Transformation und Atem

I met him briefly a number of times. One time (1976) directly after my return from Pondicherry he asked me what the motivation was which took me to travel there, and I answered him that I saw a connection

between the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Experience of Breath. He nodded and replied: “You still have much to discover there.”
 

In 1972 I was employed as a technician in the Institute for Hydraulic Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin, and I hadn’t yet worked for even one hour with The Experience of Breath. Of the possibility that humankind was situated shortly before a decisive evolutionary step, I had learned year earlier from the book by Satprem ‘Sri Aurobindo – or The Adventure of Consciousness’. I was only vaguely conscious that this would be connected with a transformation (too) of the physical body, and I had not yet posed the question of “how”.

One day in October 1972 something completely unexpected as follows: I found myself in my flat sitting in a comfortable leather chair and in a meditative mood, when the question came into my Mind: “What is she actually doing up there?” – By “she” I referred to my mother (Ilse Middendorf) and with “actually” I meant the fundamental, the achievements of the Experience of Breath, because of course I knew that through breathing she helped her clients with their problems. By “up there” I referred to the fact that the Breath Institute was situated above my flat.

The “answer“ to that question was one I received afterwards so immediately that I had the impression that I hadn’t yet thought the question completely to its end. My body straightened up so that I sat completely upright despite the very soft underlay falling away in a backwards direction. Perhaps I should better say that the body straightened itself up. “I” didn’t do anything and I noticed no muscular

activityneither to straighten my posture nor to maintain this position. There was no power or energy either from outside or inside which held me. It was also not this power of the (ascending) breath which I was later to get to know. I sensed the power of breathing as supporting the body from inside. But here it was the material itself, the cells of the body which had “decided for themselves” to adopt this position.

Since I didn’t want to believe what I sensed I opened my eyes. My glance fell on a large wall mirror and I saw myself sitting completely upright. Then my consciousness expanded itself so much that simultaneously i.e. it perceived different phenomenon not one after the other but rather in a parallel way. I became conscious that what we call time doesn’t exist in reality. Everything exists simultaneously and, however, there is a succession of events through which I changed the main focus of my concentration. At first I perceived the phenomenon that I at once recognized (in the meaning of an inner certainty) as “breath”. It was though not the breath which we know and which makes the walls of the body go broad and then small in rhythm with the breathing. This breathing came from “above”, entered through the head and left behind after running through the body (down to the feet) a sensation, which is not dissimilar to that of the “breathing wave” caused by the normal breath in the body. While the first of these “breathing waves” had arrived somewhere in the pelvic area, the next entered in the head area so that some two to three waves ran through the body at the same time.