Uradiance

  "Layam vraja: Dissolve now!" ~Ashtavakra Gita Why not dissolve this quest for certainty, for order, for a 'path'? Dissolve into a blessed chaos of electrons, which is truly all we are. And what if the All of the cosmos is encircled by every electron? Being is enough. Being is miraculous. Being is an ever-perishing and rebirthing Radiance. Vanish into that Radiance without imposing any concept, any story, any past upon it. This is causeless ecstasy. At the deepest order of resolution, there is no resolution. There is no order. There is only annihilation, making room, restoring emptiness. This is the fructifying darkness. The apparently solid world rests in groundless dissolution. This is “the fall of man” into bliss. The Source is an all-pervading vacuum, where quantum particles instantaneously appear and disappear on a tumbling ocean of formlessness, as atoms, stars, mountains, tulips, human faces, in the warp and woof of the void. For what "purpo...

  You may be a strong voice proclaiming your truth to the world. You may be a do-er of weighty deeds. You may gather many followers. Or you may go about your daily tasks in blessed obscurity, quietly holding space for God. Wherever you go, whatever thread-weaving or bread-baking of bread or stroking of brow your hand might engage in, know that you can be part of a deeper work. Your very Being on earth is a portal to the vast silence, the ineffable peace, the boundless delight of God, who cannot begin to conceive of a universe without your presence. Has the Creator not dissolved a grain of you in the heart of every creature? Has the Spirit not mingled her motherhood in your breath? Art by Elżbieta Stawińska, who is reviving the ancient art of Orthodox icon painting.

When I discovered the emerald in my chest I gave up every calling, wealth, adventure, fame, just to follow this menial vocation: I became a Jewel Polisher. With the tincture of awareness, I moisten the soft ragged cloth of this breath, burnishing my grail until aloneness becomes wine. I drink, and there is plenty. Let me ever be quenched by my own thirst. And when I pray without words, let the earth, not heaven, answer with a whisper of wildernesss, meadow and forest, a wreathe of insouciant cloud on the sober mountain, incandescent blackness of a panther’s eye in the face of the unhoused stranger, lips of the lover who lies beside me, all entangled in the misty nimbus of my breathing. Now consider that you also might mother a new creation just through this work of being still.

We want some fiercer love that sears the lover, some terrible sweetness that burns a hole in God, zeroing down the beloved. Our fire needs a sepulcher of blackness, a cauldron for the worlds that circle and spill over. It cold be a vulva or a gash. Between seasons, we singe our stitches, weave a silvery veil of ice and thaw, gowning our nakedness in waves of ambiguity. Put it on, take it off. Melt edges, get clear. Drop the sprouting germ of despair into the softest furrow, the place you mistook for a wound. Now the snow-kissed gender-fluid crocus unfolds purple lips, abandoning all distinction between pain and beauty. At your core is the brilliant bulb of annihilation. Therefore, do not reveal the whole glory. Keep a secret. Cradled by night, be a new moon. It is enough to know that the path is simply resting the mind in the heart. Winter's silence is the Mother of all creatures that break open and swirl up in green fire. Art by We...

Spend a little time today getting lost. Find your way across the rain puddle in your back yard. Meet me on the shore. We will build a shelter, weave a hut, thatch it with breathing. Now take my hand and enter. The journey is just beginning. There is a mountain of silence inside you. Inside the mountain a cave, even quieter, where you will find the bones you buried before  you were conceived. We've had other bodies, friend. But no other song. Listen. The first song still  echoes inside the bones, inside the cave, inside the mountain  of silence. Painting, Andrew Wyeth, 'Quaker Ladies,' 1956

  Please,  no thoughts and prayers. Just prayers without thoughts. This is enough for now. Everything falls into place, yet there is no place and the falling never stops. Some call it stillness. When the X-class solar flare of God irradiates each atom  of your flesh with madness, let it pass through you. Don’t be so foolish as to imagine  you are anything but space. Take no thought for tomorrow. Resist nothing and become  as solid as the diamond  on Buddha's crown. But if you fight  against the terrible   sweet radiance of death, you will be a hungry ghost. Therefore learn to tell  the difference between   thoughts and prayers, ease and dis-ease. By the time you understand this, it will be too late. Just dive into the silence where the question never arises. That is the answer. Image: mythologysource.com

My generation looked Eastward, traveled to Rishikesh, Bangalore, Katmandu, brought home gifts of qi gong, mantra, pranayam. Thank you. This generation looks Southward, journeys to Cusco, Volcano Poaz, Machu Picchu, brings home gifts of ayahuasca, forest song and Shaman's flute. Thank you. Where will the newborn pilgrims go in their beautiful and terrible flesh? Perhaps they'll wander Omward into the heart, bringing back the gifts of this moment, this body, this breath. Thank you.

  We share the same breath. We share one dust and light. One field expands from your heart and mine. The radiance in your chest contains me. The radiance in my chest contains you. All that divides us is a thought. Why cling to a mirage? No path led us here. This meadow hums with blush and blues, impermanence of moth and wild anemone ever cross-pollinating in our golden death, a circle  with so many centers God breaks into tears. The song sparrow need not  believe in anything. Pavane of scarlet poppies conquering the mind of warrior and artist alike. Fearless, soft, we share  the same breath, one dust and light. The work of Beauty is  to dance in stillness.

  Who is she? A tower of silence, a storehouse of myrrh, in the very core of your body. The distillate of pure compassion that remains when the trauma has been felt, savored, expressed, forgiven, and transmuted into wisdom. Migdal, the tower. Miryam, the bittersweet ocean of myrrh. Cave-dark, carved from stone, a naked ascetic, yet gowned in the luxury of her own black hair, she held a candle under the alter. Yet she was the alter. That is how I first beheld her in the tiny chapel of the Prioré de la Madeleine. So humble, yet her mission? To awaken the modern world to Christ Consciousness. Why did a Spirit-wind blow her rudderless boat to the shores of southern France, this grotto in Provence? To bring us the gift of the meditation that Jesus taught. The Gnostics called it "the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber": union of the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine in the heart. Jesus and Magdalene are not mere lovers, but the undulation of love itself...

All things being equal - organizing 50,000 protesters to march for justice, knitting a wool blanket for a baby, building a sustainable earth-friendly outhouse, painting plum blossoms in April, taking this breath with outrageous delight as if it is the first - all things, yes, being equal and every act a sacrament, all forms one mirage in the still blue sky of pure attention, I give up searching for vast significance and look for the great in the small. On my fingertip the dissolving beauty of innumerable suns in a snowflake. The galaxy we're lost in balanced on a snail's back. The silver-blue Pin Wheel Nebula, 170,000 light years across, inscribed on a moth wing. Etched in silence with ancient stories, a horoscope of frost at my window, foreshadowing the shape of eternity. Here is my faith. At the moment of death I loaf in summer grass. A ladybu...

  Actual intelligence is the boundless clarity of pure consciousness, prior to the arising of thought. Thoughts are passing clouds in spacious awareness. A thought can be said to contain intelligence only to the degree that the blue sky can be seen through the cloud. Most thought is spam. Wise is one who lets clouds of thought dissolve, resting as the sky, without an opinion about anything. Yet to those who cling to clouds of thought, this dweller in awareness appears to be a fool. For this reason scripture declares: "The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men." (1 Cor 1:25)    Pure awareness transcends thinking. Yet pure awareness is immanent - the very stuff of creation. Every sub-nuclear particle of matter is a tremolo of pure awareness - the stuff our bodies are made of, the stuff the earth is made of, and the stuff of stars.    Empty space is awake. The transcendent is immanent in each speck of dust. The progenitors of quantum physics understood...

Lovers need not say, "I love you." Love is their gaze. Silence is not absence, but presence. Sink into the nameless silence where all mantras arise, where all gods are born, where all paths meet and dissolve in wonder. After you offer everything, just before the next breath, the world is recreated through the Wordless. When I began the path of Love, I sought my fulfillment in an other: the Beloved, Jesus, Krishna, the Guru. But when my path dissolved into Love itself, I bore my own joy from my own molten core of golden, where a ceaseless melting bathes the world, the ancestors, and all the unborn in a secret fragrance, in waves of beauty, in tears of the Love I Am. Isn't it time to stop looking for this place, and start looking from this place? Flower photo by Kristy Thompson

    Rest ever so gently now, guided by a scent of myrrh from the tower of voluptuous silence inside you. I speak of the spiral stairway of night in the frail bones of your vertebrae as you descend to the sacred underworld in your body. Penetrate the dark energy of absence, and you will find a mysterious sepulcher in every stone, hollow as your own throat, a cup of Christ's blood in the first tulip. You’ll taste the bread of higher worlds in a plum bud. The Spirit will flow from sod into your foot soles, consuming your flesh with the green flame that undulated in your marrow before there was light. Now gaze up through your spine at the radiance of a trillion stars. Or are they reflections in a deep well? Stillness knows no distance, no above, no below. Let this breath be a kiss on your belly. You are the healing stranger you've been praying for. You are the ancient friend. All will be well through dream...