so my wife laura is doing her 200 hour yoga teacher certification training. and part of her required reading is the Bhagavad Gita.
she hates it … not that she hates it, its just not her thing. but it does happen to be mine.
so i’m doing her homework. i’ve been looking for a good excuse to read these sacred slokas for years.
here are some thoughts.
“Among those primarily interested in control of life force by restraining the flow of breathing (pranayama), some offer the out breath as a sacrifice to the in breath, and the in breath to the out breath.” (4.27).
Lord Krishna teaches that the incoming breath, the outgoing air, the retention: that it’s all Brahman (the Absolute God). that our breathing is in itself of form of sacrifice. and that to become aware of it is the basis of all wisdom.
actually the breath is sacrificing itself for our life support. it goes in and gets burned. if it didn’t sacrifice itself, we wouldn’t be alive today.
isn’t that a beautiful concept.
it’s make me wonder if we’re missing out on the human experience.
the prophets, mystics, philosophers, and poets of the Axial Age were so advanced and their vision was so radical that later generations tended to dilute it. In the process, they often produced exactly the kind of religiosity that the Axial reformers wanted to get rid of.
that, i believe, is what has happened in the modern world.
we don’t think about our breathing. see what i mean?
for the Axial sages the sacred was an immanent presence in the world around them and within themselves (“it’s all Brahman”). where all were subject to an overarching cosmic order that kept everything in being. even the god’s had to obey this order, and they co-operated with human beings for the preservation of the divine energies of the cosmos. there was strong conviction that life and death, creativity and destruction were all inextricably entwined. people realized that they survived only because other things laid down their lives. the animal, plant or breath was honored for it’s self sacrifice. infact, they believed, that this is how the world began.
best to appreciate it i figure.
since i also believe that something began with self-sacrifice.
