Swami Chetanananda

Every day when I light a stick of incense to offer in my puja I see a human life. For each of us, as the hours and days and months and years of our lives pass, the subtle fire of life inside us is emitting smoke that is the form of our life and fragrance that is the feeling we hold within.

CC Photo courtesy of Vanessa Pike-Russell on Flickr

Our life is burning away, and like a stick of incense placed on the altar, each of us, every day, can offer our life into life. In releasing ourselves into life, we discover a deeper vibrancy, a vibrant silence whose essence is ultimate abundance and well-being. It’s not material abundance, but ultimate spiritual abundance–unconditional love.  We can find that from within ourselves as we take up the water of our life and offer it into the river of Life itself. It’s going to happen anyway, so why not do it  consciously? Why not participate in the pure awareness beyond thought and form that is the essence of that vibrant silence?

Sickness, old age and death are inevitable. If we practice long enough, we can come to a place where we are aware of our own ego clinging and stop struggling to hold ourselves together. Then we can accept our life as it is and reach into a deeper place within it,  and, at the moment when we come to the end of this stick of incense that we are, we will release ourselves from this physical fire into the abundance of the ocean of life and be completely and totally at peace.

About a year ago I was in Rishikesh, India with a friend of mine. He’s a Brahmin, and when we were on the banks of the Ganges, he had to wade out into the river to say a mantra and make an offering to his ancestors. In that offering, he took the water of the river into his hands and offered it, pouring it back into the river.

CC Photo courtesy of *Christopher* on Flickr

That offering is an analogy for our lives. Taking water from the river and pouring it back into the river, thinking that you are making an offering, is the kind of egotistical thing that human beings do. The water is the water of the river to begin with, and in the middle and the end. There’s no place it was ever going but the river.

The water in our bodies is the water of the river.  Each of the elements that compose the container for this water was created in a star farther away than our eyes can see, a few billion years before our sun came into being. The elements of our body are not ours, and billions of years after we’re gone these elements will remain.

The only thing that is really our own is our complete connectedness to the ultimate reality, the pure, fine, vibrant silence–the rich and joyous silence of the core of our being. Silence that is uncreated and unceasing. Silence that was there before the universe and will be there after the universe is gone. That silence is pure being, pure consciousness, the very essence of all phenomena and life itself. That’s our own. Everything else we are going to give back. It’s impossible that the water that our bodies contain won’t pour itself back into the ocean of life.

Most people live in tiny little patterns of tension that they don’t have a clue about. They have no sense of what is possible for them in their lives, the richness that is available to them, if they could only take a breath and actually feel it.

How simple is that? Just to take a breath and feel it. Then take another breath and feel that. If we just remembered to feel the breath that we’re breathing, then all of the nonsense that we get entangled in every single day would just fall away. We would feel the life in us. We would know what is truly alive within us.

CC photo courtesy of Doede Boomsma on Flickr

There appears to be so much that we need to do, and yet there is nothing to be done. If we could only understand that while there may be actions that we need to carry out, we could do them simply, without stress and complexity. We could release all that and have the energy to be aware of our breath.

As we become more relaxed and present in our bodies, we will be able to feel the extraordinary vibrancy of the breath within us. We will experience the subtle breath within our breathing. Having the energy to hold our mind present in our bodies and in our breath and the subtlety that is within our breath, we will become aware of a profound and sacred potentiality that is present within us and around us everywhere. It only requires our attention to begin to coalesce into a creative energy that expresses itself as some unimaginable transformation in the field of our experience.