Breathing corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of the living human being. To come into the world supposes inhaling and exhaling by oneself. In the uterus, we receive oxygen through the mother’s blood. We are not yet autonomous, not yet born.
In fact, we forget this first and last gesture of life. To be sure, we breathe on pain of death. But we breathe badly, and we worry little about the air that surrounds us, our first food of life. We put ourselves under stress in order to force ourselves to breathe: we carry out athletic performances in polluted air, for example. But we do not really take charge of our life, of our respiration, of the air.
We speak of elementary needs like the need to eat and to drink, but not of the need to breathe. That corresponds nevertheless to our first and most radical need. And we are not really born, not really autonomous or living as long as we do not take care, in a conscious and voluntary way, of our breathing.
We remain passive at the level of breathing, bathing in a sort of socio-cultural placenta that passes on to us an already exhaled, already used, not truly pure air.
THE FORGETTING OF BREATH
In the East it is more common to remember that living is equivalent to breathing. And the Sages there care about acquiring a proper life through practicing a conscious breathing. This breathing brings them little by little to a second birth, a birth assumed by oneself, willed by oneself and not only by our parents, and a physiology that dictates its laws to us.
Breathing in a conscious and free manner is equivalent to taking charge of one’s life, to accepting solitude through cutting the umbilical cord, to respecting and cultivating life, for oneself and for others.
As long as we do not breathe in an autonomous manner, not only do we live badly but we encroach upon others in order to live. We remain confused with others, forming a sort of mass, a sort of tribe, where each individual has not yet conquered his personal life but lives on a collective social and cultural respiration, on an unconscious breathing of the group, beginning with that of the family.
This breathing remains closer to nature—to the mother, to woman, to the family—or closer to culture—to social or civil life, more tied to the father, to the masculine world in our tradition.
In a way we are divided between two breaths, the natural breath and the cultural breath, without a real alliance or passage between these breaths, neither in us nor between us. Thus we were born and have grown up in the perspective of a separation between corporeal life and spiritual life, the life of the soul, without understanding that the soul corresponds to the life of the body cultivated to the point of acquiring the autonomy and spiritual becoming of the breath.
The culture that we have been taught says that it is necessary to despise the body in order to be spiritual; the body would be the nature that we have to surpass in order to become spirit, in order to become soul. But this culture—contrary to certain cultures of the East, that of yoga for example—does not teach us how to cultivate breathing. Which means teaching us to assure our existence in an autonomous manner and to spiritualize our vital breath little by little while keeping it free, available, nourishing for the body itself, and for others.
Becoming spiritual amounts to transforming our elemental vital breath little by little into a more subtle breath in the service of the heart, of thought, of speech and not only in the service of physiological survival.
Nevertheless, our cultural tradition indicates to us the importance of breathing. Genesis recounts that God created man through sending his breath into matter. And Jesus Christ is born of a woman made fertile by the breath, the Spirit. The most important dimension of our religious tradition is that of the spirit. Christ himself gives way before the Spirit. “If I do not go away from you, the Spirit will not come to you,” he says to his disciples. He also asserts that all sins deserve forgiveness, including those against the son of Man, but not those against the Spirit.
The spirit is thus the most important divine dimension. For us, as for the yogis, breathing is what can make us spiritual. But we have forgotten this. And often we confuse cultivation with the learning of words, of knowledges, of competencies, of abilities. We live without breath, without remembering that to be cultivated amounts to being able to breathe, not only in order to survive but in order to become breath, spirit.
The forgetting of breathing in our tradition is almost universal. And it has led to a separation in us between the vital breath and the divine breath, between body and soul. Between breath, that which gives life, and the body, that which permits keeping it, incarnating it. The union of the two representing life itself.
This mistaken division between body and soul is, moreover, reflected in our conception of the difference of the sexes. Woman would be the body, of which man would be the spirit; woman would represent natural life and man spiritual life. He would even be, in the couple, the representative of divine life, of Christ as the head. “Women, obey your husband as the Church obeys Christ,” writes Saint Paul.
Vital breath and spiritual breath would thus be separated, and both would be thrown back upon death. Vital breath returns to inanimate matter if it is not cultivated: what does not have spirit dies more quickly. But the culture made of words that no longer bear breath conveys a dead spirit, and not a living spirit. Without a cultivation of breathing, in each person and between them, man and woman are also thrown back upon death. And they remain in a perpetual conflict concerning who, of the two, best assures the survival of the human species.
Assuring this survival does not mean only to conceive and engender children but implies preserving human life as a life endowed with consciousness, with soul. Now this task belongs to woman as well as to man. It is not the woman’s task to bring bodies into the world that man, beginning with the father, will educate. Together man and woman should engender children who are both natural and spiritual.
The event of the Annunciation, which marks the passage from the Old to the New Testament, reminds us of this. What has been said of it has often been a little naively puritanical and not very spiritual. And the theologians have been quite materialistic in looking for the proof of Mary’s virginity in her physiological hymen. Mary is a virgin because she was able to keep and to cultivate a spiritual relation to breathing, to the soul. It is not at the level of the bodily hymen that we should interpret the mystery of the Annunciation. The conception of a divine child depends on the quality of breathing and on the exchange of words that precede it—on its announcement.1
Mary, the Tradition teaches us, would atone for Eve’s offense. I understand the message in this way: Eve wants above all to know, which includes knowing things that have a relation to the divine. Now God cannot be reduced to knowledge. Wanting to appropriate knowledge of the divine, Eve consumes a breath that is irreducible to knowledge. Conserving her virginal breath, free and available, Mary retains a relation to life, to the soul, to love, particularly divine love, that is neither appropriation nor consumption of the self, nor of the other, nor of God.
THE MOTHER’S SILENT TEACHING
It is impossible to appropriate breath or air. But one can cultivate it, for oneself and for others. Teaching takes place then through compassion. And the same goes for engendering. It is a matter in both cases of giving-sharing one’s breath with one who does not yet know the way of natural or spiritual life.
The Eastern master shares his breath, passing on to the disciple a part of the breath that leads him to awakening. This awakening is not conserved in words, it is practiced, it is won at each moment through respiration. The bliss of awakening is thus partially suspended in order to teach, not because of a will for power or authority but because of compassion. In fact, the teaching of the master is what cures suffering and death. Buddha, like Christ, is a doctor before being a professor: he teaches in order to remove suffering, in order to educate others to avoid physical or psychological suffering.
Woman, faithful to herself, is close to Eastern cultures, close to the Buddha, who, moreover venerates the feminine spiritual. Woman shares her breath. Either she remains at the level of vital breath, by giving oxygen to the fetus through her blood, or she shares spiritual breath, and that, in my opinion, is akin to the meaning of Mary’s virginity.
Before feeding, before giving herself as nourishment, woman gives or, more exactly, shares her breath, her natural and spiritual life. We have not yet understood such a mystery. At the level of existence and of being, we have forgotten the importance of breathing in human and divine life. And yet this has been taught to us, in words and in images, in our tradition. But those who transmit this spiritual testament often transmit it as dogmas or truths of the past and not as gestures to be made by us here and now.
Woman, like the creator God, engenders with her breath. But she does it from the inside, without demonstration. She does it invisibly and silently, before any perceptible word or gesture. Woman teaches, through her very doing, at each moment of the present and in a continuous manner. Through carrying the child, through speaking to the child, more generally through mothering the child once born, she shares her life, her breath. If she gave it without keeping some of it, without remaining alive, the other would lose existence. She does not simply give, she shares. But what she shares is not seen.
The example given to explain the meaning of the word symbol is an object cut in two of which each takes and keeps a part. Here, there is no object and no division in two: the symbolic economy is much more subtle.
If I have spoken of breath at the level of maternity, it is because maternity is often spiritually valorized as material gift, of blood, of body, of milk, and not as sharing of breath, sharing of life, sharing of soul.
The mother gives her breath and lets the other go; she gives the other life and autonomy. From the beginning, she passes on physical and metaphysical existence to the other.
We are accustomed to praising the mother for more or less ambiguous reasons: the need to reproduce the species, the need to produce citizens, the necessity for man to give himself descendants and also the respect, even worship, of what would be a sacrificial gift on the part of woman, a gift of herself, one says, and not a sharing of life and breath.
AWAKENED BY DESIRE
Woman as woman, the female lover are more often scorned than praised, at least on the spiritual level. They are the guardians of the body, of nature, necessary, to be sure, but who constantly put the spirit at risk. They are an occasion for seduction but also for degeneration. We have few women spiritual masters in the West. In the East, the woman has long been the first and even the sole sexual and spiritual initiator. Sometimes the two initiations have hardly been distinguished. And, if we reflect a little, this is not as naive or diabolical as one may believe. Desire is often awakened by the woman. Now desire is something more with respect to need. It is probably specifically human. The animal perhaps does not desire; it feels a sexual excitation that it satisfies, including an excitation to reproduce. Human desire is more complex; it is always in part spiritual, even if the body, considered by us to be purely natural, is its place. We understand human sexual attraction poorly because it is tied to the invisible and to the imperceptible of the flesh: to the soul, to the breath.
Unless we are being perverse, necrophilous, in desire we look for something more of life; we hope for a supplement of life from the other. Already, desire itself awakens us to a life generally asleep in us. To desire really represents an awakening. But we do not know how to cultivate this awakening. Instead of making energy rise or descend in us, between the centers (the chakras, one says in the Eastern tradition) of elemental vitality and the more spiritual centers, we think of desiring someone (man or woman), rather than a sort of spiritual mystery hidden in that someone. We want to possess the other as an object instead of approaching the other in order to share with him or her the energy of desire, between desiring and desirable subjects.
Sexual desire has generally been taught to us as a work of the flesh alone and not of the spirit. This error has paralyzed the energy of man and of woman in the Western tradition. It has also made us regress to animality, to instinctual attraction, including that of procreation. It has made sex an instrument of possession, of perversion, of death, instead of finding in sexual difference a spiritual path, which can lead us to love, to thought, to the divine.
Genesis teaches that sin would be wanting to know all, wanting to appropriate divine knowledge, instead of respecting it as breath. It is not sexual energy that is sin, but its paralysis in knowledge, techniques, and the will for possession or for power.
As such, sexual desire is awakened to the spiritual, in oneself and in the other. It meets with two failures: the reduction to knowledge or the regression to simple nature. These two impasses represent the dichotomy, to be overcome in our tradition, between body and spirit, between woman and man.
In order for this to happen, it is important to recognize in each person a proper body and spirit instead of cutting human being in two: half man, half woman.
The human species is made up of two genders, irreducibly different, attracted to one another by the mystery that they represent for each other, an undisclosable mystery that is a source of natural and spiritual life.
What attracts man and woman to one another is not a simple sexual instinct, which could be satisfied by a passage to the act. We are regressing today to this stage because sexuality has become what is at stake in a commerce subjected to diverse speculations and techniques. We also regress to this stage because man and woman forget the mystery of their difference, they reduce it to a corporeal particularity useful for the production of an orgasm and of a child.
What is at stake in the attraction between the sexes thus disappears. All sorts of stimulants and drugs become necessary in order to arouse desire, a desire that will retain its hunger because it does not involve the entire being.
SHARED BREATH
In fact, what attracts man and woman to each other, beyond a simple corporeal difference, is a difference of subjectivity, and notably a difference of relation to the breath.
It is the vitality or the soul of a woman that attracts a man, as much as and more than a sex or a beauty already artificially formed. The most beautiful girls are not always the most desirable, except on television or in film. What the boy looks for in the girl is a supplement or a path of life. And, if desire as such—not love—often goes from the man toward the woman, it is that the woman has in her a greater reserve of breath. Man uses his energy in order to fabricate, to make, to create outside of himself. He puts his vital or spiritual breath into the things that he produces; he employs it in order to build a world, his world. He keeps little of his breath, his soul, in him. And, in order to maintain it there, he needs instruments: concepts, dogmas, rites, etc. But breath is then no longer free, no longer shareable.
Woman, more spontaneously, keeps breath inside her. It is a question of physiological identity, and a question of relational identity as well. Born of a woman, her mother, with the capacity to engender and to love like her, the little girl possesses from the beginning, within herself, the secret of human being and of the relation between human beings.
The little girl is born with familiarity to self, to the natural world, to the other. She intuitively knows the origin of life. She knows that the source of life is in her, that she need not construct it outside of herself. Her breath need not leave her in order to build, to fabricate, to create. It needs, on the contrary, to remain in her to be able to be shared, to be made fertile. Woman also remains in greater harmony with the cosmos. This allows her to inhale and to exhale more naturally that which nourishes the vital breath: air.
To separate himself from the mother, the origin of his life, the boy, the man, builds for himself a world different than the cosmic universe, a world that is in some way artificial. The same is true at the level of vital breath and at the level of spiritual breath: God in the masculine is further away from micro- and macrocosmic nature than a feminine divinity.
The little girl, the woman, breathes in order to live but also in order to share, to communicate, to commune. It is true on the natural plane, and it should be this way on the spiritual plane.
But, by subjecting woman to masculine spirituality, our tradition has taken her soul away from her and has thus deprived man of a spiritual resource, including a resource in carnal love. If the carnal act can appear to him as a little death, it is because he forgets what he can receive that is spiritual through drawing near to the breathing of woman. The same is true if it appears to him as a “sin,” as an offense. To be sure, this spiritual to which he draws near is not the same as his own. It sometimes remains simple breath, without words, without rites, without visible transformation of air, of energy. But if this breath is situated at the level of the center (of the chakra) of the heart, of speech, of listening—as in the Annunciation—this breath is pure spiritual being. It corresponds to what the masters of the East look for, as well as certain Western mystics who take the negative way in order to join the divine as God—nothing (nada), nothing but breath having passed from the level of elemental vitality to the spiritual level.
Love, including carnal love, can become this mystical negative way. In love, each person renounces all solitary pleasure, including representative pleasure, and uses desire for the becoming of energy in the relation, for the transformation of sexual attraction into love, into speech, into thought without, however, annihilating it. This is not to say that the two become one, but that each follows a specific path so that the relation is possible in the moment and in the long term, despite or thanks to the difference between the two.
WOMAN AS SPIRITUAL GUIDE
So woman has, from her birth, an almost spontaneous taste for relational life, which probably comes to her from the fact of being born of someone the same as her, with whom she can moreover identify in love and in generation. Woman searches for the relation to the other, where man searches for the relation to the object. The risk, for woman, is that she effaces herself because of the attraction for the other. In every sexual relation, in the sexual relation strictly speaking, woman will need to make an effort to safeguard the two of the intersubjective relation. She must not give herself up in love or desire for the other, which would mean annihilating the two.
She must not any longer reduce the other to a same as oneself, or to a child, which would correspond to a form of repetition of the first relation that she knew with her mother. She must maintain the two, and maintain it outside of a principally natural relation, such as generation. The girl knows a relation to the other almost by nature: that with her mother, that with the child. The relation to man, unless it demeans this relation, obliges her to pass beyond the almost natural intersubjectivity tied to reproduction.
The first relation with the other that woman knows is a relation linked to respect for and the sharing of life: the life that her mother respected so that she could be born and survive, the life that she herself respects in becoming a mother. The highest spirituality for woman does not reside there, even if the sharing of life as such is already a gesture that mythologies and even religions formulated in the masculine have not taught us. Our culture is full of stories of fathers who kill their sons or sons who kill their fathers, of fathers who rape their daughters and get them pregnant. Thus ethics often appears, for man, to come down to respect for the life of the other, particularly in the genealogical relation.
For woman, the ethical gesture begins with respect for the spiritual life, and not only the natural life, of the other. What man claims as ethics, woman realizes almost involuntarily on a daily basis: to not kill the one who brought you into the world nor the one whom you will engender. The awakening of consciousness, for a woman, is situated at a spiritually higher level: not only to not destroy the life of the other, but to respect his or her spiritual life and, often, to awaken the other to a spiritual life that he or she does not yet know.
The relational life of man is paralyzed by the difficulty of entering into relation with the one who gave birth to him. To overcome such a difficulty, religions have often devised a physiological virginity in the mothers of spiritual men: Buddha or Jesus for example. An anti- or counternatural mystery would allow giving birth to a son not paralyzed by a natural attraction for the mother. As for philosophy, it invented the split between matter and spirit, sensible and intelligible, etc.
The way to resolve the question is different. Despite being rational, perceptible, and practicable by all men and women, it has been neglected. It is the spiritual virginity of woman that can help man to discover relational life. A corporeal relation with the other gender that does not come down to a natural relation, to a regression to simple nature, to breathing for survival, allows man to attain a relational life made of both body and spirit.
The role of woman as lover is in some way superior and more inclusive compared with that of the mother. She makes the breath of man pass from natural vitality or from fabricating energy to interior life: a life tied to the centers—or chakras—of the heart, of speech, of listening, of thought.
Carnal love becomes thus a spiritual path for energy, the flesh becomes spirit and soul thanks to the body itself, loved and respected in its difference, including at the level of breathing.
Sexual difference is, in fact, the difference that can open a transcendental horizon between humans, in particular between man and woman. The transcendence that is revealed and worked out in this manner, in the respect for each person’s natural and spiritual life, is more radical than that relating to genealogy. Transcendences, masculine as well as feminine, tied to genealogy are both too dependent on the natural world and too fabricated. They divide us between natural life and divine life without our being able to ensure the passage from the one to the other at each moment. It is in sexual difference that the split between human and divine identities can be overcome, thanks to a cultivation of energy, in particular a cultivation of breathing. Between man and woman, thanks to love, including carnal love, an awakening to transcendence can take place that corresponds to the reign of spirit as spiritual breath, as soul. A soul not localized and enclosed, as the masculine soul is, but a soul that progressively animates the whole body, changing its inert materiality or its elemental vitality into spiritual existence through a transmutation of energy.
This passage to another epoch of the reign of spirit depends upon a cultivation of respiration, a cultivation of breathing in and by women. They are the ones who can share with the other, in particular with man, natural life and spiritual or divine life, if they are capable of transforming their vital breath into spiritual breath. This task is great, yet passionate and beautiful. It is indispensable for the liberation of women themselves and, more generally, for a culture of life and of love. It requires patience, perseverance, faithfulness to self and to the other. Women are often lacking these virtues today. But why not acquire them? Out of love of self, out of love for the other? Out of consciousness of the importance of women’s spiritual role for the present and the future of humanity.
