What Is It That You Breath – Adi Da Samraj – 1987

HEART-MASTER DA: Another idea I had that
corresponds to aspects of our discussion is that you all are
involved in a psycho-physical process of Spirit-breathing.
If you are a devotee, then you are involved in the process
of conductivity. And in your practice of conductivity what
are you breathing? Like everybody else, you breathe the air.
You breathe the chemical energies in the air. But that is
not what differentiates you from other breathers. Anybody
can breathe the chemical energies in the air, and people who
are more responsible than others know they must breathe
deeply, below the navel, but still they are merely breathing
air. Some even understand that through the breathing of air,
they are also governing the energy in the nervous system.
But what is the Spirit-breath truly?

Ultimately, the Spirit-breath is the breath of the
Divine, the very Presence that transcends conditional
existence. Thus, Spirit-breath obviously transcends the mere
breathing of air. But is it merely the breathing of energy?
Depending on how you understand it, energy is elemental.
There is energy in chemicals, in the air, in the body. There
is energy in the nervous system, which is a chemical
structure. Through conductivity breathing you are not merely
indulging in a superior form of the transference of chemical
energy. The transference of chemical energy is a peripheral
aspect, the grossest aspect, of breathing. What makes
breathing Spirit-breathing is the breathing of the Divine,
Communion with the Divine.

Viewing breathing in terms of the conditional universe,
it is the breathing of space, the breathing of that within
which air or gaseous substances are floating.
Spirit-breathing is based on the principle that space is
psychoactive. You breathe not merely air, not merely
chemical forces, but also psychoactive space. In the
practice of conductivity, you breathe space itself. You
imbibe space or participate in space as a fundamental
quality of conditional existence.

Ultimately, you breathe the Divine, but as a conditional
process, conductivity is a process in space, a process of
space, and not merely a process in the context of the
elementals in space. Elementals are part of the process. You
eat food and you breathe air, and, in terms of health, there
is a good way to breathe and a not-so-good way to breathe.
But you do not practice conductivity merely for the sake of
your physical health. At the most, health is a secondary
aspect. You practice conductivity or Spirit-breathing
because it enhances your Spiritual life, and it cannot do
that if it is not psychoactive, if it does not involve
psychic participation. To engage in conductivity is to
awaken and activate the process of psychic participation in
what is arising. It is to transcend what is less than
psyche, less than mind.

Spirit is ultimately Divine, but in the context of
conditional existence it can be understood as space. Spirit
is the subtlest of all the elements, space itself. It is
that of which all the elements are a modification. How can
you breathe space? Space does not go anywhere. Space has no
outside. Space is curved. But breathing is also curved.
Breath occurs in a circle, or, if you like, an ellipse, as
with the planets. What is psychoactive is space, not merely
the chemistry of the nervous system, not merely the oxygen
and other chemical contents of the air.

To truly breathe in the Spiritual sense is to breathe
space, to combine yourself with space or to be released into
the condition of space, to be in space as space itself. It
is to be without obstructions, even without location. This
is why conductivity at some point leads to “the Thumbs.” The
realization or the Samadhi of the Thumbs is a spacious
realization, is it not? Many of you have had this
experience. The realization of the Thumbs is a realization
of space itself, energy itself. It transcends the body. It
simply relates to the body, and the ordinary sensations of
the body are lost or become profoundly different because you
are imbibing space. I am saying to you that it is possible
for the human being to inhale and exhale space.

You are claiming to inhale and exhale space by practicing
conductivity. Maybe you never thought about it this way
before, but obviously Spirit-breathing is to combine
yourself with the most fundamental of all elementals. You do
that by using the body itself, using an elemental structure.
You are using earth, its wateriness and its fieriness, and
you are using the air, but you are devoting all of that to
the condition of space, and by doing so you are devoting it
to that Condition which is prior to space itself.

Conductivity has a unique form in the context of the
sixth stage, wherein the space elemental, which we might
call “Cosmic Shakti”, is resolved in the heart. In other
words, it leads to, or submits itself to, the condition of
Consciousness Itself, prior to space, prior to space-time,
prior to things, prior to thinking or forms of psyche. The
conductivity in the heart is the ultimate form of
conductivity, but even that limit is broken, not only in
Jnana Samadhi, or the Realization of Consciousness Itself,
but in the Recognition of phenomena, which are all
modifications of space, through total Awakening in the
seventh stage.

Thus, ultimate Realization is, in some sense, the
Realization of Space itself, but Space in its most prior or
Divine sense, which is Consciousness Itself. Consciousness
itself is a great sphere without an interior or an exterior,
without a midpoint or a self-point, without an outside. What
is the universe scientists are describing, using their
material model? They are describing the universe of
Consciousness Itself, the Divine universe. The Divine
universe is without an outer limit and without a center.

Space is Consciousness. Space is Light. Space is Energy.
Space is Shakti. Space is God but only in this ultimate
sense. Apart from the ultimate sense, space is one of the
elementals. Space, therefore, is the most subtle substance,
the primal means, in the context of the bodymind. Thus, it
is the secondary or supportive principle of the conscious
process. The conscious process is senior, because it is
Consciousness itself, identification with Being itself. But
in the course of the stages, the conscious process makes use
of the principle of space, of conductivity, of the ability
to submit all elementals to the primal element, which is
Space itself, and to realize Space itself, or Primal Shakti,
as the very Divine, the inherent Radiance of Consciousness
Itself.

Only in perfect or ultimate Realization, Divine
Realization, do you fulfill the vision of science, by
Realizing the true, ultimate, perfect, inherent, and Divine
Nature of this paradoxical appearance that you call the
universe, Big-Banged before you. And only in that
Realization do you transcend the terror, the awesome,
wonderful horribleness of being a point of view defined by
elementals, defined by space-time. That limit is
fundamentally what you do not like, but it is a limit that
you yourself are choosing by contracting, by identifying
with the limit. Therefore, you can grow beyond it by
progressively identifying with That which transcends it
perfectly. And even if you do that, you do not dissociate
yourself ultimately from this appearance. You achieve the
perfect Disposition even in the context of this appearance.
That perfect Disposition Outshines all of this, but it may
also function in this context compassionately, as Love-Bliss
itself. And that is the fulfillment of the Way of the
Heart.

PRACTITIONER: Heart-Master Da, I was just feeling
as You were speaking, what a perfect scientist You are.

HEART-MASTER DA: Tcha. I am a perfect scientist?
(Laughter.)

PRACTITIONER: You are. When you speak – I don’t
know how to say it – what you say is like a science in a
certain sense. I can feel it as that.

HEART-MASTER DA: Even in religion, science is used
as a metaphor these days. Unless you say that your religion
or Spiritual Process is scientific, you fail to get very
much popular interest. You are supposed to say it is somehow
scientific, or it is considered archaic and nobody is
interested. It is a popular device. Everything is a
scientific technique whether or not it really has anything
to do with science. That metaphor is the common requirement,
the norm these days.

In some sense, religion is totally nonscientific, not
because it is antiscientific or foolish, but because it is a
completely other discipline that should be respected in its
own right. Even so, when it is considered over against what
is called science, it can be seen not to be contradictory.
It is not threatened by science, so in that sense it can be
said to be scientific.

PRACTITIONER: Heart-Master Da, I remember once in
1984 You were trying to help us understand our doubt and the
scientific mood. You played with the phrase, “Seeing is
believing,” and You said that the conventional point of view
is a gross limitation on our perception. You said that You
regard what You call “seeing”, which is participation in
That which transcends the body-mind, to be true belief, or
belief in the higher sense, because it goes way beyond what
we can normally perceive and what we have been conditioned
to perceive.

HEART-MASTER DA: In the Way of the Heart, you are
not called to give up the body-mind. Rather, you are called
to transcend the body-mind, and there is a great difference
between these two. The great Adepts have not given up the
body-mind. They are completely free in the context of the
body-mind. They have transcended the body-mind. They exist
in Divine Association with the body-mind. They are very
paradoxical beings, non-ordinary, yet also, in some sense,
ordinary.

I carry with me all kinds of ordinary signs. How could I
not? This is a human body here. It has its own history, but
that history is not an impediment. It has become a means, an
instrument, but it also has everything you yourself call
human life. This is part of what is wrong, part of what is
at fault in your abstracting of me. You do not understand
this. You think I am some sort of universalized robot.

I am here through the agency of a real human person, and
all of the human signs are shown. This body-mind suffers
like any other body-mind. It functions through the same
instruments. There are also all kinds of capacities in it
that may not be so ordinary, but nonetheless, the instrument
is the same. It bleeds and suffers and dies. It does
everything like every other body.

I have Taught you as a human Adept, not as a universal
robot. You must enter into human association with me, as I
must with you. On the other hand, in your understanding of
me you must not treat me as an ordinary man. You must see
the whole of it, the reality of it, just as the Adept sees
the whole or the reality of existence itself.