Uradiance

A Sanskrit verse declares, "Vasúdhaivá kutúmbhakam." The world is one family. Now is the time for each of us to be the whole. Every color of the rainbow is made of the same light. When God looks at us, God sees the super-radiance of one Self reflected in the mirror of her consciousness, yet scintillating in particular faces, exquisitely unique souls. This is the very purpose of evolution. Myriad vigintillion sparks condense into the mineral kingdom, entangle their cilia through the vegetable, embed their expanding soulfulness among the wingéd, reptilian and four-leggéd creatures, then Christ-all-eyes in fiery neurons of a human brain, solidifying consciousness as angel-pearl. Who knows? Each of us may one day selve our own earth as a personal planetary spirit, just as Gaia did, She who once was a protozoan monad of wonder. "Vasúdhaivá kutúmbhakam." The world is one family. Now is the time to return to our family with a sense of planetary belonging, a sense of intim...

Yes, I’ve committed countless sins. Fireflies over a meadow just before sunrise. Tea candles on a veranda at noon. Milkweed in the ocean wind. Here's the secret: God has no interest in guilt. Abandon penance and forgiveness because the heart is an empty sky full of amazement whose dawning outshines every circumstance as honey overflows the comb. When the dandelion is ready, the frailest breath blows it away. In the richest vineyard, nothing takes root but the ancient grapes of pain bursting sweetly on the tongue today, today,  with the taste of love. When I understood this, I fell down and sang to the worm, to the ladybug, to the earth's least wanted child, "Walk on me!"

  A teacher fills you. A guru empties you. A teacher gives knowledge. A guru awakens the knower. One transmits information. The other transmits wonder without words. Your mind thirsts for certainty. Your heart yearns for breaking open. If the yearning is intense enough, the guru could be a cricket.

  Collage by Rashani Réa, who used it in a grief workshop. Thank you Rashani.

We have one thing to whine about, and ten thousand reasons to be grateful! The mind fastens on a single misery, and forgets all the countless sparkling faces of beauty. This is precisely when we need to meditate, because meditation is seeing clearly, "I am not this mind."  There is no need to control the mind, or suppress it. Just see that the mind has its own playful restless irrepressible nature and let it go, let it roam through the universe. You are not the mind.  The mind wants to drown you in waves of negative energy, waves of information. But right now, on this Sabbath morning, you don't need any more information. For a little while, don't be in-formed. Be in the formless.  No need to rise above the waves or fight against them. Just sink down beneath them. Sink effortlessly and let the mind pass gently over you. Repose in the deeper waters of un-knowing. Un-knowing is the space of compassion.  Then you can laugh, and cry, and sing again. Because laughter ...

   The notion that some of us are activists and others are contemplatives is a false distinction. We are all activists, and all contemplatives.  In the most dynamic action, we plunge 101% into our peak performance, and precisely then we find a boundless stillness at our core, an infinite silence within. Physiologists call this state "flow." At their best moments of creative energy, great athletes and great artists alike experience inner repose at the core of action. Some of us have experienced this paradox at times of maximum challenge. So the Bhagavad Gita declares: "One who sees silence in the midst of action, and action in the midst of silence, truly sees (4:18)."  When you act, leap 101% into action. When you meditate, sink 101% into silence at your heart's core. Eventually the ocean of silence will pervade the waves of activity in a very natural way. This integration of stillness and action does not come from dividing the mind, trying to detach fr...

  Blessed be the Unchosen. Does the apple tree prefer Autumn or Spring? Would brook water rather be a cloud? Does a sunbeam choose which leaf to turn green? When does a larva decide to put on twin rainbows? Which star gets the deepest night? At dawn, a liquid bell of red winged blackbird on a cattail: who chose the moment to sing? Which nipple does the infant love best? Why does the earth keep turning? Is she's choosing night or day? Nature selects all and prefers nothing. Only the mind is "for" or "against." Blessed be the Unchosen. The miracle happens here, a brilliant golden summer moth just now settling on the peony. This choice was made before the sun and moon were born.

  Meditation is not doing, but plunging, drowning in the space of the heart. Here the mind gets saturated with pure Being, so luscious, so succulent, there is no room for thought. Why visualize a golden lotus? I Am the golden lotus. Why seek an Other? I am the ground, the seed, the root, and the blossom. My silence is a diamond more solid than God. And pure Being is my very nature. I shall not even call this "meditation." I shall call it, "polishing the crystal of existence with one soft breath."  After meditation, I discover this very same inner jewel at the center of a raindrop, at the petal tip of an iris on a May morning. I see the same unbounded inner sky on the curve of a robin's egg. Ah, tender blue, the color of astonishment in an empty mind!  If there is a "spiritual path," it must be just this gentle dissolving of the difference, the borderline, between inner and outer.

You have integrity because your words and your silence, your deeds and your Being, are one stream of loving courage. You are the music of woman in my life. You bestow the grace of motherhood, and make known the miracle of childbirth. Even before our children were born, you kept that most intimate covenant of all, the secret communion of a mother with the incoming soul. Immersed in a sea of trust, how blessed our children were to choose your womb! How blessed am I to be the husband of one who embodies wisdom with such mighty gentleness. Happy Mother's Day, Anna. I love you. Photo: Jersey Shore, 1989

  "Happiness radiates like the fragrance from a flower and draws all good things towards you. Allow your love to nourish yourself as well as others." ~Maharishi   The ego does not want to hear this. The mind prefers conflict, because conflict makes it feel alive. The ego-mind loves to star in its own melodrama, imagining itself the victim in a heroic struggle against the oppressor. Of course, the real oppressor is the mind itself. But eventually it wearies of the struggle, surrenders, and sinks into the heart. Then a flowering happens, a transformation. The blossom doesn't need to take a journey, and search for bees. The blossom remains still, releasing a scent that lures the bees toward its center. So, in deep meditation, the heart breathes without effort, pulsing in repose . Let dynamic stillness exude waves of love, drawing all good things into the domain of your heart.   Photo by Kristy Thompson

Freedom is never a reaction. To be stuck in reaction is bondage, bondage to the one against whom we re-act. Freedom is observing our reactions. In that seeing, reaction dissolves. Then we can act from stillness, the silence of the Seer. Stillness is a lightning bolt. Silence is a diamond with ten thousand eyes. Why not act like a mountain floating on a sea of blossoms? Mt. Fuji. Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan

  Silence is substance. The material world is made out of vibrating energy. But what is the energy that vibrates? No-thing. The empty vacuum of perfect silence.    St. John of the Cross said, "Silence is the first language of God." The 2nd Century Gnostic Valentinus wrote, "The real Virgin Mother is mystical eternal silence." Rumi tells us, "When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music." Ammaji adds, "In meditation, silence is the Mother." And Anias Ninn: "I love your silences, they are like mine."   Silence cannot be thought. Thinking a thought about silence is not silence. Of course our silence should not suppress or negate thinking. But in the radiant quietness of Truth, the veil of thought becomes transparent, and silence outshines the mind. Then silence is freedom from thought. And if you are an activist, do not doubt that your action is empowered from a place of silence. Plunge into action 101%, and you will f...

  Let marvelous images, clouds of lies, appear and dissolve in your breathlessly silent cobalt sky. Within you is a magistrate with woolly brows. Within you is a soft shining girl spilling goat milk from an ancient jar. Within you is a stallion  bronze as the melting sun  on the horizon of a land  you have not explored. Within you are two earthworms entangled in a passionate helix of rainbows, both of them hermaphrodites. Let the judge kneel, weighted down by a single tear. Let the little girl put her hand on his cheek. Let the stallion walk warily toward you, then, at the sound of your voice, bow his crown to nuzzle your shoulder. Let the worms go at it and churn the dirt like bulls from heaven. Let the terrible beautiful world happen in the silence between ideas. Believe in nothing.       Illustration by David Onazzi for Outside Magazine

  This is a big day in astrology. Everything is in conjunction with everything else. Each quark proton in your flesh is transiting an invisible sun whose light is on its way. Each of your blood cells is in hologrammatic agreement with the whirling verb of Laniakea, the super-cluster of galaxies in whose body our solar system is an atom. The wave of the past and the trough of the future perfectly cancel each other in the oceanic stillness of this moment. Now is the most auspicious time to do whatever you are doing. Just don't try... OK, the astrologers are no longer listening to me, so I can tell you a secret: this is how it always is, every moment, every day. Illustration from the 'Tres Riches Heures du Duc De Berry'