Dr. Buteyko’s Red Thread: Causal Reasoning and Civilization’s Fate

Once, a dreadful monster, half-human and half-animal, lived on the island of Crete. According to myth, the Minotaur resided in a skillfully constructed labyrinth that no one, including the Minotaur himself, had ever escaped from.

To keep this monster alive, the king of Crete made a deal with the king of Athens: Crete would not attack Athens as long as Athens sent young men and women each year to feed the Minotaur. Every year, the monster devoured these youths. This arrangement, though tragic, was accepted by society without question. The residents of Athens mourned each time they saw a ship with black sails heading to Crete, knowing none of the youths aboard would return.

One year, Theseus, the son of Athens’ ruler, joined the doomed group, determined to end the human sacrifices by killing the monster. No one believed he would succeed. Even if he managed to kill the Minotaur, they doubted he would find his way out of the maze. When Theseus arrived on the island, Princess Ariadne gave him a red thread to trace his path back. Theseus slew the beast and, using the red thread, escaped the labyrinth with the others.

This myth gave rise to the term “red thread,” symbolizing a core theme or throughline that can guide one to clarity and understanding.

2. The Red Thread in Dr. Buteyko’s Life

A red thread that ran through Konstantin Buteyko’s life was causal reasoning. His journey began early, as he examined biological organisms and man-made objects, seeking to understand how they worked. Growing up, he heard a Ukrainian proverb, “Everything has a reason; nothing happens without a reason.” This belief in causality permeated his life and influenced his revolutionary discoveries.

In 1952, the thread of casual reasoning led Dr. Buteyko away from the medical dogma to his revolutionary discovery about breathing, but it did not stop there. Continuing to follow the red thread, Dr. Buteyko made his way out of the maze of contemporary beliefs and entered unknown territories. Since he was practicing his breathing method, his consciousness kept expanding, allowing him to see above the walls. He kept making groundbreaking discoveries about dentistry, infections, sexuality, children, education, and religions; he even tried to define what God was. Various professionals criticized Dr. Buteyko for breaking out of his medical sector and challenging the established orders. Konstantin did not care – like Theseus, he was determined to save people.

3. Buteyko the Philosopher

In the 90s, Buteyko often introduced himself as a philosopher; he was absorbed into developing The Theory of Civilizations’ End. He examined the histories of lost cultures and used his outstanding analytical abilities to evaluate whether our civilization was doomed or not.

During the last decades of the 20th century, people were mostly concerned about the possibility of the 3rd world war as the main peril to our civilization. They were cognizant that our human race could come to an end due to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons use. To demonstrate that this supposition could become the world’s predicament, Dr. Buteyko used the story of Hiroshima. The distraction of this Japanese city by an atomic bomb was unprecedented because it aimed to destroy not only the lives of adversaries in this region but the life itself. This included women, children, elders, animals, insects, birds, vegetation, and whatever else we call alive.

4. The Cause of Our Collective Madness

To Dr. Buteyko, our collective behavior was analogous to a delusional drug addict; he predicted that it would result in intensifying sickness of people and ecosystems. He foresaw an upsurge of severe diseases, especially cancer, epidemics caused by new viruses, and natural disasters. Just as the human body is always trying to maintain its homeostasis, our planet’s body struggles to keep its balance. When a body is ill, sometimes intense symptoms are needed—whether it is a fiver or wildfire.

In Dr. Buteyko’s eyes, these two main perils were severe; however, unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider them primary. He believed they were only an outcome of another, more critical issue – our dysfunctional thinking. Dr. Buteyko concluded that our modern society has greatly lost its ability to see a link between a cause and its effect. This deterioration of causal reasoning laid a path to our collective madness, manifesting as a possibility of destroying ourselves and our planet. “If a mentally ill person is trying to kill himself,”- Dr. Buteyko explained, “It’s useless to dissuade him from committing suicide. This person needs to be helped, treated, and cured; however, to end his disease, we need to know its cause.”

5. The Importance of Healthy Breathing Patterns

As usual, in order to present a solution (in this case, the survival of our civilization), he needed to find a cause of the problem (our suicidal behavior). Konstantin was not afraid to face a monster. Looking beyond the conventional answers, he pointed out that over-breathing afflicted our whole culture. During the last decades of the 20th century, this malady was intensifying due to a comfort-based, individualistic lifestyle splashing from Western countries out into Russia and other territories. Clinical work conducted at the Buteyko Clinic demonstrated that excessive breathing could trigger schizophrenia in someone predisposed to this disease; as a physiologist, Dr. Buteyko saw that our collective over-breathing affected our collective abilities to reason.

There is nothing in our lives that is not impacted by breathing. Do you need proof? Just stop breathing for five minutes and see what happens to your whole life! Does breathing affect thinking? Of course! This correlation was crystal clear to many sages who taught that gentle breathing (often generated by meditation and simple natural living) was a foundation for a peaceful, balanced, and meaningful life. Dr. Buteyko described the other side: heavy, excessive breathing creates discontent, greed, and computer-like thinking when a person can function efficiently within a limited zone but is not capable of seeing the whole picture. For instance, a typical over-breather can succeed at advancing their career in a large corporation, but it’s unlikely that he will be concerned about our planet’s vitality. In short, over-breathing supports a self-centered approach when reduced air consumption is conducive to the motivation of benefiting all. Perhaps we can say that hyperventilation breeds minotaurs when reduced breathing births theseuses.

According to Dr. Buteyko, the ability to see a chain of cause and effect does not require education. Native Americans saw that the white man was on his way to destroying himself and possibly the planet. Why is this not clear to many well-educated business people and politicians? From a physiological perspective, it is partially due to the lifestyle difference. A natural way of living supports a normal concentration of CO2; on the contrary, the modern lifestyle rooted in comfort, sedentarism, excessive consumption, and separation from nature generates a CO2 deficit, eventually resulting in dysfunctional thinking. Over-breathing conditions our collective mindset, like the blinders on a horse’s eyes, narrow the vision: they help a horse undistractedly move to a specific direction, even if it leads to a slaughterhouse.

 

6. Reflections on Progress and Civilization’s Future

Ariadne’s thread led Dr. Buteyko to a question: could the current human condition be considered ‘progress’? He was puzzled because many spiritual leaders predicted Apocalypses when scientists ridiculed this idea, forecasting a bright time ahead. Why were these two visions of our future so different? Dr. Buteyko discovered that conventional scholars automatically saw the development of any civilization as ‘progress,’ typically ignoring the fact that, for some reason, many previous cultures perished. As always, Konstantin tried to bridge spirituality and science, the old and new. After thoroughly examining our civilization, the physician made his diagnosis: degradation. Undoubtedly, for Buteyko, our global society was regressing, possibly heading towards its extinction. By the way, Dr. Novozhilov shared with me that during Konstantin’s life, the average concentration of CO2 in people’s lungs was significantly higher than it is now, which means that collectively, we are losing our vitality. Did the red thread take Konstantin to the dead-end?

7. The Search for Solutions

Konstantin believed that causal reasoning would assist him in developing an antidote for our fatal disease of over-breathing. He saw the restoration of healthy breathing patterns as a turning point for establishing sanity and saving our civilization and environment. Gentle nasal respiration resulting in a normal CO2 concentration creates physical health and, emotionally, it tames aggression. On a mental level, it widens the consciousness, making the links between causes and their effects more obvious.

8. Success or Failure?

In 1993, Moscow hosted a World Congress of Philosophy with the theme “Humanity at a Critical Stage. Philosophical Perspectives”. Seeing himself as a philosopher, Dr. Buteyko could not miss this chance to share his perspective with world-leading scholars. Listening to the presenters, he was surprised that they had no concerns regarding the decline of our civilization. They mostly dug into things of the past, such as, for instance, Greek myths. Finally, Dr. Buteyko was called to the stage. The elderly man felt as excited as he did in 1952 when he, as a young doctor, was waiting for his supervisor to reveal his brand-new discovery. Back then and even now, he sincerely believed that his work could change the world!

“So, what was the audience’s reaction?”- I asked Ludmila Buteyko in 2009.

“Well, the scholars simply ignored the projections of the eccentric Russian doctor.”

We became silent, and then, a question slipped out of my mouth: “Has Konstantin fallen into the trap of convincing a schizophrenic not to kill himself?”

Ludmila did not reply.

Back to Greek myths… The Athens’ ruler was standing on a cliff watching Theseus’ ship approaching the kingdom. He squinted into the distance, trying to determine the color of the sails. His son promised him to put up white sails if he would be returning home alive. Bright sunlight was interfering with the king’s vision. What was the color? The ship slightly turned, and suddenly, he saw the sails: they were black. Celebrating Athens’ bright future, Theseus forgot about his promise. “My son became the monster’s prey!” With this thought, the king jumped into the sea and drowned.

I often wonder: was Theseus’ mission a victory or a failure? What do you think?