When we wake up each morning, do we give orders for the sun to pass over the sky, for the birds to start singing, for all the creatures to awake and go about their business?

Do we send instructions for our breathing to change its rhythm, for our pupils to bring in the correct amount of light?

Do we increase our heart rate so we can be more active? Do we signal for the tide to turn, the moon to wane, the seasons to pass?

No, it’s obvious that we don’t. But if we’re not doing it, what is? What is taking care of it all?

When we stop to consider the world around us, even if we just look at our own body, we see that life is full of unexplained miracles. Taking place every single second of every single minute. And not just the odd one or two. Thousands of them. Something’s taking care of it all, and whether we’re conscious of it or not, it’s doing it so consistently and so precisely that we have come to rely on its delivery.

I often like to imagine exactly how much brilliance goes into each tiny facet of life. If someone asked you to come up with a design for a warm energy source that was the exact distance from the Earth for life to flourish, for the seasons to be possible and for all the processes of nature to exist in symbiosis - would you be able to come up with the Sun? Not the idea of the sun but the actual sun itself! What about designing, and making, a being that is connected at all times to a life giving energy source (which is invisible) but the being also simultaneously appears to be an individual unit (which you can see but which is actually a temporary illusion). Not only that but this being has to be able to think, feel and move. The thinking part has to be invisible, the feeling part can be discerned in the body but not seen by the eye and the movement part has to use the previous two elements to judge its effectiveness. OK. And what’s more the being has to have the faculty of knowing, a level of communication beyond thought, emotions and actions. And while you’re at it, can you make the physical body, although temporary, to be full of complex processes, both seen and unseen, which are synergistically perfect and at the same time, age. Uhmmm! Mind boggling isn’t it? We’re already stumped and we’ve only outlined the basics!

So whatever came up with the design and working of the human being is not only intelligent, it’s able to sustain complex systems and structures simultaneously and effortlessly. And we could go through every facet of life on Earth and find the same story. Flowers, insects, bird migration, whales. An overwhelming display of precision and intelligence. The interweaving of seen and unseen threads in an endless dance. We don’t need to look far in nature to see that one of the strongest qualities of this energy is beauty. Left to its own devices, it lends itself to beauty. The shine on a horses coat, a sky ablaze with colour, the metallic shimmer of an insect’s armour, the smell of orange blossom, dew drops hung on cobwebs. And not just things, thoughts can be beautiful, emotions can be beautiful, smiling can be beautiful.

How much does it cost to have access to such an incredible environment? What is the price for such a system. It’s free. It’s given freely in every moment. The energy source of life is abundant. We can fashion it into whatever we choose. It’s not stipulated that we must create one form over another. It is completely without preference. So in addition to its intelligence, precision and consistency, we can say that it is also benevolent. It gives without end and it gives without expectation. If we consider the created world in this way, it is of course, incredible. And there’s a sense of wonder and appreciation that naturally arises. A sense of connectedness. No matter how difficult our challenges can be, no matter how much we might struggle with life, contemplation of the beauty of life can lift our hearts and minds. It can reconnect us to what is real and true. Once we connect with this sense of appreciation., we wonder how we ever felt grumpy or ungrateful. Of course, there’ll still be income tax and rainy days. There’ll still be mother-in-laws and traffic jams. There’ll still be bad hair days and toothpaste tubes squeezed the wrong way. But is that where we want to put our focus, when we’re literally surrounded by beauty and intelligence and knowing what we know now about how this energy works?

When we’re looking at the bigger picture, what happens? Our experience of life changes. Nothing on the outside has to change. It all happens on the inside. And with this shift, we start to see beauty everywhere, we start to see intelligence everywhere, and reliability and precision and benevolence! We start to love life, we start to love the very same life we were just complaining about. And then something very magical happens - and this is where I feel the greatest awe and reverence ­- life loves us back. And that is when we realise that in addition to all the qualities we have identified, this energy that we are, The Sea of Awareness, is also sentient. Sentience is conscious knowing. It is bringing our world into being and our being into the world. The more we know the sea of awareness, the more it knows us. For there is only one and we are all of it.

This is my love letter to the world. It is my appreciation for all we have and all we are. May we smile often.

Jeddah Mali    http://www.jeddahmali.com