Breath Cycles, Meaning in Thought and Confucius
May 15, 2025
8 min read
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Newsletter
{Body}
Breath as a matter of cycles
Every breath you take is part of a larger planetary breath.
Breathing is only different in its relative scale and time horizon. You come into the world with a deep, booming inhale. You cycle through countless inhales, holds, exhales and holds — riding the long wave of a single, contiguous tidal volume. And then you leave the world (hopefully) with a slow, content exhale.
Just as global and regional temperatures periodically oscillate, your breath patterns also fluctuate over the course of a second, minute, hour, day, month, year, and lifetime. Modern science has mapped many of these patterns through “chronobiology” — the study of biological rhythms and timing in living organisms.
For instance, we know your breath rate changes on a moment-by-moment basis with the synchronizing of your heart's electrical activity — increasing slightly on the inhale and decreasing slightly on the exhale. We also know that, over the course of a day, your breath quickens during morning cortisol peaks and slows during afternoon dips.
We also now understand that women's breath patterns shift with their monthly hormonal cycles, while men's follow a more predictable daily cadence. And that breathing changes with the seasons — on average faster and deeper in summer's heat, and shallower and slower in winter's cold.
Similarly, we can hypothesize that how you breathed as a 10 year old will differ from how you breathe as an 80 year old. Or that — all other things being equal — homo sapiens 200,000 years ago had slightly different circadian rhythm responses than we do today for no other reason than their relative location in the Milky Way.
Breaths are, in this way, contained within infinitely nested cycles. As you read these words, your breath rate is being shaped by what’s on your mind, where you are in your daily cycle, where that day falls in your monthly cycle, where that month sits in your yearly cycle, and so on.
{Mind}
Does a thought contain meaning?
Last week I posed two questions: (1) Do words and thoughts contain meaning like a .zip file contains .pdfs? Or (2) are thoughts just empty vessels that become meaningful only when filtered through a physical brain?
The answer: neither.
I’ll address the first question now, and the second next week.
Thoughts do not contain meaning — they are meaning.
This might sound confusing, but consider a simple analogy. Where is wetness stored in water? Clearly you're asking the wrong question. Wetness isn't contained in water — wetness IS what water is when experienced. They're effectively the same thing.
Similarly, meaning isn't packaged inside thoughts like files in a folder. Meaning IS what thoughts are when experienced. The very arising of a thought IS the emergence of meaning in consciousness.
Here's a better example: I ask you, "What does the color blue mean?" Notice what happens in your mind right now — maybe you see the sky, feel coolness or sadness, remember the ocean. Your friend, on the other hand, might experience tranquility, see a uniform, recall their childhood bedroom walls.
There's no "correct" answer to what blue means because the meaning of blue IS whatever arises in your consciousness while encountering "blue-ness." The meaning isn't some separate, objective definition stored elsewhere.
This applies to everything in experience. When you ask "What does this traffic jam mean?" the true answer isn't some story your mind constructs about being late or the universe conspiring for/against you. The meaning IS the immediate experience — the tightness in your chest, the thoughts of worry, and so on.
That's it.
Listen to this week’s audio to apply this in your meditation practice. Next week, we'll explore the second part of last week's question — why thoughts don't need a physical brain, and what this reveals about the nature of reality.
{Soul}
You claim to want to be better — wiser, stronger, more compassionate, more successful — yet vehemently resist the very circumstances that would bring this change about.
In what world do your muscles grow without stimulus? Why would your relationship be made indestructible during a honeymoon period? How could your worldview be sound without surviving the test of opposition?
You become the optimal version of yourself only by facing the challenges that your future self has already conquered; the trials you're avoiding aren't obstacles to your growth — they are your growth.
June 8, 2025
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