PRANA

EDUARDO PIMENTEL VÁZQUEZ (La Habana, 1946) es profesor de Cultura Física y Deporte (Fajardo, 1976), en la actualidad es Presidente-fundador de la Asociación Cubana de Yoga (1990), delegado de la Fundación Krishnamurti Hispanoamericana y de la Fundación Lucis Trust, coordinador de retiros de Meditación Vipassana y representante de la International Yogatherapy Association. Es miembro de la Sociedad Teosófica (1972), de la Asociación de Auto-Realización (Self-Realization Fellowship, 1972), de la Unión Latinoamericana de Yoga (1998), de la Asociación de Amistad Cuba-India, ICAP (1998), del Comité Académico Maestría Cultura Física Terapéutica, INDER (2000) y del Consejo Mundial de la Federación Internacional de Yoga (2006), es asesor del Grupo Nacional de Ejercicios Terapéuticos y posee certificado como Maestro de Yoga (2002) por la Yoga Alliance. También es miembro de la Junta Directiva de la Sociedad Cubana de Medicina Bioenergética y Naturalista (2003).

Desde 1999 hasta 2007 recibió seminarios intensivos de Hatha Yoga con maestros de los Estados Unidos. Otros estudios realizados en ese país son: Iniciaciones Tibetanas (8), linaje Sakya (1993), entrenamientos para maestro con B.Goldin y Georg Purvis (Iyengar) (1994), con Rodney Yee (2000), con Dean Lerner. Nashville (2003), talleres intensivos de Kundalini Yoga (Yogi Bhajan) (2000). Ha impartido talleres y clases en San Francisco y Nueva York en diferentes años. También ha impartido talleres y clases en Brasil (Río de Janeiro, 2003) y ha realizado retiro de meditación Vipassana en México (1995).

Ha visitado la India (1997) donde ha realizado retiros de meditación Vipassana y Mahasattipatana, entrenamiento para Maestro en Yoga Institute, Jayadeva Yogendra, estudios de Vedanta e Iniciación en la Ramakrishna Misión, peregrinaje a Haridwar y Rishikesh, Sivananda Ashram y encuentro con su gurú en Pune. En 2009 vuelve a la India y Nepal donde visita centros de peregrinaje: Bodh Gaya, Mathura, Amber, Patna, Katmandu, Rishikesh, entre otros. Ha organizado e impartido clases y talleres en los Estados Unidos y Cuba donde entre 1998 y 2009 organizó retiros de meditación Vipassana (7). También desde el año 2006 trabaja en el "Proyecto Yoga", prisión de Guanajay. Es fundador de la sección de yoga en Radio Metropolitana (1991) en el programa "En buena compañía", donde por primera vez en Cuba se imparten clases de yoga. En la televisión, ha tenido un espacio entre otros programas: "Mientras llega la noche", "Estilos", "Ponte en Forma" y "Universidad para Todos".

Editorial Científico-Técnica, La Habana, 2009

PRANA, MANTRA AND KUNDALINI YOGA

A NEW APPROACH TO YOGA THEORY

Eduardo Pimentel Vázquez

Prologue

Professor Eduardo Pimentel Vázquez was the first person who ever talked to me about yoga, some time before I was appointed Cuban Ambassador to India.

While performing my duties as such I learned that India is where yoga, as a philosophical school, was born more than one thousand years B.C. and is used by human beings, together with medical science, to become physically and spiritually stronger. Widely spread and supported in India, the usefulness and prestige of the teaching of yoga have gone beyond the country’s borders and gained a foothold almost everywhere.

During my stay there I also learned that yoga is part of Hinduism, no doubt one of the world’s oldest cultures and certainly one still practiced nowadays. The Father of India himself –Mahatma Gandhi– praised yoga as a way for people to remain healthy and fit for self-government.

The book I was honored to receive from Professor Pimentel has a great impact on the three topics covered by the author: Prana, Mantra and Kundalini.

Prana, the first one, is described as an Energy-related concept materialized through its dimensionality on a human and cosmic level. As expressed in the “Introduction”, rare are the readers or students who know how to assess and put into the right context the term “prana” when they stumble upon the word “energy”. They will also find references to cosmic Indian cycles or eras, as well as plenty of quotations from classic textbooks on both philosophy and yoga.

What has come to be wrongly known as Indian “mysterious prayers” are clarified and presented in a more proper and fluid context. As a mind–unifying and –soothing system, the yoga mantra is shown with its true practical applications, to the extreme that they are currently implemented as a therapy without changing the first principles, if with certain variations.

Finally, there is the controversial hypothesis that we have a particular form of energy at the basis of our spine called Kundalini, the increase of which provides practitioners with particular states of mind.

The sound research work carried out by the author is thorough to the point of astonishment, supported as it is by classic literature and presented with an approach as comprehensive as to allow for new considerations of this topic.

I believe Professor Eduardo Pimentel is one of our greatest experts on the theory and practice of this ancient philosophy that keeps getting an increasingly large following beyond its country of origin, especially in Cuba, where thousands of enthusiasts have embraced and disseminate yoga, both with a view to preventive care at community level and through the Cuban Green and Natural health care system.

I personally consider the book Prana, Mantra and Kundalini Yoga highly valuable and, given the lack of any other serious and well documented texts of its kind, very useful to researchers, therapists, practitioners and the general public, particularly with regard to its theoretical tenets.

ÁNGEL D. FERRÁS MORENO
Former Ambassador to the Republic of India (1971-1974)

Havana, March 12, 2009

Letter from a friend

Dear Eduardo:

I read your book, not in depth or as carefully as required, of course, but mostly in a very superficial way or, in other words, based on my very poor knowledge about the topic that you wrote about.

One thing’s for sure, though: without knowing how much related Cuban literature there is, I’m absolutely convinced that we have nothing here that is similar to your book, so rich in information and sufficiently profound and well-founded as to be overwhelming. In fact, I get the impression that it can be deemed a scientific study on Yoga that many will find equal parts original and enlightening. I think there can be no doubt that your book proves that Yoga –often surrounded by an aura of mystery, religious views, esotericism and ancient philosophy– is actually backed by an impressive amount of profoundly scientific evidence, with roots in the very origins (extremely similar, as you hold in your book) of Physics and Philosophy. In this connection, I find your work exceptionally valuable, as it will pave the way for future texts, maybe more practical or unsophisticated, and help disseminate Yoga, which you place, in your own right and with good reason, within a scientific context that any scholar, Marxist or otherwise, will find acceptable.

All of the above, my dear friend, makes me feel unfit to preface such a book. The best I can do is praise your extensive knowledge about Yoga or our nearly forty years of friendship, neither of which is likely to arouse the interest of the future readers of a text like this, so deserving of an opening by a specialist or a scientist qualified to highlight its extraordinary worth.

Finally, I hope that a good editor will help you improve the drafting to eliminate some problems I found in your manuscript.

Your brother, who holds you in great esteem,

EDUARDO MERAS LEÓN
April 26, 2008

Introduction

The topics that headline each of the four chapters of this book, repeatedly picked by many authors “almost” with the same approach and interpretation, were chosen because of their great popularization in the so-called New Age literature. For example, a book by the Swami Sivananda in the 1960s has a drawing of a chakra that is “upside down”, and it was copied like that by a contemporary author.

In Chapter 1, “Matter and cosmic energy”, I go over the most common hypothesis of the world of Physics about the origin of the Universe –the Big Bang– with the clear intention of getting readers gradually closer to the notion of “hot plasma” inherent in the whole Universe. On the other hand, I searched for and studied certain classical Indian quotations about cosmos and Prana.* And on the basis of “hot plasma”, I review what’s known as “cold plasma” (bio-plasma), a suitable term to describe what Kirlian photography revealed about human beings, animals and plants.

For some reasons of critical interest, I was never happy with the translation of the Indian notion of Prana as “energy”, made without any further explanation and certainly without any scientific basis to boot. When readers or students find the word “energy” they don’t have the right elements to assess the word “Prana” and put it into context.

However, Prana has a cosmic and a human side. In both cases, according to Indian texts, we find the same energy at work in two modes, an assertion that gives western authors full satisfaction.

In Chapter 2, “Matter and human energy”, I present what the ancient Chinese and Indians called Ki and Prana as a specific kind of bio-energy (which I describe in the book) that makes a three-dimensional interpretation of every living being.

In Chapter 3, “The science of the yoga mantra”, I touch on the subject of the mysterious Indian “chants and prayers” covered by the word mantra and mixed by many authors in the best mythological and esoteric traditions –to name just two of them– without arguing their theories at all. Instead, they merely state the same Indian ideas or, what confuses me even more, put forward “theories” or their own that I find utterly untenable. I hope this chapter will help you take into account other perspectives of their principles and practical ideas.

Chapter 4, “Kundalini yoga”, starts by talking about the kind of literature that throws readers into great confusion and distorts the terms kundalini, chakra and nadi. Here I discuss these and other notions in order to include the views of Indian and western authors in hope of making my own contribution to the multiple dimensionality of such terms.

The type of yoga* I have seen spread in Cuba, at least in my 33 years of practice, is on a par with and as profound as the one known in the world’s most responsible academic circles and, in many cases, sounder than the commercial kind that only serves a culture of shallowness.

I will be satisfied if the ideas and results of my research prove helpful to my friends as well as to yoga practitioners and students.

THE AUTHOR
Havana, Janamasthami of the Lord Krishna of 2005

* In the book, lower-case “yoga” refers to the generic term, whereas “Yoga” in capital letters refers to the philosophy. Other terms like Kundalini, Mantra, and Srmadhi appear either in lower or upper case letters: the former refer to the supreme realization and the technique of the system, and the latter are generic. The word “man” is generic and applicable to both men and women. (Editor’s Note)