Since February 2024, I’ve been engaged in the longest running and most consistent meditation practice I’ve ever managed. ADD, too busy, blah, blah, blah. Just insert whatever excuse you can imagine for someone who’s just plainly undisciplined.

All that aside, one consistent statement we students of meditation hear as often as the sun rises; “Take refuge in the breath!”, “There is untold joy in the breath”, “Breath is life and life is bliss. So find your bliss in the breath!”.

So I’ve been looking. I’ve been searching the breath for that bliss, and, to my credit, found a marginal amount of success; brief glimpses of ecstasy between the mundane, but nothing substantial enough to alter my reality permanently.

As is my way, I inevitably turned to reason, wondering if login had anything to say on the matter, and I am very pleased to say that I’ve found two things worth sharing.

The first is indeed an ode to the magic, the sacredness, and really, when it gets down to it, just the plain old value of it.

A number of years ago, I became aware of a branch of psychology called “Evolutionary Psychology”. In this field, the hope is to explain our behavior, beliefs and impulses using the machinery of evolution as the primary influence. This isn’t going to involve a lot of Evolutionary Psychology, but the reason this point is relevant is due to the effect it’s had on how I attempt to understand something.

If I have a question, I have had a great deal of success looking back in time, taking what I know of how we evolved in order to understand how or why someone might behave or believe. I never tire of exploring that space either. Some of the most stories in the history of life are contained in those early chapters and I believe this to be one of them.

So where did I find the sacredness of breath in this evolutionary history? Right at the beginning.

Now, before I dive in, I must qualify that all of human understanding for what was going on at the advent of life itself is speculative and imaginary at best. But where we cannot say we know much of anything from back then for sure, we do *understand* quite a bit.

One thing that we understand is that the act of breathing itself evolved at least twice. Once for those who breath carbon dioxide, and a second time, much later on for those who breathe oxygen.

In the very beginning, there likely just wasn’t any oxygen around, so even if there was an organism that could breathe it, it wasn’t destined to make it very far; at least at that point in time. However, carbon dioxide was available by the kiloton, and so those organisms who were able to use it, did so, and inherited the earth as their own.

Easy to see this world where the only danger was in competition from other plants as a veritable utopia, and indeed it was; at least, for a few hundred million years. As it happens, these CO2 breathing behemoths, much like us, got a bit too successful in their bid for global domination, and, also like us, grew to the point where they began overconsuming their available resources.

The first climate catastrophe was under way. The first mass extinction was at hand. Total annihilation staring the kingdom of plantae square in its metaphorical eyes.

Fortunately, life itself is a clever beast. A bargain was struck and a savior was born in the form of curious little group of organisms that had the miraculous ability to breath the primary toxic waste gasses of the plant.

We took our first deep breath in, and exhaled the life giving CO2 the plants needed to survive, and survive they did!

Now… for our entire history, we have been blessed with an endless abundance of breath. The bargain struck with the plants guaranteeing that we would breathe for one another, for the rest of time. But, we must not let the availability of this resource diminish its importance.

On the list of needs for all of animal life we require food, shelter, water, and only a few of the more complete lists include air. We can go an impressively long time without food. Depending on the weather, we can also endure a few weeks without shelter. We can only live a few days without water. But the time we can survive without air is measure in either a small number of minutes or a large number of seconds.

The point I’m trying to make here is that oxygen, like food and water, is mandatory sustenance. Through the hubris that arises from having an infinite supply of it, we barely ever give it a second thought. Now food and water, we think about all the time. We have to because it’s scarce. It’s NOT always available, and so we have to fight for it, grow it, work for it. Food itself really is the basis of economy itself. The reason money exists is so that we can trade it for our needs, primarily food and water.

Understood in these terms, trying to understand the value of food, water and breath, the purest gold in the universe is ultimately worthless except in its capacity to be traded for these things. When you’re starving, when you’re thirsty, when you’re suffocating, all the gold in the world is worth nothing.

And so the first enlightening realization I’ve found about the breath is that it is invaluable and sacred. It is the most valuable resource we consume, but again, because we are all blessed with an infinite supply, we don’t spend much time contemplating its value, or that blessing, or the inarguable miracle that occurred when we, the oxygen breathers, came to the rescue and guaranteed our mutual future alongside the kingdom of plants.

And this leads to the second realization, which is, I’m sorry to say, substantially darker.

Every person has this looming question that none of us ever really get to answer. It’s asked as a novelty question, usually just for fun, or in more serious circles, to get you to think about yourself and who you really are:

“What would you do if you had unlimited wealth?”

Of course we all express the same or similar patterns; “Buy my parents a house.”, “Feed every poor person on the planet.”, etc., etc. with all our varying impulses coming out further down the list.

But this second realization, being based on the first, I think serves as the first honest and complete answer anyone’s every managed to this question. We’ve already seen exactly what we would do with unlimited wealth. Wealth is just a proxy for resources and there is indeed one resource that we’ve managed to make universally available for all in unlimited amounts.

So what did we do with that unlimited wealth?

We found another way to starve.