Regulate Breathing

My life’s ambition, my abstract love and enthusiasm for life, is to study psychoactive substances, or mind-altering drugs as you might call them. This is a bit frustrating, like being a born musician in Taliban country.

The Lords of the US gather in Bohemian Grove every year, surrounded by acres of empty forest, to privately party and drink and get down with Sasha Shulgin, inventor of most every designer psychedelic or party drug ever. Then they fly back to Washington, D.C. to publicly give speeches about the evils of drugs and vote for increased penalties and ban new substances (usually Shulgin’s inventions after about an eight-year lag time.) To coordinate the message that “drugs are bad, m’kay,” the Office of National Drug Control Policy writes pieces of television scripts and pays the networks to include them in their programming. Most people accept the message: to be “into drugs” isn’t an innocent thing like being “into music” or “into cars,” it’s tantamount to being a thieving junkie.

Sometimes I hear people say, “oh, drugs are an inferior way of exploring altered states. You can get to the same places with breathing exercises and meditation, whilst maintaining the virgin purity of your blood.” Okay, that’s not exactly what they say, but you get the idea…

I used to mentally respond to them, “yeah, right. I’m sure that is almost true if you withdraw from the world and spend years training in a Himalayan monastery, but in the real world meditation only gets me a few minutes of relaxation. And even if meditation brought me to the Ultimate Enlightenment, I kind of liked seeing the pretty colors, too, and I’m sure that that was a specific effect of the drugs.”

Now, new information has come to light, and I do believe that I may have been missing something about the breathing. A certain Pau reported a pretty heavy trip from doing breathing exercises right before bed:

Some years ago , just a few weeks after I learned about mediation and pranayama breathing exercises, I was practicing pranayama for a few minutes before I went to bed. At the same time I was attempting to quiet my mind (which I believe is easier to do while doing pranayama).

I broke through, with infinite power…I lost all sense of body, and my consciousness expanded in a fraction of a second to fill and become the entire universe … I “felt” there was nothing I could not know or see about the past present and future of everything. There had not been any psychedelics in my system for a year. Yeah, the speck of “I” that was rapidly disappearing during this event got freaked out and decided with great effort to switch the experience off before the “I” was gone for good. But the same thing happened the following night. (both times, before the blastoff, there was a period of maybe half a minute where everything around me, including empty space, seemed like it was made of sparkling blue dots).

This, in the context of a thread about boosting endogenous DMT, the powerful and illegal psychedelic that is a natural component of your body, everyone else, hundreds of plant species, and most higher animals. Is this a case of manufacturing illicit drugs? Pranayama seems to be a widespread practice with many variations, go ahead and look it up and you will find dozens of teachers providing you the training online. It seems foremost like an exercise to make breathing more conscious, although it goes beyond the simple Zen-derived techniques I’ve studied in the past.

Another way to breathe your way into an altered state is to suck a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen. During the 1960’s, when scientists could work with psychedelics and not be charged with witchcraft, there was a great interest in psychedelics as part of psychotherapy. There was some risk of giving a dose of LSD to a client and then watching helplessly as they experienced an eight-hour trainwreck of anxiety and confusion, so there was a desire to find a way of inducing a briefer altered state to test the waters. Such a way already existed, and it was called carbogen: typically, a mixture of 70% oxygen and 30% carbon dioxide.

People who were administered carbogen in a clinical setting, as a trial of their ability to weather altered states, typically freaked out. But not always:

“After the second breath came an onrush of color, first a predominant sheet of beautiful rosy-red, following which came successive sheets of brilliant color and design, some geometric, some fanciful and graceful …. Then the colors separated; my soul drawing apart from the physical being, was drawn upward seemingly to leave the earth and to go upward where it reached a greater Spirit with Whom there was a communion, producing a remarkable, new relaxation and deep security.”

Wow! Pretty colors and all!

Society’s controllers have been obsessed with preventing the common folk from having religious experiences since the Christian church merged with the Roman Empire almost 2,000 years ago (a few visionaries were sainted, more were burned at the stake). So, the fact that one can manipulate one’s own lungs and atmospheric gasses to induce such experiences presents a challenge to authority.

Perhaps the situation can be brought back under control. Progressive Insurance offers drivers a device called “Snapshot,” which monitors basics like acceleration and stopping time, and gives drivers a discount for safe practices. All Americans who have two pennies to rub together will soon be looking for discounts for their newly mandatory “Affordable Care” very soon. Why not strap a Snapshot consisting of a pedometer and a polygraph to every American, and offer them discounts for “safe biometrics?”

One strap around the abdomen, and one around the chest, and any hanky-pranayama that might occur will signal your insurance company to jack up your premiums. If you aren’t abusing your ability to breathe, you have no reason to object to such a proposition.

Breathing should be subject to reasonable regulation, just like food, water and medicine. Breathing is too important a matter to leave to individuals with their pesky notion of “rights” and their ignorance. After all, people like you and me were never properly trained or licensed to breathe. Breathing disorders are a leading cause of death.

Not funny? Sorry, but…

I’m suffocating over here!!!