Skip to main content

Breath: the gateway to the unconscious


Breathing - the act of taking air in and out of our bodies - is an activity intrinsically tied to being alive, yet most of us live with little conscious awareness of its existence on a daily basis. The reality of being alive can be defined by the act of breathing itself. Breathing in and out in a steady rhythm signifies that there is life within a body. When one places the finger under the nostrils of a corpse, one is seeking the feel of the breath as the telltale sign of the presence of life.

However, despite the vital role of the breath in the phenomenon of life, one can feasibly spend an entire lifetime without ever noticing that one is breathing. In lives lived such, if ever this awareness does arise, it might only be when when one finds oneself gasping for breath, after a hard workout or maybe in the unfortunate situation when one is drowning underwater. In the absence of breath, breath is quickly recognized as the most important necessity for life.

The human body is an orchestra of numerous physiological processes. Among all of them the breath holds a very unique place, as it exists on the edges of certain dualities within the body-reality. An analysis using the binary of a duality can be seen as intellectual lethargy (as it undermines the existence of multiplicities), it is nonetheless useful to articulate an overarching understanding of the phenomenon of the breath. This dualistic articulation would indicate that the human body has two types of bodily functions. Take a look at any middle school biology book, you will find the mention of these two actions as Voluntary actions and Involuntary actions. The terms are self explanatory. The former refers to actions that are consciously initiated (like picking something up, chewing, speaking etc.) while the latter includes actions that are not consciously carried out (like the heartbeat, muscle spasms, salivation etc.) As we can already see from the above characterization, there exists within the body-reality atleast two dualities that are relevant to this discussion - voluntary versus involuntary, conscious versus unconscious.


While almost all functions of the body neatly fall into this dualistic representation, the breath is one of the only bodily functions that cannot be categorized as such. That is to say, the breath is neither completely voluntary nor completely involuntary; neither fully conscious nor fully unconscious. In the absence of conscious awareness of the breath, we go about your daily lives, and breath continues to flow in and out of our bodies without any singular moment of volition on our part. It is an automatic action, involuntary, continuous. On the other hand, when the consciousness is directed to the breath, you discover that you can voluntarily stop and start breathing, as you do when you take a dive underwater or hold your nose when you walk past a garbage truck. There is no other action in the body that operates in such a way. In this manner, the breath has a unique position among all human physiological functions and stands on the edge of voluntary and involuntary, the conscious and unconscious mind.

It is therefore no coincidence, that meditative practices that have developed around the world over thousands of years, with an articulable goal of "expanding consciousness", all begin with a focus on the breath. This is true for all types of meditations, be it the 15 minutes guided meditation on Youtube before you sleep or the very rigorous practice of Vipassana meditation for 10 hours a day, the act of meditation begins with an intentional focus and conscious awareness of the breath. This is so because of the unique place of the breath between the conscious and the unconscious mind. As such, the breath is the gateway to the unconscious mind, and the key to expanding the boundaries of the conscious mind.

While the act of paying attention to the breath may sound simple enough, many people including myself, find it to be one of the most difficult things to do. For it is the nature of the untrained mind to flitter in between the spaces of attention that one might achieve momentarily. Nonetheless, a habit of being aware of one's breath is the certain first step towards understanding the unconscious nature of one's own mind and the unconscious reality of the universe. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reality and Fiction: Collective Hallucinations

This is a story set in my city, Dhaka, when one autumn day in the early '90s, hundreds of people gathered outside Dhaka Central Jail in protest. They were seeking to stop the hanging of a man who was apparently on death row, within the premises. However, the problem was, the man was not in the jail at all. In fact, he never existed. When I was 8 years old, Bangladesh was a country of 120 million. Dhaka was a city of 7 million. And we all had 1 television channel we could watch - Bangladesh Television. Back then, a TV was a matter of novelty. And coloured TV sets were only the luxury of a select few in Dhaka. It was a time when people across the country were crowding around the one television set in their villages. Congregations formed inside lone huts juiced up by a stolen power line, where scores of people would gather to watch the entertainment. The magic box would bring us a select range of programming - from the state-scripted nightly news, to heavily censored 80's Ame...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is Humanity Worth Saving?

There is a song by a Bengali folk singer Dwij Bhushan, in which he revels about being alive and the great fortune he had of being born in a human form. In the song, called " Hridmajhare Rakhibo ",  Dwij Bhushan is grateful to life and feels blessed to have the chance to enjoy the beauty and brilliance of this world. Some of the words (roughly translated by yours truly) are as follows: If we let go of the divine touch  Of life that is within us, We will never get it back again. So, I will keep this life close to my heart, I will never let it go. The sentiments are indeed heartwarming. Every time I sing this song, I can feel the beauty that he speaks of, often leading me to verge of tears. However, in the face of endless war, poverty, disease and ecological crises in this world, I can imagine how this sentiment can feel quite hollow. Not to mention, given the fact that humanity is the source of so much malaise on this planet, one is naturally led to wonder whethe...
Post a Comment
Read more

We are your friends

We are beautiful. Together we shine. We are loud, we are music. We are dance, dance, all night. We are permanence, like love, like hope, like time. We are ephemeral, like wisps of hash smoke, Exuding like visual poetry from your lips to mine. We rise and we fall, to the moods of the skies, To the drone of the planet, to the hum of the cosmos that never dies. We live, to live hard We choose it - living hard, over hardly living. To live, is to keep moving, We understand this truth. And we pay homage to it in our dance moves. We seek moments. Moments of laughter, boisterous and great. We take our laughter with a side of stomach ache. We seek moments of ecstasy, piercing and soulful. We feed off the lifeforce of numinous truths. We seek moments of caring, compassion and tenderness. We bask in the warmth, the buzz, the fuzziness. And we seek moments of meaning. Meaning so overwhelming, that words collapse before it. Meaning so profound, that silence is its true la...
Post a Comment
Read more

Conspiracy Theories: Epistemological Mutants

What is a conspiracy theory? Political Psychologists define it as "attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors". There are a few important elements that form part of this definition. Firstly, conspiracy theories seek to provide an explanation for political and social events. Secondly, they rest on the belief that shadowy powerful actors are executing secret plots to manipulate socio-political dynamics. Thirdly, they are generally based on a number of deductive errors in reasoning on the part of their proponents, whereby singular events or data points, that have no rational causal relationship, are linked together to form a narrative. In essence, conspiracy theories are based on connecting information nodes (which may or may not have an observable correlation, i.e. tendency to occur together) without any empirical evidence that proves a causal relationship betwee...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shijya-Moni

Shijya and Moni were brothers, twins conceived at the same time, sharing the same womb, connected by the same life-force. Their destinies had been entwined from the moment of their birth. Yet, despite the congruence of their cosmic karma, the lives of Shijya and Moni unfolded in perfectly divergent paths, in diametrically opposite tangents. So much so that it made their kinship almost unrecognizable to those who knew them.  Shijya was the ideal child, a paragon of virtue, and the embodiment of studiousness, diligence and integrity. He excelled at everything he did. A favourite among his teachers, and a darling to his aunts and uncles, he was known to be humble, polite, kind, and helpful. He had no enemies and many friends, all of whom saw him as a reliable confidant they could turn to at any time. By the time he was 16, Shijya had all academic avenues open to him to explore any field of study he wanted, winning scholarships and Ivy League admissions. He was also frequently seen spe...
Post a Comment
Read more