Re: The breathless state
I really don't know. That book is on the old shelf here next to me, and to be frank, yogananda is quite dear to me, I've read the recorded essays in numerous volumes of his recorded talks, and he is a real sweet heart if you ask me.
Now this breathless thing, it comes up a fair bit in the various Indian Yoga/Medtitation stuff. I don't doubt that it is possible, I understand the theory of it, and have been thinking/intuiting on that topic for several years, but have never met anyone that could do it.
I can lie down on the floor, and reduce my breathing down to two breaths in a minute, and from there, one breath in a minute, if I take my time, it is effortless and I found that out quite by accident before I ever read Yogananda's book. It is NOT holding the breath, but slowing down all your biorhythms and deeply relaxing your body until you are using less oxygen, like the opposite of running or jumping up and down.
However, this is NOT the breathless state, and certainly my heart is still beating. I do not know how to enter the state of suspended animation P.Y. talks about. It is odd that he RECOMMENDS it "to rest the physical heart" but does not give instructions.
Plenty of people are happy to teach all sorts of exotic techniques for high sums of money, How successful their Yoga is I don't know, but their money extraction method is most effective
Various Kriya Yoga message boards talk about some people who can do this, but it means nothing unless you can meet a teacher in person who can demonstrate AND teach it, everything else is just hearsay or mental speculation.
“Vision without action is daydream.
Action without vision is nightmare.”
—Japanese Proverb
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