Uradiance

Wishing all of you a new year. Not a happy new year, just a new one. Because if you allow time to be new each moment, you cannot help but be happy, filled with the energy of re-creation. In the coming year, let us resolve never to be more than one moment old! For if we carry the old year into the new one, if we carry over our old stories, doubts, grievances and politics, we cannot possibly be happy. No thought, no belief, no mental content can ever make us happy. Happiness arises when the mind doesn't cling to any name or form. Then we taste the wine of silence between our thoughts. We soar into the empty blue sky of sparkling awareness. No thing makes our mind happy, because our mind IS happiness.   Please celebrate the New Year every moment, because the mind is done with time. Have a very new year!” Photo by my dear friend Scott Waeschle, Comet and Milky Way, Owyhee Gorge, Oregon  

BOOK I Chapter 1 I found Santa floating face-down in the cold water. Chapter 2 I found Santa floating face-down in the cold water, again. He had been drowned in the darkest hour, just before dawn. Chapter 3 It happens every morning, and Christmas is coming. Chapter 4 My overweight, perpetually confused, crossed but brightly blue-eyed Siamese boy-cat does not appear, at first glance, to be a sociopath. In fact, he is timid and clumsy, and he flees at the slightest movement. Yet every morning before dawn, he drowns Santa Claus in his water bowl. BOOK II Chapter 1 Santa is Chester's favorite toy: an old cotton finger-puppet the size of a mouse. Chapter 2 As I bow down sadly with a sigh to remove Santa from Chester's bowl at precisely 7 AM every day, I feel like Nietzsche. Chapter 3 I wring Santa dry and lay him on the rug. Chester loves Santa. Once again the game is on, the game of paradox... Chapter 4 ... love and death, the gentle, the cruel, ba...

I don’t believe. I don't believe in my heart, yet it keeps beating. I don’t believe in my hand, yet it stirs honey into tea and washes my grandmother's cup. I don’t believe in the taste of an heirloom pear from a tree my father planted, it is so sweet. I gristle my fist around his original hoe, and learn silent bending from a gracious willow without believing anything. I don't believe in the hummingbird asleep on a lilac twig, head cradled on her own emerald breast. Or in the silken cat slipping through her element of moonbeams. I don't believe in your eyes, yet their gaze obliterates my confusion. Empty of every belief, I can listen to the sound of falling stars in my body, like snow, God’s breath brushing the alter of my breastbone. Ink painting after Zhao Shao'ang, S...

Walking through this field among a stand of old prairie oaks on a raw December day, I taste that experience again, where my own awareness and the space over the frosted alfalfa are one and the same clarity... The stark beauty of negative space patterns the mosaic of branches and twigs, receding into infinite gray, resonant with invisible stars; and this space is my own pure consciousness. Within me and without me, the same expanse,  the whole planet poised in my own self-luminous mind... And in the depths of this paradox, the same question haunts me as it did when the experience first dawned over 40 years ago in that meadow near my home outside Philadelphia, on the rolling dales of Chester County, Pennsylvania: Whose awareness? Mine or God's? This singular momentous Now of consciousness has not changed, has not become a new moment, in over 40 years; perhaps not in a thousand years. Perhaps I tasted this crystaled transparency at some Cistercian Abbey in medieval France o...

"Sojourn and dwell in your essence, in your ground, and there God shall mix you with the divine essence, without the medium of any image." ~Meister Eckhart 1:48 p.m. Pacific Time, December 21, the solstice. Yet the shift and tilt of earth is really quite insignificant, and the sun is a small star, one among 400 billion in the Milky Way, which is a modest galaxy amidst the trillions clustered throughout the ever-expanding silence of the cosmic void. What is truly magnificent is not a tiny planet or a humble star, swept toward the rim of a dust-mote galaxy, but the awakening of this vast space as our own consciousness, the effortless grasp of it all beyond thought, enfolding it all with compassion, embracing it all in this brief moment of prayer.

Today, December 20, is the birthday of Sri Guru Dev Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math. Lttle known in the West, a silent saint of the forest, he was nevertheless the well of the holy tradition that began with Lord Narayana and streamed through the centuries, from sage Vashistha to Veda Vyasa, to Adi Shankara, to Maharishi and Sri Sri, and on to the ancient Presence of eternity in this very moment. He was the spiritual teacher of teachers who transformed the lives of millions. I do not bow to one who shines above me with the splendor of ten thousand suns. I bow to one who awakens the splendor of ten thousand suns in my own chest, and stirs the ocean of gratitude in every cell of my body. Jai Guru Dev. Photo: my puja alter

Winter morning. Two junco songs. Wait, listen. The moment of silence between them is a note in the melody of Presence. This momentous sliver of silence is nectar, pressed out and overflowing, inebriating, eternally healing. It happens between chirps, between words, between ideas. Drink from this source any time of day, the infinitesimal serenity at your windowsill. If humanity practiced such listening for brief moments, we could transform the world very quickly. Yet our schools never taught us to drink from the well of silence. They taught us to hear only the chatter, and argue with it. Our teachers never said, "Hear the wordless wisdom where a thought dissolves, before the next thought arises." This sacred crevice is the blink of an eye, the pause at the end of your exhalation, the gap of ten thousand light-years from one electron to another, the interstice where our universe ends in no-thing, before the next big bang. These are all the same sacred space, beyond duration, wh...

If you're seeking practical advice, don't come here. Practical advice is for fixing your bicycle. If you want a spiritual teacher, don't come here. I will only shout at you because the coffee is lukewarm. All I have to say is this: breath polishes the body, mantra polishes the mind, inside and outside, the same glass. Atoms are made of brilliant emptiness solid as diamond. Stop being educated! Give up namarupa To shatter the mirror of name and form. Concepts will melt in the ghee of pure sensation. Words will dissolve in the hum of bewilderment. Meditation is fierce healing. The enormous green jaws of the praying mantis devour her lover. You become softer than silk. You become the night between a spider's moon-lit threads. The Goddess Kundalini does not want to catch you. She wants you to be free. Photo by Pang Way  

Why does the flame in the temple of your heart keep burning even when the mind is an empty lamp? Because yearning makes you hollow, and your spine is a wick dipped deep into the radiance that overflows each cell of your body. Blessings of Hanukkah and many other miracles appear when Being kisses the flesh. Painting by Elena Kotliarker

The old problem-solving model was to work from the analytic mind (manas), assembling the parts piece by piece until you achieved the Whole. The new way, which is really the most ancient way, is to work from the intuition (buddhi), seeing and grokking the Whole all at once and feeling it as complete, so that from the subtlest level of your feeling, which is very near the source of creation's energy, the Whole attracts the parts and completes itself. This is working with least effort for maximum achievement. But do we ever see this principle operating in nature? Yes, all the time. We just don't recognize it. The forms of matter are in the vacuum as waves of pure mathematical probability before manifesting as photons and neutrinos.The entire oak tree is in the acorn before it sprouts. The sparrow's heart sings in darkness, then there is dawn. Love the woods before you use the trees. Photo by William Neill

You're not here to save the world. You're here to discover that you Are the world. You are compassion. You are perfect healing. In you the mountains are lighter than the sky. Don't try to understand this. Just fall in love with yourself in every pair of eyes. Detail from Botticelli  

In these Winter woods the deer are not waiting for Christmas; they are Christmas. And you, faithful pilgrim of the seasons, are you waiting for the birth of astonishment? From beyond the fiery rim of the cup that drips worlds, rays of grace fall into your body. One question remains: will you hold your last breath, or offer it in gratitude? The answer is how you do it now, how you rehearse for that breath with this one. Both are the same, the breath of life and death, one Being, tilted toward itself in perpetual solstice. Cherishing a Winter moon in the hollow between your ribs, bright seed in virgin darkness, give back the night. Give back the night to what has never been created, for this also is you. The incandescent silence in your secret core bears pangs of music, binaural dissonance of love made flesh. Not the flesh of God, but your flesh; not the gasp of Mary, but your inhalation, trembling all the starry harmony of human form. A gain and again , r ehearse the gift. For thi...

  Atma tvam, You are the self in all creatures. Love until there is no other. Let adoration be the fragrance of your Being. Sing and dance in the highest world, which is this one where you learn to say yes. Yes to aloneness, to snow, to the scarlet berry of your pain. Where you learn to behold your own face in the gaze of a stranger. Where you learn to frolic as warblers and children who carefully make frolicking their business. Now go out and play, whether you have your red boots on or not. Play in the rain, play on ice, risk amazement. Love until there is no other.

Miracle of warm Spring dew on Winter hills. Juan Diego, whose robe-full of December roses spills before the bishop, revealing Our Lady's Aztec form imprinted on Maguey cactus cloth, thank you. Mother Mary of Guadalupe, pray for us. Thank you.    December 12, Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

  A discussion on the four keys to human virtue transpired in the Assembly of the Wise. The post-modernist philosopher stood up and said, "The four keys are sex, food, money and death." The people applauded with great enthusiasm. Next the moral philosopher stood and proclaimed, "The four keys  are prudence, temperance, harmony, and fortitude." There was a general murmur, because these words had not been heard for a thousand years and no one could quite remembe r what they meant. Then the Yogi spoke. "The four keys to are dispassion, loving-kindness, non-violence, and contentment." Some of the people smiled, but the rest whispered among themselves. Finally someone said, "This is hardly philosophy!" Finally the Fool stood up. He said, "The key to human virtue is being grateful." The assembly waited impatiently, then began to grumble. Someone shouted, "What are the other keys, Fool?" To which the Fool repl...

  People love to log in. I love to log out. For a little while I log out of absolutely everything. I don't just log out of facebook, and the internet, and my computer. I log out of the world. I log out of the mind. I log out of me. What's left? No thing. You can't even call it being, because "being" is a concept and you've logged out of conceptual thought. That's why the Buddha says, "It neither is nor is not." So you'll just have to experience this for yourself and give it a name. Meister Eckhart calls it "the Godhead beyond God." The Yogis call it, "nirbija samadhi": seedless meditation. The Buddhists call it, "sunyata," emptiness, which of course has been completely misunderstood because we logged into mind and turned "emptiness" into an idea. So forget all thoughts, names, forms, stories about the past or future, and just log out. Even a moment of this is eternity, because you've logged out of t...

  I f you want a bitter seedless life, just keep identifying your self as victim. K eep blaming others for your circumstance. But if you want your heart to melt into the impeccable splendor of the golden sun and illuminate the earth with courage, take off the cloak of your old story. Step naked through the portal of the present moment into a kingdom where darkness sparkles and silence sings, because there is no judgment, and fear is swallowed up in Love.

  Now we pass from the Information Age to the Age of Unknowing. True teachers are not stuffed full of facts, but empty. Past and future events are devoid of substance, the present moment also a spark of the void. Wisdom does not tangle the mind in arguments, but dissolves thought into deepening silence, hollow yet resonant. Out of that silence, the world is born. A lightning bolt and a rose petal are both blazing swords that sever the sky into One. Write your name on water. Then drop learning, gaze into the palm of your hand, behold the mother of stars. Sumi-e ink painting: Zen Master Hakuin's self-portrait.