The air is sacred, and I don’t mean that in a woo-woo, pretend sort of way. I mean, take a look—just take a deep look. Use your actual deep human intelligence to notice air. I just breathed in a bunch of it. We live within the atmosphere.
We know that ancient peoples and Indigenous people did not feel that they lived on the Earth the way we do. We live on the Earth and see it as a resource to use. They, however, felt that they lived in the Earth. This is why they had ceremonies for Grandfather Sky and Grandmother Earth, because they saw themselves as participants living within the Earth.
We’re all sophisticated and educated now, right? We know we live within the atmosphere that surrounds the entire Earth, held down by gravity. It creates the wind, weather, and everything that happens. We know from watching sci-fi videos that if you enter the atmosphere too fast in a rocket ship, it will burn up. We know that shooting stars are meteorites hitting our atmosphere. We live within the air, which seems hard to believe—it’s just air, right? But I can do this, and I can feel the air hitting my face.
Airplanes fly in it; birds can flap their wings and sail up because the air holds them. Although it can’t be seen with our eyes, it can be felt on our skin. It’s there, invisible but existent, and we are within it. What is air? It’s all sorts of particles that come from the Earth. We live inside the air; we live inside the Earth. We cannot jump off; gravity holds us down and holds the atmosphere down as well.
Air is alive. Trees create it. Fires burn carbon, producing carbon dioxide, which trees turn into oxygen. Oxygen is inside me; it’s what makes me alive. Without oxygen, I’d be dead in three minutes, more or less, depending on how good I am at holding my breath.
So, when you start expanding your consciousness into what air really is, it becomes sacred in a real way—not in an imagined way or because a book says so. We have an inner intelligence that can broaden and pull in all these details about air, making something invisible seem real, vital, and alive. We can be thankful for the way it exists and what it gives to us every moment, creating harmony with this sacred air.
Our climate emergency shows the urgency of this awareness. We’ve polluted the air by not paying attention. The second we pay attention and open our natural, loving human hearts, we realize air is a thing we can destroy or take care of. This is the new story we need to start writing about who humans are and how we live within the Earth, intertwined with everything and everybody here. Air is the perfect symbol for that.
Here I am, sitting in my room, shooting a YouTube video. I will upload it, and you will watch it later. Despite being in different locations at different times, we are surrounded by the same air. Air is sacred; it’s everywhere on the planet, a living, breathing entity like us because it helps create the life within us.
We can easily expand our consciousness to see our interconnectedness. Consider the tiny glitch in your mind that makes you not notice this interconnectedness, the little thing that doesn’t notice because it’s never been pointed out. That’s what we call the ego in spirituality, and dropping it is what nonduality seeks to achieve. Here we are, right now, having this moment of complete connectedness and nonduality. This is how simple it is to be awakened humans, a species awake on the planet, living with and interconnected with our sacred air.