He concluded his post with a kind of desperate plea to his readers, with the hope of compiling a ‘best of’ red pilling methodology. He asked us if we’ve had success at red-pilling people and if so, what was our ’secret’. Paraphrased, he wants to learn from us "What are the best ways to red-pill someone?"
I wrote an answer to Kirsch’s query that began as a comment and grew into an essay. It is a long version of Kate’s great summary she included in her query: ‘Yogic calmness’.
In response to my essay Kate astutely observed that if all it takes is yogic calmness to red-pill the convid deniers, why aren’t the yoga leaders leading the fight against all things convid. And those things include the mask delusion, shunning, cancelling, denying truth, rupturing families, destroying trust, forced dis-employment, bankrupting small businesses, all of which were morally justified fomented hysteria, panic and the beginnings of mass formation. (My paraphrase of her question.)
After reading Kate asked:
Thanks for that, Guy. One thought, regarding the need for people to become more calm/yogic in order to be free from fear and the mainstream narrative. While I agree that this is important, how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios (so to speak)? Not to mention the Dalai Lama promoting the poke. I'm not challenging the essence of your perspective, just curious about what you think about this part of it.
My response. Great question, Kate!
My partner and I have wondered about and talked about this a great deal, even before the convid got going. Our 'initiation' into 'real' yoga was through the Art of Living Foundation and with many of the people we encountered there, they seemed to not quite live yoga, as we understood it to mean — that ‘yogic calmness’ for example. We had both taken their initial and perhaps signature course, the ‘Art of Happiness’, now called ‘Happiness Program’, at different times and places for each of us. The AoL is huge, although mostly unheard of in North America. I think that at its roots it is a very good organisation. Both Yoshiko and I experienced a giant leap forward towards happiness and yogic calmness with the course. And we both considered that course to be a beginning step into ‘real’ yoga, not a terminus.
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Regarding the convid it is clear, on hindsight that the founder, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, knew it was a scam. And for, presumably political reasons, neither endorsed nor eschewed the injection. Instead he emphatically advocated that the so-called covid was not a threat to healthy people. He repeatedly said that being healthy will keep you safe, the covid isn’t dangerous, please eat cumin and black pepper, keep a good diet and keep up you yogic practices all of which will keep you strong and safe. There is no need to be afraid, and remain equanimous. He did not explicitly tell people to refuse the injection nor to take it, unlike many other so-called spiritual leaders, including the Dalai Lama.
The people of the Art of Living Canada remained calm and equanimous and did their best to stop the hysteria from becoming mass formation and helped to keep people calm! Right?! Not at all. As close to the opposite of that as can be imagined. They put on the mask of calmness over their panic and likely made the situation worse by being in denial of their anxiety because they were practicing yoga and Shankar’s Sudarshan Kriya. Well, that was the official stance and practices from the executive downward. I know of three ‘regulars’ who opposed the shunning practices. The one open, vocal and forceful and has been completely shunned and removed from AoL Canada. The other keeps quiet most of the time, although gently raises strong questions in such a way as to not get locked out. The other says nothing. And I know someone who was seriously injured by the injection and who also says nothing.
So, the executive accomplished its goal of near 100% injection compliance and critical silence in ASo, the executive accomplished its goal of near 100% injection compliance and critical silence in AoL Canada. And they do not see that that is tyranny! And in doing so have violated their own AoL all inclusiveness code by having censured and excommunicated people who openly and strongly questioned the convid narrative. I had, at one point, a highly respected teacher discontinue talking to me with ‘You are too toxic for me to talk to!’ We haven’t communicated since. (I don't know about other branches or areas of the AoL.) Eventually, some time after the peak hysteria had passed and face-to-face meetings became officially authorised again — so-called ‘normal’ had returned at last with the tyrannical authorities giving their official approval for people to meet‘normally’ — they began to organise with a lot of fanfare for at long last face-to-face meetings. For only the injected. My friend, the gentle critic I mentioned above who had the courage to speak albeit very carefully, spoke softly and with a great deal of power she stuck it to them, their hypocrisy. She protested their planned meeting by pointing out the hypocrisy of being 100% inclusive while at the same time excluding some people. The result was that the longed for face-to-face reunions were deferred to a later date in order to respect inclusivity at the expense of the ‘good’ people who truly wanted to keep everyone one safe. They stood strong as the true humanitarians who took the injection for the good of us, who moralistically virtue signalled that they had indeed taken another jab in the chin to accommodate with spiritual brownie points the evil toxic ones, the undeserving, the uninjected. That last bit is a bit of an exaggeration, of course, although it does capture the unspoken part, the hidden values being expressed by the actions they did in fact take.
Why?
The Japanese have a great word I like to use: 'modoki', which means not real despite the appearance of being real. (‘Shibboleth’ might be the closest English word in meaning to ‘modoki’.) So, yogi / yogini modoki: they aren't really centred, haven’t expressed real equanimity in the face of challenge which is easily seen by what they did, how they did it and with the quality of the words they used to help accomplish their actions. Now that is a strong statement to make against someone like the Dalai Lama, for example, of course! I didn't know at the time that I wrote my response to Kirsch’s plea that the Dalai Lama had also endorsed the injection of unknown chemicals. Too funny. (Although I have always found something distasteful about his approach, so maybe he is modoki too, despite or because of all the hype around him. And, despite all that hype, or maybe in part because of it, I’ve not even picked up one of his many books to read. Later on I saw him publicly tongue kiss a young boy at an official function! That gave me the heebie-jeebies.)
In 2016 I attended a two day Vancouver workshop with Shankar as the key teacher on day two. That was a very rare event and so had everyone of the executive and senior teachers very excited. Of all the 'wisdom' Shankar shared in his time I clearly remember only one thing he said: he directed everyone to be calm and centred, ‘to be equanimous’. He likes that word, equanimous, and repeated it many many times. And from the experience I also remember most clearly why Shankar repeated ‘be equanimous’ so many many times. It was because, throughout the two hour session, and in the time leading up to it and winding down from it, the AoL Canada people and the senior and junior teachers, and most of the participants, were jumping around in his presence like Mexican jumping beans on speed. They were absolutely 100% not calm, not centred and the opposite of equanimous. And, I suspect, that they were unable to hear or comprehend anything that he was saying, especially that the phrase ‘be equanimous’ was directed to the senior people and teachers. And the class was, in my experience and confirmed in conversations later with other more equanimous participants, pretty much a waste of the ostensible purpose of it, which was for new people to experience the power of Sudarshan Kriya as lead by its creator, Shankar, to create equanimity.
Most of these people, especially the teachers, have taken on the responsibility of maintaining a daily or near daily yoga practice with pranayama. Added to that is the expectation of at least one extended silence retreat per year. And yet they had gone crazy with him there and, by their own stories, had gone crazy everywhere and every time they were close to him or thought that they might get close to him. I was fascinated and remember little else from that two day experience. And, by synchronicity, while I was writing this Shankar announced travel to Canada and the following meme was shared in the group’s WhatsApp:
AoL Canada teachers rejoicing in being without equanimity. Music: Kate Bush — The Kick Inside.
Why?
The people who I met doing Shankar’s yogic practices were largely middle class professionals. These people have, typically, something in common with the people who fled the martian invasion of New York in the 1930s: middle class professionals with a significant amount of university schooling. In a communication course I learned that the working class people who listened to Orson Well’s Mercury Theatre invasion broadcast didn’t panic and flee the destruction of the city!
It was the professionals who read and listened to the news and trusted it, trusted the news more than their senses. And Welles’ did such a good job of the fake newscast that people fled the burning city without even the smell of smoke in the air! So, the AoL people are of a similar class: those of the well indoctrinated by news people who trust the words of news or government pronouncements more than what their senses are showing and telling them. That might be one of the best definitions of being without equanimity.
Why?
Yoga is a perfect vehicle to hide one's self from one’s Self because it provides an immediate allopathic-like palliative to anxiety. In my practice and life experience I discovered that yoga and meditation are often not enough to heal our trauma and so yoga can easily become an addictive drug no different than alcohol, sex, money, prescriptions or power. Except that it looks way better, often with immediate physical, emotional and psychological benefits that seem to be healthier than those that the 'bad' drugs provide. Shankar is a man of science and so has initiated and paid for independent scientific studies that have confirmed its efficacy to change one’s health to the better as advertised.
Some of the Measured Benefits of Sudarshan Kriya. Music: Apparat — A Bang in the Void.
"If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him” So You Can More Easily Remember Who You Are
Have you heard the caution / koan "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Why kill him? The non-koan part of this koan is straightforward: because his energy / power can easily overwhelm our own. And that feeling of experiencing his integrity cries out to us to accept what is an accidentally imposed feeling of a selflessness that came from outside of our own self info our mind full of self.
Really, who am I? Is it even possible to know that I’m not the Buddha? Music: Caravan Palace — Reverse and Paul Borg and Sandor Jozsa — The Devil in Disguise.
And this kind of energy is a super powerful ‘drug’ that can quickly and easily and joyfully siren-like become the easy choice of losing our self into this life-energy and to mistake it for our own. It is a significant reason why cults are popular and seem to have an endless supply of leaders and followers. And also why some do not see a significant difference between a ‘true’ guru looking to free his/her disciples, and a cult-leader looking to narcissistically feed off of his/her adherents. In both cases, the temptation of the disciples or adherents is to take the lazy path and to choose, effectively, to be taken away from being truly grounded within their own true self by grounding themselves through someone else’s self. That creates an even bigger disconnect from our bodies, the earth and its interdependency than before that experience. For example, in my relatively early days of recovery from co-dependency through yoga, I listened to many yoga teachers confessing their multi-year even decades long addictive behaviours with food, wine and especially cannabis.
It is likely that many, perhaps even most, people who practice yoga are not actually truly centred and calm. They are equanimous-modoki, and this became crystal clear in the time of the convid. Of course they want to be equanimous in mind-body-spirit, which is often why they started yoga in the first place. And more often than not after a while they are able to look that way: yoga-modoki. A friend here has said to me that he is very skeptical about yoga because he knows a very popular yoga teacher here whose life and energy is not at all that of yogic peace. Yes, the practitioners will step up to do seva projects, sit and breathe and do yoga with the expectation that all this good work will transform them! This is another great trap of yoga that can, for the more discerning, lead to a problematic yoga question. Something like this: since I do yoga and, since I have been told and mindfully understand that when I do it and sevawithout expectation, why hasn’t my expectation of reaching some form of promised equanimity been realised? After all, I am sincere and do my practices everyday! This is a truly beautiful truth-trap: the expectation that change occurs when I remove expectation of change occurring! LoL! Tricky.
Who here has ignored that tiny voice that has prodded us towards or cautioned us against this or that action or direction? [Hands up! Headshake. Yup, LoL!! Me.] And so that quiet voice often goes muted or ignored in a yoga practice. I experienced several pretty serious physical injuries by not listening to that voice, including me tearing the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my left knee because I was doing the right thing! And since that is a clear example of how I completely disregarded even the tangible reality of my body’s language, how much easier has it been for me to ignore that softer voice, often wordless, that is likewise suggesting to me to do, or warning me against doing, this or that?
Buddhist Yogi teacher scholar Michael Stone gives a pointed and, at the same time, humorous observation on that inherent laziness of our self, what Stone calls the ego in this case, to stuff our ears and blinker our eyes. My expanded paraphrase from his quotation:
After six or so years of dedicated yogic practice, the practice will ask the yogi / yogini to take the next step, which is usually a significant renunciation of an important part of his / her life. That awareness of that demand for significant change often triggers the ego who, with consummate skill from lots of practice, moves to distracts the yogi / yogini into doing something else that is more important, something deeper and esoteric that will mask from him/her the failure to have the courage to make that significant change. And so the change taken is false and is often accompanied by the death of humour and the arising of moralistic expertise on that obscure aspect of yoga (~56:30,’Best of Awake in the World’ podcast: In That Lump Of Flesh And Bones (or in SoundCloud) significantly paraphrased / edited by me.)
IIt is the avid practice of a distracted mind, one that has been well trained / enculturated by school and society, to seek distraction, to hide from, or even run away from, that tiny voice that is calling to us that we are in the wrong boat or that that boat which had once saved our lives is now no longer saving us, that it is now hindering or even crippling us. ‘I spent my life climbing a ladder, to learn that I’d put it against the wrong wall.’ Psychologically and emotionally what are often really daunting acts are to begin to question the existence of the that boat and/or ladder. Then once seen, do we have the courage to question their importance and their significant presence in our lives? Have we been walking or scrabbling up the wrong ladder, scrambling in ignorance to be present only within our saviour’s wisdom while ignoring our own wisdom that whispers to us our individuated path? To ask the question, ‘To what extent has my indoctrinated distraction-mind found in yoga the perfect distraction?’ can be an unthinkable question to ask. Which is much like the addict who is denying their addiction before bottoming out. With yoga, though, what might that addictive bottom look like?
A Hand Written Copy of the Pali Canaon. Music: Caravan Palace — Mirrors.
What is the addictive draw of yoga? Postures and breath are the common ones that have been given the gloss of being the path to transcendence, and that transcendence is to get the key, the final escape in a vague future from the suffering that inheres this physical life in the here and now. That idea is often, although not solely, considered to be the ‘natural’ extension of ‘proper’ karmic practices through reincarnation. Reincarnation is a core construct within Hindu and most of official Buddhism. For me it has been an interesting discovery that Buddhist teachings miscast what Gautama Buddha said and taught about reincarnation. From the Pali Canoncan be read that Gautama Buddha officially negated active engagement with this idea as a ‘spiritual’ concept because from it a practice is created that forms a spiritual bypass that encourages rather than ameliorates suffering in this present moment. I read between the lines that reducing suffering doesn’t happen unless we are present! Yogi Buddhist teacher scholar Michael Stone engaged these ideas in his podcast ‘What Are You Going to Do with What You’ve Got’ or listen to it on SoundCloud, ~14:00. He references the Pali Canon text Saṁyutta Nikāya: Connected Discourses on Feeling 36.21; Sivaka”.)
The expectation that the experience of non-suffering is beyond life is to exacerbate suffering this life. And that mindset and practice keeps the goal of peace as a kind of mirage we like to talk about. Most people who practice yoga do not have the centred equanimity to see what is true for them and hence they are easily tripped up by false appearances within their version of yoga-world and from that the world in general. The gloss of yogic calmness often exacerbates avidyà. So a yogic bottom can be as Stone described, humourlessness expertise and/or a kind of withdrawal from life.
It is only when we have the courage to face our life exactly as it is, without any sort of self deception or illusion, that the light will develop out of the events of our lives that the path to our individuated success can be realised and made manifest.’ (My adaptation from I Ching #5 Hsu / Waiting (Nourishment) tr. by Baynes/Wilhelm.)
Is this up or down, right or left? Everyone knows, surely, Mr. Plato, that in truth is the manufacture of
My Awareness. Maybe?
I became aware of this very quickly in my own practice watching the AoL senior teachers behaving like children in a candy shop with their guru! Yoshiko found it appalling and refused to have anything to do with AoL, even though her life changed in a significant way for the better from the breathing practice she learned from them. "How could Shankar allow this to continue?" she would criticise. I would answer that I'm sure he doesn't want it to, and is aware of it. And that he is faced with the same problem we are: how do you wake up people who have concluded with sure finality that they already have the truth? They took one intensive and after that they could sleep again for the first time in years, their digestion improved, pains of the mind and body ameliorated and life wasn’t so hard. These people have met their Buddha (another form or Fauci or whoever) and lost themselves. And the issue is the same: how do you tell them that their truth is wrong, especially when for most of them they have seen huge improvements in their physical, emotional and psychological health with breath and postures having so elegantly replaced their past drugs of alcohol, narcotics, negative thinking or whatever?
The ‘mass formation’ psychologist who gained prominence and perhaps pariah status early in the convid,Mattias Desmet breaks down the members of society as being: asleep, quasi asleep and awake as roughly 30/40/30 percent. I'd love to see how that breaks down within large yoga communities. And within those communities, I anticipate the asleep will be very asleep by seeing how in large numbers they reacted to the convid in lockstep with the mostly asleep as observed by Kate. (And a Buddhist contacted me, with the observation: her temple was closed, masks required, and she wasn’t welcomed.)
Yoshiko and I have been practicing yoga and addiction recovery (from co-dependency) with Tommy Rosen, who has connected the dots between recovery from addiction and yoga in a truly amazing way and who presents that extremely well at his recovery centre, Recovery 2.0. When covid got started he shared with us his great shock and dismay at how so many of his great yoga compatriots had gone to sleep with the narrative. We watched him share his disbelief and sadness that so many important and lifelong friends and high level yoga coaches distanced themselves from him. And he, like me, discusses in places how yoga can become a drug like any other drug: a distraction from and by-pass around that base level of anxiety that Rosen has described as being in a spiritual frequency of addiction.
Buddha and Standing Art Found in Spain. Within which house of truth are we happily ensconced? Music: Caravan Palace — Comics.
And an Antepenultimate Note
It has been in the time of the convid that I have found how true is the Buddha's first requirement: to see clearly with, "Right Understanding or Right View". And that that importance is echoed by Patañjali in The Yoga Sutras with the his having put right seeing as the first of the five keys to begin the removal of suffering, the five kleshas. (Number one is avidyà, although often translated as ‘ignorance’, that misses the mark. A-Vidyà ‘a’ meaning not and vidyà meaning seeing; so a-vidyà is to not see accurately, to not see what is true as true and/or to not see what is false as false in tangible reality and experience. The whole ‘what is a woman?’ ludicrousness of our time being an example, perhaps even an epitome, of that. Although the Welles’ broadcast of panicked people fleeing a city being destroyed without any physical evidence of that destruction ranks in there too.) In recent months I have come to see that without avidyà the other four kleshas wouldn’t exist: raga, attachment to pleasure; dvesa, attachment to avoiding displeasure; asmita, singular fixation on our own true stories of ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘my’; abhinivesa, attachment to the continuation of our stories of ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘my’, often translated as ‘fear of death.’)
Seeing Clearly we See Synchronicities
How is it we are to see clearly, and know that we are in fact seeing with vidyà, right seeing and with that right understanding? An amazingly difficult challenge for most of us who are fully educated (indoctrinated) people stuck in our mind-brain's need for absolute truths so long as those truths are disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our communities and disconnected from the earth. Thus we can deny the differences between men and women and/or find people who believe that men can get pregnant.
And of course, the answers I gave to Steve’s and Kate’s questions manage to bypass a challenging impediment: how do we any of us know we are awake,I mean really awake? How do we know we aren’t asleep still, that we have with absolute confidence mistakenly trusted as true something that is false? This is a slight paraphrase of Patajñjalis avidyà. The answer comes, in my experience, with the quality and direction of the synchronicities we get: synchronicities are the connections between intuition, appropriate eccentric actions and interactions with the world and our selves. The overlaps and ‘guidance’ we get from our small voice and our shared synchronicities with the real world of people, places and us will point to where we are still asleep and where we are in the process of waking up more fully.
And so that is a common shadow side of yoga and why it is very often a sweet sweet path into spiritual bypass.
And a Request for Help
In July of 2024 I had unexpected pacemaker surgery that cleaned out my savings.
I requested donations to help me through the pinch. I anticipate that my immediate threat of insolvency will be cleared before the end of the year.
I updated this November 5th, 2024. If you come to this essay before January 1, 2025, and you are in position to help and would like to, you can check out the details of that in the link in the post. Once my yoga based trauma recovery centre is given the green light with confirmation of my residency, I anticipate the need for immediate financial help will disappear. As the situation changes I will update my requirements. At this time, I’m about 1/3 of what I anticipate is required. So if you are curious and would like to help me, please consider my request for donations and give an amount, if you are called to do so, that gives you joy. I appreciate and am grateful for considering me.
"yoga and meditation are often not enough to heal our trauma"
Thank you for saying this. If someone wants to do those things, and it helps them a little, they should do so. But I've seen numerous talk therapists and psychiatric treatment centers embrace "mindfulness" as a cure, and they have it dominate the limited time they have to work with emotionally-wounded people.
As a result those clients are unhealed and become completely discouraged.
Yes. Our most beloved therapies come from a tradition of head not body. They will talk about the body and think that words are enough. Our society wants to look at what is life by killing it and then doing autopsies. And do not see how inane that is. Talk therapy and yoga can be like that: palliatives that often cut us off from the truth of who we are, shadow and light, ease and dis-ease.
I loved the Constructive Living Therapy by David K. Reynolds. The biggest challenge he faced with clients was to get them to do the physical and emotional exercises because most believed that reading about them was good enough.
The yogi-Buddhist teacher and scholar, Micheal Stone, talked about his plateau after 7 years. He despaired that he had wasted 7 years. Then he came to someone who showed him that Yoga was not a mind practice. It was an exercise to develop powerful engagement in the 'real' world through the integration of mind/body/spirit. Yoga is so easily confused as a body exercise, disengaged from the mind and designed for the mat.
My partner and I were talking about that too as it relates to our finding an 'unconventional' teacher. If we met him a few years ago his approach would have been good and the depth of what he is actually teaching lost to us. We wouldn't have been ready for him then.
Stone makes the observation that at about 6-10 years the dedicated yoga practitioner will be faced with the realization of what yoga is really asking them to *renounce* [strikethrough] embrace. They freak and back off. Then focus on becoming a specialist in some often obscure aspect of yoga and lose their sense of humour. :-D And so true.
Thank you. As noted, my partner and I noticed that this group of senior yoga teachers were not *yogis* because they were besotted with being in *their* gurus presence. It wasn't a big surprise that they 'went' mostly to sleep because they were *already* asleep.
Their guru could not wake them up. LoL.
In yoga there is an axiom: problems created by the mind cannot be solved at the level of the mind. It is the breath that brings the mind under control, like the string which controls the kite. I add to that, "and without the string, the kite does not fly."
It really is a fascinating time we are living in. The truth of our collective inattention and distracting and, in a way, laziness, with respect to our social practices of the last few hundred years, perhaps more, has now made itself known. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
![Q: 'I agree that [yogic calmness] is important, so how do we account for all the yoga teachers who fly Ukraine flags and require masks in their studios?' — Audio](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F151307402%2F6ff5e93c-9396-4d86-97c2-56d33c091334%2Ftranscoded-1730953510.png)
"yoga and meditation are often not enough to heal our trauma"
Thank you for saying this. If someone wants to do those things, and it helps them a little, they should do so. But I've seen numerous talk therapists and psychiatric treatment centers embrace "mindfulness" as a cure, and they have it dominate the limited time they have to work with emotionally-wounded people.
As a result those clients are unhealed and become completely discouraged.
Yes. Our most beloved therapies come from a tradition of head not body. They will talk about the body and think that words are enough. Our society wants to look at what is life by killing it and then doing autopsies. And do not see how inane that is. Talk therapy and yoga can be like that: palliatives that often cut us off from the truth of who we are, shadow and light, ease and dis-ease.
I loved the Constructive Living Therapy by David K. Reynolds. The biggest challenge he faced with clients was to get them to do the physical and emotional exercises because most believed that reading about them was good enough.
Yes. Well said and thank you for the comment.
The yogi-Buddhist teacher and scholar, Micheal Stone, talked about his plateau after 7 years. He despaired that he had wasted 7 years. Then he came to someone who showed him that Yoga was not a mind practice. It was an exercise to develop powerful engagement in the 'real' world through the integration of mind/body/spirit. Yoga is so easily confused as a body exercise, disengaged from the mind and designed for the mat.
Yes.
My partner and I were talking about that too as it relates to our finding an 'unconventional' teacher. If we met him a few years ago his approach would have been good and the depth of what he is actually teaching lost to us. We wouldn't have been ready for him then.
Stone makes the observation that at about 6-10 years the dedicated yoga practitioner will be faced with the realization of what yoga is really asking them to *renounce* [strikethrough] embrace. They freak and back off. Then focus on becoming a specialist in some often obscure aspect of yoga and lose their sense of humour. :-D And so true.
LOL! Yes. Great point. Edit done.
Wonderfully insightful article, Guy. Thank you.
Thank you. As noted, my partner and I noticed that this group of senior yoga teachers were not *yogis* because they were besotted with being in *their* gurus presence. It wasn't a big surprise that they 'went' mostly to sleep because they were *already* asleep.
Their guru could not wake them up. LoL.
In yoga there is an axiom: problems created by the mind cannot be solved at the level of the mind. It is the breath that brings the mind under control, like the string which controls the kite. I add to that, "and without the string, the kite does not fly."
It really is a fascinating time we are living in. The truth of our collective inattention and distracting and, in a way, laziness, with respect to our social practices of the last few hundred years, perhaps more, has now made itself known. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.