the daily task of moving beyond apostasy by asking What is real? concerning every aspect of
personal identity, we start sacrificing “unrealities”— in the process, expanding our sense of self
and inching our way closer to unconditioned happiness in being. National citizenship gives way
to world citizenship, and membership in a faith to membership in the human family. By example
we can then teach our children, ambassadors to humanity’s future, the importance of
vanquishing narrowness, the real enemy, by placing expansiveness of the self above all other
considerations.
Humanity now stands on the threshold of this new era, with centuries of accepted truths pulsing
inside us as unquestioned patterns of limiting awareness. In exposing them one by one to the
light of knowledge, we sacrifice everything that keeps us narrow, for the self cannot cling very
long to anything found to be unreal. Day by day, we renounce something else—a long-buried
belief, a consuming corporate or community alliance, a bite-size fragment of sensory
input—until all that is left as real is our breath, as Rumi so eloquently illustrates in his poem
“Only Breath”:
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West,
not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or the next
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.31
Breath, according to the theory of self, reflects the actualization of our awareness of infinite
substance, Rumi’s “beloved.” Breath can be ignored, in which case it restlessly carries reactive
emotions and divisional misperceptions into the world, erecting obstructions to our own and
others’ expansive self-knowledge. It can be extinguished, as occurs among intuitive scientists
intent on uniting with the infinite self. Or, universally, it can be sacrificed more moderately
through regulation and gradual slowing, transporting the seeker from an awareness of breathing
individuation to an awareness of breathing expansion to the realization of breathless
substance—the infinite God known in stillness without identity or religion.
About the Author
Śaṇkara Śaranam, multi-award-winning author and researcher, world traveler and lecturer, also
plays classical guitar, composes music, and writes poetry. An ascetic and mystic, he now
devotes his life to making pranayama techniques available worldwide at no cost.
•
Born in 1968 to Iraqi Jewish parents who had fled their homeland years before, Śaṇkara was
raised in the Midwest and New York City. He received his bachelor of arts degree in Religion
from Columbia University, where he graduated magna cum laude, and earned his master’s
degree in Eastern Texts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He currently resides
in southern New Mexico, with his wife and their two children.
Śaṇkara, founder of Whirlwind Community and The Pranayama Institute, is a sought-after
speaker and workshop leader, and writes an online forum that is read by students in over
seventy countries. For more information about his speaking engagements and teachings,
please visit The Pranayama Institute’s websites: www.pranayama.org and
www.godwithoutreligion.com.
Notes
1Chapter One
Hebrew Bible citations throughout refer to the Jerusalem Bible (Koren Publishers, 1992).
2
New Testament citations throughout refer to the New Revised Standard Version (Oxford
University Press, 1977).
3
Qur’anic citations throughout refer to The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, trans. Mohammed
Marmaduke Pickthall (Penguin Books, undated).
4
The dorsal plexus, located behind the heart, corresponds to the thoracic sympathetic ganglia
running laterally along both sides of the vertebral column.
Chapter Two
5
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 332–337.
6
For decades, historians believed that Vedic society dated back roughly 3,500 years, to the
presumed Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent—a theory strongly supported in the late
nineteenth century by the well-known indologist Max Müller. Today, based on subsequent
archaeological and geological discoveries that discredit the Aryan invasion theory, the Vedas
are generally said to have originated many thousands of years earlier. The Vedic sage Manu,
author of Manu Samhita, is thought to have lived anywhere from 6,000 to 9,000 years ago.
7
This presentation of the Vedic cycle theory derives from Sri Yuktesvar’s treatment of Manu
Samhita in his book Kaivalya Darsanam (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1984), 7–20.
8
Cited in Subhash Kak, The Astronomical Code of the Rgveda (New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal, 2000), 3–5.
9
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Dell, 1965), 106.
10
Ibid., 26.
11
Ibid., 663–664.
12
Timothy Ferris, The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics (Toronto: Little,
Brown, 1991), 261–271.
13
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 330.
14
Toynbee, A Study, 57.
15
Joseph Jacobs, The Fables of Aesop (London: Macmillan, 1915), 85.
Chapter Three
16
Cited in Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (New York: Philosophical Library,
1946), 74.
17
Jalal ud-din Rumi, Selections from Rumi, trans. Edward Rehatsek (Bombay: Education Society
Press, 1875), 186.
18
The medulla oblongata extends from the lowermost portion of the pons to approximately the first
pair of cervical nerves, where it becomes the spinal cord.
19
Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Bonanza, 1954), 12.
20
Only a fast-moving electromagnetic force, as opposed to a slow-moving fluid or metabolic
process, accounts for the yogic ability to instantly stop the breath simply by lifting the gaze.
21
George Schwartz, Food Power (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 63.
22
Joseph Campbell, Inner Reaches of Outer Space (New York: Alfred Van Der Marck, 1985), 16.
23
Ibid., 17.
24
James Baldwin, The New Yorker (17 November 1982), quoted in The Great Thoughts, comp.
George Seldes (New York: Ballantine, 1985), 34.
Chapter Four
25
Stanislav Grof and Hal Zina Bennett, The Holotropic Mind (New York: Harper, 1993), 89–111.
26
Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1923).
27
Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 29.
28
Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Advaita
Ashrama, 1998), 212.
29
John Robbins, May All Be Fed: Diet for a New World (New York: Avon, 1992), 92.
30
George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” Partisan Review (January 1949), 1.
Conclusion
31
“Only Breath,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks (San Francisco: Harper, 1995), 32.
Reprinted, with grateful acknowledgment, by permission of the translator.
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