Member-only story
Breathing as Prayer
There has been so much said about the breath, and enough could never be said about it. The mystic is at a loss to explain what breath is, as a scientist is helpless to give the explanation of electricity, though both will try their best to make it intelligible to their students. And, as electricity when controlled can be utilized for a great many useful purposes, so still greater purposes and important purposes can be accomplished by the control of the breath.
“The importance of breath is only now becoming known to the scientific world, and there is much of this mystical subject which is unexplored. But mysticism has been founded on the science of breath. There is no mystic, whether Buddhist, Vedantist, or Sufi, who makes use of another process than that of the breath. Breath is the first lesson and it is also the last.
What people call the aura is the light of breath, but it is not everyone who sees it. A radiant countenance is a proof of an aura which illumi-nates it, and the lack of it is the lack of light in the breath. A seer sees the sign of a death more clearly and longer beforehand than a physician can. The reason is that the seer sees in the aura of a person whereas the physician sees only the condition of the body… The Sufi, by the development of breath, experiences this light, which becomes for him a proof of the existence of that dimension which is unknown to the ordinary…
