VBT – Meditation 45.1
Every Breath
If you go and observe animals, those animals whose breathing is very slow live long. Take the elephant: the elephant lives long; the breath is very slow. Then there is the dog: the dog dies soon; the breath is very fast. Whenever you find an animal in which the breath is fast, any animal, the animal will not have a long life. A long life is always with slow breath.
Tantra and yoga and other Indian systems count your life in breaths. Really, with every breath you are born and with every breath you are dying. This mantra, this technique, uses the outgoing breath as the method, the medium, the vehicle, to go deep into silence. It is a death method. INTONE SILENTLY A WORD ENDING IN “AH.” The breath has gone – that is why a word ending in “AH.”
This AH is meaningful because when you say AH it completely empties you. The whole breath has moved out; nothing remains within. You are totally empty – empty and dead. For a single moment, for a very small interval, life has moved out of you. You are dead – empty. This emptiness, if realized, if you can become aware of it, will change you completely. You will be a different man.
Then you will know well that this life is not your life and this death is also not your death. Then you will know something which is beyond the incoming and outgoing breath – the witnessing soul. And this witnessing can happen easily when you are empty of breath, because life has subsided and with it all tensions have subsided. So try it, it is a very beautiful method. But the ordinary process, the ordinary habit, is to emphasize the incoming breath, never the outgoing breath.
We always take the breath in. We ALWAYS take it in, but we never throw it out. We take it in and THE BODY throws it out. Observe your breathing and you will know. We take it in. We never exhale, we only inhale. The exhaling is done by the body because we are afraid of death, that is the reason.
If it was in our power we would not exhale at all, we would inhale and then control it within. No one emphasizes exhaling – inhaling is emphasized. Because we HAVE to do exhaling after inhaling, that is why we go on “suffering” it. We tolerate it because we cannot inhale without exhaling.
So exhaling is accepted as a necessary evil, but basically we are not interested in exhaling. And this is not only about breath, this is our whole attitude toward life. We cling to everything that comes to us; we will not leave it. This is the miserliness of the mind.
And remember, there are many implications in it. If you are suffering from constipation, this will be the basic cause: you always inhale and never exhale. The mind which never exhales but just inhales will suffer from constipation. The constipation is the other end of the same thing. He cannot exhale anything, he goes on accumulating, he is afraid. The fear is there. He can only accumulate, but anything that is accumulated becomes poisonous.
Tags: Every Breath
