Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

individual self dissolves.
    We can learn to raise our awareness, perspective, and frame of reference to cosmic proportions. Allowing consciousness to move out toward the vast perspective of galactic and intergalactic proportions, and into the relationships of matter, high-energy particles, white holes, and black holes of immeasurably large numbers has a profound effect on consciousness. Viewed from the cosmic perspective, the human frame of reference is nearly infinitesimal in comparison, almost illusory in that vast sea of time and space. We can access this vision by gazing at the stars, the Milky Way, and out into the mysterious universe. We can also access it by contemplation of cosmic proportions. The beauties and revelations of science provide an extraordinary meditation journey. A few of these numbers are offered here.
    It took many centuries for humanity to learn more about the nature, size, and scope of even our tiny corner of the universe. For millennia we assumed that the planet Earth was the center of an unchanging universe. It was only in 1609 that Galileo invented the telescope. Now we have learned and seen the vastness of our galactic home. Let your mind take the astronomer’s and mathematician’s journey.
    Light travels at a speed of 12 million miles a
minute
and now we know that the nearest stars lie 5 light
years
, or 31,500,000,000,000miles away! This distance would require approximately a 100,000-year journey in today’s spacecraft. Our Milky Way spiral galaxy consists of 100 billion stars. Think about that for a moment. Galaxies are composed of countless numbers of stars. Our galaxy is enormous beyond conception but it is only a part of clusters of galaxies of astounding size—galaxies that span hundreds of millions of light years across.
    Our current science and instruments can see about 15 billion light years. The Milky Way itself is about 10 billion years old with millions of stars forming and dying all the time. Supernovas create components of life, such as oxygen, gas, and the elements. Earth itself is truly stardust, a speck of our galactic center cooling off. Aside from these vast cosmic distances with black holes, white holes, supernovas, and star systems, there is the microcosmos with quarks, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, and possibly antimatter.
    Gases, rain, radiation, and bombarding cosmic elements shaped Earth. Our planet revolves around the Sun at 900 miles per hour. The stars move away a million miles a day at about 40,000 miles per hour. The outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, where Earth resides, is 100,000 light years wide. Our galaxy is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, many of which are far larger.
    If we lived the entire history of the earth in one hour, in the first 50 minutes we would be in a world of single-cell organisms. Animal life existed only in the last ten minutes, and all of human history would have occurred in the last one-hundredth of a second of that hour.
    Our Earth actually exists on an energy-matter, space-time continuum: From our galactic Milky Way center, our energy source, through time and space, through the creation of all the elements of the physical universe, from cosmic energy and radiation, to light; and then coalescing down to the creation of every molecule and element on this speck of stardust called Earth, which is bathed in the light of the sun and the radiation from the galaxy, and on which self-reflecting humans were born to marvel at the wonder of it all.
    We have no way to understand truly these massive numbers, times, and distances—and that is the point. Contemplating the vastness of the universe can be a catalyst for transcending the normal limits of consciousness. When we actually hold these perspectives in awareness, they become a dissolving and illuminating, transformational perception of the immeasurable. This vision becomes a form of cosmic consciousness. Whenever you have the opportunity, on a starlit night, lie back, meditate on the cosmos, and take yourself on that cosmic voyage.
Death Meditation
    Meditation on death can open our hearts and fill us with love and compassion. Thinking about our own death can, after moving through the fear, lead to cherishing each moment we have. We don’t like to think about death, and we usually push the idea of our own end into the distant future. But death is ever present, all around us, and even sits on our shoulder. The word yoga means, and reminds us about, connection and