Tag: eternity

Breath

The breath doesn’t disappear when you stop breathing at the end of your life. It is the source of your breathing, and it continues, just as your spirit continues. Indeed, breath and spirit are one and the same (identical word in some languages). This is a wisdom we come to as we pass from this world to the next. The Spirit that brought you life as you know it here on Earth, through your breath, is never-ending.

If you are fortunate, you may come to this awareness within your lifetime. Sudden jolts to your habitual way of perceiving the world can awaken this cognitive/emotional expansion. Crises or change, as well as deep spiritual practices, frequently have a transformative effect on your view of yourself and all of life. What seemed solid and unchanging suddenly becomes fluid and ever-shifting. You begin to realize that the “unknown,” that which we haven’t yet solidified into facts, is perhaps your greatest source of expansive wisdom.

Birth and death bookend our physical lives, but eventually we see them as illusions that we invented to explain what appears to be a beginning and ending. In truth, we are part of an infinite continuity of being, the eternal Spirit that fills the universe and our physical forms with awareness. A profound soul awareness that expands with each breath we take, each experience we live. The entire universe is within you, as you are within it. Sounds contradictory but only when your mind organizes the world into inner/outer, beginning/ending. From the soul’s view, everything is one, without polarity or edges.

Some religious traditions see eternity as a heavenly after-life in which we are reunited with our loved ones who have already passed into a world similar to the one we live in here—but where peace prevails. We often picture gods and goddesses who inhabit that world, there to comfort and guide us. Yet perhaps it is we who are the gods and goddesses living on Earth in human form and there is no after-life, only the eternal Now. Divinity is everywhere.

The human mind longs to find truth, to define life and death, so that we can keep fear at bay. Fear, however, is a product of the mind and of the need to know. Peace arises from the heart and soul, from a profound acceptance and understanding that is beyond questions, answers, and definitions. I find that when I become lost in fear of the unknown and the vastness of infinity, it is because my mind is frantically spinning its wheels. If I breathe deeply and allow a deeper awareness beyond the mental to arise within me, I settle into the “peace that passes understanding.” This is the eternal breath. The journey of my lifetime, of all of our lifetimes, is to recognize that peaceful presence as Home and one another as soul family. In doing so, we experience eternity with every sweet breath in each present moment.

Breathe Your Life

Mystics have written that each breath holds birth and death in it. Perhaps each lifetime is one long inhalation and exhalation, as Spirit fills us and then gradually, finally, empties back into the Source from which it arose. We are spirits passing through, part of a mystery that only our souls know the extent of. Our human lives courageously carry us into the unknown of life on Earth, and as we travel, soul awareness slowly seeps into our consciousness. If we are fortunate, we grow wiser with each year we live.

Those who have passed through a serious illness, such as cancer, and come out the other side, often carry within them kernels of insight that may help them understand a bit of life’s mysteries. At the very least, it expands their view of their own lives and life itself. (I think of writers Mark Nepo and Suleika Jaouad.) They have looked into infinity and seen themselves. Everything is different after that.

During the months I was treated for breast cancer, I had moments of seeing the universe as a giant tapestry with moving parts that are perfectly interconnected. The pieces engage in a dance of beingness in which we all are included. There are no mistakes; everything unfolds according to a greater purpose that our souls know and our human selves catch glimpses of in our lifetimes. What I experienced carried me through treatment to survival. I could see at the deepest level that facing cancer was all part of my soul’s plan for this lifetime. I felt peace within my heart in that awareness.

A “peace that passes understanding,” as the saying goes. I experienced peace beyond any rational attempts to understand it. This is the peace that lives in each breath and is the essence of every one of our lifetimes. To live through both challenges and celebrations and accept them as integral parts of your life. The breath holds this wisdom within it. Each time you or I inhale, all of life moves into and through us. Each time we exhale, we fill the world with Source energy. The human form is a container for Spirit. When you consciously breathe your life, Spirit flowers in all you say and do.

Not everyone faces a health challenge that opens the door to eternity, but each of us, in the course of a lifetime, eventually looks beyond the mundane into the infinite. It is why we are here. To stand firmly on this Earth, this beloved blue planet full of varied experiences, and see the entire universe before us. It may happen at any time, for any reason. Or it may happen as you move through a “review” at the end of your life. Ultimately, you are Spirit embodied, and all the wisdom of the ages lives within you. Take a deep breath, open your heart, and see the invisible flow of your life and all lives, perfectly, peacefully, orchestrated in each moment.

Joy, Grief, and Miracles

My entire life I have carried within me, in equal parts, exquisite joy at being alive and profound grief at one day having to leave this world for the vast unknown of eternity. That unknown, and the sorrow surrounding it, frightened me terribly as a small child. At night, I would cry about this seemingly insoluble dilemma of life and death and the infinite universe. As I explored a spiritual path in my adult life, I came to see that this life/death dichotomy arose as part of being embodied spirit in physical human form. My soul saw no polarized separation; only my mind did.

There have always been times in my daily life when I saw the world as my soul did: expansive, wondrous, flowing, filled with miracles. When I am walking quietly in Nature, surrounded by birds and trees and flowers. When I am with friends and family, feeling the love that connects us. The trajectory of my life has been to balance out the joy and grief, to come to peace with all the varied and sometimes contradictory experiences of living as a human being on Earth. Perhaps this is what we are all doing in our own way.

Immersed in presence in the natural world, I feel that balance. Trees, birds, clouds, flowers, seasons. I am outside of time, beyond the mind’s observations. I connect to all parts of life with each breath. Breathing like a tree, like a flower, like a bird. Therein is calm, a surrender to something greater that is comforting not frightening. Here, infinity is who I am. It flows within me and surrounds me as well. In Nature, I recognize that life holds infinity in everything. Somehow grief falls away in those moments, and I only know the peace that is at the center of my soul.

The key perhaps is to see the entire world as one with Nature, to recognize that Mother Earth and Spirit are a single seamless creation with no beginning and no end. And within that eternal, never-ending Presence is something beyond the mind’s ability to understand. Only in completely letting go of the need to solve the puzzle of existence and accepting the wonders before us each day do we experience peace. And a balance that brings together joy and grief in the human heart and makes them whole.

This is where I am now, sitting silently on the edge of eternity and knowing it as who I am, who we all are. William Blake could hold “eternity in an hour,” infinity in the palm of his hand. He saw a “World in a Grain of Sand, and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” To me, this is the greatest and most exquisitely beautiful wisdom I’ve ever encountered. Within it is the amazing grace we all hope to find in our lifetimes, no further away than our own miraculous hands or the flowers at our feet.

Precious Moments

Whatever your current age or state of health, you have probably experienced moments when life feels exceedingly ephemeral, as if it could disappear in a split second. This is raw truth. We are here on Earth as human beings for a tiny moment in eternity, yet time itself is always relative—sometimes racing and sometimes “stopped.” As our lives move forward and evolve, we experience the various aspects of life and living and come to know both impermanence and loss. In doing so, our hearts may break, yet we grow wiser. And we begin to see beyond time to eternity itself.

When my mother and father were first married and living in Chicago, they went to see a show in which one piece of music particularly touched them. Throughout their lives it was their favorite song. It describes how a lifetime seems long at first but then suddenly very short—and very precious. Every time someone sang it on TV or radio, they would pause, listen, and look across the room at each other meaningfully. I have such a clear memory of this, which I’ve carried with me all my life. The songwriter, and my parents, had tapped into both the sweetness and the poignancy of life.

My parents were married 57 years when my mother passed away; my father died nine years later. I think I came to know why that song held such significance for them as I lived through their aging years and eventual deaths. Now, many years later, as I myself am aging, as well as facing breast cancer, it all takes on new meaning. In my heart, I feel strongly that I will survive this health challenge, yet you can’t live through such an unexpected and intense experience without being changed, without taking a hard look at your own mortality. Of course, my entire life I have been focused on the mystery of eternity and death, feeling both fear and fascination. (Maybe it runs in my family genes!) None of it coincidence, I suppose. This is my soul journey. Before birth, I chose the parents I had for exactly these reasons.

Over the years, my spiritual path has gradually led me to a “peace that passeth understanding” about it all. Particularly in the last few months, I have come to see an extraordinary beauty in eternity and the nature of the universe. Cancer can be both frightening and soulfully expansive. In recent weeks, I have experienced moments of timeless immersion in infinity, primarily in Nature, which defy description. The heart and soul cannot translate what transpires at those times. But you are transformed; the inner “enlightenment” you were born with rises to the surfaces and shines through your being. Fear no longer defines your days and nights; light does. And trust in something greater than the mind’s limited view. Your inner vision expands to encompass a magnificence and grace that spans all time and space.

Does every human soul eventually experience this as an incarnated being on planet Earth? I don’t know for certain. I can only express what I myself am living through. Still, the trust I carry within me whispers that this is the destiny of all human beings: to see the true nature of life and what appears to be mortality. In the calendar of life, the days we are given at first seem long, then short, then eventually become infinite, timeless—and “precious” beyond life, death, and meaning itself.

“You are infinity dancing in impermanence.”—Panache Desai