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Breathing is consciousness. Breath is the activiating principle that determines the form of consciousness. Conscious breathing is one of the most powerful ways in which both individual and group consciousness can be offered in the service of universal transformation. Why is this so? Conscious breath represents more than merely the principle of inflation and deflation of a biological organ used to maintain the survival of organic life-forms at an instinctive level of functioning. Conscious breathing has the potential of interconnecting and integrating all levels of energy in the universe. At least, these ideas are clearly held to be true by a variety of teaching traditions from Eur-Asia to the Middle East to the Americas.
In the cultures of the American southwest, breathing individually and as a group was and is still taken as a sacred function. (To exemplify one such practice, the work done in the Great Kiva of Casa Rinconada at Chaco, New Mexico serves as a primary example. The following information will not be found in scholarly or anthropological works of any kind. Nor would this information have been allowed out by the initiates who have maintained an unbroken lineage of this oral teaching, were it not deemed absolutely necessary for the evolution of humanity at this critical point in its history.)
One of the major work activites in the great kivas, such as Casa Rinconada at Chaco Canyon, was called the Universal Breath Prayer or Breathing the Universe. This particular practice involved the entire community, and in effect was a culmination of the preparatory work that had been done during the year by individuals and kin groups in the kin kivas. The individual spiritual practices that had been carried out by each member of the community were now integrated into the greater work obligation that could only be accomplished by the unified being intention and aim of the group as a whole. In essence, through a series of graduated steps, the individual became harmonized first with their own organic form, the organic form of their kin group, then the organic form of the culture. Once this preliminary harmonization was complete, a second essence based harmonization took place in which the individual now worked on conscious recognition of their specific spiritual typology, the essential typology of their kin group and then the essence characteristic of the culture. Spiritual initiates who could be consciously present from the view of this cultural essence took on the role of teachers and guides for the rest of the community.
One of the chief aims and obligations of humanity: Actively participaing in the transformation of the universe – and thus in turn being transformed by the Universe – micro to macro - macro to micro...
Kiva invocants breathed in different sectors of the universe, according to their level of true Being Presence. These orders of breath went from the astronomical to the planetary to the biological to the theological - in a never ending conscious circulation..,
