Uradiance

Blessings to all on Sri Krishna Jayanti, the birthday of Lord Krishna. Tell me why you took birth in this human body? I took birth to experience the greatest adventure, the infinite journey.                                   But it is not far. It is the journey of a single breath, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. And not so difficult. There's a flute sound you can follow through the wilderness. That sound is the Name of God, that will lead you through the green valley of the heart, and guide you to the mountain peak, shining in the vast sky just above your crown. From that peak, a luminous stream of melting song flows down ceaselessly through your spine, watering the garden of your flesh to make it fruitful. In this garden Sri Radha, who is your yearning, meets the Beloved, who is...

My higher self sat me down and said, "Now you be quiet and listen. People who believe it's their duty to save the world often wind up bitter and burnt out, because they can't. The world has its own destiny, and you have yours. "Fulfill your own destiny. Do what you love. And if you do it 100%, with grace and integrity, and lots of good wholesome mistakes, you will surely help a few others along the way. You will live as wise and happy a life as is possible under human limitations, and the world will be ever so gently uplifted. If you want more than that, you are probably an egomaniac. Got it?" I replied, "Got it. Thanks, Willy."

I awoke this morning with a prayer on my lips. "Lord, I promise I won't get so drunk today." But with my very first breath came the wine of love. I am a child of the Sun and Moon, hopelessly lit by wonder. Forgive me. I will scatter my poems so silently in the woods, the deer will eat them and stay out of your flowers.

Non-duality and devotion are as inseparable as a blossom and its fragrance. The nectar of Bhakti sparkles at the center of the Advaita flower. The bee became still, not through fasting, but through drinking God's infinite sweetness.

Doing 'good' is not the Way, just as doing 'evil' is not the Way. The Way is no doing. This does not mean, don't do! It means dynamic action through inner stillness without wasting energy in moral judgments. Be immersed in what you love and action flowers, the seed, the petals, the fruit all one. But perhaps you do not know what you love? Ah, that is the problem.

The lotus is a sign of grace from below. Touched by the breath of dawn, it springs from mud, expanding without effort, blossoming from darkness into beauty, because physics is a metaphor guiding us toward the metaphysics of wonder. If we could feel the flowering as a silent pulse in the secret wound of the heart, the rich would give their wealth away. The outraged would surrender their despair. Bullets would melt into tears. The thief would repay what is stolen. His victim would insist, "Please keep it, you need it more than I." Isn’t this why we sing? Anger is not our true home. Friend, there is something gently bursting inside you that heals the world. Photo by Aile Shebar

  We are one human family. That is the biogenic truth, the terrible fractured beauty of our wholeness. We have bled each other since the first man and woman named their sorrow, their breath, their fire. Earth is our body. We are eight billion shades of Green. Article, Science Magazine http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/new-gene-variants-reveal-evolution-human-skin-color

There are only a handful of stories. We keep telling them in countless versions: the story of gain, the story of loss, the story of laughter, the story of tears... But have you noticed, when we hear a good story, we can't wait to see how it ends? This is a hint about the nature of reality. Truth does not lie in the story at all. Truth lies in the end of the story, the moment we get it, breathe out, and drop it. Here we are again, in the beginning, before the Word of creation. .. This is the opportunity for release into boundless awareness, where no story is told, because the present moment has no plot... But usually, after that burst of freedom, we get drawn back into the story, starting over a new version of our favorite saga. And so it goes... Until someday, somenow, we drop the story and stay where we are, in the sparkling Presence which has no beginning or end. Let's meet here, in this wilderness, where the grapes are already fermented on the vine....

  In the beginning the Father gazed into the mirror of the Spirit and saw Christ. That mirror was the womb of eternal silence, for even God is mothered by a mystery. Then Christ gazed in the mirror and saw You. You too were born of that joy! الثالوث في البدء، حدّق الآب في مرآة الروح ورأى المسيح . تلك المرآة هي رحم الصمت السرمدي، ذلك أن الله أيضاً ولد من غموض . ثم حدّق المسيح في المرآة ورآكِ . أنتِ أيضاً ولدتِ translated into Arabic by Dana Chamseddine.

What is Energy? What is Joy? To bathe each atom of your flesh in the most beautiful name of God. Could you find fragrance in a flower not rooted in the soil? Could you find truth in a mind not rooted in quietness? Could you find fire in a heart not rooted in the music of love? Surrender to the one whose breath makes a sweet sound in your chest. Listen to the whisper that draws you gently down into the silent light that created the stars. _________ Blessed Eid Al-Adha to all my Muslim friends!

Be perfectly content with not knowing. Don't take sides. If someone preaches their politics or religion, just smile and pretend you are listening. Remember why you are here. You are here to be here, even when they are not here. Stay in this moment while they tell their story about the past and future, which do not exist. Breathe in pain. Breathe out compassion. Be present, but keep it a secret. If you do this to show your enlightenment, you are more ignorant than they are. When they go on and on without any end in sight, offer them some tea, or bourbon.

I am more than this whirl of dust. I am more than this stream of breath. I am more than this rattle of words in the skull, called my mind. What am I? I am listening      to a raindrop          falling on an alder leaf              at dawn.                And I hear the silence who listens. And in the silence, I hear the voice of the raindrop. "You are like me, a bead of perishing. Yet as you perish, you reflect the sky, and contain the sun, with all the stars." Photo by Dwobbit on Deviant Art

In Vedic philosophy, the subtlest field of the mind is called "ritambhara pragyam." It is the field of self-luminous intuition, where every desire arises as the seed of its own fulfillment. If the meditator witnesses the desire arise at that finest mental level, tasting its essence, then the experience desired is complete without requiring any object of the senses, for the object is already contained within the subject. Understanding this, how could we see desire as a barrier to God? Desire is God in the form of fire. Honor your desire, embrace your desire, merge with your divine burning. Then your desire is fulfilled, without dividing the unity of the Self.

Religion has been high-jacked by true believers. But Spirituality is nurtured in Uncertainty. Because we uncritically value our beliefs, we give our uncertainties a negative connotation. Yet Uncertainty is the seed of creation. According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the whole universe arises from the field of quantum uncertainty, where a particle's momentum (mass multiplied by speed) and its location cannot be simultaneously known. The "particle" may just as well be defined as a non-localized wave of pure mathematical probability. Can we find any more positive way to honor the creative power of bewilderment? Emily Dickinson wrote, "I dwell in possibility." The field of infinite possibility is the groundless Uncertain, the unfathomable space between our thoughts. Beliefs are not nearly so full of Truth as the silence between them. Medieval Christian mystics honored this space as the deepest prayer, and called it "the cloud o...

After forty nine years of meditation, I feel like sitting on my porch and smoking an Arthur Fuentes Hemingway "Short Story" cigar with the Buddha. It is perfectly all right to desire. It is perfectly all right for the breeze in the pines to sigh, and for flowers to carry on so silently the way they do, making colors. To spend a summer evening among roses and weeping begonias, having fallen again and again in love with the same body, the same harmony of all small parts we call "the soul." Because this is a world of desire. Each yearning is a breath of what it yearns for. A world of indecipherable sacraments, the squeeze of a hand, the taste of sugar that a hummingbird knows. This is a world where every earth-frail shape, even as it perishes, points inward.

I am a Christian. I believe in the Trinity. My breath is the Holy Spirit. My body is the body of Christ. My heart, at rest in its own sparkling emptiness, is God. If you burn me at the stake for proclaiming the Truth, I Am the fire! Photo: Persian miniature of Sufi saint, Mansur Al Hallaj, burned at the stake for proclaiming, "An'al Haqq," I Am Truth.

"Take no thought for tomorrow." ~Jesus, Matthew 6:34 For those who are addicted to thinking, here is a one-moment meditation: Drop This Thought. The practice is unbelievably simple, so don't believe in it. Don't even do it. Dropping this thought doesn't mean trying not to think. Trying to not-think is a form of repression that wastes our energy, because thinking is inevitable. But what we can effortlessly drop is our clinging to ideas. As soon as an idea or image arises in the mind, no resistance is required. Just drop it. Not-clinging requires no effort. In fact, dropping a thought increases energy. When I drop this thought, the energy bound up in thinking dissolves its form and expands into pure awareness, which is the sparkling joy of boundless possibility. The moment I drop this thought, an explosion of transparency fills the inner and outer sky, blessing every atom in my body and resonating into the stars. Drop thought, drop affirmation, d...

Your joyand my joy are one spark. Make peace through Joy.

Love is ceaseless dying. You gave your breath to the mistress of the dark and she melted the edges of your tongue, that flame of resistance. Now you are a peony sparkling with raindrops in green silence. Who knows where a petal ends and a moonbeam begins? The gaze of the moth-winged Goddess Chandra has entered your chest to teach you emptiness. Now you must learn the secret name for overflowing. Chandra is the Moon in Sanskrit. Photo by Aile Shebar

Some men need to climb a mountain and stand at the peak in the face of the sun to feel complete. I only need to follow a gentle inhalation up the sparkling slope of my body from belly to crown, to stand at the peak in the face the sun and surrender. I would rather be a servant of this breath than a master of the mountain. Photo of Mt. Rainier, taken from a hill near my home

To fall in love is to fall into the space between thoughts. This eternal space is Presence. It is the Self. Here one needs no romantic partner to be deeply in love. The Self sees a leaf, a hummingbird, or a cloud in pure intimacy. The whole shimmering creation is the Self, apprehending its own luminosity as the Beloved. All is a mirror. Intimacy is the secret heart of the world, and the Self is the space of intimacy. I and myself are one, yet two, because, in my capacity for Self-reflection, I contain the boundless possibility of otherness, the potency of space between subject and object. The subject-object relationship in any perception, the I-Thou relationship in any meeting of persons, is a sacramental sign that outwardly mirrors the primordial intimacy of Self-communion. I can truly say to an other, even a stranger, "We are two, yet one, for we exist in the space of awareness. I belong to you." This is what it means to love my neighbor as my Self (Mat...

Here is the secret just spilled by the honeysuckle, passed on to a hummingbird, whose wings whispered to the thrush, who sang it to sunbeams in the silence of dissolving mist, where an elderly cedar breathed it to ten thousand murmuring roots: You only have Power when you give it away.

On this golden morning, how many miracles have I already missed, because I don't have time for the present moment? I look deep into a chrysanthemum. It awakens me. If I could translate this flower's voice into words, it would be these: "Gaze at me and be healed. May your body grow lighter than the sky. May you dance with me in this breath."  Every flower wants to share this simple practice with us.... Go into your garden, a meadow, or a patch of forest sunlight. Look deeply into one small creature . A caterpillar, a berry, a blossoming weed, a pebble. Look until you see not only the creature at whom you look, but the source of your gaze. Look until you are aware of awareness. Relinquishing every image of the past, let one small creature guide you into this moment. This creature was created to awaken you. No old wound of body or soul can withstand the onslaught of its healing presence. The object awakens the subject to Self-radiance. You d...

You are not unhappy. You think you are unhappy. You have strong sensations that invite clear, intense, thought-free awareness. But instead, you superimpose on them the thought, 'I am unhappy.' It is your own mind that makes you unhappy. Get rid of this mind and just be aware.

Every flower is a Buddha. The lilac is a Buddha tree. Sunlight is Buddha. Glass is Buddha. Buddha the stone cat. Buddha the candle. The only thing not Buddha is Buddha. Being nothing Buddha becomes everything. Try it and see!

The wanderer could not find his way Home, so Home returned to the wanderer. The wanderer confessed, "I am lost in your love," to which the Beloved replied, "You have no choice." The wanderer said, "I, who imagined free will for ten thousand lifetimes, now surrender. Let my will drown in your ocean of freedom." The Beloved answered without words, "This moment has been floating through every birth and death." Friend, do you also wish to reach the final destination, which is the place where you were before you were born? Then you must listen very carefully to this conversation between twinkling eyes of silence. Photo: with Sri Sri in Seattle, the moment he said, 'You have no choice.'

Meditation is listening to God speak. But God's native language is silence. Therefor, meditation is listening to silence. Meditation is a conversation beyond language, like the movement of waters underground before a stream gushes into the light. The silence of meditation is not empty, but running over with the juice of mutuality, the ebb and flow of yearning and affection. There are tides in silence, giving and receiving. Love-play in stillness is the Mystery of our dialog with God. When the prophet Elijah fled for his life from the priests of Baal, he hid in a cave on Mount Horeb. Deeply depressed and alone, Elijah listened and watched. There was an earthquake, then a desert whirlwind, then a bolt of lightning. But the Lord was not in earth, wind or fire. Then Elijah opened his heart to pure Presence. Centering down to the formless, he found God in a still small voice of quiet. The Hebrew here in 1 Kings 19:12 is very subtle . What Elijah heard was a ...

"Control is opposed to evolution." ~Maharishi Wisdom is out of control. No need to control the mind, just transcend the mind. No need to silence the intellect, just transcend the intellect. No need to suppress the ego, just transcend the ego. How do I transcend? I do not. The grace of the Master does it for me. Effortlessly mind, intellect and ego bathe in vast loving Presence, Presence like the sky, pervaded by love like the color blue. Beauty stuns the mind into stillness. Intellect grows quiet in the boundless light of Yes. I dissolve into Am, Am into We, We into communion. This work of Un-Doing is meditation. When the work is undone, mind is clear. Intellect is sharp. Ego is a playful agent of laughter. Useful tears spring up. Are they tears of sorrow or joy? One who goes out of control has enough dispassion to feel the joys and sorrows of all creatures, as if they are her own. Such compassionate dispassion is the fruit of transcendental meditation.