In our body we have five elements. The element responsible for production of the elixir of life (prana) is earth. The element of air is used as a churning rod, through inhalation and exhalation, and distribution is through the element of ether. Ether is space, and its quality is that it can contract or expand. When you inhale, the element of ether expands to take the breath in. In exhalation, the ether contracts to push out toxins.
Two elements remain: water and fire. If there is a fire, water is used to extinguish it. This gives us the idea that fire and water are opposing elements. With the help of the elements of earth, air and ether, a friction is created between water and fire, which not only generates energy but releases it, just as water moving turbines in a hydroelectric power station produces electricity. To generate electricity, the water has to flow at a certain speed. An inadequate flow will not produce electricity. Similarly, in our system, normal breathing does not produce that intense energy. This is why we are all suffering from stress and strain, causing poor circulation which affects our health and happiness. The current is not sufficient so we are merely existing, not living.
In the practice of pranayama, we make the breath very long. In this way, the elements of fire and water are brought together, and this contact of fire and water in the body, with the help of the element of air, releases a new energy, called divine energy, or kundalini shakti, and this is the energy of prana.
The universe is a manifestation of the play, or transcendental polarization, between Being and Becoming, Consciousness and Energy. In the human body, which microcosmically replicates all cosmic principles and levels of existence, the divine Energy expresses itself in two principal forms-the life force (prana) and the serpent power (kundalini-shakti). The life force is universally present in the cosmos and as such is known as "primary life force." It assumes the functional aspects in connection with the human body, which the ancient records styles the "gate keepers of the heavenly world"
The two most important forms of the vital energy are prana and apana, because they are the subtle realities underlying the flow and the ebb of breathing. Breath control directly impacts on the ascending and descending current of the life force, which naturally alternates-roughly every eighty minutes-between the channel on the left (called ida) and the one on the right (called pingala) of the central pathway. The ultimate purpose of breath control is to activate the flow of prana through the central passage, which then draws the much more powerful energy of the kundalini into it.
We can understand the evolutionary process from the transcendental plane to the earth realm through an analogous model furnished by modern cosmology. At the "time" of the Big Bang, the world existed in a state of unimaginably condensed ball of energy, sometimes called "quantum vacuum." Suddenly (and for no known reason), some fifteen billion years ago, a chain reaction occurred in this original high-energy soup which led to the creation of hydrogen atoms. This event coincided with the emergence of space and time and the gradual formation of our spatio-temporal universe, with its billions of galaxies, supernovas, black holes, and quasars, and the cold dark matter interspersed between them. Within this unimaginable vastness are planet Earth and the human species-both products of the original flash from chaos to cosmos.
Now scientists are busy exploring ways of freeing up the energy stored in matter by smashing high-energy subatomic particles into protons. The adepts are engaged in a parallel operation in the laboratory of their own body-mind. They use the vital energy to repeatedly "smash" against the blocked opening of the central pathway of the nadi system.