Breath Intelligence
OXYGENESIS: from his Californian notes written circa 1981-1982
‘The language of the breath is the subtlest known and the least known. Its link with the autonomic nervous system can be found. The Oxygenetic process provides psychoanalysis without words, regeneration without medicine, information without thinking.’
Maurice worked in this field in four countries. He wrote, ‘All nervous systems are strong, even when they function badly. They convey messages to the brain without fail. If the two sides of the brain were removed and the brain-stem only left, the organism would continue to function autonomically---that is to say, it would continue to ingest and digest, evacuate liquids and solids, withdraw muscularly from unpleasant contact. The brain, if replaced, would then continue to receive he information. It would become ‘aware’.
It is this awareness that leads us to believe that the mind is actually in control of the organism, and guides it, and is even the seat of the ego. But in the Oxygenetic process this conviction (virtually the basis of western thinking since the seventeenth century) undergoes a deep change, but not through argument or exchange of ideas: it comes about in the organism. The organism finds itself living in a different way. It no longer feels in the grip of the mind, least of all of a super-ego intent on ideals, punishment, goals, blueprints of behaviour. Something more intelligent, more dependable, more in touch with the objective world seems to have taken over. Emotions are no fewer or less strong but the organism is now insulated: for emotions are the mental symptoms of our encounter with the world, and the bridge for that encounter is the nervous system. In the case of schizophrenia the ego is split because the sympathetic and para-sympathetic systems, in their interaction, have lost the power to distinguish inner from outer, subjective from objective, private from public.
My interest in this field began at Oxford where in my studies of the various metaphysical theories of perception I began to suspect that the mind was not in fact the seat of our power to ‘objectify’ our sensations, as the great philosophers argued. My claim is that the seat of the ego is the nervous system, which can be reached by dieting, fasts, medicine and surgery, but can be altered, individuated and aligned only by the breath. Above all, that system is our sole source of information about the world. Whatever is known to us must be received through the nervous system; and the mind is a secondary receiver. This is the case even with material of a telepathic or intuitive nature which we often assume to come in some way ‘through’ the mind.
For the mind to receive the right information no changes in the mind itself will avail, since it is a receiving, analyzing and ordering agency. Only a change in the nervous system will ensure that the information service is a sound one. Once it is sound, information of a quite unexpected nature begins pouring in.
It is well-known that thinkers sometimes make a breakthrough in their work which they find quite unaccountable. Te answer is suddenly there after perhaps years of waiting. Te mind just doesn’t know how it happened. This was because the nervous system was quietly nd invisibly at work, and presented the answer when the organism ws ready to receive it or act on it.
The intake of large quantities of oxygen may be, but need not be, beneficial. It can be harmful and deeply disturbing to the organism. Oxygenesis is the process of learning the language safely, carefully and confidently, in private consultation.’