“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” — John H. Secondari
The flight Secondari speaks of can be compared to what Eckhart Tolle describes in the introduction to The Power of Now: a state of deep peace and joy, joined to a renewed, vivid perception of everything around us.
Anyone who has known this ‘flight’ understands it as a profound inner shift.
When the door opens to perceiving each thing with more light and beauty, we then awaken to the monotony we have been living, without even noticing.
And as Secondari suggests, once you have lived it, you will always long for new flights.
The span of a flight can vary, but without question, the first experience is the most remarkable, because everything in it is new.
A flight may begin – after a period of intense longing for illumination – through a sudden change in breathing. It quickens and deepens until, quite naturally, we arrive at a new inner state, without the inducement of any technique or substance.
In that moment, ordinary, merely pulmonary breathing – the kind that sustains our life within our nature order, where everything is perpetually changing and bound to duality – can give way to a subtler rhythm. This is magnetic breathing, a sign of realignment with an entirely different reality: a static reality. This reality is the original divine order, a sublime state governed by spiritual laws wholly different from those that rule ordinary life.
Magnetic breathing does not wholly belong to the physical state. It unfolds in the etheric body when a spark of consciousness begins to express a more static state. It is not just the in‑and‑out of air, but the absorption and circulation of living forces (prana, chi) that emanate from this higher order. It is as if the whole being begins to inhale a living current directly from a more real and enduring source, filling not only the lungs but the space between thoughts, awakening subtle centres.
While pulmonary breathing ties us to the cycle of birth, change, and death within this nature order, magnetic breathing signals the being’s reconnection with its true home in the static order. This is where the flight begins – not as an escape from the world, but as an entry into a more real and eternal dimension of existence.
Of course, there are surface similarities to altered states brought on by drugs. Even so, that path is misleading – unsustainable and risky. Drugs operate entirely within the spectrum of polarities of this nature order (pleasure/pain, euphoria/depression), creating an illusion of expansion that, in truth, binds us even more deeply to it.
Using substances to chase expanded states, creates illusory, fragile perceptions. They work from the outside in, never as a truly inner process of rebirth from the static order.
Hence the biblical warning:
“Truly, truly I say to you: whoever does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a robber.” — John 10:1
The “gate” is the path of genuine awakening that leads to the static order, while “climbing in by another way” is the attempt to force a spiritual experience using the expedients and forces of this nature order, such as drugs. As true spiritual teachers have long emphasized, purity of the vehicle – the body and the bloodstream – is a condition for this new life‑principle of the static order to manifest sustainably, moving us toward a lasting bond with what Secondari calls, ‘heaven’.
The aim, then, is to turn what were once only flights, into a new and enduring way of being – a rebirth through a transfiguration into the glorified body of the original divine order.
May we all make that shift.
