Lupelius - The School for Gods

to Lupelius, this achievement is physical. The body is the most visible part of the being. Theintegrity of the being is a victory that takes place in our cells.There is no war as holy as that in which one ‘conquers oneself’, no greater victory than exceedingone’s own limits. Integrity is the healing of the being. It requires overthrowing age‐old beliefs,transforming negative emotions and destructive thoughts, achieving self‐mastery and control of one’seating, sleeping and breathing…Studying this and other passages of ‘The School for Gods’, I perceived the nature of theexperiments that Lupelius and those around him were conducting, in that glowing laboratorythat was his School in Ireland one thousand years ago. There his warrior‐acolytes trainedthemselves to master sleep and food, reducing their reliance on them day by day ‐ afundamental part in their training to become invulnerable and immortal.According to Lupelius, sleep was a bad surrogate for breathing, a contrivance that the bodyhad devised, to free itself, if only for a few hours, from insufficient and inefficient breathing.As I delved even further into Lupelius’s thinking I realised that nothing is as close to us, andat the same time as mysterious and unknown, as our breathing. We are creatures living at thebottom of an ocean of air. And although we are submerged in this element and every squarecentimetre of our body is under pressure from this ethereal ocean, we still absorb aninsufficient quantity of oxygen into our lungs. Lupelius made the astonishing discovery thatthe amount of air we all breathe in is many tens of times less than we actually need.In his manuscript he examined and accurately described this condition of near suffocationto which man has been reduced, referring to it as ‘underbreathing’.The consequence of this strange phenomenon is that, according to Lupelius, there are vitalparts of our organism that do not receive an adequate supply of oxygen and are undernourished. Anticipating by many hundreds of years the discovery of the importance ofrespiration in catabolism and organ regeneration, Lupelius concluded that mankind wasseriously polluted. He considered that it was necessary for a man to dedicate several hours aday to breathing fully, deeply and completely, and he predicted that one day every school,organization and community would teach breathing techniques as a way of training people totake in the much greater quantities of oxygen that the body really needs.I noted with regret that, ten centuries later, that prophecy was still far from being realisedand that man continued to ‘underbreathe’ unperturbed, behaving as if oxygen were subject toheavy taxes or counted amongst the rarest and most costly commodities in the universe.According to Lupelius, deep breathing cannot be done mechanically but only through aneffort of will. From him I learned that the destiny of a man is linked to his breathing by adouble thread.The more deeply a man breathes, the richer his reality…If you want to change your destiny, work onyour breathing….dedicate time to breathing.30