Most people admit that it is very difficult to maintain a vast perspective. Instead, we lose the enormity of our lives, and of Life itself, in favor of fleeting thoughts and imaginings. The piece below is an excerpt from my book, Waking Up to Life! It was written to help us remember what is REALLY going on, in any moment that we forget the miracle of existence. It’s called, Waking Up to the Miraculous…
Reality, Uni-verse, Evolution, Life, Humanity. All here and now, Miraculous! Humanity is an expression of an unfolding Miracle that began in a place 15 billion years from here. We are children of a womb the size of a needlepoint that burst and gave birth to a fireball that burned a million years. All the elements of the universe, the stars and the planets, the earth’s oceans, forests, lands, and creatures, our bodies, our hearts and our minds, our memories and our dreams, our lives and our deaths were in that womb as a potential. It has taken 15 billion years of unimaginably complex unfolding for us to be here now. Each Life is a mysterious expression of a 15 billion year old miracle.
The odds against us even being here are astronomical. One metaphor suggests that the likelihood of Life coming to be as a random chance would be like a tornado blowing through a junkyard and constructing a 747 jet. On the day you were conceived, you won your first race, the sole victor of the Great Sperm Marathon defeating approximately 30 million others to receive the gift of union and conception. Against odds far greater than winning any old Boston Marathon.
When you were conceived a series of chemical transmissions and reactions took place. You started as a single cell measuring 1/1000 of an inch and contained instructions within your DNA that would fill one thousand books of six hundred pages each. These instructions were a potential in your parents, and their parents, and their parents, your children and their children and far beyond.
Physics has proven that, because we live in an expanding universe, every point can be considered the center. Each and every one of us are, in a sense, the center of the universe after all! It is very likely that it has been in your lifetime that physics has also proven that there are no solid objects. Your body is mostly ALL open space. As author and physicist Brian Swimme put it “if all of the space were taken out of you, you would be a million times smaller than the smallest grain of sand”. The book you are holding, the floor you rest upon, the lover you hug, all open space swirling and supporting, shaping and sensing, attracting and repelling, communicating and penetrating, open space. Acts of intimacy and love, violence and fear, creation and destruction, all expressed by open space within open space. Right now, open space reading open space!
I remember dissecting a (dead) cat in a biology class, and coming to see that a cat shares almost the exact same body structure as a human. Every bone and blood vessel, every nerve and organ, every muscle and tendon. And this is the same with all mammals. If you want to be shocked out of complacency, simply explore mammalian biological processes and functions. Do you know how an eye works? A lung? Have you ever read about the brain, or how a nervous system works? Cells, chemicals, electricity, organs, systems and processes. How does it all keep going? Absolutely miraculously freaky! Have you ever seen a birth? A miracle! Have you seen the dying process end in death? A miracle! Each moment there are millions of births and millions of deaths, of plants, animals and homo sapiens. Lives coming into existence from where? Lives ending and going where?
Have you heard about the Mandelbrot Set? Seen the Hubbell Deep Field? Witnessed a sky burial? Flown in a jet? Looked at the night sky? Vomited? All miracles! Right now as you read these words, you are moving through space at 10,000 miles per hour, spinning 1000 miles per hour, sharing a great rock with an unfathomable multitude of Life forms, just the right distance from a star that not only sustains us, but also provides us with seasons, sun rises and sunsets. The sheer diversity of Life forms we share this planet with is enough to give one pause. There are over 30,000 known Orchid species. The sheer diversity of Life forms we share our bodies with may be too much to consider for too long
Our flesh both inside and out is host to whole living ecosystems. When you take your next breath you will receive some small amount of oxygen that has been shared by Moses, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Christ, Hitler, and Santa himself.
Have you ever had your heart broken? Crawled into a warm bath? Have you ever loved someone? Cried yourself to sleep? Felt helpless? Have you ever wakened excited because today is the day you …? Have you ever had a nightmare? A stomach ache? An orgasm? Have you ever had someone believe in you? Have you ever said goodbye, and knew it was forever? Have you ever given up hope, only to find freedom? Life makes these miracles possible. Prison and skydiving, compassion and homelessness, fear and lust; these are also the things of Life. When we are able to remember the miracle of Life in It’s totality, then everything stays in its rightful place, as expressions of Life. Life giving Life, living Life.
