In recent decades, western medicine, after experimentation, has come to recognise and use the health-giving and invigorating effects of what is called voluntary respiration. Yoga teaches and practises pranayama, ascribing to it indisputable educative, regulative and spiritual value. Wladimir Bischler, in Chapter 14 of The Forms and Techniques of Altruistic and Spiritual Growth, says that medical science has now reconciled itself to some of the methods borrowed from the orient and studied the multiple effects of correct voluntary respiration. He has detailed the multiple effects of it not merely on the lungs but on the whole metabolism of the human body. He has said that spire therapy, the name he gives to the method, opens new and broad horizons to medicine, to hygiene and to therapeutics. He has ended by saying that investigations of modern science have only confirmed the empirical intuitions of the oriental sages and philosophers.
Pranayama, as an essential ingredient of yogic discipline, might well bestow a number of benefits other than mental and spiritual. But the main aim of Yoga is self-realisation, communion of the self with the Self; the exercise of pranayama involves the control of the mind and of the whole of human consciousness, which is the basis of all cognition and awareness. A human being consists of his body, his life, including all biological activities, and his mind, which is the seat of what we call the ego - the ‘I’, and all cerebral activities centred round the ‘I’. The goal of Yoga is to empty the whole of one’s basic power of consciousness of all memory, ideation, sensual urges and desires and try to be aware of pure consciousness, as a spark of the cosmic energy itself, which is of the nature of the self-conscious principle of Supreme Intelligence. For a person who wants to tread the path of Yoga, his first effort will have to be to cease to identify himself with the body-life-mind complex completely and to look upon those three elements as tools for transcending the ego, in order to identify his inner being with the pure, unmixed powerof consciousness whose very nature is all-peace, harmony and creative joy.
