You Are the Universe

Transcript

Find a comfortable position... Let your eyes close... Let your weight be fully held by whatever is beneath you — chair, cushion, floor...

The earth is holding you. You can let go of holding yourself.

Take a slow breath in...

And let it out...

And as you breathe, consider something remarkable: you did not come into this world.

You came out of it. The way a leaf comes out of a tree. The way a wave rises out of the ocean.

You are not a stranger visiting the universe. You are something the universe is doing — a movement of the whole, exactly as a whirlpool is a movement of the river.

Think of it this way: an apple tree doesn't labor to produce shopping malls or televisions. It produces apples. It apples. And in the same way, the universe — this vast, unfolding process of stars and soil and oceans — doesn't produce strangers or visitors.

It peoples. The universe is peopling, and you are one of its people. Grown out of it, made of it, returning to it, never for one moment separate from it.

Look at your own skin. You've probably always thought of it as a boundary — the wall between you and everything else. But is it?

Breathe in... and the outside world flows into you, becomes you.

Breathe out... and you flow back into the world.

Your skin is not a wall. It's more like a place where the exchange happens — a place where universe becomes, briefly, a person, and then gives itself back.

Feel this now, physically. As the air enters... that is the world entering you. As it leaves... that is you entering the world. You are not in the breath. The breath is you, happening.

The sunlight that made your food... the water that is most of your body... the iron in your blood, forged in dying stars long ago... All of it, you. You are the universe, arranged in a way that can close its eyes and sit quietly and become aware of itself.

That's what's happening right now. The universe is using your awareness to contemplate itself. You are its eye turned inward.

Rest here, in this feeling of no-separation. Nothing to achieve. Nothing to become. You are already, and have always been, the whole thing.

Gently, now... begin to feel the room around you again... the sounds... the temperature of the air on your skin...

Take one more deep breath of the world...

And open your eyes — the universe, looking through them.