Abraxas

Instructions for the “Awareness of Breath”

Lie down horizontally. Relax your body.

1) Realize that if someone were to lift your arm, it would fall back, as if it were dead weight.

2) Realize that if someone were to push your body from where it lies, it would tumble around on the earth like an inanimate object.

3) Realize that you could no longer move your body, even if you wanted to: it lies very heavy, inert. Abandon it, no longer concern yourself with it.

With calm and resolve, converge into yourself. Turn toward the threshold of “silence.” After nothing exists but clarity and awareness of consciousness, come back until you feel the slightest sensation of your body.

You will then notice that your breath, in the meantime, has slowed down and is now almost imperceptible. At this point:

1) Evoke the image of air: a free thing, without origin or cause, without bonds, infinite, fleeting, penetrating all things, susceptible to sudden variations, without supports (see the essay by Leo in chapter II).

2) Having done this, very slowly reawaken the breath without “touching” your body—namely with an act of the mind and not with a movement of the muscles.

If your soul is ripe, it may undergo a TRANSFORMATION, called Knowledge of the Air and also Knowledge of Prana (pranavidya).

a) The habitual sense of your self in the body will be overthrown. You will no longer feel as body and in the body, but you will be air, space; an air by which you will feel the heavy and inanimate mass of the body being carried, moved, and penetrated.

b) Formerly you felt the air moved by your lungs, namely by an activity of the body. Now you will find that the air causes the lungs to move: it moves the body in the material function of breath, and regulates the flow of the blood in it, giving it life.

c) The function of breath will then be transformed from automatism into an act of the living spirit.

If, after all this, you fix the breath coming and going, it will appear to you as light (“The Life was the light of men”; John 1:4).

If, when proceeding, you penetrate with breath the “frozen,” petrified sensation of the form or the structure of your immobile body, what will emerge is the waving perception of a body made of luminous mobility. It is the ethereal or fluidic , as “matter in the white state.”

If, finally, after achieving your magical dignification, you fix the breath and, as an act of the spirit, focalize it in your lungs, becoming a point without dimensions, what will emerge silently, in a new vision, is the Archangel of Air.

In the habitual life of every day, beginning with these experiences, you will experience a sense of wonderful physical lightness and of freedom.

You will be given a natural power of overcoming fatigue and weariness that will appear miraculous to others.

You will also suddenly “see” flashing points in the air.

In the evening, when getting ready to go to sleep, something like silent and luminous explosions may occur in your eyes.

Observe everything carefully and objectively, and be silent.

It has been said: “You may practice breathing techniques for decades and be very successful at it, but until you actualize prana from your breathing, and until the breathing process has been dematerialized and given in function of the flow of the currents of animated life, all of your efforts will be in vain.”