Uradiance

My spinal cord with all its nerves and twigs of fire is a motionless lightning bolt that reaches into every hollow of my flesh, sweetening the juice in each berry and cell. This must have been the burning bush that Moses saw inside,  inside, for the eye  that sees itself is God. The sap in this tree is silence. If there must come a thunder, it will be  the world, not the heart. Painting by Jyoti Sahi

Merely by resting in your heart you soften one thousand miles of space around you. Those who come near you feel a touch of wild cotton, the radiance of seven pearls threaded on a sunbeam. Their souls begin to orbit your belly button. They enter the invisible garden of Presence and somehow taste the blood-red seeds in the pomegranate's core without gashing the husk. This is why you learn to repose in the golden shrine of your chest. Let others make the haj or fall upon the sword. You just need to be more hollow. Victorious the mind that no longer seeks because it has dissolved into the erotic splendor of the void. Let your next exhalation be what pours from the libation cup offered by a dying warrior. The triumph is surrender. Now let a death-song swell your throat, like his, in a voice that is yours and not yours, as smoke curls up from a wick just blown out. Return to the lips of the one who says, “Well done! Did no one ever tell you? That breath was the name of God." Sculp...

  As you awaken, just before the mind of yesterday falls like a net of stones behind your eye, be weightless. Be Presence without a story. How your soul looks in that mirror when it sees itself! What gets you out of bed, dancing like a wild purple iris in the breeze of your own inhalation! It doesn't matter at all what you will do for a living today. The priceless jewel is just living. It doesn't matter at all how much money you will make today. Your body is more precious than sunlight. Your sternum is beaten from finer gold. Whether you feed the multitudes today or only wash the dishes makes no difference at all. What matters is to plunge down the stem of this unfolding meditation flower, to follow the thunderbolt in your backbone all the way home to silence, to drop the terrible fairy tale of last week's anger. The mirage of sorrow vanishes in clarity, your heart the whole sky, empty and blue. Love doesn’t need a story. Photo by Marney Ward

  The racoon pauses before my statue of Kwan Yin. Still, near, barefoot, I smell the musk, and know by the ancient cinnamon scent in Autumn air that Earth was just created a moment ago. Nothing that is real ever strives to be other than it is. Under the weight of grace I lower my gaze, noticing the color of the fallen, how they forget their trees, to bleed and surrender the soul of gold to living loam. There is no greater miracle than becoming ordinary. It give wings to your tears.     Painting by Rebecca Latham, collage by Rashani Réa  

The false prophet proclaims a general truth, but God whispers the fragrance of a   rose: this rose. A honey bee isn't interested in genus or species: the madding sweetness of this blossom is what he desires. Nor is the artist inspired by flowers in general: she must paint this incomparable azalea.  With general truth our minds swell up, assuming the abstraction to expand us and make us smarter. But a mind turgid with beliefs is neither clear nor useful. It is a gray intellectual thicket that prevents real empathy, real presence. The general truth, in fact, may make us smaller, because it confines awareness to a conceptual box   which our ego must argue and defend. We do not live in general, we live in particular. When we taste this sensation, this perception, this very breath with sparkling awareness, it may be a portal to the infinite, a singularity unbounded. Which is why saints, Zen masters, and fools have attainted liberation by the flash of a plum blossom in the moo...

Wonder why the Prophet always descends from a mountain peak, brandishing stone tablets of Law. Wonder why the Prophet can't meander out of the valley like a stream, holding ripened berries in her hand. Wonder why the Prophet doesn’t say, “Thou shalt” instead of “Thou shalt not.” Wonder why we carve our names on pillars, steeples, sky-scrapers, states, and why we can’t forget them in the hum of returning bees, the undulating curve of wine-stained hills at dawn, at least a little while. Wonder why nations don't gather in a circle called Earth, blending the roll of their hips in a harvest dance, melting into one rainbow serpent. Wonder why we need pyramids and politicians. Wonder why we get so mad we must defeat each other, even ourselves, when the berries taste so sweet just as they are, and better when we share them crushed, fermented in one cup, as lovers share their secret selves after the wedding. Stock photo, Mt. Sinai

Don’t take a walk, give one. Barefoot or shod, pause ever so briefly as you press your sole’s soft center to the ground. Hikers of switch-back trails call it the rest-step, which is a kind of meditation at the heart of going. The planet can feel this lost harmony of the body and its breath, pathlessly meandering through trillium silence in the dangled gaze of columbine over glowing moss, careful not to tread on cream drops of paschal flower, caressing the loam yet never quite arriving. This way, you won’t disturb the marmot at his prayers. My photo: a marmot praying, Mt. Rainier

Sister, Mother, Friend, O Paramour! What passes is not time, but attention to the wedded graces we came for: freedom to mark or not to mention unkept promises; without a word to glance like steel, or choose forgetting; share the wonder of a hummingbird, or passion kindled by the setting sun over low gold distant hills; this azalea from a thoughtful daughter bursting purple plenty, how it spills its loving cup of Lethe-water; how we drink of it, grow young at last - not by regret for all that is stillborn, nor yearning for a scent of rose in thorn - but tasting full the Presence of the past. Photo from All About Gardening

  We’ve spent a great deal of our spiritual life denying, bypassing, suppressing the night inside us. Now we need to return to the black hole, the dark heart inside the bright one. Are there not two chambers, one empty, one full? Learn from the moon. In the bleakest midnight of the soul, as C.S. Lewis found, we can be “surprised by joy.” Suddenly we rediscover the sun in the heart of grief, we relax into grace, the gift of mysterious unbidden happiness. We savor a warmth which is the very nature of our blood, the good smell of fresh baked Bread in the midst of Winter. Be forewarned,  when you bypass the darkness, you bypass the light!   Each breath received contains dark energy. Each breath offered contains more starlight than the Milky Way. Why favor one or the other? Have we vested so much energy in our trauma that it became our identity? Night the new hero, light the new villain. “Holier than thou” replaced with “darker than thou.” “Happier...

We are each a hologram of all, containing the microbiome of earth, stars, galaxies, the DNA of butterflies and pomegranates, in a uniquely personal configuration. The hologram called You and the hologram called I are infinitesimal turnings of one kaleidoscope, each expressing the whole rainbow mandala as no other ever has, or ever will. The universe "groans in travail" to bear us as ineffable singularities. The exquisite beauty of the individual person is the jewel of evolution. Those who deny it have allowed their politics to lead them into the Cult of the Collective. But the collective and the personal are two aspects of one hologram. Individuality does not deny the collective, but embodies it. An individual is the personal song that rises from the chorus of the fungi, bacteria, and elementals of the biosphere. The Person does not stand apart from the Whole, but is rather the fulfillment, the very soul, of our cosmic collective purpose.   Mandala by Caryn Babaian

The mind sees a world in crisis. But the crisis is the mind. If we see through a shattered lens, everything appears shattered. Let us heal our sight. Have you ever meditated on your eyes? We are always streaming through our eyes. But do we ever take a few moments to rest in our eyes: not flowing outward toward the world, nor inward toward the mind, but resting in the liminal space, where seeing is empty, without seer or seen? Through the portal of the eye, the energy outside presses in as a dancing chaos of light. Simultaneously, through that same gateway, we project our mind outward, organizing the light we see, superimposing onto its radiant chaos the forms that correspond to our desires, anxieties, and old stories. The mind exits. The world enters. Yet we never notice the space of the doorway, the transparency of our own eye. We don't linger to look at what is looking. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "The eye is the light of the body...

I am Tawa the Sun. But who created me? Spider Woman did. She is the darkness inside light. These are her instructions.... Untangled from your silken theater, play the weaver's game. I will teach you. Let beggars and presidents, anarchists and kings, cling to threads of desire while you simply witness the glistening. Don't be a bead, a diamond, a tear on a gossamer net. Be the black between. Fling your heart into orbit around stillness and become the untethered gaze that sees from every star. Find a naked lover beneath The veil of your breathing, The musk of your flesh anointing her emptiness. Your body becomes her. She looks lovely in you. Let every photon of your bone bathe in the glory of its origin, and each electron collide with the darkest particle of its other self. What if the path doesn't lead to the next moment, but deeper into this one? Let loss be the illuminated door. The eloquent don't speak. They catch the full moon in their quivering web of silence. Pa...

  If you get a friend request  from God, don't accept it. She is a hacker. She will infect your cell phone, your iPad, your camera and everything it sees, including your own reptilian brain with a viral buzz, a neuroplastic musk that melts all boundaries and fine philosophical distinctions, even the molecular membranes that guard your bureaucracy of punctilious neurons from the amphibious tongues of fire that tease up from your steaming amygdala, yes, dissolving even the firewall between "inner" and "outer," as the algorithms of your heart force you to surrender, to collapse in the cyber-void at the center of the iris with no eye, erasing all your files, all the documentation of your misdeeds, until you simply gaze into what gazes. Photo: Kristy Thompson

You never claimed the title of Guru. You had a more important mission: to initiate seekers into the most intimate relationship of all, betrothal to the Beloved Within. Therefore I can only surrender and dissolve. When anyone tried to worship you as Guru, you turned away and bowed to your own Guru, who represented the timeless lineage of the Shankaracharya tradition, the stream of wisdom flowing down from Lord Narayana and the sage Vashishta at the dawn of history. You did not call me to worship a form, but to drink the formless nectar of bliss poured through the ages, into the grail of my own heart. When you initiated me , you gave me a gift much more profound than a personal guru. You gave me an immediate effortless connection with Being, the source of creation. A personal guru may be a comfort, a soothing consolation, but your gift was more precious by far: the practice, the Sadhana, to taste the Divine as direct experience, without an intermediary. You personally introduced me to...

  On certain afternoons      the radiance of things           just as they are, requires no politics, no ideology.      First it rains,           then the sun comes out, the warming and cooling      of the globe, the rising           and falling of my diaphragm. Both Winter and Summer      I am free, no more important           than a morning glory. Most of my DNA      I share with a mouse,           infinitude with gnats. Endangered herds stampeding      through earth’s wounded valleys           I gather...

The holy community sings to God, a gathering of the shattered, the failed and fallen ones, filling violet emptiness with thanksgiving. They flow out of themselves into each other. They build a fire in the center of their loss. It could be a hungry log, a trash can, your broken heart. The holy community is not a circle of the perfect. The untainted are too whole. They will not become parts. How could the woundless give thanks? Through what broken places would they sing? Photo by Art Wolfe, Gujarat, India  

You took up meditation out of weariness. All you really wanted was a good night’s sleep. Sick of yelling "shut up!" at your own mind. Needed to oil the rusty gears in your solar plexus. But then somehow a wave of grace, of pure attention, spilled your gasping heart onto the shores of the present moment, and you became a silent witness, gazing over breakers and troughs of the past and future, watching them subside into a single tear of oceanic gratitude. That's when the rhythm of stillness arose, not in the dance of the goddess, but in honor of your own footsteps on the sand exquisitely spiraling into pathlessness. Who’s your teacher now? The cluster of plum blossoms nodding on a naked twig in late Spring snow? A vanishing hummingbird who suddenly awakens a deeper emptiness inside you? The next inhalation, grazing your chest with moonlit wings? Now it seems, no matter how busy you are...

Don’t let anyone market  your innocence  and sell it back to you  as a spiritual technique. Just blow bija bubbles like a baby. Suck distant galaxies through  your bellybutton. Let your intellect plummet  down light-years of surrender in a flash of thunder. It's not such a long way  into the starry darkness  of your diaphragm, the space that was here before God said, “Let there be light.” Rest in the silence before the question arises: that is the answer. Thousands of years ago,  Ashtavakra shouted, “Layam vraja!  Dissolve now!" He was in a cave and no one heard him, yet the rocks trembled, the sky  evaporated into itself,  and now we live in the echo. When the thought of “I” floats by, let it pass like a petal on the stream of abysmal transparency. Only dreamers take the night-journey. Real pilgrims never leave Om. At dawn, they're still wandering  round and round, well-focused,  content, truly loving ...