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| Jai Shri Hanumana! |
" We fly all the time. We have no need to fly unaided. There is no ecological niche that could be filled by aerial people...If by some incomprehensibly reality defying mutation a child was born with the nascent power of flight..."
For all the sound scientific reasoning in the rest of the book, the above quote seems a rare lapse in rigor. It's the kind of false argument against something that a lay-person, bereft of any scientific specialisation, might make. Essentially what is being argued is that something is not technically feasible because there's no need for it.
But the road of human advancement is littered with things that started out as having no conceivable use. When Fred Flintstone was chiselling a circular object that later became a wheel, Barnie and the other neighbours must have been laughing at him because it was going to be no good in the hunt against the woolly mammoth. Similarly, and perhaps with a bit more historical accuracy, the development of number theory was at first regarded as 'pure'(ie. abstract and non-applicable) mathematics until it's usefulness was discovered in cryptography which underpins today's cybersecurity.
But to be fair to Adam Rutherford, the question of the possibility of human unaided flight itself seems like a non-starter. On the face of it, it's a pointless question because it's so manifestly obvious that we can't fly because we're too heavy and we don't have wings. And are unlikely to develop wings anytime soon.
However, in the realm of science, categorical statements on matters of speculation have been shown to come a cropper, as if by making them, we throw a challenge down to the gods of scientific discovery. Two examples being, the belief for a long time that the earth was flat and, at the beginning of the era of aviation, that it would be impossible to travel faster than the speed of sound.
In both the aboves cases, as in most cases of scientific breakthroughs, a change in perspective led to the 'paradigm shift' as Thomas Kuhn called it in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The history of aviation provides an even more pertinent illustration of this paradigm shift as it relates to the possibility of human unaided flight.
When the original 'renaissance man' and polymath, Leonardo da Vinci sat down in his studio in 15th century Italy, and began to sketch out his ideas for human aided flight, he drew on his 'scientific' observation of the flight of birds and their wing action.
There is no historical record from that time of this approach having worked. Nevertheless, all subsequent attempts at human flight followed a similar line of attack of the problem and were variations on the theme of bird wing action.
That was until Orville and Wilbur Wright came along and demonstrated that the fixation on mimicking the bird's wing flapping had been a dead-end. What was actually required was the ability to generate sufficient power to create uplift.
The result is that today we are able to make airborne, commercial aircraft weighing in at hundreds of tons, with no frantic flapping of wings in sight.
This was all because the focus of the problem of flight shifted to the idea of buoyancy or uplift.
It is this established scientific phenomenon of buoyancy that provides for the possibility of unaided human flight.
Delhi, India, 1996. The heat of the sun is abating towards the end of the sahaja yoga open-air public program and Garima and a couple of her friends decide to remain outside and continue to meditate together for a little while longer.
As the girls' kundalinis come up and they begin to get the indication of this as the cool wind sensation on the palms of their hands and above their heads, something else begins to happen. At first Garima thinks that it's just her experiencing it, but then notices the other girls also clutching on to something.
What Garima later describes was of a very strong feeling that with the meditation her body was beginning to feel so light and weightless that if she hadn't grabbed onto something she would have involuntarily began to float off the ground.
This is just one instance of sahaja yoga practitioners reporting a feeling of 'bodiless-ness' while in deep meditation.
There's quite a difference between getting a subjective feeling of floating and actually have your body lift off the ground, so the above accounts are easy to dismiss as just that, a feeling.
However, these sensations are occurring with just a minute fraction of the kundalini's potential expressing. It's like the difference between the energy of a battery to run your bedside alarm clock and the energy required to power a Tesla over a distance of 60km.
In centuries-old treatises about the kundalini, there is mention of siddhis or superhuman abilities, one of which includes flight as a result of the body becoming weightless or bouyant.
Long before Stan Lee of Marvel Comics conceived of Superman and other super heroes, India had her own stories of a character of incredible strength who could fly. Ironically, given that this question of human unaided flight is in the context of human evolutionary advancement, this character that could fly is a monkey. Hanumana is celebrated all across South Asia and China as the folkloric Monkey-King. Jai Hanumana!
