Hello Friends,
Wishing you a peaceful transition and a happy new year. Conspicuously minus the exclamation point, or any emphasis. We have endured enough anxiety to feel no loss at the elimination of directed excitement. Instead I am taking this moment to become silent. I’ve grown increasingly quiet during recent time and feel that I must take this road a bit further if I’m ever to find a path toward communion. “Communion” with its 6 definitions at dictionary .com allow enough uncertainty to make me okay with moving toward an objective nothing; in the hopes that it may contain something.
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The Christian definition of “communion,” (which appears first on my current dictionary app) “the act of receiving the Eucharist,” involves the ingesting of a sacrament (specifically bread and wine) to symbolize an assimilation with the purest archetype of an aspirant’s devotion. The Yoga practitioner might consider the practice of Pranayama of similar significance. Though no priest has blessed the air that surrounds you, it is possible to personally imbue each breath with the significance and power it deserves. Bread may be a “staff of life” as one tradition teaches, but the understanding that a spark of divinity may be contained in the air we share, that vegetation recycles, feels an ever present reminder of interconnectedness through the concept named Prana.
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Prana, isn’t Brahman, Krishna or any other of the Hindu deities. Rather the deities are better thought of as manifestations of consciousness or Archetypes in the Jungian sense. Representations of an idea, if not an ideal. Prana may be thought of as the energy on which the Universe runs. Prana is not, oxygen or carbon dioxide but it may be transported through both. Democritus gave the name atom to the smallest unit imaginable in the Western system over 2000 years ago, while the East continued using words such as Prana and Qi to denote the force underlying all matter.
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While bread eaten by the Christian in the act of communion is given its significance by a priest; Air is given its significance by the practitioner who marvels at the possibilities and exchange occurring at each act of respiration. Breathing, a vital process, like the action of taking in nourishment through food, has a voluntary component (though the impulse to breathe is much stronger than any impulse of cessation). This allows respiration/digestion to act as a doorway to the command center of the central nervous system.
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Timothy Leary’s translation of “The Tibetan Book of The Dead” refers to Buddha Vairochana “the highest path to enlightenment” as “the central realm of the densely packed.” Our sympathetic nervous system in the thoracic and lumbar regions has been associated with more active survival “instincts” whereas the sacral and cranial regions are awarded to the more “passive” para-sympathetic nervous system. While this distinction may be useful, it also allows an aspirant to assume areas of control and those off limits rather than components of a whole - delineated for the sake of providing an ordered approach. The “central realm of the densely packed” may provide a wink to the moment before the big bang or it may impart direction of attention to the central nervous system as the storehouse for all phenomenon that has potential to arise in individual experience.
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The past couple years have provided unique (and often increasing) challenges to goals of communion. Community and communication for example have at times broken down. Though the chance of communion is always possible with a recognition that “one” exists in relationship. Even in complete solicitude “one” is in relationship with the environment; and given inquiry one might notice they exist in relationship with definition(s) of self and the dialogues and dialects that arise from inquiry.
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My own seeking involves an intense period of elimination. Fasting and silent meditation serve to eliminate incoming information. First serving as a period of deprivation but generally seeking to cut out sources of distraction in locating ever present sources of contemplation. Before I take off for my own journey, I invite you to join me Sunday January 2nd 2022 10am EST for an hour of guided breathing and meditation via my YouTube channel. Hoping you can make it and look forward to connecting on the other side.