“It is no exaggeration to say that if even five minutes a day were spent in mental and physical breath control, a person’s whole life would be made anew. For, besides the physical atoms of the air, such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, there are literally thousands of different radiations playing through the atmosphere, some of them infinitely subtle and powerful, which come from planets far outside our solar system! These can, and should, be drawn upon by us in correct breathing, specialized through our endocrine glands, and used in our most vital thinking and creative activities.”

— Vera Stanley Alder

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter XV The Essential Science of Breathing

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Vera Stanley Alder50

British artist 1898–1984

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“Breathing is really a very complex activity. It does not only consist of taking in air, absorbing oxygen from it and letting it out again as carbonic acid gas! The breathing has a tremendous effect on the character, determining the mood, courage, strength of purpose, health and inspiration from day to day.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter XV The Essential Science of Breathing

“There have indeed been civilizations upon your planet that understood as well as you, and without your kind of technology, the workings of the planets, the positioning of the stars -- people who even foresaw "later" global changes. They used a mental physics. There were men before you who brought back data quite as "scientific" and pertinent. There were those who understood the "origin" of your solar system far better than you. Some of these civilizations did not need spaceships. Instead, highly trained men combining the abilities of dream-art scientists and mental physicists cooperated at journeys not only through time but through space.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume One, (1977), p. 196, Session 702

“Correct breathing also performs a constant massage of the internal organs by raising them up and down, thus curing constipation when it is caused by faulty insufficient breathing (as is often the case) which holds the muscles of the abdomen in a static position. Therefore the first thing to do is to make sure that you know how to breathe from the physical standpoint, and how to control the muscle of the diaphragm. This muscle forms the dividing line between the chest and the stomach just below the ribs. Place the fingers upon the diaphragm muscle just below the ribs and under the centre breast bone. In this arched hollow lies the muscle upon which correct breathing depends. Take a slow breath, drawing the muscle upwards and inwards, following its movement with the fingers, fill the lungs with air right up to the collarbones. Then breathe out slowly whilst tucking the diaphragm still further inwards and upwards!”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter XV The Essential Science of Breathing

“The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.”

William Kent Krueger book Ordinary Grace

Source: Ordinary Grace

“There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus… the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. …in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.”

Peter Kropotkin book The Conquest of Bread

Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 1 : Our Riches, p. 57

“And do not think that the oceans and the seas will protect us. The food that we cat, the water that we drink, yes, even the very air that we breathe can be contaminated by poisons originating from thousands of miles away. And it could be that, even if we ourselves escaped lightly, the unborn generations of our children would bear on their distorted bodies the marks of our failure to control the forces which have been released on the world.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

“What takes place within the structure of the leaf, then, with the aid of the wonderful green workmen, is this: A certain number of molecules of water, brought to the leaf from root and stem, are taken in hand and compounded with a certain number of molecules of carbon extracted from the air that has been brought into the leaf laboratory through its mouths or stomata from the outside atmosphere.
When the compound has been effected, we still have the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that composed the water molecules and the atoms of carbon, but they are so marvelously put together that they no longer constitute the liquid water or the gas in which the carbon was imported. They now constitute an altogether new substance which is termed sugar.
Thus only three elements are dealt with and these very familiar ones. It would seem as if almost any chemist should be able to manage a simple combination like that. But… no human chemist knows how to manage it. There are forces to be invoked in effecting that combination of which no chemist has any knowledge.
Only the chlorophyll grains in the plant leaf have learned the secret, and up to the present they have kept their secret well.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening

“Just as our soul, being air, constrains us, so breath and air envelops the whole kosmos.”

Anaximenes of Miletus (-585–-525 BC) Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher

DK 13B2

“General systems theory is a series of related definitions, assumptions, and postulates about all levels of systems from atomic particles through atoms, molecules, crystals, viruses, cells, organs, individuals, small groups, societies, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. General behavior systems theory is a subcategory of such theory, dealing with living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. A significant fact about living things is that they are open systems, with important inputs and outputs. Laws which apply to them differ from those applying to relatively closed systems.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Miller (1956) "General behavior systems theory and summary". In: Journal of Counseling Psychology. 3 (2) 120-124. Cited in: Francis Ferguson (1975) Architecture, cities and the systems approach. p. 12

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