 In my guided meditation Expect Miracles I ask you to start looking for miracles everywhere in your daily life. The more you see miracles the more you will believe in them and the more they will show up. It's using the basic Universe principle energy flows where attention goes. When you think about something and you feel good about it, it makes an energetic connection in the quantum field which then manifests that thing your physical life. In other words, get excited about the miraculous nature of life and your life will become miraculous. Asking you to start looking for miracles everywhere can seem like a high order. Who in this world of struggle and conflict sees miracles all the time? All of us. It's simply a matter of changing your perspective. Miracles really are around us all the time, so long as we're willing to see them. For real? I mean really. I'm just sitting here drinking my coffee. How is that miraculous? The real question is, how is not? Let's imagine you've just gotten a cup of joe from your favorite coffee shop, and you're walking out with a paper cup full of piping hot dark roast. Let's take a look at that simple paper cup that's so magically holding your liquid from sloshing to the ground. And I do mean magically. Do you know that the atoms that compose you, me, cups, everything, never touch each other? That's right, it's an illusion. Between every single atom is an imperceptible cushion of space. The fact that the cup appears solid, and that your hand holding it appears solid, is one of the miraculous illusions of this world. How does this happen? When atoms reach a certain point, they are no longer attracted to each other, but start to experience repulsion. The closer they get the stronger this repelling force is. Which means the more you try to force them together the stronger the force is pushing them apart. How strong? Stronger than any force we're capable of producing here on this Earth. Which means that two of the most microscopic building blocks of life area capable of exerting more strength, more POWER, than the strongest person alive. The smallest pieces of this world contain power. That is rather miraculous. You are created of those pieces. You are created of billions and billions of atoms, atoms which are working in their own divinely intelligent and miraculous way to keep you together. So this cup you have is kind of amazing. And we've barely scratched the surface of its fascinating makeup. Along with there being space around atoms, there is also space within the atoms (around each nucleus, electron and protron is also space). There is just a lot of empty space within everything. If you collapsed the empty space of a cup and somehow overpowered those powerful atoms, the actual dense matter of your cup would be less than a fraction of a grain of sand. Seriously. (Fun fact: this is the science Rick Moranis' character referred to in Honey I Shrunk the Kids.) Now we're starting to understand how wild and strange your cup is. But we should go deeper. Let's consider the material that makes up the cup and take a look at this paper receptacle. Paper's not special, right? Okay it's got that weird space between the atoms thing going on, but beside that, it's just paper. Right? Is anything just anything? Where did the paper actually come from? It didn't just appear as a cup in the coffee shop. It had to start as a tree. A tree has a protective layer of bark, which acts like your own skin, protecting its interior from the outside elements. It also has a system of veins that run sap up and down it in order to nourish the tree, much like your own blood system. A tree is a living, breathing part of this world. It's not just a tree.  But how exactly do we even have trees that can be turned into paper? Where did the first tree come from? In 2007 tree stumps that were 385 million years old were uncovered. Trees have been living and evolving on this earth longer than any human ancestor. A lot longer. About 379 million years longer. When you stand before a tree, you stand before something that connects back to a time that we know almost nothing about. The trees connect back to the mysterious and miraculous birth of life as we know it. There's more to it than that. Trees are grown in special harvesting places called managed timberlands. The logs are shipped to sawmills for processing... oh but wait, that's not simple either. What are the trucks made of that ship the logs? What about the person who drives the truck, the person who can never be again and was never before? That special person who is them self a cosmic mystery. The tires for the truck had to be made, the metal was made somewhere. All of these separate parts of the earth turned into a truck, so that someone could ship logs to a processing plant to make paper. And then there's the wax that lines the cup, which has its own mind boggling story of how it came to be. Nothing in this world is simple. Everything is connected to everything else. Those trees that make the paper? They were nourished by the water that cycles through the sky and earth, by the soil that has been on this planet for billions of years. When you hold paper, you hold something that is connected to all of time and creation on this planet. It's that amazing. To say that the entire world conspires together to make a little cup that holds your coffee would be true. If that isn't miraculous, I don't know what is. Not to mention the fact that we've already established the cup itself, with all its space filled atoms, is already miraculous in nature. And that's just the cup. We didn't even get into the coffee inside of it. When you sip coffee, you sip something that is only made possible by a complex and fascinating series of events. It's something that passed through the hands of people half a world away, was shipped by fuels that came from inside the earth and was brewed by somebody who is made from the same materials as the stars in the sky. Everything in this world can be looked at in this way. If we're going by the dictionary.com definition, then a miracle is, "an effect of extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a super natural cause." Is this something we see often? If you've ever seen an ant carrying a crumb, then yes. A worker ant can carry something that is 5,000 times its body weight. How do you explain that? There are miracles all around us. Life is the miracle. You are a miracle. It's often just a matter of change in perception to see how miraculous this life and world are. We don't generally look down to ants for inspiration of miracles. But they're right there, literally right under our noses. Why not take a moment and marvel at what's happening all around you right now? As I said in the beginning of this blog post, that which is like itself will be drawn to itself. Think about miracles, notice them, and notice how your life changes. Expect Miracles is a 20 minute guided meditation and available as an mp3 for $2.50.  “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” |