Page:Hatha yoga - or the yogi philosophy of physical well-being, with numberous excercises.djvu/63

Rh not been suspected by modern scientists, and which are not discernible by the tests of modern chemistry, although future investigators will scientifically prove their existence. Once liberated from the food, this food-prana flies to the nerves of the tongue, mouth and teeth, passing through the flesh and bone readily, and is rapidly conveyed to numerous storage-houses of the nervous system, from whence it is conveyed to all parts of the body, where it is used to furnish energy and "vitality" to the cells. This is a bare statement of the theory, the details of which we will endeavor to fill in as we proceed.

The student will probably wonder why it is necessary to extract this food-prana, as the air is heavily charged with Prana, and it may seem like a waste of effort on the part of Nature to use so much energy in order to extract the Prana from the food. But here is the explanation. Just as all electricity is electricity, so is all Prana simply Prana—but just as there are several forms of the electric current, manifesting widely different effects upon the human body, so are there several manifestations or forms of Prana, each of which performs certain work in the physical body, and all of which are needed for the different kinds of work. The Prana of the air fulfills certain offices; that of the water others, and that derived from the food still a third set of duties. To go into the minute details of the Yogi theory would be foreign to the purposes of this work, and we must rest content with the general statements here given. The main subject before us is the fact that the food contains food-prana, which the human body needs,