Uradiance

  In a civilization that has nearly exhausted itself , one sign of weariness is the denial of individuality. Please don't buy into the propaganda that says, to become whole, you must drown your person-hood in the collective. Don't doubt your uniqueness, your voice as a free moral agent. Whether of the left or the right, authoritarian ideology wants to level you into the mean, to undermine your singularity. Levelers herd you into racial, gender, and tribal identity groups, the better to submerge you in their programs of bio- or socio-engineering. They even use new-age "spirituality," appropriating concepts of advaita (non-duality) or the device of the sangha, to dissolve the particular into the general good. What they don't want you to know is this: good is never general, only particular. Your soul is a dancing hologram. You are a one-time-only turn of the kaleidoscope. You may reflect the cosmos, but the configuration is yours alone. You are this wave, enfolding...

Of course the outraged are outraged that you are not outraged. But in truth, you are under no obligation to be angry. And though they are certain the world will not survive without their angry opinion, you are under no obligation to have an opinion about anything. Opinions arise and dissolve like clouds in the empty sky. You cannot grasp them, so why try? To realize that you are not under any obligation to believe in your thoughts is the dawning of freedom. Why should you insist that they are “your” thoughts or “my” thoughts? They just arise and dissolve in vast awareness. A thought is just dark energy, billowing out of the void in the axis of a neuron. You came here to be astonished. Bow your head and pour the ideology out of your skull. Your beliefs will compost next Spring’s kale. To be green and useful, the uncreated light of heaven must pass through the belly of an earthworm. You came to meet your friends in Rumi’s meadow, out beyond opinions. Bring an empty cup. In the...

Mineral people are plant food. Plant people are animal food. We animal people are food for worms. Worms and maggots are microbe food. Matter is divine. The top of the food chain is not man, but microbe. Microbes are embodied angels who merge into vast infernal networks of holy mycelia. The mycelium network is the soul of a living planet. The planet is an archon, a goddess. Her spirit is the breath of a mushroom. Irradiate the stars with your body. We're all food.   James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Theory, dies at 103 LINK Chalk mandala by biology teach Caryn Babaian LINK

  The teacher said, "Let go." So I let go of the teacher. Now there is no one letting go and nothing to let go of, morning sky empty and blue, the teacher a chickadee in the cedar by my window.

Breathing in, from the belly to the galaxies above you, breathing out, from your the spiraled emptiness on your crown to the groundless abyss of beneath your sacrum, where the world is born, one breath of wholeness boosts your immune system. Gratitude for a butterfly on a blossoming weed in your backyard boosts your immune system. Stroking animal fur, and savoring it's warm feral fragrance, boosts your immune system. Walking barefoot on wet moss at dawn, feeling joy at another's success, hugging this moment, just as it is, boosts your immune system. Now fall into your flesh, landing softly in each cell. This too is medicine. Vaccinate your blood with the blues of the sky, the song of a sparrow, the daily practice of amazement. Proclaim sovereignty over your own body.   Photo: Indeed, a butterfly on a weed-blossom in my backyard.

    Collage by Rashani Réa, my co-author on several books, see below

The Master became a Fool and started to babble. He was sitting on the edge of the well of joy. These are a few of the things he said before I slapped him on the back and knocked him in. No one is to blame. Perfection is a mistake. Being right is an obstacle to truth. To bow is liberation. To feel the wound at the heart of joy is devotion. Surrender is the only victory. The goal is not to be independently wealthy, but to be independently happy. What is happening now is never as important as what is happening now. Be a cause, not an effect. You were not created in the image of a beggar, but in the image of a creator. The chaos around you is just your old skin sloughing off: you are a rainbow serpent of wisdom. Throw out the voice that loves to argue, meet the one who loves to sing. God hears all prayer as music without words; the names don’t matter. The Lord is ruthlessly forgiving; how much love can you endure? Let every moment be con...

God is ruthlessly forgiving. Can you stand her fire? Let this burning have its way with you. Ferment your ashes. There is nothing that cannot be changed into wine. Now drop these small weapons of fear and resentment. You are only a sheath. Love is the sword.

  The emperor recited his own royal merits, then asked the wanderer what merit he possessed. Bodhidharma replied, "mu." The emperor asked what knowledge he taught. Bodhidharma replied, "mu." The emperor asked what meditation he practiced. Bodhidharma replied, "mu." Mu means "nothing." Therefore throw away your rosary of shoulds. It is costume jewelry. Have the courage to slice off thou-shalt-not, right at the throat with a single stroke of the blazing sword of emptiness. If you call the whirlpool of stars in your heart, "the soul," it becomes the shadow of an echo. If you call your oceanic succulence "the flesh," it turns to stone, dark gravity of otherness. And the sky where our bodies evaporate into each other’s bittersweet mist? If you name it "love" we are riven in two. Out of hoarse silence rains a voice of cinders. Use your scriptures for kindling. Toast the commandments ...

    The journey is over at this end of the rainbow. The distance from here to there is only hesitation.  You arrived before the pilgrimage began. Erasing the thought, I am seeking , dissolves at least three million light-years. Andromeda floats on the jelly of your iris. We're all star-clusters petaled in one calyx, colors of the garden prism'd through a hollow seed. We’re answers in the silence where no question has yet arisen.  But if we don't take time to gaze deeply, we just call it now, this holographic quantum bijou emitting rays of past and future. Pay a little more attention to the bling of suns. Yatha drishti, tatha srishti. As you are to yourself , so your world appears. Between pistil and stamen, a trillion pollinated nebulae. Between I and Thou, a musk so gold and pungent it drowns the drone, arousing the distant queen.  Don't be one or two. Grounded in diamond uncertainty, behold the earth unda...

   Here in your garden  is a patient waiting. Cool morning air, caress of golden  sunlight, and a breath of mist in-lit with pearl.   A presence patiently enveloping the bud of the peony, an expectation in stillness, awaiting the burst,  the annihilation, and the Beauty. Does it happen in  a moment or a day? Is it like the burst of clustered galaxies over countless eons seen in an ever-present past? Why would that even matter if Beauty is always  already here? If it happens, has happened,   continually waits for itself  to happen? And you can't make it happen, whether in  a moment or a day,   because you are simply the witness,   the bewildered One  who, prior to thinking,  prior to feeling, prior  to knowing "I Am,"  is perfect stillness, radiant silence, love unbudded and unbound,  patiently waiting beyond duration,   enfolding what you must become? No the mind can't do...

  Why bow before a white  silk dhoti and a pair sandals,  to one who sits on a golden dais  garlanded with roses and gladiolas?  Thousands perform padanamaskar,  shattering their brains on his bare toes. But that finite human form is only the reflection of something  infinite inside you, something  that bursts open in your solar plexus and flowers beyond light. The one you worship out there is not the Guru - not unless his gaze awakens the music in your silence, his whisper tastes of nectar  in the space where your breath stops,  his shape dissolves into the stillness  at the core of your heartbeat.  The real Guru is within. The real Guru is within. Let that one awaken this one. Then bow. Photo by Kristy Thompson

  What makes you feel renewed when you're hurting? Merging awareness with breath, and breath with sensation in the body, dissolving the mind into your wound 100%, without resistance, without even naming it "pain," whether the wound be anger, grief, or yearning. This is the alchemy of Direct Touch, which transmutes hurting into free energy, into ananda.

  Fierceness is not the only path. Anger is just one flavor of fire. There are other ways to become authentic, as when a hummingbird loses herself in a sip from the honeysuckle fountain, or a barn owl drops the heart of a mouse down her owlet's yearning gorge. Or merging with spanda wherever you are, that which expands and contracts yet remains like the sky, the breath of boundless space delighting in the gasp of an atom, This! If you would become a lord among fools, penetrate the flame. Immolate your lungs in the divine shadow. Darkness is not the opposite of light but the womb of light. It is good for those who get lost in colors to hear this again and again. Pierce the black hole of un-knowing and mother your own nebula. Both sun and moon ascend through infinite night. Stars are brilliant, yet savory is the blackness between them. Her rays cast a sparkling path across the waters of your mind, and his golden beam, through morning mist, caresses the bud beneath your bruises. Who c...

Yesterday we had a neighborhood cook out. Everyone brought food. There were no enlightened diets, just the delicious casserole of each other. It never occurred to anybody to take pictures. You can't take a picture of Presence. We were completely happy just eating and laughing. It was a party because there were no parties. No politics. No fireworks. Nobody said grace, because everything is grace before it arises. Only afterward did we realize that this was a miracle, the ordinary miracle that is always available. And it was liberation, because freedom is just being a neighbor. Independence is entanglement. Breathing in, there is awakening, with no "I" who needs to awaken. Breathing out, a vast hug that does not need to be given, because it already encircles us, enfolding the bodies of friends, city parks and streets, the distant hills, the intimate ancestral stars. We float like stunned dust in the silent explosion of gratitude. Watercolor by Yvonne Hemingway

I pledge allegiance to no flag. I pledge allegiance to no nation, no tribe, no party. I pledge allegiance to no bombs bursting in air, but to the silence in a day of prayer. True patriotism is rebellion. True rebellion is joy. Cast down the mighty, the masters of war. I pledge allegiance to the poor. I pledge allegiance to hemp and sod. I pledge allegiance to the unnamed god. I pledge allegiance to the moon and tide, to sun and wind and what I cannot know. I pledge allegiance to the rainbow, to the light that contains all colors. I pledge allegiance to living coral. I pledge allegiance to an heirloom tomato seed and to the wisdom in the weed. I pledge allegiance to the unborn curled in their mother's sea of trust. I pledge allegiance to the dust. I pledge allegiance to all winged and swimming children of the earth, to creatures that crawl or come out at night, to all my relations who wait to take birth, to b...