Innocence and beginner’s mind: The Portal to Beauty

Innocence and beginner’s mind: The Portal to Beauty

The experience of the breath will allow you to enter the garden of your own being. It is very easy to miss beauty. We look everywhere for beauty but right in front of our noses.

To witness the miraculous means to dissolve the blinders to the very fact of your own existence. I wonder how it is that people take their own bodies for granted. There is not a human being on this planet that can express the intelligence and beauty and power of the very body they are using to examine the world. There is an implicit assumption that we must do something to improve upon what has already been given.

The very fact that your body is animated by breath is miraculous. Instead of using mind efforts to control the breath to do it right (the assumption being that it could not possibly be perfect without your conscious mind directing it), take the attitude to learn from the breath. The only effort that is necessary is to direct the consciousness to behold and be in a state of wonder that the breath of life is breathing through you.

When our mind finally stops trying to control our breath and simply witnesses the exquisite refinement and infinite variation and depth of the breath, we have finally woven our minds back into a relationship of innocence with the present moment.

Innocence is certainly the domain of the child, but it is not the child about which we are speaking. While children have the quality of innocence, so does every expression of the natural world. We are apart of the natural world except that we hold ourselves apart in the way we structure our reality in our conscious mind.

It is the adult human mind that must reawaken to the sacred in all things. The most primary place we can reawaken is the breath. It is a simple shift of attention to come back to the breathing pulse that is with us from birth to death. It is alien to surrender ourselves to something that is so close to us.

When I shift and hold the primacy of my breath in my consciousness, I am immediately taken out of the noise of my mind into the unfolding present. Conversely, when I unconsciously give my attention to the virtual thinking reality of my mind, my intellect, I place myself in a two dimensional universe in which I am no longer in the present. From the thinking mind, I am either in the past or the future where I have no control to creatively interface with the present moment. We become victims of our future/past story, we have removed ourselves from the possibility of our true creative potential which only lives in the present moment. Our relationship with our breath is our primary access to the present moment.

In the present moment I am breathing, connected to all things, created by the divine will, which has created all things. We are all divinity breathing itself into existence. Everything and everyone is miraculous and wonderful. Everything comes from the activation of the breath of divine principle.

Only in so far as we are lost in the dark stories of our two-dimensional thinking, outside the reality of innocence and wonder, will we see the Other as enemy. We can only see the Other as enemy if we cut ourselves from wonder, if we have made our own innocence—the sacredness of our own body—an enemy. We do this when we hold our mind outside of our aliveness and then fiercely and desperately attempt to control life. It is a natural response to tighten our efforts to control life if we have lost trust, because we are out of contact with the higher organizing principle of the oneness of all being.

As soon as we correct our relationship with life and allow life to breathe us into the present moment, we can experience the wonder this creation. Immediately, the need to manipulate and control others falls away and there opens a space for the heart to soften. The heart is the direct connection to direct knowing of the interconnectedness of all being.