2. Inspiration and Intuition

There I must remind you of the way in which, for example, in India - at a decadent level - a wonderful, admirable form of knowledge has been preserved, which was once much more significant than it is today, but which did not, as it must be today, proceed directly from thinking, but which proceeded from a very specific regulation or even dysregulation of the breathing process. Within the original yoga method it was a matter of raising the breathing process, which otherwise always runs unconsciously in the human being, to consciousness. This can be achieved by changing the rhythm of inhalation, breath holding and exhalation from that which occurs unconsciously. If you give the breathing rhythm different numerical ratios than you have in ordinary everyday breathing, then you breathe differently in relation to inhaling, holding your breath and exhaling. What is called the yoga method is essentially based on such different shapes and forms of breathing. This yoga method brought the whole breathing process to consciousness. Man breathed by consciously changing the rhythm of his breathing: the flow of breath consciously entered into the circulation of the blood. The whole human being undulated and interwove with a changed breathing rhythm. And just as we receive sensory observation in the ray of sight or the ray of hearing, just as we receive knowledge of the colors of the surrounding things through sight, just as we receive knowledge of the sounds emanating from the surrounding things through the ray of hearing, so the one who made the breathing rhythm into an elevated, into a magical perception, felt the soul-spiritual, he perceived in the breathing process the soul-spiritual permeating him. At the moment when the breathing process became fully conscious, and when at the same time that disposition of soul was present which was present in South Asia about seven or eight thousand years before our era, at that moment, through this altered breathing rhythm, one not only sent the physical air into the body with this swelling and surging, but one sent soul and spirit into this flowing breath, and one experienced soul and spirit, insofar as the soul and spirit of man are in this flowing breath.