Re: Impregnating Breath

["Martin" <martin@...>]

Dear David,

I was at first reluctant to reply to your post, because I too am at 
the same stage and as such do not feel it is my place to offer 
any 'advice'. On the other hand, sometimes it is easier for someone 
who is at the same level of development to understand where you are 
coming from in terms of your concerns.

Anyway, what I have written below is more me trying to figure the 
exercise out in my own head than any sort of advice; I'll leave that 
to those who know what they are talking about :-)

Firstly, the trait which you choose to inhale must be chosen for a 
reason. For example, you would probably not choose a trait which you 
felt did not need much work. You mentioned 'opneness'. Why did you 
choose that trait? I am assuming because you would like to become 
more 'open' in whatever sense is meaningful to you. 

Now if you feel that in your mundane personality, you could be more 
open, then that is something which you have decided to work on. Why 
then do you feel a resistance to acknowledging the fact that it is 
something you need to develop? You use the word 'deficient'; perhaps 
that is not the best way to think of it due to the negative 
connotations of the word. Maybe, being linked to the Universe as a 
whole, we have immediate access to all the traits we desire, they 
are already a part of us, but we need to learn to access them, to 
flick the switch, to bring the trait down from higher planes into 
our mundane existence.

If this is the case, then imagining the trait as strongly, as 
vividly, as powerfully as we can tunes us into the vibration of that 
trait. I presume we are allowing this trait to swell and accumulate 
within the astral ether because it is the representative of the 
spiritual plane manifest on the plane of our emotions, which is the 
best place for enhancing one's personality.

Now, if I understand the exercise correctly, we *start off* 
imagining the trait accumulating in the astral ether of the air 
around us, and so our thoughts, tuning in to the relevant vibration, 
bring about the desired trait within the air, and we are not, 
therefore, projecting it from within ourselves. 

If this is true, I believe it helps to solve your concern about 
developing the trait *within* yourself and then projecting it out 
into the air, only to breathe it in again. This is not what we are 
actually doing (if my theory is right). We are using our thoughts to 
help guide down the congruent vibrations from a higher plane, 
focussing them into the astral ether of the air around us, and then 
breathing in that air and hence the trait impregnated within the 
ether which then is absorbed into our physical body. 

>From there I usually imagine it spreading into my astral body and 
then my mental body, resulting in a complete circuit: we use our 
thoughts to bring the trait down from the mental plane into the 
astral plane and then breathe it into our bodies, and so grounding 
it in the physical. By imagining the trait spreading throughout my 
three bodies, I believe that the process which occured in the 
macrocosm is happening in reverse in the microcosm.

I don't know if any of this rambling makes sense to you, or even if 
any of it is correct - it is simply how I, at my present (very 
early) stage of spiritual development, see this exercise.

Martin