Daily Yogi: A Podcast to Expand Your Perspective on Life

When the Light Goes Out

Manuel Enrique

Life literally glows. Death extinguishes that glow.

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In dark laboratories at the University of Calgary, electron-multiplying cameras captured four mice, alive, glowing with the faintest visible light. Each cell emitting photons in a soft radiance barely detectable by the most sensitive instruments science can build.

Then death. The light vanished.

And it did gradually, measurably. The photon emission dropped significantly after the animals were euthanized. What had been radiating life now emitted only darkness. The researchers documented this phenomenon across multiple species. Mice, plant leaves, living tissues. They all lost their inner luminescence at the moment life departed.

But what exactly was this light? What force animated every cell with its subtle radiance, only to withdraw so completely at death? Could it be that these biophotons are what the Yogis called prana?

Over a century ago, Yogi Ramacharaka described this exact process with startling precision. At death, he wrote, "the prana, being no longer under the control of the Spirit, responds only to the orders of the individual atoms... the unused prana returning to the great universal storehouse from whence it came."

The body becomes dark when the commanding mind withdraws. The light that once animated every cell fades back into the infinite reservoir from which it came.

Perhaps what these Canadian researchers measured with their sophisticated cameras is what the Yogis perceived through inner sight. The luminous vapor of life itself, the radiance that distinguishes the living from the dead, the glow that vanishes when consciousness departs its physical vessel.

Science has many names for this phenomenon now. Reactive oxygen species. Cellular stress responses. Metabolic byproducts. But strip away the technical language and you find the same truth the ancient masters taught.

Life literally glows. Death extinguishes that glow.

Every cell radiating the faintest photons, broadcasting your aliveness to the universe. Your very being emits a signature of vitality that modern instruments can finally detect.

The Yogis may have been right all along. Beings of light, temporarily housed in flesh. And when our time comes, that inner radiance simply returns to its source.