I had a bit of a joke post about breath being more important than god some time ago but now reading the Upanishads there is a clear link between the holy spirit, air and the reason that the holy spirit can not be tainted.
The reasoning in the text is of how sight may be tainted (by the mind basically) to form good and bad sights, so too sound, so too smell, taste and so on. Breath however is untainted, being both useful on in and out and never having a quality good and bad attached to it (unlike smell, taste, sight, touch, sound) - The sacred spoken tone of Om is this resonant purity and (although translated to English using English terminology) there is a strong feeling that this is the holy spirit, breath itself.
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Additionally if they were all tripping on Soma and the sights, sounds and so on could lead to dualistic good and bad trips, then perhaps this holiest of holy syllables, Om, was a way of getting a level.
Spirit is related to breathing, of course: Respire, inspire, expire... In many languages they are the same word (Latin, Hebrew, Greek, etc).
ReplyDeleteGood post, though. Never thought about it that way. Ever taken a "bad breath"?