Energy is continually wasted in useless activities, unrestrained emotions, and improper living habits. When you are at peace you use little energy, but when you are angry or hateful or otherwise emotional, you use a great deal of energy. Proper care is necessary in operating a delicate machine; the same consideration ought to apply in using the body-machine.
When you work you employ your muscles, nervous system, mind, thoughts, feelings, and spiritual perceptions. Currents of energy are required in all these areas in any kind of work. When you are running you are using about four or five horsepower of energy. If by removal of gravity you no longer felt the weight of your body, you would use very little energy in running. The greater the body weight, the greater energy required to move it. A very practical reason to avoid overweight!
The battery of an electric wheelchair will move the weight of the chair and its occupant about fifteen miles before its energy is exhausted. Did you ever stop to think that your body-battery is wheeling this physical vehicle around all the time? Its energy powers not only the muscular motion of the limbs, but all other actions as well. When you are talking, for example, you are using thought force as well as muscular force and thought requires energy. Without it you cannot think or transmit thoughts into speech. When you are thinking deeply you burn up a tremendous amount of energy, exhausting the brain’s reserves. Let us suppose you have sixty thoughts per minute. In a month, allowing eighteen hours of wakefulness daily, you would have had nearly two million thoughts. In a lifetime of sixty years you would have produced more than a billion thoughts. After that many thoughts, most people would be dead; the brain’s stored energy from food and cosmic sources would have been used up. When we ponder how much energy-current we are using all the time, the wonder is how we live as long as we do! Nevertheless, by adequate replacement of expanded energy, we can live longer and more efficiently.
There are two sources from which man draws energy for his body: from food (which includes oxygen) and from the medulla or “mouth of God.” The energy thus imbibed is distributed to the body cells; any excess goes to the brain, to be stored there for use as needed.
Food is only a secondary source of energy supply. The greatest flow of energy into the body comes from the intelligent cosmic energy that is all around the body and omnipresent in the universe. It is drawn into the brain storehouse through the medulla. This intelligent cosmic energy or vibration is the basic “substance” of all matter. Scientific experiments conducted by Dr Crile have shown that the brains of dead calves continue to emanate considerable current. In death the cosmic energy loses only the physiological channel of the nervous system.
Extract from the book “Divine Romance” by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda.
