Uradiance

Confess! You are having a secret love affair with your Anger, that ruby-fanged serpent, that Autumn moon coiled in your belly. With the wand of immortality and the prod of your conviction that you cannot die (admit it, yes, it's death that is the outrage) you coax her quivering tongue to flick flames at steeples, minarets, missile silos, and topple the pyramids of lineage. Don't hide in that chamber of correctness. You're just like them, filled with the wrath of your fathers. Give up blaming. Just stand on your funeral pyre and dance naked in the foolishness of hell. After all, Hell was the name of the Goddess once when caverns were holy and fungal, reptilian love dropped her veil of madness,  and the sun melted our bodies into ghee. Painting by Anne Marie Zilberman

The cult of outrage is very popular these days, and Kali has become the chosen deity of the angry, who often disdain people who are blissful. Yet anger is just an ardent and intensified form of bliss, and quite addictive. Sometimes we prefer honey, and sometimes we like to crack our teeth on rock candy. In the wisdom of Tibetan art, the Goddess of Wrath holds a golden dorje, or lightning bolt. What is the nature of lightning? Overwhelmingly intense, yet lasting but a fraction of a second. Use the golden dorje of your fury to energize, cauterize, and heal. But let the lightning bolt pass all the way through you, from heaven to earth, from the sky in your crown to the dust on your soles. Finish your anger. Let it vanish. When we let anger flash completely through us like a blue flame, it leaves us lighter, ready to soar in the breeze. It doesn't leave us more angry. The right use of anger is to free us from anger. Anger is not our true home. If I linger in the lightni...

  My very act of seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, penetrates the object of perception and permeates it with consciousness, until it is no longer an it, but a Thou. Even a mossy stone, a whisper of hummingbird wing, the musk of late September tomatoes, this fierce hibiscus blossom on my back porch. My senses awaken her Thou. Her beauty awakens my Thou. To behold is an ancient art, beyond mere seeing. To behold is to be held. As we entangle our gazes, this scarlet blossom curves toward consciousness, and I bend closer to Me. Together we approach the asymptote of the Self. Together we melt the mind-made distances between seer and seen, humanity and sap. She is my soul, and I am her body. Our holy confusion makes everything clear. In one beholding, each be held. Photo: hibiscus on my back porch.  

Here is the birth of sorrow: to perceive the world as solid, and the chatter of your mind as something real, while your Silence is reduced to an abstract nothing. Here is the birth of peace: to witness both your mind and its world as an ever-dissolving mist, while your Silence solidifies into a jewel, a diamond of utmost reality. Ask any teardrop, any star. Image from unsplash.com

No need to maintain any state of mind. Simply cease to grasp the concept held at this moment, and the mind springs back into its natural buoyancy, an explosion of silence. Many seekers try to hold onto awareness. But awareness cannot be held or grasped. Awareness is not a "state," and the very effort to maintain it only generates the chatter of more thinking. Who is the maintainer and what is being maintained? This duality of the do-er and the object of doing simply re-creates the endless cycle of samsara . Eternity has no duration; it is the instantaneous pulsation of the boundless. Freedom is gained this instant, moment by moment, not by maintaining awareness but by releasing the effort to think any concept. What happens when we unclasp a thought? Awareness returns to awareness in a blast of Self-recognition. The energy that was bound up in the thought becomes available as bliss: pure consciousness devoid of concepts. This instant of eternity cannot be ...

This just about covers everything I've ever learned. Thank you, Robert, wherever you are... Oh wait, you're right here! "Always remember, the true teacher is in your heart. The real teacher is within you. A person who has gone within for many years and become silent within, will be attracted to the same silence without. They will come to the place that agrees with the within. When you have attained a degree of spiritual knowledge within, you will meet the Sage or the teacher without. It's the same difference. There's no difference whatsoever. But those of you who shop for teachers, who shop for gurus, who go shopping for spiritual life, will always be disappointed, for you will find some fault wherever you go. And again, the fault that you find, is also within yourself... "So we begin to feel that there's a living Presence within us. As we work with this feeling, that Presence turns out to be us. It turns out that we are not merely the body, or t...

  You are both Lover and Beloved, one and two. Not in the ancient garden of Vrindavan but here, on a swing inside your breathing, your sigh, a wanting beyond desire, and what enters, filling the silence. There is a midnight for love, and a dawn. If you think you can live without Radha, you will never meet Shyam. If you think you can live without yearning you will never be content. معاً أنتِ المحبّ والمحبوب معاً، أنتِ الواحد والإثنان. ليس في جنائن فريندافان القديمة، بل على أرجوحة داخل النفَس: تنهيداتك، توقك الذي يتجاوز الرغبة، وما يدخل ليملأ الصمت. هناك منتصف ليل لأجل الحب، وهناك فجر. إنْ ظننتِ العيش جائزاً من دون ‘رادها’، فإنّ ‘كريشنا’ لن يظهر. وإنْ ظننتِه ممكناً من دون توق، فسوف لن تعانقك السعادة. (Translated into Arabic by Dana Chamseddine)

With this breath, I create a new world. It is not a heaven but an earth, full of radiant imperfections for you to busy your hands and heart with. I do, however, inscribe certain commandments, not on stone but on your body, just over the diaphragm, not with flames but the cool green fire that glows from within leaves and lightning bugs. First, let there be no shame. Second, let there be as many paths to Me as human hearts. Also a path for the dolphin, a path for the moth, a path for the thistle and poppy. Some creatures, like standard poodles, horses, the golden-throated, shall need no path, for they shall be paths unto themselves. Let us include hummingbirds and tree frogs in that one. Now here is the third and final commandment: Thou shalt not say, "My way is the only way." If you commit such blasphemy, you must be wrapped in silk bandages, anointed with blue lotus and hazelnut oil, carried with early Beatles songs to an oasis for the possessed, and nu...

A friction of breath on breath ignites the fire of the Beloved in your body. If you need a reason to be born, this is good enough. A Goddess of inconceivable beauty longs to nurse you with braided streams of wild starlight. There has never been a more perfect time than this to breathe. Because you have lost the way to the palace of your thalamus, your pineal minaret, the cavern where your pituitary hangs like a luminous spider in a web of moonbeams, you must live in a world of blood-stained shadows. But when grace overflows your soul, taking the form of gristle and bone, the corpse of God turns back into bread and rosé. There’s a reason why pain has shaped you into a dark chalice. Repose in the silent kiss of inhalation and sighing, the touch of So’ham inside your chest. This is the sound of returning, again and again, to your Self. When the dream of the cloud evaporates in love's sky, the double vision of inner and outer disappears. Your spirit reposes in your body like a hand sl...

    Why do you assume that you are rising, that you are on a journey, that you move upon the world, in time, among the stars, when in fact the stars move on their journey through your breath, time falls through your stillness, the world is born each instant and dies in the silence of the one who watches but refuses to name it? Why do you assume there needs to be a knower when things happen quite as they are without being known or unknown? Why not abandon what was never yours to carry? Be the field, not the photon. Be the meadow, not the poppy. Come thistledown, float through us. Whirl, earth,  at the core of this heart. There never was an "inside" or an "outside," but plentiful vastness in quietude for all that ever was or will be to happen in a single unending moment. We’re always here, You and I, nestled in the weaving of this prayer before dawn. Photo by Muhammad Rehan

  Women of Afghanistan, I would write a poem to you, but I do not have the words to speak of your courage. I do not have the courage to speak of your dreams. What use is the pain in my heart? I breathe out your names. Malala Maiwand, Shahnaz, Mursal, Saadia, Nazifa, 10, and Frozan Safi, Fatima Ahmadi, Negar Masumi, Zahra Mirzaei and Zarmina, Zainab Abdullahi, Banu Negar, Khadija Amin, Qamar Gul and Shabnam Dawran. But what of all the Nameless Ones? I breathe them in.  

"Layam vraja: dissolve now." ~Ashtavakra Gita They say that dissolving the "I" is enlightenment, and this is an extraordinary event. But really, isn't it quite ordinary? Didn't it happen when you were a child, in every-day moments of wonder? Marveling at a lightning bug, marveling at the eyes of a new friend on the playground, marveling at a shooting star.   Doesn't it happen now, when you give yourself completely to your grief, and dissolve into a tear? When you give yourself to joy, and dissolve into a smile? Give yourself to the sound of Miles, a Monet water lily, a sonnet of Keats, and dissolve into silence. Give yourself to the Friend in your heart, through a touch of divine inhalation, and dissolve into thanksgiving.   At such an ordinary moment, is there anyone left? Doesn't enlightenment, the dissolution of the ego, happen ten thousand times a day?   What is all this talk about getting rid of "I"? The problem is not having an ego, t...

Pure consciousness is the essence of matter. Awareness pervades the earth. Every mineral, biological, and neurogenic form is made out of no other substance but the transcendental Self. Matter is spirit. The apparent conflict of soul vs. flesh, mystical experience vs. embodied experience, is a false duality created by thinking too much. No need to think about it, no need to invent concepts such as "embodiment" and "spirituality." When meditation dissolves into silence, this so-called "samadhi" vibrates through our neuro-physiology, and when we are busy with the world, our so-called "embodiment" is a vibration in consciousness. Any distinction between transcendence and embodiment, emptiness and form, is merely semantic, for the sake of argument. The ego-mind sustains itself through argument. What we need is not argument, but love. In truth, each electron, each neutrino, each quark-proton in your body is a pulse of love, a pulse of awareness returni...

One of the subtlest forms of ego is to imagine that we must carry the suffering of the world on our shoulders. This little mind takes great pride in that work. It is true, we cannot help breathe in the suffering around us. Yet the healing is not to hold it, but to breathe it out, pouring this world-sorrow into the boundless ocean of Divine Love. Take time to complete your next exhalation on behalf of humanity, and all earth's species. Follow it all the way into the Infinite. Offer everything, and rest. 'Cathedral Green' by racoonart.

I don't know. I just wonder, and that is enough. My religion is astonishment. And what most astonishes me is that people think they know anything. Do you know that this is not a dream? Do you know who you are when your mind is transparent and free of thoughts? Is it even your mind? Who beats your heart? Who breathes you when you are asleep? Do you know your true name, the one you were given before you were born? If you don't know who you are before birth and after death, how do you know who you are in this brief tremor of now? Go to the garden. Let this flower inform you. Not with knowledge, but amazement. Water color by my friend, Marney Ward

"Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: as you are, so your world appears." ~Vedas Our actions don't really affect the world so much. Neither do our words. Neither do our thoughts affect the world as much as we think! What transforms the world is our Being. You are the world. No need to try so hard. Don't worry so much. Simply Be.     Photo: flowers on my porch

Don’t let anyone market your innocence and sell it back to you as a spiritual technique. Just blow mantra bubbles like a baby. Suck distant galaxies through your bellybutton. In an instant your intellect will plummet through light-years of surrender into the starry darkness of your diaphragm. Rest in the silence before the question arises: that is the answer. Thousands of years ago, Ashtavakra shouted, “Layam vraja! Dissolve now!" Why not return to the hollow center of a star, the blackness where God has not yet said, "Let there be light"? When the thought, I Am, arises let it pass, a petal floating on a stream of abysmal transparency. Only dreamers take the night-journey. Real pilgrims never leave Om. They wander round and round at dawn, truly loving the shape of zero. NASA photo: Heart Nebula

Maybe you're not really ripe until a faint breeze plucks you from your little twig and you fall without a sound into the dark. Who told you this was your own breath? Photo by Ed Perry

  When my gaze first plumbed the sky blue pool of love it was a melting diamond of ten thousand stars. It was the beauty of a face so intimate, yet it was beauty alone, beyond the face, beyond images. When I first gazed, I sipped, then drank some more, until I was inebriated with longing, with the yearning that is the very wine it thirsts for. I thought it was Christ, I thought it was my Teacher, then I thought it was the Lord. But it was I, it was my Self. O dear one, your own Being is the Friend, the beginning and the end of the pilgrimage. Now, between your crown and chest, are legions of angels ascending and descending through many mansions on the stairway of one silver breath. Image unattributed from Pinterest, yet I believe it is by Bahman Farzad

Jesus said: "I am not your master any more, for you have drunk, and have become inebriated from the bubbling spring which I have caused to gush forth." ~Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, 13 Where is this bubbling spring? How can we drink from it? These words of Jesus are not symbolic. The spring he describes bubbles out of an open heart, flowing with an inward Light that is not figurative but substantial, an energy more real than any material object in the world. Christian Gnostics called this heart-center the bridal chamber. Yogis call it hridaya. When the divine Spirit, the shakti of Magdalen, rises up the spine, she enters into the sacred marriage. This is the ancient hieros gamos: the union of the royal bridegroom and the bride, God and the soul. Here in the heart the soul meets Christ, the Shiva-tattva, who descends from the stars through the crown chakra, to unite with a rising current of planetary energy from the mother. The up-pointed triangular flame of ground-e...

No writing on your sail. No affirmations, not even "I." Just let it ripple in the cool steady breeze, this breath. The sail itself is the name of the Goddess. You can stop rowing now. Let the current carry you. Born on the river of your vagus nerve, throw the map away, the chart of nadis and chi lines, chakras and postures. Who knows where you're going? Destinations don't matter any more. Just sailing is grace. Merely breathing in this body is adventure. And the sparkling sun on living water? The beauty that shines from your heart. Painting by Leonid Afremov

The same God who said, Let there be light shining out of darkness, has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, shining in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6) The light that shines above the heavens and the earth, the light that shines above all worlds, that is the light that shines in your heart. (Chandogya Upanishad) Prayer is dangerous. Prayer is risky business. In prayer, you risk being changed, "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (1 Cor. 15). Prayer is a naked plunge into infinite possibility. And we must be clear that the one who takes the plunge is not the one who will emerge. The former self will be annihilated in the darkness of the unpredictable, and what emerges will be someone new. "Your old self is crucified with Christ" (Rom. 6). "You have died; your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3). Yet St. Paul describes the new person who emerges from this terrible transforming darkness, n...