Hydrogen is a gas, the most abundant element in the universe. Gas is a carrier of energy; kinetic and pressure energies such as electrical, magnetic, chemical, and the vital life-force energy that supports life. Life cannot exist without air, for without hydrogen the sun would not exist. The sun’s energy supports life. More than 90% of sun is made of hydrogen, about 9% is helium i.e. more than 99% of the sun is made of air element. The remaining 1% is composed of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon, iron, neon, magnesium, and sulfur.
Air is motion and all motions and propulsion in the body are carried out by air, the vital bio-motor force that governs and manipulates all moving functions, conscious or unconscious. Air is the element of motion, the kinetic energy that moves everything in the body; blood, fluids, nutrients, and waste materials. When air escapes from the body, movement stops and life ceases.
By controlling the breath, we can learn to control many functions of body. People have learned to control their heart with their breath. Yogis in India can stay buried underground for weeks by controlling the autonomic functions of the body through breath. It is evident that we have the power and capacity to control our body through consciousness, through our mind, by how we think, which means we can control our diseases too, not only control, but the mind can cure diseases completely.
Air is the medium through which vibrations of consciousness are propagated as thoughts. Gas shares similar properties with thoughts. Just as gas can be quantified with measuring instruments, so can thoughts be measured and quantified with instruments. Magnitude and speed of thought is measured by electro- or magneto-encephalogram. Motion of thought is chaotic and random with no particular direction similar to gas molecules. Thoughts are scalar traveling in all directions circumferentially and hence we can measure the magnitude of thoughts but not the direction.
In Tibetan, air element is called duje which means accumulated action. Action involves motion therefore action in motion is a thought. Mental impulses or motivations leading to accumulation of actions that are stored as aggregate of thoughts are called memory. Memory is linked to the past and hence thought is related to time. Consciousness and thoughts are intimately linked together just as space and time are intimately linked. Consciousness cannot function without thoughts and space cannot exist without time. They exist in one fabric of space-time continuum as modern science has proven.
The fundamental property of gas is expansion and pressure and the fundamental mechanism behind pressure is contact and touch. Without contact pressure cannot be generated. Bumping of gas molecules coming in contact with each other produce pressure. Contact and pressure is the mechanism by which we appreciate our sense of touch. Communication happens through the process of contact between signal and receptor and therefore air is the medium of communication.
The air we breathe not only contain nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen but also contains life-force energy, chi, or prana, the vibration and motion of consciousness. Air is the carrier of life-force energy and consciousness. Pressure brings out the sense of touch and pressure is required to make sound for communication. Air and pressure are the elements of speech and communication.
Breathing is our connection to higher intelligence and power, the life-force energy, that’s why nature made breathing effortless, we don’t have to think about breathing, it’s automatic and subconscious. This is a blessing and a curse at the same time, blessing because if we must be conscious and remember to breathe at all times, perhaps we may forget to breathe one time and die. It becomes a curse when we form bad habits of breathing that doesn’t meet the needs of body. This is exactly what is happening with many people, cursed with a bad habit of nervous, rapid, and shallow breathing. They do not use the diaphragm, the biggest muscle for proper mechanics of breathing, The diaphragm muscle acts as bellows for the lungs. Diaphragmatic breathing means using the abdomen to breathe, the abdomen bulges out during inhalation, pushing the diaphragm down to make more room in the chest to help suck in more air. Nervous breathers are chest breathers which is a problem because chest cannot expand enough to fill the whole lung. This hurried breathing creates shortage of oxygen and energy causing many health problems over time.
Chest breathing is for emergency situations because it provides a quick and short burst of energy. Unfortunately, many people have adopted this bad habit of rapid shallow breathing even without emergencies in their lives. This is a problem because continuous chest breathing fools the mind into thinking that there is emergency and instructs the body to prepare for fight or flight response. The mind and body are a two-way street, one affects the other. Your body is made to follow your mind, but the body affects the mind too, a diseased and painful body gives unhappy feeling in the mind.
You can expel mental toxins by breathwork. If a thought is bothering you, do a long exhalation and hold it there as long as you can and see what happens. Chain of thought will be broken and your mind will enter into a different state temporarily. Stilling the wind of breath also stills the mind. You an expel negative thoughts with expiration or keep positive thoughts with inhalation. This is called Kumbhaka in yogic exercise translated as “filling and holding a pot”.
A thought is a unique pattern of moving quanta of energy with specific frequencies. Thoughts are signals traveling through the environment like TV and cell phone signals ready to be picked up by any instrument that has specific receptors for specific frequency of signal. When your cell phone picks up a signal, it has a matching frequency. The brain works in a similar way, there are receptors in the brain for tuning into certain frequencies of thoughts. This is the reason why some discoveries and inventions applying for patents have applicants from different parts of the country applying for the same patent on the same day, which proves that information locus is beyond the brain of an individual. Any brain can tap into the information field and pick up a desired information. The brain is simply a transceiver, an instrument that receives, processes, and transmits information.
The salient property of gas or air is motion. Motion exerts pressure and pressure makes things move, blood pressure makes blood move. Pressure is force applied per unit of space. Smaller the space, greater is the pressure. Pressure give rise to contact and hence a unique feature of air is contact and touch.
Motion implies movement from point A to point B which takes time and hence air represents time as well. Time is a human construct to represent motion. Time has past and future. Most thoughts are of the past, sometimes past thoughts are dressed up and projected into future as imagination. Thoughts never stay in the present because in the present there is no motion, a present moment is a standstill, an eternity. We cannot measure time in the present because once you say “this is the present second” the next future second comes along and overshadows it. Therefore, time is of the past and future, not of the present. In the present moment, there are no thoughts, only experience. There is culmination of both past and future in the present in the form of experience.
Human beings are fascinated with time because we are conscious of our own thoughts. Animals are not conscious of their thoughts and that’s why they seem a little dumb. Although animals are mostly driven by unconscious instincts, they still have the ability to sense the future because in the present culminates future and past. Animals can sense a tsunami approaching and flee to higher grounds while humans remain in stupor and get swept away. Because animals are not busy with their thoughts, they have space for future information or intuition to come through. Humans are busy either ruminating the past or fantasizing the future.
Thoughts create reality from past and future and consciousness experiences that creation in the present. Time creates and consciousness experiences. Thoughts and consciousness always go together just as space and time always go together, without space there is no room for motion of time and without time there is no creation for consciousness to experience.
There are two things that are important in terms of comprehending life and its experiences: objects and name—objects include anything that is beyond our self the subject and names are definition given to those objects. Language is simply a collection of names. To label and to name something is to define and to define is to comprehend and to cognize. Repetition of definition is an attempt to re-cognize, to cognize it again without going through the tedious process of learning. Repeated definitions create memory and beliefs. A belief is a collection of thoughts with definitions and meanings attached. A thought by itself doesn’t come attached with definitions and meanings. A definition is what gives meaning to thoughts but the power to define any thought is with the individual, your free will. When you go to a doctor and ask him to define your illness, you are abdicating your power. Not every illness is the same, a cancer presents differently with different people.
The subconscious mind, the storehouse of memory, doesn’t care what definition and meaning is attached to any object, situation, or thought as long as there’s a definition attached to it so that it can be saved as memory file. Without definition, an object cannot be stored a memory. You can associate any meaning to any situation or a thing. It’s a personal choice. This is exactly the reason science is finding it difficult to study emotion because emotions are personal and varies with the individual subjective definition and meaning. Unfortunately, many people are not aware of the fact that we can create new definition for any thought or emotion, we don’t have to keep using the old definitions and meanings we have learned from our parents, peers, teachers, and society. It is a gift from nature that things don’t come attached with meanings, nature left it to us, our own free will to choose any definition that is appropriate for our self and situation at that particular time. This is how we create our personal reality by choosing the right definition. This is the reason why everybody has different opinion on things.
Beliefs involve trust; we cannot believe someone if there is no trust. Belief is a habit of putting trust into something. It’s a belief when you trust that the sun is going to rise from the east tomorrow morning. We trust that gravity is going to pull us down, that’s belief. Belief is a repeated thought generated automatically and habitually. Belief is a habit of thinking the same thought over and over again for an extended period of time. A habit is a recurrent unconscious behavior acquired through frequent repetition. In other words, a frequent unconscious repetition of a thought is called a belief. Most repeated thoughts become subconscious because that’s how the mind works. The conscious mind needs space for new thoughts, it prefers to send thoughts that are trusted to the subconscious mind and unconscious memory banks. Hence belief, habit, and memory are the same thing. So, be careful of what or who you trust and believe.
Beliefs are powerful that determines our health and disease. In medical experiments, there is a phenomenon called placebo effect where a group of patients taking sugar pills believing to be real medicine gets cured simply because they believe. The proverb “seeing is believing” is mistaken, it should read “believing is seeing”. Because they believed, they got to see the effect of medicine. If you don’t believe, you cannot create memory, and if you don’t have memory, the thing doesn’t exist. Beliefs create memories and memories help us function in the world.
The good news is that believing in something is easy, it comes naturally to us. We are hardwired to trust and believe from birth. As an infant we trusted our mothers to take care of us but later in toddler years we learned to trust the fact that fire burns. Trust is blind. We are always trusting someone or something. Trust is a fact and fabric of life, without trust we cannot function. What matters is what we choose to trust in. If we choose to trust in the negativity, we will manifest more negative incidents in life according to the law of self-similarity. If we choose to trust in the positive, more positive things come into life. What we choose to trust in depends on what we believe and what we believe depends on how we define and the act of defining something is called programming. We can program our beliefs.