Page:Hatha yoga - or the yogi philosophy of physical well-being, with numberous excercises.djvu/224

224 were. Electricity is everything, but still dynamos and like centres are necessary to gather it up and send it out in concentrated form. A constant current of Prana is maintained between the sun and its several planets.

It is generally taken for granted (and modern science does not dispute it) that the sun is a mass of seething fire—a sort of fiery furnace, and that the light and heat which we receive are the emanations from this great furnace. But the Yogi philosophers have always held differently. They teach that although the consti­tution of the sun, or rather the conditions prevailing there, are so different from those prevailing here that the human mind would have much difficulty in forming an intelligent conception of them, still it is not literally a mass of matter in combustion, just as a blazing ball of burning coal would be—nor is it as a ball of molten iron. Neither of these conceptions are accepted by the Yogi teachers. They hold, on the contrary, that the sun is composed largely of certain substances very simi­lar to the newly discovered substance known as "radium." They do not say that the sun is composed of radium, but have held for many centuries that it is composed of numerous substances, or forms of matter, having properties similar to those observed to exist in that substance which the Western world is just now thinking so much about, and which its discoverers have termed radium. We are not attempting to describe or explain radium, but are merely stating that it seems to possess certain qualities and properties which the Yogis teach are possessed in varying degrees by the several