Prior to the triumph of scientific materialism in the nineteenth century, when people lived rather closer to nature, both physically and culturally, the idea of a life force was a universally held assumption. How else did the plants grow? How did all living things flourish and multiply? The sheer extravagance of life was obvious, even to the casual observer. Our planet is today somewhat damaged, yet still gloriously fertile and alive. The invention of the microscope and the discovery of microorganisms reinforced this view. Life appears everywhere, including the most unlikely places. Dirty pond water teems with life. It’s on the roof of my house in the form of moss and lichen. In prescientific cultures it’s still a “given”. When this belief comes as part of a non-western “package”, like yoga, cultural relativism enforces a scientific indulgence. Isn’t a bit disrespectful to attack or ridicule someone’s cultural standpoint? When it tries to creep into the scientific realm through the backdoor, the scientific establishment reacts with irrational fury, like an angry householder confronting a burglar. I hope to show that, far from being just a mystical or philosophical concept, prana is a tangible force that we can feel inside ourselves and in the right conditions, observe. We cannot yet measure it objectively, though we can measure its fluctuations outside the organism, whether human or otherwise. It has also been demonstrated in the laboratory and lecture room by means of a soft blue glow in a vacuum tube, well away from any possible electrical connections.
Jul 2011
What is Prana?
As late as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a lively scientific debate (which sometimes turned nasty) between the mechanists, who argued that the living was no different from the non-living, just more complex and the vitalists, who argued that the living was charged with a mysterious “something” (which they were then only able to identify rather hazily), which made the living fundamentally different from the non-living. Vitalists and their later scientific successors were often treated badly, and subject to professional ridicule and ostracism. Even today, researchers sometimes work in secret and publish under assumed names, a shocking reflection on the intolerance of the scientific “establishment”.
The word “prana” consists of two Sanskrit roots, pra=life and na=force or energy. Thus prana has come to be understood as not only “life force” but also “breath”. As we shall see, the two are synonymous from a yogic standpoint. It’s common knowledge that the lungs are a type of gas exchanger, absorbing oxygen, which enters the bloodstream, to be “burnt” by the body and expelling waste and unused gases, such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide. It’s a bit more complex than that, of course but the basic model suffices for this brief article. According to yoga theory (and in yoga, theory is always yoked to practice), that model is correct but incomplete. The theory postulated by the old yoga sages (and some later thinkers) is simply this. There exists a specific life force, which is everywhere, like an infinite ocean. All living things, including humans, are charged with prana. That is what distinguishes living from non-living things. In animals, including humans, it is absorbed into the body partly from the food we eat but mainly from our breathing. It then flows round the body with “hotspots” at places known as chakras. When the life force is depleted or blocked (usually by muscular tension), we become ill. Clearly, it is now easy to become simplistic. Other, more obvious causes of disease should be recognised, such as poor diet, infection and occupational hazard.
The name of the life force varies according to cultural origin. In traditional Chinese healing techniques such as acupuncture it is called “Chi”, in Japanese systems, “Ki”. In the 1940’s and 50’s the Austrian doctor and biophysicist Wilhelm Reich rediscovered the life force and called it “Orgone”. The scientific study of the orgone thus became “Orgonomy”. He built an “orgone energy accumulator” (often abbreviated to “orac”), which produced impressive experimental results in the treatment of cancer in mice and humans, then almost always a fatal illness. I have myself built and used a similar accumulator to successfully self-treat recurring tumours on my bladder lining. Reich’s crime, in the eyes of science, was to take the life-force concept out of the realms of philosophy and metaphysics and into the bright lights of the laboratory, where he felt it belonged. His work is still controversial but his successors, mostly unpaid and self-financed, have achieved accelerated plant germination and growth in objective, controlled experiments. This is significant. With human subjects, the sceptic can argue in favour of the placebo effect – in a nutshell, the power of suggestion. This claim is difficult to refute, though a sophisticated “double blind” experiment at the University of Marburg, Germany has demonstrated raised body temperature amongst volunteer subjects who did not know whether they were in a real or fake accumulator. The “fake” subjects experienced no rise in temperature. I have been able to reproduce exactly the same temperature rise, using myself as “laboratory rat”, though obviously not “double blind”. The familiar placebo objection breaks down when we experiment with plants, which have no intellect or imagination to influence.
All known energies such as heat, sound, light etc. can be found on the electromagnetic spectrum. This is not the case with the life force. As the scientific mind likes to keep things tidy and classified, this is another reason for denying its existence. However, there is no reason why it cannot be either a “parallel” energy or a type of primal energy, which splits into different, known energies in the same way that white light splits into different colours when it passes through a prism. Another possibility is that it is a “cocktail” of known energies, which is somehow conducive to life. These ideas are my own and rather speculative but the tangible reality of the life force is beyond doubt to any reasonably open minded person in good contact with nature and the nature within, which we call atman in yoga.
Yoga is widely touted as a “spiritual practice”. What do we mean by the word “spiritual”? It’s almost impossible to define but a belief in a “higher power” comes close. If that higher power in your view is called God, then prana is the Breath of God. If not, it is the force that animates all living things, including that strange species we call Homo Sapiens. There is some evidence that it can be moved and manipulated to a certain extent by the mind during meditative practice. Some meditators and healers claim to have accelerated the healing process by diverting prana to a diseased or injured part of the body. There have even been claims of tumours being dissolved this way. The art of spiritual healing seems to be an intuitive transfer of prana from one organism (the healer) to another (the patient). The healer acts as a kind of cosmic aerial. We have much to learn about prana but the potential, in terms of human knowledge and development is enormous.
