On Feb 6, the first day of this conference, the question we considered was, "What are the strategies available to grow from the position of seeing our specific God as the only True God to the position of seeing all relative Gods of different faiths as divine emanations of the same One God." Once we achieve this growth, all specific ideas of the divine are seen as different ways various cultures perceive the same One God who in fact is an imperceptible mystery.
The faith and the culture in which we are born conditions us in specific ways like our inbuilt instincts. They become a box in which our thinking and behaviour are constrained. Behaviour so constrained is automatic and unconscious making us do things without any awareness. The first step in any growth is to behave consciously. How then do we become conscious of the unconscious? This is a great question.
Thousands of years ago, Vedic researchers in human behaviour, who invented yoga considered this question and discovered that we are able to train ourselves to behave with awareness even when we are boxed in by our early life conditioning. They suggested that this training is accomplished with a practice. They called this practice with the name of pranayama. It is a Sanskrit name meaning conscious regulation of life energy. It is life energy that makes us behave and it is life energy that makes us breathe. They experimented to see if conscious regulation of breath will enable us to regulate our life energy. They conducted their experiments on themselves and concluded that they hypothesized well. They noticed that conscious regulation of their own breathing in fact changed their life energy by noticing the changes in their mind and behaviour. Mind becomes calmer, more peaceful and purposeful.
A few thousand years later, the Buddha researched ways to alleviate human suffering. He figured human suffers because they largely behave unconsciously. He with studies on himself rediscovered the power conscious breathing in behaving better. Better behaviour alleviates human suffering.
Ordinarily, breathing is unconscious. If we practice to regulate it consciously for a period of time, we in fact train ourselves to behave consciously. That enables us to think and behave outside the box of our early conditioning. The focus of the conference on Feb 13 then is to look at human neurophysiology, neuropsychology and evolution to see how conscious regulation of breath can regulate our life force.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
~~Carl Gustav Jung