Inspiration

05/14/20 • 9 min

Inspiration

To inspire means to breathe in. Not with your upper chest, but with your diaphragm, the part below your ribs. Breathe in. As you hold it, reflect on this miracle. You are filling your lungs with mostly nitrogen, some oxygen, and as you release your breath, you are giving the plants your carbon dioxide. Every breath is a miracle. That should be the first and only inspiration you need. That you keep breathing is a miracle, a blessing, a treasure and gift reserved only for the living. So should you start to feel depressed or disconnected, this is something you can always return to. Inspiration, expiration.

Of course, the feelings, experiences and relationships we encounter will add ‘content’ to trying to stay balanced and may throw us off-kilter.

So, if the breath doesn’t inspire you, fill you with hope and joy, then where else can you go? What can you do?

This is where you enter your laboratory. You may not know this, but you are one. A laboratory. You are an ongoing experiment. But that means you have to keep trying new things, new combinations, new experiments. Now, the thing about science, is that it is mostly about failure. Failure does not mean bad. It's just data. So part of what we are doing in this case, is finding out about what makes you inspired. To do that, you will need to look back on your life, and remember what has inspired you in the past. What does inspiration mean to you? Does it give you impetus, ideas, hope, or just happiness? Perhaps what you first need to do is think about and reflect on what inspiration means to you.

So here we are in our laboratory, and we are going to try and re-create or reanimate that feeling of inspiration. What ingredients do we need to start with? Was it a poem, a motivational talk, a book, a specific person, an unexpected revelation? Perhaps the ingredient we need to start with is Love. Without Love all the other ingredients will not truly inspire.

As Albert Einstein writes to his daughter, “There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.

This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.

To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we a

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Inspiration

Of course, the feelings, experiences and relationships we encounter will add ‘content’ to trying to stay balanced and may throw us off-kilter.

So, if the breath doesn’t inspire you, fill you with hope and joy, then where else can you go? What can you do?

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

Thank you for choosing our podcast amongst all the millions available. If

Support the show

Please send your questions to: [email protected]

Previous Episode

Propulsion on the Spiritual Path

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Propulsion on the Spiritual Path
Ibrahim Ansari

Sometimes certain realizations or experiences propel us towards a spiritual path:
You realize you know nothing,
What you do know is so infinitesimal it will take just a minute to list them,
you have no power - everything comes from somewhere else. And when you do try to do something...
Your personal will gets in the way,\ You understand that this place is a school. You’ve learned a lot, now it is time to articulate the lessons and figure out what and if you have learned,
You are prideful - you think you are the center of the universe and you that’s not right,
You judge everyone - you think you are better than others and that’s not right,
You think you know better and wish that would stop,
Life is not as fair as you wished or expected,
You have heard that humility and sincerity are important, whatever they are,
Everything is a paradox,
Teachers don’t know everything,
You don’t know who you are, and finally,
Crisis! Physical, mental, or emotional.

So here you are desperate enough or courageous enough, curious enough or confused enough, to listen to this podcast by some fool who won’t give you straightforward advice.

That’s because the next steps you take are your own. There are lots of shops and shopkeepers just waiting for you to wander through. Self-help books and guru-talkers will be more than happy to take your money and point out ways for you to:

Buy their special advanced spiritual methods,
Be special in a special group,
Learn to channel and
Talk to the dead,
Read aura’s, or
Learn to manifest wealth.

Any of those are a path. Just not the one you were expecting. If they tell you that they know the path to make you rich and famous - well, that is not a spiritual path.That is the opposite of what any of the great prophets taught. There is no perfection in this life. There is practice, there is getting better, there is learning how to learn from failure. But there is no perfect being in this world. Everyone makes mistakes. There is no learning without mistakes and failure. Being human means to grow and learn. Learning means that it is important and vital that you make mistakes and fail.

The point is that you must learn how to learn, how to go deep inside and reflect on what has happened to you these past years. What have you learned? How do you know what you know? In this case, I mean that gnosis of experience and knowledge that cannot be removed from your being. Unconditional love, a deep understanding about someone or something... Not facts or opinions. The knowing that is part of you.

Whether it was the answer to an important question, an experience, a person, love, a crisis - you were taken to the underground spring of unity and drank of the sacred water. Once that touches your tongue, once that divine wine enters you, there is no going back. You can only want more. No substitution will do.

There are knowledgeable guides, but you should be aware that you are like a child. You are naive. You may think you

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

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Next Episode

On Death

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On Death

This apocalyptic year of the pandemic, along with being bestowed with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and chronic back pain, certainly helps keep the awareness of death constant.

S/He is always leering at me over my shoulder, keeping tabs on how I go about my day. Will I do something stupid? Will I eat something beyond my digestive ability?

After all these years of preparing for and contemplating death, I’ve come to an incomplete acceptance that death is a door to the next round of life.

Rumi says, “This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”

We fear separation, change, we abhor letting everything we know and love disappear. When we stare into the vast and endless depth of the unknown, we shrink at the lack of confirmation or echoes. No data, no facts, just endless reams of religious dogma and spiritualist fog. The dead seem to be gone for good, except for the astounding and continuous stories of ghosts across the centuries and all countries.

We grieve when someone dies, and yet we may also be secretly grieving for ourselves. We have our own mini-funerals when we are in the presence of the dead. The proximity of death closes in on us like tides and waves. A little closer when we are reminded, a little further when we choose to forget.

As human beings, we bond with our family, friends and mates. It is like a silver cord connects us to each other, and when that person dies, it feels like that cord is cut. That severing causes pain. Maybe that is what hurts. Perhaps there is much we do not know about this transformation. We are embedded in a true mystery.

We each have to arrive at an attitude towards this Great Secret, to develop a healthy relationship with death. Just as with any other relationship, there are good and appropriate models of what constitutes a wholesome connection. And part of this attitude may entail getting a better handle on how to deal with life. For me, when I am okay knowing death is behind everything, I feel much more gratitude towards the simple and beautiful attributes as breathing, trees, air, water... Moments of joy just looking up at the clouds, the stars, and down on the ground and contemplating this massive ball of rock and ocean hurtling through space, protecting us from all forms of radiation so we can enjoy this ride here on the outer reaches of the galaxy, spinning around a star. What a concept!

Perhaps part of this reflection on physical termination is both to learn how to embrace it and move forward knowing that the universe is not vindictive nor meaningless. It also helps to deepen our connection with others, knowing that nothing is permanent, and to bathe in the blessings that each moment brings us.

I’ve talked about paradoxes before. Perhaps, as Khalil Gibran poses in this poem, that this is where the final paradox is resolved:

On Death

You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

Thank you for choosing our podcast amongst all the millions available. If

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Please send your questions to: [email protected]