What Breathes Us?

When you touch your bliss, it rings, confirming with the showering of further delight. A song emerges from the core of your being when you touch this sacred space. Unlike any other joy, it is fulfilling and rewarding in an unconditional way. It does not depend on any condition or circumstance to be in place. There is no prerequisite in order for this bliss to shine. It shines just as the stars shine in the blue sky at midday. One who sees with pure eyes can see this light shining at all times, even on a dark, cloudy night. Other forms of happiness are dependent upon various conditions and circumstances, but this bliss is self-existing.

One with pure eyes observes an ordinary ecstasy happening throughout nature at every moment. Pause for a moment and observe this orgasmic celebration. The trees and flowers are singing, the rivers and clouds are dancing, the sun, moon, planets and stars are playing their hearts out, holding nothing back. Why does humankind seem to be so unhappy? TV and news seems to document the same negativity manifest on a smaller scale in our workspace and social encounters. Even celebrations, vacations, and leisure activities seem to be pushed. How rare to find a person standing astounded at the miracle of life flowing in a small insect, a cedar tree, a babbling brook, a solar system, a galaxy. The human hand is a miracle of astounding proportion, and animated by an intelligence of staggering vastness. The play of light upon the human eye is a mystery unfathomable by science. Does science understand the being of fruit fly? It can break down all the components, but it can never infuse this organism with aliveness. It will never figure out that aliveness factor.

We breathe. What breathes us? Rocks breathe, the seabed breathes, oranges and light and cars breathe; the dark night breathes in and out, cosmic dust breathes, even empty space is breathing. All these things are alive and breathing, however subtle. They are expressing energy in some form. I am calling this expression breathing. You can feel this breathing in everything because what you are is this breathing aliveness. And you can feel the ecstasy in this breathing. Life and death are one variation of the in breath and out breath. The ecstasy, the bliss of existence is big, bigger than our small-minded notions of right and wrong, good and bad. These notions are limited by a perspective born out of fixation upon a self-identity. Releasing identification with this self opens up the vast perspective of God, of empty seeing from no reference point whatsoever - a happening that the rational mind simply can not wrap itself around.

The bliss of the whole includes everything in its celebration. Everything. It does not leave out what the mind would consider unacceptable. This celebration is beyond good and bad, right and wrong, happy or sad. This celebration is happening at all times and everywhere and can be realized in a miraculous /ordinary way at any moment. Look and see this celebration happening within and without before thought. Before you have any thought, this celebration is happening. It is utterly independent of thought, rational thought. One can see the actuality of this instantly, or use a variety of meditation techniques to reveal it. This celebration is not trying to remain hidden, miserly hiding the Truth from us. On the contrary it is vividly dancing naked, exposed in the wide open.

This can be approached from another direction, through appreciation – big appreciation or basic appreciation or primordial appreciation. Existence appreciates itself in form. You could say existence loves all of its forms or manifestations. Is it not so that your being in all its vastness, is deeply in love with itself? Are you not in love with all these manifestations of the whole? Is it not the mind that separates and divides that which is inherently whole? God looks upon her creation and sees that it is good. God looks upon all these forms, the 10,000 things and sees that they manifestations of one Being; that they are none other than the one-body, and what God feels is love. Is this not so?

It is as if existence appreciates experiencing itself in a myriad of ways, in billions of ways. It experiences itself in a child dancing around a tree and the collapse of a star in a distant galaxy. It experiences itself in infinite permutations, in infinite worlds in this herenow. It is simultaneously experiencing and appreciating itself with out any experiencer. This appreciation is vast, primordial, and before thought. When the hawk’s talons sink into the dove, there is the primordial ecstasy, the appreciation. When the child emerges from the womb, life emerging out of nothingness, there is deep appreciation, and when the child returns to nothingness after being struck by a car on the highway, before and within the human heartbreak, there is blissful appreciation. When the athlete vaults to his personal record, and when the elderly man falls breaking a brittle hip, there is immeasurable appreciation in and from the isness of existence. Our minds rebel against or applaud these things according to our social conditioning and biological programming, but this does not change the fact that existence loves its creation, manifestation, and expression in all its various aspects. While our human heart breaks at loss, suffering and death, and rejoices at gain, pleasure and birth, existence, God or pure consciousness appreciates all, spontaneously extends love to all processes, to both the healthy newborn and the terminally ill three year old on the oncology ward.

Not just for what we agree with does existence celebrate and appreciate, but for all things and processes - an abundant crop feeding thousands and a typhoon killing thousands. You may have read lines in scripture and sacred texts or in the poems of the mystics, that referred to allowing things to be as they are or to let things be, let it be, leave be, allow, allow it to remain as it is, love it as it is, or accepting “what is” instead of what you think it should look like or how it should be according to your pictures. In this you can see the arrogance of little me: God allows yet the I thinks it must be otherwise; existence accepts and does not interfere with its beloved creation yet the ego wants to change things, to improve upon existence, to make things better according to its agenda.

The whole is loving, open and allowing. It allows, and even allows the ego to make its efforts to improve upon creation. Again, nothing wrong with ego. It makes things more comfortable and secure for human life, its survival and health. It is just that through conditioning we have it in the place of master (we identify with and think we are this ego-structure as if it were a solid, separate self existing entity, which it is not, it is a useful, mechanistic process), instead of in its proper place as servant. Thinking we are this ego-identity, we miss our original face, who we are in the totality of our Being. When we realize our original nature, we see that we can still make our children safe, we can perform research to discover cures to cancer, we can provide relief for typhoon victims, and use the tools of science to cultivate the land and feed ourselves; we can promote health, comfort, security, safety, happiness, entertainment, recreation, whatever, but we move from awakeness, graceful presence, from our godliness, our realization of wholeness, and the wisdom and love of non-reference point. It seems like a small shift but this transformation makes all the difference in the world. You are awake and being awake your are filled with love for Self as it appears in all of its various forms. You can see how this alters everything. Imagine the Arab-Israeli peace process conducted by participants who are awake. Even if they were not very intelligent or intellectual or knowledgeable in the ways of international diplomacy, they would move from the wisdom of non-reference point; wisdom that realizes there is fundamentally no other; that Arab and Jew are just labels, just identities, names for the sacred nameless. They wouldn’t just think this, they would live it; they would live their godliness, realizing the God-Being they are, and seeing it as identical with the God-Being the fellow across the table is.

Talk is cheap. Spiritual terms like Namasté just roll off the tongue or onto the paper, but to embody such a term, to live it and express through our humanity is quite another thing. Adyashanti speaks of a fidelity to Truth. We can never just hover, never just flop and not put forth some effort to express our realization through our humanness, our body, mind and emotions. The day never comes when we can go on autopilot and leave everything to the god within. Quoting a Sufi, Osho said God needs our hands to tether our camel. This human life is a precious opportunity for awakening. Once we taste this awakening and it deepens in us, stabilizes in our humanness, then we take up the mantle of responsibility to express it, to embody it in our day-to-day living as human beings. We discover our freedom and then embody it and express it in everything we do and say. This is celebration. We can relax into this responsibility because it is blissful. May not be pleasurable, comfortable or pleasant all the time, but it will carry that deep, subtle bliss of wakefulness. For some, this is the heart’s deepest desire to embody wakefulness and express it daily in their humanness.

Post by Akilesh