The circle of love

The true transmission

Sometimes you hear a voice behind a door – it is calling you.
As a fish flung onto the shore feels with its whole body the pull of the water it must return to –
so this turning toward what you truly love saves you.

The voice comes to the soul and says: lift your foot, step over the threshold.
Enter the emptiness where the question, and the answer, and the question again all meet.
We rarely hear this music within – yet we all dance to it.
Let yourself go silently toward the call – toward this pull to what you love with all your heart.

Do not ask for union – there is a closeness deeper than it.
Love in such a way that love frees you from the very word "bond."
Love is the light of the soul. And the taste of grief as well. In it there is no "I," no "we," no proud "I exist."
When the eyes fill with tears in silence – love can no longer be spoken in words.

I lived at the very edge of madness, wanting to understand the reasons,
knocking at a door. It opened. It turned out – I was knocking from the inside.

Step out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.
As salt dissolves in the ocean – so I dissolved in You,
beyond all doubt and all certainty.
And here, suddenly, in my chest, a star rises –
so clear that it draws all the others to itself.

What we have now is not a thing imagined.
It is not sorrow and not joy, not self-reproach, not rapture, not longing –
all of those come and go. But this – a presence that does not go.
What more could a person want?
What we are now made the body – cell by cell,
and the universe – star by star. Everything grew out of this.
And it itself grew out of nothing.
I am light within light. If you see this – be careful: tell no one you have seen it.

A soul that lives in this world and wears no shirt of love –
that is, has not given itself to love all the way –
such a life is a deep shame.
Be in love like a child, without looking back, for love is all there is.
There is no other way into the Presence than through love, given and received.

If someone asks: and what is love? –
answer: it is when your "I want" melts into "You." The will dissolves.
True freedom comes to those who have slipped even out of the questions about freedom and fate.
Love is king; both worlds roll at his feet,
and he barely notices their tumbling play.

Love and the lover live outside of time.
All other desires are only a substitute for this way of being.
How long will you lie there, embracing a corpse?
Love instead the soul that cannot be held.
All that is born in spring dies in autumn – but love knows no seasons.
From wine pressed of grapes, expect a hangover – but this love exacts no such toll.

It is hard for you, riding your own body – dismount. Walk light. You will be given wings.
Be clear as a mirror that holds not a single reflection.
Be clean of images and of the unease that comes with them.
Look into what feels no shame and no fear before any truth.
Take all human faces into yourself, judging no one. Be pure emptiness.

"What is in there, that you ask about?" – Silence. That is all I can say.
Lovers have secrets they keep.

O God, our drunken eyes have clouded our sight,
our burden has grown heavy – forgive us.
You are hidden – and yet from east to west You have filled the world with Your light.
Your light is brighter than sunrise and sunset, and You are the deepest ground of awareness,
the one that opens the secrets we hide.
You are the force by which our dammed rivers break through.
You whose essence is hidden, whose gifts are in plain sight.
You are like water, and we like millstones. You are like the wind, and we like dust:
the wind is unseen, the dust in plain sight.
You are the unseen spring, and we are Your blooming garden.
You are the spirit of life, and we are like hand and foot: the spirit bids the hand close and open.
You are the mind, and we are Your voice: Your mind bids this tongue to speak.
You are joy, and we are laughter, for we were born of Your joy.

Each movement of ours is a ceaseless confession of faith,
a witness to Your eternal power –
as the very turning of the millstone bears witness to the existence of the river.
Dust settles on my head and on all my words about You,
for You are beyond all we can think or say.
And still this servant cannot stop trying to voice Your beauty.
Let my soul, in every moment, be a carpet beneath Your feet.

These shapes we take ourselves to be are cups drifting on an ocean of living awareness.
They fill and sink, leaving behind no trace on the water, no spray of farewell.
And what we truly are is also this ocean. We are so close to it,
though we swim in it and drink of it.
Do not be a cup with a dry rim.
Do not be one who gallops all night and never learns of the horse beneath him –
the very wave that bears him.