The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX called Pranayama. And thus it is that we find the Yogi saying that he who can control the Prana can control the Universe. To the perfect man there can be nothing in nature that is not under his control. If he orders the gods to come, they will come at his bidding. . . . All the forces of nature will obey him as his slaves, and when the ignorant see these powers of the Yogi, they call them miracles.* PRANAYAMA The two nerve currents Pingala and Ida correspond to the sensory and motor nerves, one is afferent and the other efferent. The one carries the sensations to the brain, whilst the other carries them back from the brain to the tissues of the body. The Yogi well knows that this is the ordinary process of consciousness, and from it he argues that, if only he can succeed in making the two currents, which are moving in opposite directions, move in one and the same direction, by means of guiding them through the Sushumné, he will thus be able to attain a state of consciousness as different from the normal state as a fourth dimensional world would be from a third. Swami Vivekdnanda explains this as follows: Suppose this table moves, that the molecules which compose this table are moving in different directions; if they are all made to move in the same direc- tion it will be electricity. Electric motion is when the molecules all move in the same direction. . . . When all the motions of the body have become perfectly rhythmical, the body has, as it were, become a gigantic battery of will. This tremendous will is exactly what the Yogi wants.t And the conquest of the will is the beginning and end of Pranayama. * Raja-Yoga, “ Vivekananda,” p. 23. See Eliphas Levi’s “The Dogma and Ritual of Magic,” pp. 121, 158, 192, and Huxley’s “Essay on Hume,” p. 155. + Raja-Yoga, “ Vivekananda,” pp. 36, 37- 98