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Chapter 18: The Manifestations of Prana in the Seven Bodies

Just as breath is taken in from the outside and the air exists outside you, likewise an ocean of thought exists outside you. Thought comes in, and thought goes out. Your breath can become my breath at another moment and your thought can become my thought. Every time you throw your breath out you are likewise throwing your thought out. Just as air exists, so thought exists; just as air can be contaminated, so thought can be contaminated; just as air can be impure, so thought can be impure.

The breath itself is not prana. Prana means the vital energy that manifests itself by these polarities of coming in and going out. The energy that takes the breath in is prana, not the breath itself. The energy that takes breath in, which asserts it, that energy that is taking the breath in and throwing it out, is prana.

The energy that takes thought in and throws thought out, that energy too is prana. In all of the seven bodies, this process exists. I am only talking now of the physical and the mental, because these two are known to us; we can understand them easily. But in every layer of your being the same thing exists.

Your second body, the etheric body, has its own incoming and outgoing process. You will feel this process in each of the seven bodies, but you will feel it to be just like the incoming breath and outgoing breath, because you are only acquainted with your physical body and its prana. Then you will always misunderstand.

Whenever any feeling comes to you of another body or its prana you will first understand it as the coming in and the going out of breath, because this is the only experience you know. You have only known this manifestation of prana, of vital energy. But on the etheric plane there is neither breath nor thought, but influence - simply influence coming in and going out.

You come into contact with somebody without having known him before. He has not even talked with you, but something about him comes in. You have either taken him in or thrown him out. There is a subtle influence: you may call it love or you may call it hatred - the attractive or the repulsive.

When you are repulsed or attracted, it is your second body. And every moment the process is going on; it never stops. You are always taking influences in and then throwing them out. The other pole will always be there. If you have loved someone, then in a certain moment you will be repulsed. If you have loved someone the breath has been taken in: now it will be thrown out and you will be repulsed.

So every moment of love will be followed by a moment of repulsion. The vital energy exists in polarities. It never exists at one pole. It cannot! And whenever you try to make it do so, you try the impossible.

You cannot love someone without hating him at some time. The hatred will be there because the vital force cannot exist at a single pole. It exists at opposite polarities, so a friend is bound to be an enemy - and this will go on. This coming in and going out will happen up to the seventh body. No body can exist without this process - this coming in and going out. It cannot, just as the physical body cannot exist without the incoming and outgoing breath.

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