So you’re angry, you were late, you spilled some coffee on yourself – now you have a meeting with your boss and you’re practically hyperventilating. Your colleague tells you it’s going to be ok, just breathe. Hardly good advice, right? Wrong, but not because it improves circulation.

Help Me Obi-Wan

We’ll get to the practical application of breathing, but first some foundational understanding. Ever heard of a hologram? The simplest definition of a hologram is something where the whole is contained in any single part. Before studying metaphysics, my only contact with a hologram was of Princess Leia from R2D2 in “Star Wars.” When I first read that we live in a holographic universe I thought to myself, “we live in a universe comprised of a poorly rendered transparent and outdated projection system?” I thought it was a little too far off out of the jurisdiction of the Law of Attraction.

The neat effect of a hologram is you see the same image no matter where you’re standing, but let us return to what it really means. Something (our universe) where the whole (the infinite universe) is contained in the part (as little as a quantum particle) Think about that for a second. Try to wrap your mind around the entire universe – you, me, the clouds, the sun, the deep reaches of space, the collective unconscious, heaven, hell, purgatory, shangri-la, all of time – contained in a single quantum particle, smaller than the smallest atom. And not just any quantum particle, every quantum particle. The ones that make up the sky, the trees, your skin, and the images on a movie screen. There is a scene in “Men in Black” at the very end where you find out the entire world of the movie is contained in a tiny marble, being played by some alien species on a foreign world. Yeah, it’s like that.

If this is indeed true, then how do we begin to comprehend what an immensely complicated reality we live in? The answer is fractals. You may or may not know that a fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.” (Wikipedia) They’re also very pretty.

From Micro to Macro Cosmic

Don’t remember geometry? It doesn’t matter. Consider this example: Have you ever been on a hike and while studying the ground, thought to yourself “that looks like a mini landscape down there and I’m a giant.” Conversely, have you ever had the sensation in a plane of looking down at the world, thinking, “it looks like a model earth, and I feel like I’m a giant.” While these examples may have given you a good ego boost, they uncover a piece of the truth: That life, whether you scale it up or down, is essentially the same intelligent process. And the cause of much of our confusion comes from not understanding the world this way.

Let me take you on a journey. If you’ve played the video game Spore you’ll already be familiar with this journey. We start on the quantum level where everything is pure possibility. Every particle contains within it infinite potential to be anything. There is some kind of intelligence involved in unifying and organizing these particles, which I will not speculate on here. Let’s just say it’s about as easy to comprehend as the movement of planets are to an ant.

Moving up we have cells in a body. Not just human bodies, but plants, animals, and every “living” thing in our world is comprised of cells. Haven’t you heard metaphors of the body as a city, complete with “defender” T cells and “foreign” viruses? I use quotes here to exemplify how we anthropomorphize life at any scale into a fundamentally human situation. As we’ll see, that’s not far off. Notice also that cells communicate with each other easily and efficiently.

These cells are organized in some intelligent way, to keep the body or the entity alive and healthy. They live, die, wound, and heal, without us doing anything. Moving up in scale we have the organs in our body, which also act mostly on their own, although we have some control. But again there is some intelligent life force there.

Now we have humans, animals, and plants as entirely self sufficient and “separate” beings. They are also symbiotic beings that exist in an intelligently (some would argue) organized way. They feed themselves, clothe themselves, maintain orderly societies complete with rules, and distributed tasks. They also live, die, wound, and heal. They move along veins of roads and communicate via complex interconnected electronic networks, not unlike our nerves. If you could only fly as low as earth’s stratosphere, take out of context, the pulsing interconnected systems of lights might be a similar sensation to us viewing the synaptic storms in our brains.

Moving further out, we have our planets, the solar system, and everything beyond. Though many believe that life exists only on Earth, we already know that our universe is constantly expanding. We also know that the distance between atoms is huge compared to the size of the atom – much like the distance between our planets. And do not electrons orbit other atoms in a similar way to how our Earth orbits the sun? Moving further, what evidence is there to refute that our planets and solar systems are simply atoms of something much larger?  Can a cell in a body comprehend the internet, or the stars?

This is where our brains start to hurt. But just try to imagine it. The entire known universe to us as just a little quark in a universe much larger, and possibly exactly the same as this one. If you’re having trouble, take some LSD. But then the process continues. Fractalization, by definition extends into infinity. The process goes both ways. What’s to say that there aren’t things infinitely smaller than a quantum particle? That inside a quantum particle lives a whole universe of it’s own, more expansive than our known universe and time? If this doesn’t tell you that reality as we know it is an illusion – an endless feedback loop extending into infinity – I don’t know what will.

Our thoughts work the same way. For those of you students of the Law of Attraction, you will remember the concept that whatever we focus on expands. Of course it does. Our universe is constantly expanding in all ways towards the infinite, how could our thoughts not naturally follow suit? This explains why when we’re down we remember bad things that happened to us or reframe former possibilities to limitations.

Life’s (Not So) Secret Message

Wow, that was a cool head trip, but how do I use this to make more money, improve relationships, or achieve goals? The answer is that every scale of our great fractal universe has blatant messages of how to “improve” the symbiotic system. I will address one of them here, the one I believe is the most universal.

Back to our cells. They run healthy when they receive nutrients from food, water, and most importantly, oxygen. Oxygen, if you think about it, is a constant life giving force. We breath in oxygen to nourish our cells and keep us alive. Then we expunge our Co2 back into the air to also keep us alive. There is a natural inflow and outflow. This extends to every scale. Life/death, ebb/flow, trough/crest, day/night, sound/silence, light/dark, action/reaction, space/matter, finite/infinite. Life is in a continual natural state of inflowng and outflowing. It can’t not be. If any simple fact is universal to all planes of existence, this is it. This is the secret magic life gives to us when we’re born, though we don’t even know it.

Naturally this extends to manifestation. What happens when we don’t breathe in? We die. What happens when we don’t breathe out? We die. But what happens when we want something really badly? Do we wait around for it to happen without doing anything? Is this any different than holding our breath in? Or do we do do do do do to “make” it happen? Is this any different than only breathing out? Yet we wonder why things don’t happen for us.

I read a passage once about someone who was aimless. They didn’t know what they wanted. And the answer was simple and sums it up: “Want what life wants.” We are all life, playing our part in the endless creation of the infinite reality. We all breathe in and out. Next time you want something, do this. Consider everything you do as breathing. Have you breathed out the Co2 and gone and test drove the car of your dreams? Have you breathed in and waited in total faith that an opportunity to buy that car would come? Most likely not, you were too busy breathing out, straining your manifestational ability by depriving it of vital nutrients. If you did breathe in, did you then breathe out by taking action on the opportunity? When you completed the action, did you breathe in and appreciate it?

This can be applied to anything. Breathe in and out your creative process, your workout, your money. Do you hoard money? It’s time to breathe out. Do you do too much for others? It’s time to breathe in. Do you watch too much TV and wish you would write? It’s time to breathe out. Do you force yourself to stick to a schedule? It’s time to breathe in.

I’ve saved the most special nugget of wisdom for last. You know those desires you’re just aching to have manifest? Are you breathing in or out? Because every one of us is destined for the dreams we have. This is what life wants. This is what it’s all about. As much as you hold it in, sooner or later something will force you to breathe out, or you’ll die. Maybe you won’t actually die, but you’ll live a half life. You will be a shadow where there was light. But just as we’re surrounded by oxygen that is ever life giving, so is the same for the energy that charges up and magnetizes manifestations. Some call it love. Other’s call it god. I call it your birthright.