LGBTQ Constitutionally Protected, declares the Supreme Court.

After an exhausting week of verbal racist attacks, violent threats, insults, and the daily dose of invitations to go back to where I come from, it was such a beautiful soothing balm to my heart to see this rainbow colored glimmer of hope.

This is a sign post, dear friends. We are walking the good path. Keep going! Keep going!

Never have I seen a sparrow stop in mid flight just after lifting skyward.

Neither shall we stop.

Take a moment to enjoy this brief respite in the storm, and take in the rainbow beauty announcing the world to come.

(Historic ruling: Supreme Court says LBTQ community enjoys constitutional protection against discrimination.)

I Find You in the Silence

I find you in the silence of the ‘I’ that is never there, and I know myself in the certainty of your undeniable presence.

I hear you in the encounter. I encounter you in the silence, when the ‘I’ no longer speaks and no longer acts.

There, in the midst of action and word without the separated self; there, in the union of the one who acts and the one who observes; there we are silence, act, and naught.

Why I Lay This Soul to Be Torn Apart

I have seen the dunes of time, rolling with the shifting sands of the endless desert between the dream of life and the wake world of the House Absolute.

Who can cross this unforgiven vastness?

Who survives the ancient whirlwind that tears apart gods and worlds?

Who stands whole before the terrible stentor of The Heart Of The Sky, whose voice creates and destroys the infinite abode?

Who will cross this desert, whose ever shifting dunes are formed out of the cold breath of the eternal void upon the sand of time where every grain is the unique divine point of view of every traveller, of every dreamer of the House Absolute who ever entered this desert void?

And why is it, beloved of my soul, that I would lay that very soul to be torn apart, to add one insignificant grain to the infinite sand? It is so that you too may come to find your completion, your satiety in the constant embrace of the beloved, and that you may also know the glory in plenitude as I have.

There’s Only a Continuum of Sentience Between You and the Universe.

Picture yourself in the middle of a sentient universe, a conscious being who reaches within because there is nothing outside. It reaches within. It folds upon itself, exploring different levels of sentience until energy is manifested and matter is formed. I want you to picture that as a process of folding upon itself and unfolding out into experience.

This sentience is going within to know itself. It is perceiving itself on different levels, as pure intelligence, then as sound, and then as light. After becoming light, this supreme being experiences itself as cosmos, as galaxies, and finally as planetary existence.

It is not that it is creating sound and then it creates light, and then it creates stars, and then it creates planets, and then it creates things. It’s more that every layer is itself and it has a continuous unfolding of consciousness—knowing itself at different levels.

To give an example of how this is a continuum you may consider the nature of matter itself. Everything that we call matter is composed of atomic particles, and each atom is composed of subatomic particles, electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. Each one of these particles is a packet of energy, a vibration that exists for a time. The relationship between these particles is what creates what we know as the material world.

From the moment when there is light in the Universe, this same light has been coming together as vibration creating stars, creating galaxies, creating planets, creating moons, people, plants, animals, rocks and everything. There is no substantial difference between matter and energy. It is all a continuum. Matter is slowed down energy. The only distinction between matter and energy is in our conception of it, how we relate to it, how we think of it, but it is all part of the same continuum.

In that same way, there is no real difference between the mind of God and the physical universe. It is all a continuum of sentience.

The Tiger-Sheep and the Nature of the Teachings

A tiger cub found itself alone in the world as soon as he was born. His mother was killed by a hunter at the exact moment she was giving birth. The hunter took his pictures, with his foot on her body, wide smile holding the phallic crutch he calls his gun. He shares the picture and tales of his conquest and fake bravery, seeking somehow to steal the fierce nobility of the tigress by imbuing her blood on his pictures, trophies, and tales.

In the meantime, the little cub was left behind to die. He survived, though, when a young shepherd girl, passing by with her flock, saw the cub, and filled with compassion for the dying child took it with her to raise.

The cub was raised among the sheep, and since sheep was all the shepherd girl new, she treated the cub as a sheep. All the cub saw around him was sheep. All he heard was bleats. He learned to walk, eat, and bleat like a sheep. He thought himself a sheep, and seeing only sheep around, he never suspected he was anything other than sheep. All the sheep, too, learned to see him as one of their own. He behaved like sheep and bleated, so they responded to him as they did to each other.

So the tiger cub grew up, obviously different from his flock in appearance, but internally he saw himself as just one of them.

One day, a wild tiger approached the camp, hunting. He was about to pounce on his target, when he spotted the young tiger running away scared like the rest of the flock. Puzzled, he let his prey aside and pursued the young tiger until he caught up with him. The young tiger bleated, scared for his life.

The old tiger grabbed the tiger-sheep by the back of the neck and dragged him away. The tiger-sheep bleated in panic and pain, scared for his life. The old tiger brought his prey to the side of a river, and forced him to look at his reflection for the first time.

“Look,” he commanded, “you are like me, not like them!”

The young tiger-sheep was in shock at the revelation, but all he could do was bleat. The old tiger forced some meat on the young tiger-sheep. It was an unpleasant and terrifying experience, and he vomited the meat in horror.

In time, however, he learned to like the smell and taste of blood, and the meat was strength and force in his body.

So it’s shown the truth of the teachings, that its strength seeks to be stolen by the hunter and never realized, thwarted and hidden by congregations and good intentions, and revealed only by the clear example of He who is a mirror of the deepest Self.

In this Space I sit

In this space I sit, surrounded by a mystery that penetrates every particle and creek of my being.

This mystery moves. If I look inside I see nothing. If I sense the space before my eyes, I find darkness. If I place my attention behind, I see nothing, a dark shadow. I feel the cold presence of the empty void behind me, pushing me, supporting me.

I notice the emptiness moving through my fingers. I hear the emptiness surrounding my words––words that pretend to have meaning but are carried away from me by this emptiness, the echoes of something unknown.

Even the being who says “I am”, implied in every sentence, the being that observes, that hears, that sees shadow and light, the being that says “I am” sits in the shadows between the worlds.

If I look within the source of attention, trying to find the I am, it retreats even further. When I think I’ve grappled the self, surrounding it in a craftily and carefully constructed web of meaning and concerns, saying “here I am,” the I am becomes smaller, more remote, more in shadow. I look for the I am not realizing that the one who searches is also the I am, forever retreating yet always at the center of every experience.

A Whisper of Silence, this Self.

I do not have a name for myself. I simply exist without tag or form, moving without comparing any one moment with any other moment.

There is just a presence in the liquid movement all around, the flowing of the fields of light, the forgetting the words and their meanings. There is just the peaceful communion with the reality that extinguishes all illusions.

Abiding in this state I forget that there was such a thing as the world. I forget the mere possibility of existence, of sound, of light, of movement, of time. I forget, living in this eternal space, that there is a word for that space. I forget the opposite of what is. I forget the distinction between self and it.

In that forgetfulness, a slight vibration surprisingly comes. It happened, and it went. I almost missed it, almost feel that it did not happen at all. Maybe it did not happen. Maybe that slight stirring comes only from within to put a tiny mark on the perfection of that infinite silence. Maybe it’s just a habit that I have accumulated over countless dreams of existence––a slight distortion of the darkness.

It comes. It goes. It’s a whisper of silence.

How I Create Myself

Imagine all events of the universe already laid out as a finite multidimensional field. Now, imagine God’s consciousness entering a point in this matrix of events. This point of consciousness now begins to experience events in sequence. The sequence followed becomes experience, and with that comes the concept of time.

With the accumulation of experiences comes a sense of self born out of the memories that I can see behind me. I also sense the field of events around me and ahead of me, not clear to my vision but I sense they exist ahead of me, in my future. When I place my attention on the future, I project what I know onto it. What I know is born out of my past. This is how I create my sense of past and future.

Now, when I turn my attention to my past, I have to choose what events I remember and which ones I emphasize. I tell a story to myself about my passage, and the way in which I tell this story determines what I leave out and what I underline. I can only do this story telling from the perspective of an author.

I am the author. But I am not a fixed, limited author. I am creating myself each time I see my past, and every time I project my story onto a future. I create myself according to the story I weave, and I weave my story out of the material at hand (i.e., the memories available to me).

So, my sense of self is created not only from the passage of memories, but also from how I weave these memories and how I project them onto the field of possible futures.

My Precious Double

Think of a dream you are having. You project yourself into that dream. That projection is a double of you, an avatar that is native to the dream environment. You are creating both the dream and the dream self that inhabit that realm.

If you identify with that double, you act and feel as if that is your only reality.

To be aware of both the dream and the one who is outside the dream allows you to loose your form, and to exist beyond the limits of your dream.

To withdraw your identification from the dream double is to wake up, and to find yourself in the wake world–which itself as a dream to the eternal void beyond all dreaming and experience.

The Elusive I Am

The being who says “I am”, implied in every sentence, the being that observes, that hears, that sees color and light, sits in the shadows between the worlds.

If I look within the source of attention, trying to find the I Am, the I Am retreats even further. When I think I’ve grappled it, when I think I have surrounded the I Am in a web craftily and carefully constructed with meaning and concerns, when I say “Ah! Here I Am!,” the I Am becomes smaller, more remote, more in shadow.

I look for the I Am, realizing that the one who searches is also the I Am, forever retreating yet always at the center of the experience.