To Riccardo

 

A friend of this website in Italy asked me why I put so much emphasis on the "breath." He asked if there was something beyond the breath. And certainly there is. Breath is the bridge leading back to the breathless Source. Breath is the vibration of love that wings us back to God's stillness.

Breath. The word the New Testament is Pneuma and it also means the "Spirit." In the Old Testament it is Nephesh, which also means "soul," and Ruach, which means "Spirit." In Chinese it is Qi, creative spirit flowing through the universe and the body. In Sanskrit the breath is the Prana, or Shakti, the very Goddess energy of creation.

Your breath is not just air. Breath is the form or body of a deeper energy. Just as your body contains breath, so your breath is the body that contains the Goddess Shakti. When you bring the magic of awareness to a breath, you discover that this breath enfolds the divine energy that created the galaxies. She humbly enters your temple, clothed in your breath. She reclines on the altar of your heart. Quite literally, your heart. For your body is a sacrament, and everything in your physiology is the outward sign of an inward grace. This organic blood-drenched muscle of the beating heart is not just a pump, nor merely a physical organ. It is the bread-luscious host of the Holy Spirit. 

 

What is the sacrament that you attend in the Holy of Holies, the Heart? When your breath becomes very subtle here, breath transcends motion and becomes the stillness from which the universe was born.

God is Shiva, the unmoved silence of pure consciousness. For the sake of love's play, this stillness vibrates in waves of itself. This energy is love, and this vibrant love is Shakti. In the Biblical traditdion, She is known as Sophia, the Wisdom who danced with God at the creation of the world, just as she recounts in the Biblical book of Proverbs, chapter 8.

So your breath is the Holy Spirit dancing with God the Father, Shakti dancing with Shiva. And in this Holy Trinity, who is God the Son? You are. You are the divine child born from the union of God's ever-witnessing stillness and the Spirit's breath. The Trinity is Father-Mother-Child, Silence-Breath-You.

So, in the fathomless depth of contemplative prayer, you can let go of the breath. You transcend the breath. You surrender to stillness. Let go of the Mantra, let go of the Name of God: surrender to silence. The science of meditation is the science of creation in reverse.

As vibrations of energy and matter emerge from stillness to create the cosmos, so in meditation our body reverses this process, sinking back into stillness through vibrations of breath and mantra. This is how meditation literally re-creates the body as you tap into creation's Source.

Coming very near this Source in the hridaya-chakra, you intimately participate in the music of the stars, and imbibe the light of distant galaxies. For at this most refined level of energy, distance is an illusion, time and space dissolve, the Eye of the heart is opened. Swirling sun-clustered nebulae bubble up and dance in the silent depths of your own awareness.

This is how it happens: by the grace of the mantra, the most sacred name of God, your breath dissolves into a never-ending stream of sound, the continuum of the cosmic Word, or Logos. This is the Hum through which creation is sung. But then, you go rest even deeper in that vibration, and it resolves into pure Light: the glow in every star, and the spark in each electron, each neutrino. The whole material universe is no-thing but this Light.

But now you transcend even the subtlest sparkling threads of Light and enter the Divine Darkness. This boundless unmanifest ocean of tranquility, this darkness that was here before "God said, let there be light," is who you Are. You are the source of light, the wellspring of creation, the fountain of love. You are the Mother. You are the eternal silence of pure Being. For as I have said before, darkness is not the absence of light, darkness is the womb of light.

Beyond that, I have no words. Thank you, Riccardo, for asking this question. Big huge hug to You.

Photo by Bahman Farzad