I have found that when you move often in life you miss some of the most exquisite and real experiences of life's rhythms and changes. Natural cycles of development, arising and subsiding, go largely unnoticed and the delicate play of life becomes hard to detect.

You are what you give attention to

Sit and contemplate a puddle of water quietly and silently after the sun has risen. Stay with the puddle until it is no more. Gaze gently and lovingly into the infinite sky and watch slowly as the interlaced compositions of cloud before your eyes fade into endless blue.

If you sit long enough with the puddle of water or the cloud something curious happens. As any serious meditator knows you are what you give attention to. Thus when you center yourself in anger and resentment you become an angry resentful person. Conversely when you give attention to love and happiness you become a loving happy person. And so on.

Sitting then contemplating the puddle or the cloud, you become aware of the fading, disappearing quality of life. Your life begins as some aspect of the mystery, mysteriously you arose here in this place at this time. Labeled and identified you began your life, your exploration of life, your separation from life, your division of the unity of life. Progressively you learned about life, its foibles, its excitements, its insecurities, and its wonders.

Among so much unknown

Life became yours or you became life's. You discovered purpose and fulfillment or the promise of both. Life perhaps took you over or perhaps you felt that you held it in the palm of your hand. Other people empowered and inspired and led you or perhaps you were isolated, alienated, and alone, unhappy and questioning, bewildered and awkward, among so much unknown.

Your way led you to some expression of this self, this being who you had become, who you were confirmed as, identified as, even as you refined his or her stance in the world with opinions, preferences, sharing your character and personality, making some impression, some imprint here. Here I am you felt... here I am, along with the accompanying sense of whether or not that matters and if so how did it matter, why did it matter, and to whom did you matter?

You may have sought meaning, you may have sought purpose, you may have felt valued, validated, or not... but like the puddle or the cloud you were fading, disappearing from your very first breath. From the very first breath at the start of your life you were in wonder at life, but also in wonder at death. For death is inherent in life. Just as the first note of the aria presupposes the last note that will end it, just as the first ray of sunlight in the morning begets the sun slipping beneath the western horizon, your first breath extended, reached, and related to your very last breath, when, breathing out, expiring, you, like the puddle or the cloud, have passed away, out of existence, out of being here in this world, out of temporary relative consciousness, into infinity.

Is that it? you sometimes ask... others or yourself. Is that all there is? A brief in-breath and a long out-breath with some action, some possibly pointless activity in between, making no particular difference, leaving no significant impression, when, like ants, we simply toil and act until the life is squashed out of us. What happens after death? Or perhaps we mean after life. What happens when our little puddle-cloud life dissipates, atrophies, and subsides into nothing... perhaps nothingness itself? What will have counted? What will have made any difference? Why, who, what, and how are we here... if at all?

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #185