Transformation und Atem

Many of the most advanced cultures of humankind have transmitted to us the experience that the breath is in the position to connect “Body, soul and spirit“ likewise to induce a contact with them. Since in this publication I apply Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, according to which breathing exists in an interactive relationship to the body, to the external Vital and Mind, to a higher Vital and Mind and to an inner and likewise psychic being.

The encounter with the Perceptible Breath after Ilse Middendorf may confirm these findings. So far, so good – now it will become interesting when one perceives the mutual interactivity between the breath and the inner and/or psychic being which are mentioned above. A practical form of breath work should make this clearer:

Sit on a stool and breath – only that – let the breath come,

don’t use your willpower, let the breath find and follow its own course. – Whatever you experience after some of the breaths, the Vital and Mind take part in this process insofar as the Mind tries to classify what is happening at that moment and the Vital evaluates it (is it doing me good or not etc.?) The body and breath in turn react to this classification and evaluation through the Vital and Mind (the therapeutic contact with the Experience of Breath is founded on the basis of the interactive relationship).

In advanced work with the breath, the latter “awakes” too the interest of the inner and spiritual nature: as soon as the breathing is allowed to come and go of its own accord, its participation will be perceived through feelings. They are differentiated very significantly from those of the outer being (the Vital and the Mind). A comparison should make this clear:

Powerful but transient pleasure and transitory happiness, suffering, overwhelming enthusiasm and dejection, doubt, human love (which is reliant on reciprocation), feelings of inferiority, sympathy and antipathy, vanity, pride, quarrelsomeness, power obsession, thirst for glory and arrogance, anxiety, narrowness, fear, concern, annoyance, grief, rage, jealousy, shame, envy, hate, desire and yearning, passion, despondency, restlessness, – suitable expressions are also the terms “yearning psyche” or “outer person” too, “Person of the foreground” and “psyche”. The “psyche” is in many ways the same as the term the “ego”.

The evaluation of everything that happens is typical for this level.

A further typical characteristic of the psyche is that (in its unconscious areas) it indulges equally in pleasure as in suffering. In this way one can explain the large number of people who while explaining (and themselves are persuaded of it) that they would do everything in order to overcome an illness from which they suffer, actually (unconsciously)  reject every possibility of healing.