Another thing, in this search for breatharians, I saw in passing the
term "prana". So I searched for references to prana on the web. Lots of
references to this in the context of yoga came up.
One reference said that the body could live on prana alone, and that
with proper yoga excercises, the pituitary gland will develop and draw
in pranic energy. Could it be that seeds are somehow drawing on a form
of prana when they germinate and grow? And so, do we know what life
really is?
Another thing, there are the references to types of energy mentioned in
the book "In Search of the Miraculous" by P.D. Ouspensky. He wrote about
Gurdjieff's search for thirty years for the school that Christ went to,
using a hundred people searching the near and far East, I believe. He
eventually discovered the location of the school, run by the Essene
Brotherhood, and attended it.
When he returned he was a considerably changed man. He had and
demonstrated various "powers" and spoke of various ways to
enlightenment, particularly the 4th way. (direct development of
willpower, or awakening, practically the same thing) He said that the
body could live on various types of foods, and the finest of these was
the food of "impressions".
It is interesting to note here that there are some claims of autopsies
on aliens who have childlike, partially undeveloped bodies, and that
their digestive tract seems to never have been functional!
Gurdjieff went on to say that if one were deprived of the grosser foods,
such as what man now eats, he would most certainly die in a predictable
amount of time. But if he existed on the food of impressions, he would,
if deprived of them, die INSTANTLY. And he could live on the food of
impressions without eating the grosser foods.
I find it intriguing, and somewhat hopeful, to think that man could have
at one time been in such high states, for it means that we could
possibly return to them. I am also reminded of a song by now deceased
Tim Buckley, where he sang about dying, and the refrain of that song
was, "And it's a long way down." Truer words were never spoken. It is so
far down that we would just as soon forget it ever happened and claim we
only live once! (A new development in the West.)
Just looking at the changes we know of over the span of one lifetime,
could we, the human race not have changed beyond imagining over the span
of 40,000 years? Every old timer I have known has claimed that times had
changed for the worse. Old timers throughout history have said the same
things. Now that's a lot of decline! A person at a high level of
cognizance (the high points of his life) is quite healthy also, and as
he sinks down in awareness his body begins to deteriorate and break up.
Could he not rise to even higher states than we know of, and could he
not have higher physical states to go along with this mental state? What
if there was a plateau for normal healthy happy human beings, and then
much higher, other changes that occur in the body to follow the higher
functions of the being inhabiting it? In reference to this, I read
somewhere that after the Buddha died, they found some curious knobs of
something around his neck, some sort of calcium or other formation, a
ring of something that his body had made, in response to what? A higher
etheric body? A foundation or "hookup" for some sort of astral body?
Bob Aldrich
Los Angeles