# The Short Cut to Regeneration Through Fasting/Chapter 10

CHAPTER X
Exercises
Breath as Force–Muscle Tensing, with Fasting.
When we begin to fast, our first attention is to our flesh structure. We must tear down our old house of worn-out substances and gather new material for our new construction work. The body is always reconstructing itself but it is too slow a process to fit the whirlwind consciousness of the new Illuminatus.
Saint Paul said “I die daily” and this is true, but this death is in the form of a gradual change of which the individual is more or less unconscious; but with this new death of the flesh through fasting, the struggling cell consciousness must be helped out of its place by quick methods and these methods are breathing and muscle tensing.
Idle tissue atrophies, a breathless, airless blood stream putrefies and decays; while both together form a morgue for the half-dead ego man within the pulseless body.
As soon as a cell has outlived its usefulness, it should be cast out; as soon as air is thoroughly deoxygenized it should be exhaled from the body. There is no place in the true economy ​of normal flesh for waste material.
It is the retained refuse in the form of urea and carbon dioxide gas that prematurely ages the flesh, dulls the mind and causes the whole being to mature too rapidly.
There is no doubt but that at the root of all old age of the flesh there are seeds of carbon products, while fresh air, perfect breath control, exercise, a limited amount of pure food and muscle education, is the open secret of rejuvenation.
Air and Fire, or Breath and Vibration, which form the fuel of the flesh, are the most potent forces of the Illuminatus. The conscious breath, passed over the lips in a rhythmical breathing, becomes like a bellows igniting the dry cells waiting for the spark of higher energy. This increased vibration of the cell body and circulation starts a violent conflagration in the body and burns out, like dead leaves, the lingering waste products.
This conscious control of the breath, with fasting and muscle tensing, were the mysteries of the temples of Lemuria and Atlantis over thirty thousand years ago, and those who knew the law continued their lives thousands of years in youthful, free, healthy bodies.
Greece caught something of this mystery many thousand years later as it was repeopled with the incarnate egos of ancient civilizations and it became a world of artistic wounder.
Under the new method of exercise we conserve all our energies, yet have results the old ​methods never gave us. This new method is not alone the normal muscle function, but an almost abnormal action, brought about through tension and release. A muscle used and released will keep normal, an unused muscle atrophies and and an overused muscle hypertrophies. There is a normal use and disease which must be maintained of a weak, dying flesh body results.
In the life of our modern civilization the ordinary individual does not use more than two-thirds of his muscular system, nor does he use one-third of his lung space. A few important muscles are made to do all the work, the rest lie dormant or, at the best, try to urge themselves upon the attention through lameness, weakness or stiffness.
Our flesh body is our personality, and our personality is our presentation card; and by it the world reads the story of our death or our abundant life.
Not many people are really proud of their personality; we outgrow the states of mind that build it; and, when we have outgrown anything, nothing connected with it is as beautiful as our new desire.
The old world never knew that we could change our personality just as fast as we can change our desires and that when we have outgrown a situation or an idea, we can take off the old face and form which fitted them, and grow new ones just as easily as a lobster grows a new claw.
With fasting, breathing, thinking, tensing we ​take off the old food body, which has in it the lines of our past thinking and acting, and with our new wisdom, born from this higher revelation, we get out of Nature’s way and let her forces order for us a new outfitting, and this may be of any style or texture we decide. We are the highest expression of intelligence on this planet. It is for us to command–all the elemental minds of nature must take our orders, they cannot choose but obey.