You take 20,000 breaths per day. BREATHE 478

 A

a

C

Sitting silently in a room without a recognizable personality, and with most of his memories gone, his grandfather still seemed to my friend to be experiencing something. Even when only the slightest glow of awareness remains, consciousness is obviously present in some form, up until the last moment it exists. And this minimal level of awareness—whatever it’s like right before the lights go out altogether—may be completely unlike our familiar, human experience.

A

 The big bang gave us a universe, but for several hundred million years the universe was extremely simple. Beneath the surface, though, interesting new possibilities were stirring, and eventually, stars and galaxies began to light up the darkness. They added an entirely new cast of characters, new emergent properties, and new forms of complexity, and they led the universe across a second threshold of increasing complexity.

A

FF 1990

I experienced it as a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific, gushing from my heart with incredible strength. Then suddenly that light exploded. It filled the room and expanded to embrace the entire universe with the same white brilliance. I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was the substance out of which everything that exists is made. This was what created the universe out of itself. Then, with immense surprise, I recognized that I was that light! The whole experience lasted perhaps a minute, and it changed me forever. My relationship with the world had always been as a separate observer perceiving the universe as outside myself and disconnected from me. What made this event astonishing was its impossible perspective because I was both the experiencer and the experience. I was simultaneously the observer of the world and the world. I was the world observing itself! And I was concurrently knowing that the world is made of a “substance” that feels like love and that I am that! In other words, the essence of reality was revealed to be a “substance” or nous that knows itself by self-reflection, and its self-knowing is experienced as an irrepressible and dynamic love full of joy and peace

A

In Christian theology, particularly in Eastern Orthodox thought, nous is the spiritual aspect of the soul that is capable of perceiving God and spiritual truths. It is seen as the highest faculty of the human soul, above reason and emotion.

A

JNANA IN ADVAITA 

A