Those who meditate regularly without striving to calm the restless breath or control the life force or vital essence often find insurmountable difficulties on the spiritual path. There are some misconceptions on the subject of pranayama. The science of pranayama has been miss-translated countless times as holding the breath. Prana means energy and yama means control, that means control of our alternating breath, inhalation and exhalation to become perfectly rhythmic and once they become rhythmic you can slow them down through the science of pranayama. What the Chinese call yin and yang are when the negative and positive currents are harmonized within you, then you begin to have proper equilibrium in your mind. Those two currents are responsible for the harmonious vibrations in you thirty thousand billion cells. Therefore unregulated breath caused by emotional current is the main culprit for inharmonious vibrations.
Breathlessness is the technique which makes you immortal and until we realize our own immortality we will have to reincarnate again and again. That is why the through breathlessness a new world of perceptions open, the soul is released from its bodily cage and one can enter the astral world at will, not to accomplish astral travel but to meet the cosmic guru and be in the company of highly advanced beings and above all enter into the chakras of the spine. Our great guru has said “get your consciousness into the spine with Kriya Yoga and once you are there I can take mountains of your karma away from you.”
Only by pratyahara where the mind goes within is it possible to completely concentrate on God in meditation otherwise the mind will experience sensations and thoughts arising from them. To control the breath is to control the mind. The mind cannot control the mind. We are trying to teach through meditation about the periods of time where you are not breathing and caution you not to become panicky. When doing the breathing technique of Hong-Sau you systematically begin to slow down the breath and it becomes shorter, gradually shorter and then periods of where there is no breathing at all. That is the breathless state. As you begin to stop breathing the body becomes relaxed but you can become tense, the heart will begin to beat faster and then you have brought yourself back from the state of breathlessness because of fear. You see, says Sri Daya Mata you can’t advance to quickly with the science of yoga without enough devotion. Therefore you need the hypodermic of devotion for God that will calm down the lunatic mind. All of those techniques have to work side by side with devotion for God.
When you begin to become like steel and refuse to be affected by negative emotions you have learned one of the main foundations of yoga, even-mindedness. In yoga you are never taught not to feel but are asked to shield yourself completely from destructive emotions and that consists of changing your programming in television and movies. Unless you begin to remove everything that triggers in your subconscious mind past memories of violence, horror, rape and murder you will never have harmonious breathing within you. All those destructive emotions affect your patterns of breathing which affect your moods. In making a deep study of music you cannot even conceive what the western music of our day is doing upon our emotions.
During the struggle of meditation you constantly hear the complaints “I hear nothing, feel nothing and I have no experience in meditation,” that’s because the meditation efforts are to shallow. Rhythmic inhalations and exhalations are the basics for attaining breathlessness. When the yogi can disconnect his mind from the troubling activities of breath from his twenty one thousand daily inhalations and exhalations by quieting his heart with the practice of Kriya Yoga or the Hong-Sau technique he learns to disconnect his mind and breath form his five senses and dissolves his ego in the awareness of the soul. The Hong-Sau technique enables the practitioners to solve the mysteries of breath by doing away with it as the intervals become longer and longer without discomfort. Only when the mind is absolutely certain that nothing will happen to it, it gets easier.
In doing this you have to have a lot of faith as you are entering a world which is actually more than any science fiction you can watch unless you are anesthetized then you enter into it and you do not know your into it and you become joy, you become bliss and you become love. There is no more you, me or ego experiencing this, you become love and joy in various degrees. When you practice the meditation technique of Hong-Sau you think you are just practicing relaxation, you are very very mistaken. When you obtain even a little calmness of breath the lid is open and trillions of specks of energy fill you from the ether, you become so powerful you can’t imagine. This is what you will feel by the depth of intensity in your meditation. For you in the world with so short of time to meditate put intensity, develop intensity, if you have fifteen minutes put in everything you’ve got and then you will find that patience will not be necessary.
The Lord has no favorites. To him who loves God, to him He surrenders. But He cannot be known except through communion. No matter how many good works you do; no matter how much service you render to humanity; no matter how vast your philanthropies –they are not enough. To know God, direct communion through meditation is necessary.
However there are four related forces which must be harmonized before you can harmonize your breathing rhythm that coincides with the main obstruction in your life. In the practice of concentration the relation between the following four related forces must be known, life force, breath, vital fluids or sexual energy and mind. A control and balance between these four bodily forces will bring fast results without any down-fall. Students who meditate regularly without striving to calm the restless breath or control the life force or vital essence often find insurmountable difficulties on the spiritual path.
It’s like a chain reaction if one life force is restless he is nervous and keeps his body in constant motion, if his mind is restless than vitality or sexual energy is restless than breath is restless but if one controls life force with the practice of calmness at all levels his mind and vital power are in his control. To sum up if breath is made calm and rhythmic by the practice of Hong-Sau the life-force, mind and sexual instinct will gradually come under control. Calmness is a positive state of mental expansion and that leads to intuition when guided by meditation. This is the quality you want to attain from expansion. The more you meditate in a calm state the more intuition you will have no matter how spiritual you are you may be still a child in you spiritual realization. In the development of intuition one cannot outgrow the laws of cause and effect in his own life. With a calm neutralized mind all the events of the future will appear vividly. When through breathlessness you attain intuition then you will have your decoding machine and you are going to see in the future not through reading the palm, astrological or the tarot but to see directly concerning you what is coming in the future.
You must understand that meditation is the inner war drum to make good habits willing to increase their forces in order to attain victory over the consciousness of the devotee on the slumber of indifference. Do you know what that means? A woman said to me “I’m on the spiritual path and it’s worse than ever. All hell is breaking loose in my life and I’m having more problems than I ever had.” That’s because you have accepted the challenge you are now facing evil and you are no longer indifferent you are being challenged and you are going to be kicked to the ground ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times and that’s why Swami Vivakananda say’s fight fight fight and fight even though you are in defeat. The one who fights to the last step is the one who makes it. The ego has to be demolished. Remember this to those who want to end the countless cycles of rebirth, the love of your body is nothing but the love of your own jail. Not that we should reject it but do not be attached to your body. For more information on the Hong-Sau and Kriya Yoga techniques go to the Self-Realization Fellowship website. From The Talks of Turiyananda
