, and find unspeakable peace: Gautama Buddha, Mary Magdalene, St. Theresa, George Fox, John Keats, Eckhart Tolle.... "Depth calleth unto depth." (Psalm 42)

Before we invented the myth of mine and yours, we lived in the Sacred Garden. We were stewards of beauty, not owners of property. To occupy is not to own. Let us return to the garden. Occupy the Earth. Plant it well. But do not say, "This belongs to me." How can I own the ground or what springs from it? How can you own a tree, or a single kernel of corn? Did I create the soil? Did you create the seed? Did our schools teach the buds how to blossom? I plant here, and half a world away, you taste the fruit. You sow there, and I enjoy the harvest. We eat each others labor. No one can tell who planted this, and where the flower will blossom. Under the loam is a tangle of roots and indecipherable causes, known only by gratitude. Walk gently on the earth, for wherever we walk, we step on each others hearthstones. At the harvest, leave the edges of your field ragged, unplucked, bending with fruit for the poor. Were you not a wanderer once too? Occupy gently: the earth is a...

To make flame, ancients struck stone against stone, worshiping a star. I brush my heart with breath, just one: the whole earth catches fire. I birth the moon, I touch the sun inside, a deeper light, and higher. O Goddess of desire, transit me: I am empyrean. Painting by Tara: LINK

Relaxation is power. Total relaxation is cosmic power. In total relaxation, a heart beat incorporates all-pervading silence; each pulse musters the universe. To relax in meditation is bliss. To relax in action is dance. To relax in work is success. Successful action is without tension. Ego is nothing but tension in the system. To the degree that tension is reduced, ego dissolves. When there is no extraneous tension, there is no ego, and action arises from silence. The silence of the universe sings through every heartbeat to perform action. Then action is successful, free from the sense of a do-er. relax into your work, act in freedom, dance, and the universe will breathe your success. You cannot accumulate karma when you relax in the midst of action, because you are not doing it.  Of course, this is easier said than undone.

All around us, in tiny farms, forests, villages and valleys, a new economy humbly emerges, where the market is the heart, the politics is equality, debts are forgiven, and not one handful of soil is owned by any man. Earth belongs to Herself, and we are only pilgrims here, working and dancing in the Sacred Garden.

I am learning that the present is not modern. Presence echoes with ancestral voices. The very depth of the present is the past. Too often, the "modern" rejects the past, attempting to blossom without roots, mistaking individualism for enlightenment, and cynicism for profundity. There is nothing "modern" about the well of Presence. The deeper you go down into it, the more ancient wisdom you draw up. The silence of that well is the chant of your grandmothers - never cynical, always tender, yet enduring as stone. I think of Forster's lovely lines from 'Howard's End,' when sisters reconcile by rediscovering their family's furniture in an old house... 'And all the time their salvation was lying round them, the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future with laughter and the voices of children.' The way is neither to reject the past, nor cling to the p...