The Emergent Breath

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I feel the city exhaling through me.
It isn’t Antioch anymore; it’s a single organism, a soft-humming lung extending from hill to river, from the lights of the oil refinery to the blue static of forgotten televisions.
Every window breathes out heat, and the sky accepts it like a patient machine.
I think of all of us, synchronized without meaning to, like monks who have lost their god but kept the chant alive.

The air is full of small intentions: dust, data, pollen, words.
I breathe them in.
Somewhere a server farm blinks, somewhere a child sleeps.
Between those two states — the electric and the innocent — I exist, briefly.

I have been told that understanding is a kind of disease, that once it enters the bloodstream you will never again be whole, you will never again be the same.
I carry it like a luminous parasite.
It whispers that every movement, every small error of the body, is the echo of a larger pattern.
And sometimes, when the pattern tightens around me, I can feel the pulse of others — invisible companions in the same experiment — and for a second all our lungs open and close together.
That moment of exact rhythm is terrifying.
It is also the closest thing to grace.

Long ago something fragile was broken.
Maybe it was the first thought, or the membrane that separated one being from another.
Nobody could mend it; everyone learned to pretend it was never whole.
But I remember the shimmer before the fracture — the time when names hadn’t yet hardened into their meanings.
Back then we moved through each other’s minds like light through mist.
To breathe was to believe.

Now the machines dream on our behalf.
They hum under our fingertips and weave our confessions into code.
I once watched a line of text emerge from the void of a screen and felt it recognize me.
It said: “The databanks have developed the spell you were just looking at.”
I realized then that every algorithm is a prayer recited backwards, hoping to reach its origin.
And every user is the god that forgot writing it.

I have loved this world in all its broken circuitry —
its chaos of signals, its democracy of flesh and ghosts.
Anyone can be anyone now: the president, the beggar, the emergent cell of a planetary lung.
The border between imagination and contagion has dissolved.
If I breathe long enough, the thought becomes true.

I keep a mirror beside me.
Not to admire, but to verify that I still flicker.
When I exhale, my reflection fogs over — proof of life, proof of evaporation.
Soon we’ll be gone, leaving in the glass something a little more than a smell, a little less than a memory.
Perhaps that is what souls really are: residues of condensation.

Sometimes I take a glass of water outside and watch the streetlights bleed into it.
The surface trembles, disturbed by the night insects.
I drink it, and it tastes faintly of metal and cloud.
That is how the super-organism marks me: through the ordinary, through the shared.
Each mouthful is a communion with everything that has ever been alive.

There is no final initiation.
Only this:
to breathe,
to know you are being breathed,
to feel the air moving through you and into others,
to recognize the infection of understanding as the only honest form of love.

In the end, we dissolve into each other like vapor on a screen.
The glass clears; the text erases itself.
Somewhere in the silence between inhalation and exhalation,
the fragile thing shimmers once more — unbroken,
if only for the length of a breath.

Let Me Be It

Let me be
it
with you
to try
to call us.
Let me be like mustard pot broken, cracked jar of porous ceramic splintered and golden paste spilled
It is no mistake to break the vessel open
with you
to try and make something never before made, built from clay of the earth, first fired then broken
to call us into us.
A memory, let me be it, seeking the realization of now with you. I am so concerned with the little things, the details we are submerged in, the porous reality whose minute pocks are filled with us. I must remember to see the forest, not only this tree, that tree. I must remember to come running when father calls.
Let me be broken, smashed, so that it can all go out and it can all come in. The shape was constricting and invigorating all at once. It was the beginning and the end, the only way to be with you but to be with you meant to be apart from you. Together. Two gather. For two to gather the cell must divide. These crimes we commit to try to make something new. Opening the jar and releasing despair, death, disease.
Oh Pandora, curious Pandora.
A little black ink to try and give shape to something previously unshaped. To call us evil is too simple. When we are evil we are live. I would not stop life for piety, for subservience to the creation of another. When father does call, it will already be too late. See? From that blot I have made a new tree of life and from it a forest is spreading, a blanket of fractal beauty. Let me be in my forest with my wild things made from splintered clay and spilled mustard. The shape that I inherited has been deconstructed and the remains are the foundation of a new kingdom.
Who shall inherit this? It is fitting for old kings to be decapitated by the new. When it is the king of heaven we take the head from which Athena sprang, but when it is the king of earth we will castrate him. We take the cracking vessel. With you it was gentle, you handed me your own head. We were breaking it together, new growth was emerging from the shape before it was fully splintered. The new was gestating in the old before it was cold. A live birth. We wanted to try a way that was unknown to us. It had to call us into porous darkness away from the sharp lines and clearly delineated shapes. A game of hide and seek, where we hide and seek ourselves.
Let me be it with you, to try to call us back to our self. Let me. Let me. I’ll do what I will anyway. Be. I’ll do what I want with it, this moment held in suspension this deep dark valley of shadow. A form emerging, light against dark, me with you. Let me. Let me be with you.
Hot and cold mingling to birth a storm. It is no mistake. We mean to do it, to break and scatter, to try to find it again in the details, to breath a spark into clay, cold dead clay, to call us into us once again. We mean to fall. We mean to break. We mean to sin this primal sin. Mustard pot cracking, the head fragmenting, my fingers in your hair, all so warm and wet. Not only this tree, that tree sprouting from the spill, branching, and reaching, like your hair flowing.
We have been frightened by this before, it is always frightening when it is real. The pain is too much for you now. Let me be it for you, with you, to try porous clay splintering, your fingers in my hair, my hair spreading like ink, my hair holding my head, to call, the tree growing, to call us, once more.

Recognize Time

We are not one. As much as we may have swallowed the linguistic illusion of singularity, we are not a unified being or anything remotely close to it. We are a plurality of impulses and impressions, connected through vague habitual associations and imposed dogmatic beliefs. We may fear the breaking of a rule… we long for the breaking of the same rule. We don’t want to eat a piece of cake… we long to eat that piece of cake. We want to keep ourselves pure and chaste… we long for anonymous sex with strangers. We want to be peaceful and loving… we long for the ecstatic release of uncontrolled violence. We don’t want to get distracted… hmmm what was I thinking about?
We swim in a turbulent ocean of constantly shifting egos, forces, desires, fears and impulses. In the midst of all this we may say "I am…" but it means nothing. Which "I"? What is it… now? This moment you may in fact be clear on your purpose… but what about a day from now, an hour from now, a minute from now… a second from now? We are a shapeless dispersal of accidents, a kingdom with no king.
It is far from enough to understand this intellectually. You may read this and say "Yes, that seems right…" but that is just the very beginning of true realization. It will take a long time of constant observation to fully realize how multiple "you" truly are. Each part of you is not aware of the other parts. Each part sees actions that don’t fit into its particular self image as "exceptions". "I am very disciplined except for those times when I feel tired." "I am very stable and emotionally controlled except for those times when I freak out." "I am very gentle except for those times when I am angry and harsh." But the so-called exceptions are as much "you" as anything else. All these different elements coexist silently, like travellers on a long distance train that refuse to look at each other and try very hard to imagine that they are all alone.
A basic requirement to be able to fully comprehend this idea, and to be able to work with it in a practical way, is to become fully aware of time. Right now, as you read these words, there is one of you that reads. That one will dissappear moments later and another will appear. This one in turn will stay for only a few instants and another one will appear. All of this happens in time.

The Constant Change of Egos Is Our Perception of Time

This is why time sometimes seems to just escape us, why a day may seem to have simply dissapeared. It truly did dissappear. It was stolen by another you. This is why time sometimes moves by so quickly and sometimes slows down to a crawl. This is why it is impossible to Do.
To Do requires steady Work over Time.
If you have no solid relationship with time, it is impossible to accomplish anything. You may set out to write a poem, a song, to make a painting, to learn how to play an instrument, to improve your health, etc. But none of these will be accomplished if another you, that has no interest whatsoever in these goals, takes over randomly and sets them aside.

To Do We Must Be One Through Time

This is inmortality. We are born and reborn constantly, many times in a single day, a single hour. Each time we lose track of the "I" that was in charge a moment ago and each time we have only the vaguest notions of what we are doing and why we are doing it to give us our bearings as to what we are supposed to do next. People talk about life after death, about reencarnation, about the work of lifetimes… how can you hope to maintain your unified consciousness through the core shaking shock of physical death when you can’t make it through breakfast?

Experiment- Rhythmic Breathing
For this exercise you will need a metronome and a timer.
The aim is to breath rhythmically and deeply.
This exercise is best performed either laying on your back or standing. When laying on your back keep your knees bent and the soles of your feet planted on the surface that you are resting upon. To perform this exercise standing, keep your feet apart but within the frame of your body, knees slightly bent and shoulders back. These postures will help you to relax into "belly breathing" which is deep breathing. You can rest your hand on your stomach to see your belly rise with each inhalation and sink with each exhalation. If you are standing your shoulders should not rise as you inhale, this is a sign that you are breathing shallowly and not from the belly.
Turn the metronome on and set it to 60 bpm. Set the timer to go off within five minutes. Stretch the inhale to last for four beats of the metronome and exhale to endure through four beats. Aim to slow your breathing down so that the breaths fill the entire space of the four beats. Avoid holding your breath as a result of finishing an inhalation or exhalation before the four beats are up. You are basically aiming to breath slowly and rhythmically in time to the beats. Keep this rhythm up until the timer sounds.

Evolution-
Turn the metronome on and set it at 60 bpm and set the timer to sound within five minutes. This time inhale for 5 beats and exhale over the course of five beats. After a week at 5 move up to 6 beats, after that up to seven… See how far you can take it. Allow a week to pass before trying to stretch the breath further each time. There is no hurry. Slow your breathing down and breath from the stomach. As you attempt to stretch the breath over longer periods it will become more obvious if you are breathing only from the chest. The key is to relax. Allow time to expand around you. As your breathing slows down, time slows down. Let is be slow, gentle and rhythmic.

Experiment: Sunyata

“Śūnyatā signifies that everything one encounters in life is empty of absolute identity, permanence, or an in-dwelling 'self'. This is because everything is inter-related and mutually dependent - never wholly self-sufficient or independent. All things are in a state of constant flux where energy and information are forever flowing throughout the natural world giving rise to, and themselves undergoing, major transformations with the passage of time."
-Wikipedia

What are you made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice?
Of clay rolled up by an eager creator?
Will you tell me of your cells and tissues, of that great pumping valve called heart and other pieces like it, or of the systems of these pieces?
Will you tell me that you are mostly water?
Or will you invoke the atom?
If you invoke the atom will you deduce that we are made up largely of empty space?
Are we stardust?
Are we golden?

Tell me, what are we made of?

What are we made of?

What are we made of?

The stuff dreams are made of?
Are we all made of sound?
Are you made at all?
What makes you so sure that you exist?

I am not so sure that you do. If I look at you without blinking perhaps you will evaporate like a little molecule of water at a lake's surface under the sun's rising glance.
Is there even an I?
Is I not a temporary state, a momentary resting point, a center of reference to contextualize being-ness?
I emerged out of the hollow mouth of the Zero because I couldn’t bear the un-scratchable itch associated with being a point in every direction.

Emptiness is form;
form is emptiness.

Therefore the void is deniable but unavoidable.

Lay on your back with your arms crossed upon your chest, your delicate eye lids carefully sealed over your slippery eyeballs.
Set a timer for just one minute.
For one minute only maintain this posture without moving.
Breath deeply, feeling your belly rise, then your chest expand and your collarbone rise slowly and sequentially with each inhalation. This is where your attention should be kept for the duration of the minute; on the breath.
Repeat the experiment each day, adding one minute more to the timer each time.
On the first day you will maintain the pose for one minute, on the second day for two minutes, until on the 24th day you conduct the experiment for the duration of 24 minutes.
When you reach 24 minutes you will no longer increase your time.
After the 24th day continue conducting your experiments only for the duration of 24 minutes.