Abraham Lincoln said “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” So exactly what does that mean?
We cannot taste, touch, smell, hear, or see except through the mind. We may seem to experience taste on the tongue, but it’s actually the brain that registers flavor. Similarly, when one part of the body hurts, the pain is really in the mind, not in the body part. There are two instruments for perceiving pain: the nerves and the gray matter of the brain. But we perceive only if the mind allows a connection between them. Unless the mind says there is pain, there is no pain. Consequently, a mind made strong by the practice of Reiki-Raja Yoga is less affected by the sensations of pleasure and pain.
We don’t often think of our bodies as electrical systems, but that’s what they are. Everyone knows that nerves send electrical signals from our brains to the rest of our body in the form of directives or commands and that the rest of our body sends signals to our brain from the somatosensory system that allows us to feel cold and warmth and touch and pain. All those nerves go to a long thin tubular bundle of nervous tissue we call the spinal cord which transmits signals between the brain and the rest of the body.
In the Western world, yoga is typically a system of exercises that physically stretch the chakras (energy points in the human body), bringing the energy and life force into the body. Yoga in Indian traditions, however, is more than physical exercise, it has a meditative and spiritual core. For example, the autonomic nervous system is centered around the spine, and driven by the medulla oblongata at the base of the spine. This structure is electrical and it’s tapped into the life force of the universe. In Reiki-Raja Yoga, we effectively exercise the connection between this system and the life force, giving us the ability to tune our mind over time and create happiness within ourselves and in the lives of others. It’s a mental yoga. The yoga of the mind. The principals behind it are similar to the ancient laws of karma - if you do good things, good things will happen to you; if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. Similarly, if you think happy thoughts, happy things will come back to you.
We know this and then somehow it’s as if we forget it. Electricity is defined as the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of electrical charge. It’s a form of energy. And it’s flowing up and down and all over our body all the time whether we are sleep or awake.
Why do we forget this? It may be because we live in a material world and consider ourselves continuous with this material world of our technologies and our physical accomplishments. It’s difficult to conjecture.
Our body generates electricity and heat and absorbs energy from its environment and gives up energy to its environment. Electrical energy flows between our brain and the rest of our body through our spine. When electricity flows through a conductor, it creates an electric field that can be thought of as an area of influence. If a body is in that area of influence, in that field, it experiences a force. These are all proven physical phenomena in physics.