It Is Your Being
Everything will be misunderstood; that is why I never talk about it. I simply lead you to the door of the temple and leave you to enter and know. I leave you at the door of the temple. These four steps help you to reach the door. Then you can enter. You are standing right in front of the door and the door is open. If the temple magnetizes you, calls you, challenges you, you will enter. No one has returned back from the fifth step. No one can return because it is the ultimate ecstasy. Your whole being simply gravitates toward it.
The fifth is left out of discussion. It is your own being; it is not a state. The first four are states. In the first you are working with your vital energy, with your prana – with breathing. Breathing is life. In the first step, you are working with your life. You are destroying the pattern of your breathing. Through chaotic breathing, you are destroying the settled pattern. And if you can destroy the pattern of breathing, then all the patterns in all your bodies will be loosened – because breathing is the most subtle thing to work with.
You may not have observed, but whenever your mind changes, your breathing changes. Even a subtle change in mood and your breathing immediately changes. Or, to be more correct, even before the mood changes, the breathing has already changed. When you are happy you breathe differently; when you are angry you breathe differently; when you are tense you breathe differently; when you are sad you breathe differently; when you are relaxed you breathe differently. The rhythm always goes on changing.
Observe it. Observe the moods of your breathing. You are not breathing the same way the whole day. In the morning you breathe differently, in the evening differently. Just by knowing about your breath, everything can be said about your mind, what is happening to your mind.
Sooner or later, when medical science and psychology can penetrate into this phenomenon of breathing more deeply, they will make a graph of it. Your breathing graph will show through what types of moods you have been passing throughout the day. When you are asleep you breathe differently; when you are alert you breathe differently, when you are sleepy you breathe differently. Breathing can be changed easily, and if you change the breathing you change the mind.
You can work from both ways. There are many schools of yoga. Some schools, particularly the schools of raja yoga, start with the mind. They say first change the mind, then the breathing will change by itself. And there are other schools, particularly of hatha yoga, which say change the breathing and the mind will follow. Both are right because both are related.
Do one thing: while you are feeling relaxed, someday just lying in your armchair, and the whole world seems to be happy and at ease and you feel at home, note your breathing. Just observe the rhythm: how are you inhaling and how are you exhaling, what is the proportion of time, how much gap is there between inhalation and exhalation? Note everything; then do one thing more. Sometime, when you feel angry, breathe the way you were breathing when you were relaxed. It will be impossible to be angry. Then you cannot be angry. You cannot be angry! It will be impossible to be angry because anger needs a different type of breathing.
Excerpted From The Supreme Doctrine CH: 5
