FEELING THE MIRACLE
10 Simple Exercises
At this moment, if you were fully awake, your life would feel miraculous. Without that feeling, there is no miracle. We should take seriously a famous quote of Einstein’s: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” The words are inspiring, but how do you actually live a life with the awareness that everything is a miracle?
Here are ten total meditation exercises to answer that question. In each you are asked to take an everyday experience and see it through new eyes. The aim isn’t to connect you to a religious miracle or anything supernatural. The everyday world is miraculous. We are immersed in mysteries at every turn, yet it doesn’t matter whether we can explain these miracles. They continue to occur regardless of our viewpoint.
The reason to change your worldview is that you will be drawn closer to your own source in pure consciousness—pure consciousness in its role as the creator of everything that summons the miraculous into our life. Nothing is more basic. If you want to live as if nothing is a miracle, the scientific worldview will back you up. Science is all about taking physical phenomena and giving each the best rational explanation possible. I’m not devaluing the contribution of this approach, because it is obvious that we find ourselves surrounded by advanced technology and all its benefits (as well as its hidden and not-so-hidden dangers).
The problem with the scientific worldview isn’t that it strips away the possibility of miracles, although it certainly does that. The problem is that consciousness has had no place in the history of science until very, very recently. Leaving aside the 2010s, in which the “hard problem” of explaining where consciousness comes from began to attract scientific notice, working scientists took two assumptions for granted. The first is that consciousness doesn’t need to be explained—it can simply be accepted as a fact of life, like the air we breathe. The second is that if consciousness has to be explained, then doing so within the limits of physical processes will be enough. Basically, the mind will reveal all its secrets once neuroscience maps the brain as completely as possible.
Neither assumption is valid. You fall in love, not your brain. You have wishes, dreams, beliefs, fears, insights, biases, and curiosity, not your brain. I cannot predict when science will accept that consciousness is the most important aspect of everyone’s existence, but without a doubt you and I are totally dependent on consciousness. So that we don’t take this fact for granted, it is beneficial to realize, here and now, just how miraculous consciousness is. Only then will you cross the threshold and begin to live as if everything is a miracle.
Try the ten exercises that follow. They are so brief and simple that you can do them all at once or one at a time with a pause to reflect on what you have discovered. Some of the material has been introduced in more detail earlier in this book, but a concentrated dose, combined with your personal experience, makes these meditation exercises really sink in.
MIRACLE #1
LIGHT
Exercise:
Close your eyes and visualize complete blackness. You might use the image of a coal mine or a cave deep in the earth, the night sky without stars, or simply a blackboard. Now open your eyes and look at the room around you.
Where is the miracle?
When your eyes were closed and you imagined nothing but blackness, you were seeing your room as it actually is. No light exists without you to perform the miracle of turning invisible photons into brightness, color, and shape. The night sky actually is black. Stars do not shine. The noonday sky is also black. The sun doesn’t shine.
Physics knows that photons are invisible, and photons are the elementary particles that carry light. The fact that we see things happens entirely in consciousness. The brain is as black inside as an underground cave. The visual cortex has no images in it. There is no physical explanation for how the ordinary chemicals that make up the brain—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, for the most part—produce the three-dimensional world we see and live in. The whole mystery is the essence of the miraculous nature of the everyday.
MIRACLE #2
TRANSFORMATION
Exercise:
As you sit in your chair, be aware of the air going in and out of your nose. Feel its coolness and the motion of the in and out breaths. Now get a glass of water and take a sip.
Where is the miracle?
The air you breathe is the same as the water you sip. Two gases, oxygen and hydrogen, are present in both (air also contains other gases, principally nitrogen). What makes air different from water is transformation, yet behind this word lies a miracle. There is no rational explanation for why water is wet or why it is the universal solvent. And, as far as we know, there is no explanation for how two invisible gases had the potential to become the one substance without which no life can exist.
Sodium, an unstable metal, and chlorine, a green gas, are separately both deadly poisonous. However, when combined, they form sodium chloride, or table salt, which is not poisonous and which, in fact, is a necessary component of every cell in your body. There is nothing miraculous about sodium atoms bonding with chlorine atoms—the bonding process is elementary chemistry. The miracle is that such simple bonding suddenly transforms two chemicals into something unexpected, inexplicable, and unpredictable. If water didn’t exist, it would be impossible to predict that two gases would produce it. If salt didn’t exist, there is no predicting that the bonding of two poisons would make one-celled life possible, starting the chain of events that led to Homo sapiens and every experience you and I have ever had.
MIRACLE #3
BEAUTY
Exercise:
Look at a photo of someone you find beautiful. It can be a movie star, a baby, or someone you love, but it needs to be a photo and not just an image in your mind’s eye. Turn the photo upside down and look at it again.
Where is the miracle?
When you turn the picture of a face upside down, you can no longer recognize who it is. This is a phenomenon related to how the brain recognizes what it sees. The visual cortex is set up so that it recognizes objects in the world right side up. (The fact that we can recognize familiar faces immediately has never been explained, but we will leave this aside as a secondary miracle.)
The miracle is how beauty appears in the face when it is right side up and disappears when it is upside down. Where did the beauty go? This question cannot be answered without asking where beauty comes from in the first place. It is said that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, but that is not true—your eyes could not find beauty in the upside-down picture because beauty is a quality of consciousness. We therefore see the abstract quality of beauty differently. The loved one you see as beautiful is likely to be a stranger to me. The special beauty a mother sees in her own baby is more intense than the beauty she sees in her neighbor’s baby or in the newborns lined up in a maternity ward.
No one invented beauty. It is something we know without needing to explain where beauty came from. Brain cells process visual images, but only consciousness adds beauty to those images or takes it away. How beauty was born, why it comes and goes, what makes us sensitive to it—all these things are everyday miracles.
MIRACLE #4
LOVE
Exercise:
This exercise requires you to choose something you love, and the choice is up to you. If you really love chocolate, nibble a piece and try to not love it. Make it taste neutral or even distasteful. If there is a movie you really love, imagine it in your mind’s eye, recalling a scene or maybe just the movie stars in action. Now try to hate the movie and think of it as rubbish, a waste of time. You can see how this exercise works. Take anything you love, including the person you love most in the world, and strip away your love so that the thing or person is neutral to you or even an object of distaste.
Where is the miracle?
Once we love something, it is impossible to remove the love. This isn’t the same as love turning to hate or a loving relationship that turns sour. We’re talking about something you really love right now. The quality of love has merged with the thing you love. It has become like the sweetness of sugar (which is another thing you cannot remove). No one knows how love chooses its object, becomes attached to it, and refuses to let go.
Think of the romances that take a tragic turn. The loved one leaves or dies, and yet for the other person, love never dies. All kinds of complications arise where love is concerned, as we all know. Yet the pure, basic fascination of love has no explanation. You can make a person feel a loving impulse by increasing the amount of certain hormones, but you are only manipulating the sensation of love, which is an isolated aspect. Love in its fullness and completeness reaches infinitely beyond any physical sensation, as evidenced by legends and myths of romance going back thousands of years.
Whether you think of how much you love your pet or how much God might love you, the mystery of love is bound up in consciousness. We are aware of love and always have been, for all of recorded history. Since there is no explanation for why love is universal, it belongs among the miracles of everyday life and is one miracle we can personally feel.
MIRACLE #5
CONNECTION
Exercise:
Think of someone you’d like to connect with. You need to feel that this person is connected to you, so it helps to imagine their face, their voice, or a good memory associated with them. Have the intention of wanting to connect, then wait and see if the person soon gets in touch with you.
Where is the miracle?
This is the only exercise you can’t complete immediately. I hit upon it almost by accident. While recording a podcast on Facebook, I asked viewers to imagine someone they’d like to connect with. I posed this exercise as a way of discussing synchronicity, because we’ve all had the experience of thinking of someone and the next minute having them get in touch out of the blue. It’s one of the most familiar ways to recognize the whole phenomenon of synchronicity, which is defined as a meaningful coincidence.
Synchronicity is spontaneous. You don’t normally communicate with other people simply by thinking of them. Yet on the morning of this podcast, one viewer after another sent me the same message, “I just thought of a friend I hadn’t seen in years, and she just called. Amazing!” I was more than a little surprised. It’s risky to ask people to use the power of telepathy, or whatever you want to call it, when telepathy is condemned by skeptics as pure superstition.
In reality, any phenomenon that occurs in consciousness doesn’t need our belief or skepticism, approval or disapproval, acceptance or rejection. Consciousness constantly moves within itself. Everything in consciousness is connected, because you cannot subdivide or slice off one aspect of it. Consciousness is whole. In everyday life we act as if we are disconnected, isolated individuals. My mind isn’t the same as your mind. But there’s a false assumption in that sentence. My thoughts are not your thoughts, but our awareness is the same.
We are connected, first of all, by partaking in human awareness. We don’t hear what dolphins hear or smell what dogs smell. We don’t test the air with our tongues the way snakes do. Within this broad connection there are also specific ties. People share a religion or nationality, for example. Getting more specific, you arrive at family connections. And within family connections, you find identical twins, who are famous for having such intimate connections that they can sense what is happening to each other at a distance. There are numerous accounts, for example, of one twin’s having sensed the moment the other died.
Connections of this kind go beyond any physical explanation. If you are sending out an intention to hear from a friend, and that friend calls you out of the blue, the signal being sent and received isn’t a radio signal flying through the air. Connection exists as another miracle of everyday life. To be conscious is to be embedded in total consciousness. There is no separation between you and the whole.
MIRACLE #6
WAKEFULNESS
Exercise:
Sit quietly and be aware of any sensation or thought that comes your way. You can have your eyes open or closed. You can look inward or at your physical surroundings. Now make yourself completely unaware. Blank out everything, right now.
Where is the miracle?
Once you realize that you are aware, you cannot become unaware. In other words, this is an impossible exercise. Once a famous Indian spiritual teacher was asked to prove that there was an afterlife. He gave a surprising reply:
You are misled in your question. You believe that you were born and will die because your parents told you so when you were a child. In turn they were told the same story by their parents. If you want to know the truth, forget the story and look to your own experience. Can you imagine not existing? Can you feel what it was like before you were born or after you die? No matter how hard you try, you cannot escape the condition of being aware. In this lies the secret of eternal life.
In this book and in many spiritual traditions, being awake and being aware are the same thing. The search for enlightenment is based on being awake and trying to become more awake. When you stand back, this seems a funny search. Awake is awake. It exists as a state of consciousness without which you cannot exist. It is impossible to wipe out awareness no matter how hard you try. To succeed, you would have to stop existing.
Existing and being awake don’t just happen to go together. They are the same. There are actually two miracles here. The first is that we are awake at all and not just rocks or zombies. The second is that we know we are awake. The search for enlightenment isn’t about becoming more awake. It is about acquiring more knowledge about this miracle of wakefulness. To know more, you have to experience more. The experience can involve more love, more creativity, more compassion, or any other conscious experience. A flash of “Aha!” can bring an overwhelming epiphany. But nothing of the kind is possible without being awake. Thus wakefulness is another miracle of everyday life.
MIRACLE #7
REVELATION
Exercise:
This exercise is completely open-ended. Pause for a second and wait to have your next thought.
Where is the miracle?
Every thought you have ever had, including your next thought, is a revelation. Out of nothing, a light shines. That’s a reasonable definition of revelation. There is no need to put a religious spin on the phenomenon. The basic miracle is evident simply by having a thought. Thoughts are unpredictable. No one knows where they come from. Even if you say they come from the brain and point to an MRI of the brain lighting up, that image merely detects gradations of heat and metabolism. Your brain is filled with electrical and chemical activity, none of which is a thought.
If a thought is a revelation, what does it reveal? It reveals itself. Take a simple thought like “The sky is blue.” A fact is being stated, but that is only the content of the thought. Before you get the message about the content, the thought announces, “Here I am, your next thought.” There is the revelation, that out of nothing, something comes to light. The constant creation of something out of nothing is considered the ultimate mystery about how the universe was created at the Big Bang.
You exist with a thousand small bangs every day, as thoughts, images, sensations, and feelings are revealed to you. You didn’t ask for them to exist, and no one knows how “nothing” accomplishes the amazing feat of turning into “something.” We stand before it as a total revelation. That’s why revelation is another miracle of everyday life.
MIRACLE #8
TRANSCENDENCE
Exercise:
Think of the color pink, and as you do, see the image of pink cotton candy in your mind’s eye. Now change the color of the cotton candy to blue, then to green. Finally, see the cotton candy vanish.
Where is the miracle?
You find it quite easy to see an image in your mind’s eye and to make it change color or disappear. Instead of taking this ability for granted, reflect a moment. Are you the image of cotton candy that you saw? Obviously not. By manipulating the image in your mind’s eye, you have proof that you are not that image. You are beyond it. Likewise, you are beyond any thought you might have. Nothing happening in your mind is you. You pay attention—or not—to what is going on in your mind, but who is paying attention?
The one who is paying attention transcends the mind’s constant activity, like a pedestrian waiting on a street corner for the light to change. Traffic and passersby on the sidewalk move constantly, but the pedestrian simply waits and watches. No matter how much they might be attracted by a certain sight, they are beyond the thing they are looking at.
When you saw the cotton candy change color in your mind, something deeper was at work. You created the color you chose. Where did you get the ability to create anything? You didn’t go anywhere physically, nor did you open a box of colors in your mind to choose pink. You create mental images simply by being creative; it is an aspect of consciousness that exists nowhere and everywhere. All human beings go there to use their imagination, make a painting, daydream, or recall a memory from the past.
The miracle is that you are here doing a trivial exercise with cotton candy and at the same time you can access pure creativity, which has no location in time and space. In other words, you are timeless anytime you want to be. In fact, you are timeless whether or not you want to be. As a transcendent being, you travel between the finite (time ticking by second by second on the clock) and the infinite (the timeless). Even if you have never seen yourself this way, it qualifies as a miracle of everyday life.
MIRACLE #9
BLISS
Exercise:
In your mind’s eye, see a toddler walking unsteadily across the floor. The mother is a few feet away, holding out her arms. The toddler is eager to get to the mother. Their face is wreathed in smiles, their eyes gleam as they rush to embrace her, and at the same time, there is delight in those eyes at being able to walk.
Where is the miracle?
We’ve all seen a baby’s face light up with joy. As you created the image in your mind’s eye, the toddler you saw looked blissful. You saw it; you felt it. But whose bliss was it? You assigned it to an imaginary child, and yet you are the one who felt it. In some way the bliss was a projection. It belongs to you, but it also got projected onto the baby.
Any experience of bliss is just like that. The feeling of joy belongs to you, but it is also projected onto something that made you feel joyful. This something can be anything. The English poet William Wordsworth captures the experience of bliss in the following lines from his poem “Surprised by Joy”:
Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb.
This is actually a specific moment, because Wordsworth has turned to share his joy with his little son, only to remember in the next instant that his son is dead. It is a touching, even a wrenching, moment for him and the reader. Yet what is more uplifting than “unprovoked joy,” as psychologists call it? Bliss appears out of nowhere and vanishes of its own accord. It happens to us all the time. We are surprised by a moment of joy, and then it is gone, usually fading away so gently that we don’t notice, or perhaps we sigh for a moment when we realize that we are not going to be joyful all the time.
The miracle is that bliss exists in the first place, always ready to surprise us, often when we least expect it. A baby who has no word for bliss, and no thoughts about it coming and going, can tap into bliss anyway. This aspect of consciousness cannot be explained. It just is, a miracle of everyday life.
MIRACLE #10
BEING
Exercise:
See yourself poised to dive off the end of a diving board. You glance down, and below you is not a swimming pool, but rather an ocean of white light. The ocean extends in all directions. The sight pulls at you. You cannot wait to dive into the white light, so you bend your knees, spread your arms out wide, and spring off the board. Now, just at the peak of your dive, freeze the image. See yourself in the pose of a swan dive, frozen in midair above an infinite ocean of white light.
Where is the miracle?
The one thing we are sure of, every single one of us, is that we exist. But this is also the one thing we cannot describe in words. “I am” has no action to it. You can assign all kinds of things to “I am.” I am walking, I am hungry, I am a lawyer, I am about to be promoted. But “I am” doesn’t need anything added to it. It stands alone.
Yet even those words aren’t getting us close to the reality of being. In this exercise you re-created the feeling of a flying dream, which most people would say, if they have ever had flying dreams, feels completely free and ecstatic. Flying dreams liberate us from gravity and fear of falling. But so does being here.
To be is an untouchable condition. In Book II of the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna gives a time-honored description of being: “Weapons cannot cut It, nor can fire burn It; water cannot wet It, nor can wind dry It.”
One commentator made the following astute remark about this famous line of verse: “Here the unseen has been explained by means of the seen.” If you reflect for a moment, these words describe our entire existence. We act out the unseen, infinite field of pure consciousness by means of the world we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.
We act out the field of pure consciousness by turning it into thoughts. Poised like a diver in midair over a sea of white light, we are not going anywhere. Being doesn’t move, and we are that being. But when consciousness enters the world, we feel ourselves moving, being born, dying, and everything in between. At every moment this is happening, we are poised in midair over the sea of consciousness, which is the sea of Being.
In this last exercise everything is summed up. When you realize that you are an expression of pure consciousness, pure Being, then naturally everything is a miracle. Creation sprang up of its own accord, and you find yourself in its embrace. By any measure, just to be here is miraculous.