Pure awareness or oneness has no boundaries and is not comprised of individuals or separate things. And yet paradoxically it is the source of everything.
All individuals or separate entities or things come into being because awareness becomes aware of itself. This creative act, awareness of awareness, is twoness. Twoness is the second harmonic of oneness, the second harmonic of awareness. It is duality, separation, identity, etc.
There are reflections of twoness everywhere including in bodily form and processes. The most basic of these is breathing. Others include the heartbeat, which in itself is probably a duality of its own with breathing as its complement or partner. We have two hands, two eyes, two nostrils, two lungs, two legs, etc. The heart has two chambers, the breath is divided into inhale and exhale. There's no end to duality because it's the second harmonic of infinity. No harmonic of infinity could be less than infinite in its manifestation, reflections, and descriptions.
In my case I discovered the Breath of Flight by accident in 1980 and the consequence was a month of non-stop bliss that I didn't understand or know how to analyze. I just knew I was both calm and high, so I kept on doing what I was doing. After I gave the practice up and re-entered everyday human society, it took me almost 38 years to figure out what I had done that made me high for a month. For a long time I thought it was all about Breathing More Air That I Wanted, but what kept bugging me in trying to reproduce that kind of euphoria is that it only lasts a minute after you stop breathing intensively. So it took a long time to figure out what I had done spontaneously those many years ago.
For most of that time I thought you had to breathe a certain way, because I recalled being in a vibrational state during this month of bliss. Finally not too long ago I figured out how to guarantee a somewhat euphoric vibrational state, but since this state fades quickly if you don't breathe a certain way, I renamed this breathing method the Buzz Breath because it gets you high in a physical way. It wasn't until I read a few short chapters on breathing from The Music of Life by the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan that I learned what the Breath of Flight really is. By "Breath of Flight" I mean a breathing technique that effortlessly alters your state of consciousness and makes Suspended Attention your natural condition. Which means that when you breathe air, you literally feel like you're inhaling the fuel that creates the world. Which gives you the confidence to step right up to the Unworld and gaze upon it.
I think it's a good idea to experience many kinds of breathing or at least to know how to get a lot of air into your lungs, starting with the belly breath where the abdomen protrudes during inhale, followed by the chest breath where the rib cage expands to the sides and you feel your shoulder blades, collarbones, and eyebrows moving up. Breathe More Air Than You Want and find out what the resistance is like and what happens if you ignore it: you do get high. Don't hurt yourself or make your lungs bleed, but get some experience with breathing exercises and learn that breathing differently does in fact change your state of being and your energy level.
Since every wanna-be guru has published his own breathing method on YouTube, I'd say go ahead and milk this opportunity for all it's worth, and then when you're ready for something more profound, something that will actually get you right up to the Urumara so you can literally see into the Unworld, come back to the Breath of Flight. To perform the Breath of Flight, you don't control your breathing at all. Instead of using the conscious mind to control your breathing, you use it to simply watch your breathing without comment. You focus the Attention on the breath and you maintain that focus no matter what. I would recommend not limiting this practice to sit-down meditation sessions, and since there's no prize for getting More Air Than You Want, you don't have to become a mouth breather to accomplish this. I prefer to breathe in and out through the nose, but it doesn't matter. How you breathe has no effect on the Breath of Flight. You pay Attention and you automatically become aware that you're breathing your mind, body, and world into existence, which takes you straight to the border of what you used to think reality was.
What happens when you continuously pay Attention to the breath is that the conscious mind releases its fear of losing control of the breath--which is the fear of death which keeps you from getting consciously unworlded--so the autonomous nervous system handles the breath automatically, same as when you're unworlded or "asleep", i.e. when you've managed to dissolve the world. In short, if the relatively incompetent monkey mind drops the reins, the breath becomes seemingly self-regulated because now the Uppers are in charge. The Uppers are what they used to call the "subconscious mind".
The Breath of Flight dissolves the world. Why? Because when you maintain awareness of your breath, you're literally watching your body, mind, and world come into being. Thus instead of compulsively creating a typical body, mind and world that make no sense according to your ideals, you're creating a body, mind and world with awareness. I should say with Attention, since Attention is the use of awareness as a tool.
Back in 1980, I'd tried to meditate maybe once or twice because friends talked me into it, but I didn't see the point and I never got interested in pursuing it. But now I know that if you stop thinking, the world dissolves. Don't take this in any absolute sense. The world dissolves a little around the edges first, and for most of us that's about all the longer we're capable of not thinking. Not thinking sounds easy, no? What happened to me in 1980 is that I was highly motivated to breathe continuously; either that or be evicted, since I was living in a place called "Consciousness Village" where the dogma being preached was an exercise that involved an hour or two per day of breathing without ever holding the breath unconsciously. Holding the breath is what we do when we're worried, as many of us are most of the time.
Bristling and terrified at the invitation to be homeless, I announced that I would refuse to do the prescribed breathing exercise, but instead would breathe continuously, never holding my breath, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And for a month, until after I'd left the place, that's what I did.
I was so highly focused on not getting evicted that I did in fact perform the breathing exercise--which we had to do an hour or two per day--but I did it all day. People were worried about me. And after I left and I felt the Vibes fade and I went back to my normal neurotic personality, I didn't even know what I'd lost because I didn't know I'd tricked myself into meditating continuously on the breath and thereby shutting off the internal dialog by mistake.
Summary: The breath is a reflection of 2ness; it creates the body, mind, and world of the individual. If you ignore your breath as most people usually do, the breath will fuel the internal dialog and the body, mind and world thus created will be filtered through the monkey mind. If you watch the breath, you will fuel the creation of the body, mind, and world directly through a relatively serene/quiet/clean filter. The result is that you will be in a state of Suspended Attention in which the Uppers will be receiving enough of your energy that they can help you experience new and magical things such as being able to close your eyes and assemble dream scenes at will.
Enjoy the Breath of Flight.
