"I Believe I Can Fly"

Jai Shri Hanumana!

In his wonderfully ambitious book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, geneticist, Adam Rutherford, in dismissing a future possibility of human unaided flight, says:

" 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!  


 

Built for Bliss.

Apparently, the geeks in silicon valley are keeping themselves ahead of the competition by micro-dosing  LSD. Not enough to be strung out on an acid trip, but just enough to flush the brain with creative juices and come up with the next killer app.

Good or bad, here's why the practice highlights a feature of brain function which is suggestive of our human potential. This is that despite all evidence in the human condition to the contrary, every man, woman and child on the planet, by virtue of birthright, is actually built for bliss.

Exhibit A: Serotonin 

Serotonin is a major neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger that, amongst other functions, plays a large part in how happy we feel. Low levels of serotonin has been linked with depression, although the direction of causality has not been confirmed.

LSD has been found to activate the serotonin pathways in the brain and central nervous system. Also,in some recent research using imaging techniques to track the effect of LSD on the brain, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and his team at Imperial College, London, have shown that LSD 'lights up' what were thought to be unrelated areas of the brain, possibly accounting for the synesthetic 'psychedelic' experience of a 'trip'.

This relaxation of brain 'rigidity' induced by LSD is reminiscent of our brains as infants. Robin Carhart-Harris says, "Our brains become more constrained and compartmentalised as we develop from infancy into adulthood, and we may become more focused and rigid in our thinking as we mature. In many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: free and unconstrained. This also makes sense when we consider the hyper-emotional and imaginative nature of an infant's mind."

So that's where the boost in creativity may be coming from: an enhanced ability to make novel connections between unrelated things.

What the research might also explain, according to Carhart-Harris, is the sense of 'ego-dissolution'  or 'being one with the universe' that is sometimes experienced: "Our results suggest that this effect underlies the profound altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience. It is also related to what people sometimes call 'ego-dissolution', which means the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnection with themselves, others and the natural world. This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way - and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug's effects have subsided."

The insights gained from this research, it is said, can be added to the arsenal of  treatments for the increasing mental health problem of depression.

Some indication of the size of the problem is given by the World Health Organisation, which is leading a 2017, one-year global campaign on depression. According to the WHO website:

• There are more than 300million people of all ages worldwide, suffering from depression.
• This represents an 18% increase between 2005 and 2015.
• It's a leading cause of suicide in 15-29year olds.
• It's the leading cause of disability worldwide
• 80% of disease burden falls mainly on people in low and middle-income countries.  

So depression is a large and growing global problem. The main treatments are with 'talking therapies', such as cognitive behavioural therapy(CBT)  or medication, such as with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors(SSRIs). It is based on the success with SSRIs that LSD offers hope for a similar treatment path.

However, this may be limiting the scope of what LSD is telling us about how we work. Set in the context of pointers about our human potential, the effects of LSD on the brain could be the equivalent of shining a torchlight into a dark room. Not to make out the contours of the room; but to locate where the light switch is.

The light switch - your kundalini.

Recalling the capacity of LSD to lead to what has been described as a mystical sense of  'ego-dissolution', here's the description of just such a state by Yang Lili, a young Chinese yogi on a tour of India : "So strong feeling here (indicating top of head). It's like a hole. It's like  we're all in the universe. It's like we really melt into the universe.."

Being interviewed alongside Yang Lili, is her friend Zhang Yi who adds about the experience: " ..felt full of love. All is love. No other words. Just love..."(translated from mandarin).

What Yang Lili and Zhang Yi are both describing, is not a shared LSD trip but the pill-free, clear-headed experience of a kundalini meditation based on a genuine kundalini awakening.

But what is the kundalini and what is 'genuine awakening' ? According to one of the most influential texts on hatha yoga, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika written in the fifteenth century, the kundalini is the means of human 'liberation'/'self-realisation'. A definition from an online source gives this:

 “Kuṇḍalī Sakti[feminine energy] sleeps on the bulb[base of spine], for the purpose of giving moksa[liberation] to Yogīs and bondage to the ignorant. He who knows it, knows Yoga.” (śl. 107) and “Kuṇḍalī is of a bent shape, and has been described to be like a serpent. He who has moved that Śakti is no doubt Mukta (released from bondage).” (śl. 108)

 Although the concept of kundalini and it's function does not exist in western medical science, anatomical naming (see Grey's Anatomy)  may hint at some esoteric understanding of the human body in the distant past.

For example, the kundalini, which has been described as the 'feminine divine',  is said to exist in a dormant (potential ) state in the tail bone in the human spine. This bone is also known as the 'Sacrum' - etymologically related to 'sacred' .

Also, the kundalini, on awakening, rises upwards and passes through the top of the skull and can be felt as a rising cascade(fountain) of a cool breeze sensation (pneuma). The name of the bone at the top of the skull is : 'Fontanel' , which derives from 'fontaine' , French for 'fountain'.

The actual effect of kundalini's rising can also be correlated with a recognised cognitive state. This state is given in the  second line of the quote above from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which says : "He who knows it, knows Yoga".

The authoritative definition of yoga contained in the original source book of yoga, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, defines yoga in sutra 1.2 as : "Yogas chitta vritti nirodha." . This is translated from the sanskrit as : " Yoga is a stilling of the flactuations of the mind/attention". This is technically known as nirvichar samadhi or 'thoughtless awareness'.

This thoughtless awareness state is one we have all habitually experienced but have forgotten about. It is the mental state of our childhood; before we acquired language and which corresponds to the 'sensorimotor' stage in Jean Piaget's cognitive development. 

In a child, the state of nirvichar samadhi is more commonly called 'pratyaksha' , which is a sanskrit word meaning: 'just seeing without any accompanying mental activity' or 'just witnessing'. This shines new light on Robin Carhart-Harris's observation above about how LSD puts the brain in a state it was in during infancy: free from the rigidity of thinking.  

So genuine kundalini awakening can be gauged from these two features: 1. A fountain-like sensation (of  coolness) above the head and 2. An accompanying spontaneous inducement to a mental stillness/silence/ absence of thoughts/ inner peace.


The thousand-petalled lotus

Apart from feelings of mental quietude, the kundalini is also said to produce a feeling of 'bliss'.  From an ancient text the Lalita Sahasranama, the following descriptions have been given of the kundalini: 

Param-ananda-mayi  - source of supreme bliss; Nirvana-sukha-dayini - giver of the enjoyment of nirvana; Sahasrara-ambuja-arudha - mounted in the 'thousand- petalled lotus' (at crown of head); Sudha-sarabhi-varshini - sending down a shower of nectar.

The 'thousand-petalled lotus' appears to be a poetic rendition of the brain limbic system. Studies have shown the activation of the limbic during meditation. In a 1993 paper entitled, Plasma beta endorphins in humans: effect of sahaja yoga, Dr. Ram Mishra of McMaster's University, Toronto and others, reported an observed increase in beta endorphin production of up to 70% with kundalini meditation (sahaja yoga).

Other studies based on EEG measures of sahaja yoga subjects, found brain activation patterns consistent with subjective feelings of thoughtless awareness (nirvichar samadhi) and happiness.

To highlight other positive effects seen, a 2001 study by Dr Adam Morgan : Sahaja Yoga: An ancient path to modern mental health? showed significant improvement in the symptoms of anxiety and depression compared to use of cognitive behavioural therapy.

For all the millennials out there in silicon valley who have considered going the LSD microdosing route to enhance their creative edge, there's also a 2016 study that shows boost to grey matter from sahaja yoga meditation .


Philosopher's stone.

Could the awakening of kundalini have been the secret 'holy grail' in alchemy, the forerunner of modern chemistry and the scientific method, via Robert Boyle (1627 - 1691), whose Boyle's Law is still in use today? Ostensibly, the goal of alchemy was the transmutation of base metal into gold but this may have been coded language for the pursuit of human perfectibility by discovery of the philosopher's stone. The philosopher's stone was also known as the elixir of life or the elixir of youth.

In 2009, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and others published research identifying the part played by telomeres, which are DNA caps at the ends of chromosomes, in the cellular aging proces. The shortening of telomere length is a marker for aging and meditation was shown to affect the telomeres in a way that led to an anti-aging effect.

If vanilla meditation or mindfulness practice has been demonstrated to have an anti-aging effect, then what even greater effect might a meditation juiced with kundalini awakening have? The effect of kundalini in this regard is  suggested by the line above from Lalita Sahasranama: Sudha-sarabhi-varshini - 'sending down a shower of nectar'.

'Sudha' (nectar) is a synonym for the more commonly-used sanskrit word 'Amrita' which is cognate with Ambrosia , the food of the gods in Greek mythology. In Indian mythology, Amrita, also has divine origin which resonates to the present day.

According to the Guiness Book of Records, the largest gathering of people on earth is at the Kumbha Mela festival held every 12 years in India. At the 2013 kumbha mela , an estimated 40 million people  squeezed into an area a third of the size of Manhatten, which has a population of just 2 million and feels packed.

The Kumbha ('pot') festival is a remembrance of the divine origin of Amrita. It is said that as Lord Vishnu, the power of sustenance, preservation and the evolutionary urge, was travelling airborne over earth, four drops of Amrita fell from the pot he was carrying and landed at four locations in India. These locations are where the Kumbha festival is held in periodic rotation.

The story of the origin of Amrita may symbolise the yogic process of Khechari Mudra , which occurs when the kundalini touches the crown of the head and engenders a downward flow of 'nectar' into the thoat.

This action of the kundalini has been described by one of the earliest writer-practitioners of kundalini yoga, Sant Dnyaneshwar(1275–1296) , who, in chapter 6 of one of his most prominent works, Dnyaneshwari, says of  khechari mudra:

"Body gets rejuvenated The skin which covers the lustre of this nectar and is brightened by it is shed and all the organs show their bright aura. (6:250, 252-253). Now even Death is afraid of it (the body) and the aging process gets reversed and the yogi gets back his bygone childhood and he looks like a boy."

Evolutionary growing pains?

All this may seem far removed from the ordinary man or women on the street going about their daily business, but what if the stresses of modern living that is producing such a worrying uptick in the global incidence of depression is simultaneously acting as a push in the other direction?

And is that other direction showing up as more and more people globally having an interest in  meditation as a coping mechanism for stress?

While a coincidence of two things does not necessarily imply a causal link, the graph below taken from google trends and showing where in the world keyword searches for 'meditation' were coming from does make interesting viewing.

In his book, Your Inner Fish, paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, Neil Shubin describes his expedition to find the missing link between marine life and land mammals. His expeditionary team discover the fossil of a 'fish with hands', Tiktaalik.

It may be fair to assume that fish don't mass in shallow water and then develop limbs to crawl onto land without some evolutionary pressure on them.

Similarly, the increasing stress in modern human society and indicated by the growing problem of depression, may in fact be evolutionary growing pains. When there is a problem the species are bound to seek out the lowest threshold solution.

And this is probably how an evolutionary mass phenomenon spreads through a population. The google trends graph above can be viewed in that light.

Tipping-point


Are we on the cusp of a transformation in human awareness? If the experiences of a few statistical outliers - the Yang Lili's and the Zhang Hi's are scaled up to a critical mass of the population, might we see an overall improved mental health across the globe and therefore a better society?

In 2011, the snapshot below of web traffic to an email-link accessed sahaja yoga website, showed that sahaja yoga meditation was being practised in 993 cities around the world.

Today, the number of sahaja yoga practitioners has significantly increased thanks to programs of global outreach, such as the one shown below.

If we are, as human beings, indeed built for bliss then we may gradually begin to see the evidence of that


 

 

A Strange Happening in Cauldwell Street.

At about 9:15pm on Thursday, 7^th October, teenager, Jason Haynes was riding his motor scooter back home from his part-time job at Sainsburys, when he was involved in a collision with a car on Cauldwell Street, Bedford.

The driver of the car, and one other motorist, got out to attend Jason who was lying on the ground injured. Given the obvious pain Jason was in and not knowing whether any bones had been broken, they decided not move him but wait for the ambulance, which had been called.

It was while lying there waiting, that Jason recalls a lady in a long white garment coming to him, speaking to him briefly and then placing her hands over parts of his body. The lady then left and shortly afterwards the ambulance arrived to take Jason to the hospital.

The doctor who examined him was surprised to find no injury, given the nature of the accident. Jason attributed this to the lady at the scene of the accident who had seemingly healed him with her touch . However, he could still feel some pain in his lower back, where the lady hadn't touched.

A few days later he saw a photograph of Shri Mataji in the paper advertising a public lecture on sahaja yoga in Guildhouse and recognised her immediately as the lady who had come to help him at the accident.

The only thing was: the date of the lecture was the 7^th October. Shri Mataji was at Guildhouse in the middle of delivering the lecture at the same time as the event Jason described was happening.

Ross Francis, the journalist who investigated the story and who interviewed witnesses at the accident, could find nobody else who had seen the lady healer at the scene.

Below is an old photocopy of the front-page report Ross Francis filed in the Bedfordshire Journal, October 12th, 1982: A strange happening in Cauldwell Street.

 So Jason Haynes got cured; Ross Francis went on to write other regular features for his local newspaper. That incident, after being a key topic of conversations in the local pub and supermarket  for a while, probably got filed away in most people's memory as one of life's unexplained events . Except , of course, for any local people who attended Shri Mataji's lecture, that night in October 1982 and then went on to spend time with Shri Mataji to learn sahaja yoga.

For them, as with other sahaja yogis,' miracles' became the common but extraordinary experience in different encounters with Shri Mataji. Some of these encounters are captured in a book by Linda Williams, available on Amazon. Personal accounts of nine different people contained in the book are shown below.

1. Curing leukaemia with kundalini awakening - Gautam Sarkar

2. Commanding the ocean waves and calling forth light at Ganapatipule - P. D. Chavhan

The power of the meditation photograph - Ravindranath Saundankar

3.Protection from a distance - Jayant Patankar

4. Removal of doubt - Gregoire de Kalbermatten 

5. Only a 'Himalayan Master' knew who Shri Mataji really was - Sandeep Gadkary

6.  Mountain Villagers in Himalayas waiting for Shri Mataji over generations - Auriol Williams.

7. Bandhan works on inanimate object - Tarachandra

8. A mother's scolding of her children in a place outside of time - John Henshaw.

9. Christ resides on Agnya chakra - Niranjan Mavinkurve.

Avoiding the Robot Apocalypse

As Apocalypse scenarios go, this one is quite familiar : Somebody builds a robot that can actually 'think' for itself; then in flagrant disregard of Asimov's 3 Laws entailing doing no harm to humans, the robot runs amok and proceeds to wipe out the entire human race.

Luckily, we've watched that movie, come out of the movie theater (alive) and managed to put our Terminator and Skynet fears to bed.

Not so Elon Musk, and other AI futurists, who envision bad things happening as a result of the rapid advancement and unintended consequences from developments in artificial intelligence. This is according to Maureen Dowd, writing in the March issue of Vanity Fair magazine : Elon Musk's Billion-Dollar Crusade To Stop The A.I Apocalypse.

The premise of the idea of  humans inventing robot overlords is that human intelligence and ability is at statis; that we'll be able to incubate super intelligence in machines that will, to our detriment, surpass our own.

The best guard we have against rogue A.I, according to some of the Silicon Valley luminaries interviewed in the piece, is to have a 'kill switch' to shut them down. Or, in a strange case of 'if you can't beat them, join them', it's suggested that we turn ourselves into cyborgs: half human, half machine.

If A.I is going to be this much of a threat to the survival of the species, then, like in Jaws - the movie, we're clearly going to need a bigger boat. This bigger boat may be provided by our own unexplored human potential.

For all the human ingenuity that has brought us to this stage of technological development, where we're capable of creating our own likeness in machine form,  no human invention so far surpasses the prototypes found in Nature. Is the camera a better piece of design engineering than the human eye, for example? 

Nature hides the complexity of her design genius in the cloak of simplicity, efficiency and economy. By comparison, our most vaunted inventions have a primitive crudeness that we cannot see.

On that basis, the human being, the current pinnacle of Nature's iterative design improvement process(evolution), is more marvellous and wonderous than any robot or 'super' intelligence, humans themselves could hope to create.

We were not given the user manual for how we work, so, since the beginning of the biological sciences, we've been trying to piece it together with reverse engineering. Neuroscience can't fully explain how the brain works, or where consciousness and the sense of personal identity come from.

If we could somehow get hold of Nature's user manual for humans, might there not be a chapter at the back entitled 'Advanced Functions'? There's enough scope in our ignorance, for us not to rule out the possibility that there's more to us than meets the eye.

After all, only 2% of our DNA actually codes for the protein of which our bodies are made. Is the remaining 98% really 'junk' DNA? In recent years within genetics, it is being discovered that the term 'junk' DNA is a misnomer or fig leaf for our ignorance. And that, in fact, there is some hitherto unknown function in this non-coding DNA.

Some of this function is regulatory  - the equivalent of a traffic cop directing the traffic of gene expression that makes us who we are and which could determine illness, ageing* and a range of different abilities .

Here's how New York Times bestselling author, Yuval Noah Harari, summarises the idea of unrealised human potential, in his book Homo Deus:

"Biological engineering starts with the insight that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies. For 4 billion years natural selection has been tweaking and tinkering with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoeba to reptiles to mammals to Sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that Sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus - who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives - into Homo sapiens who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what might be the outcome of a few more changes to our DNA..."

So how might Superhumans avoid the Robot Apocalypse?

The answer may relate more to survival. When a calculus of human existential risk is done, catastrophic climate change, a pandemic as a result of  anti-microbial resistance or a geopolitical-related nuclear mishap, are more proximate than being done in by the robots.

So if we can survive or avoid the first 3 risks, then outsmarting the smartest robots will be a piece of cake . We must have been rehearsing it for some time now, in the popular imagination, through all the marvel movies we've been watching.

* Superhumans are really coming - unpacking junk DNA

History of an Idea: Elixir of Youth

Creation, Man and his fulfillment (Universe is a beautiful cosmos)

Lecture given at Gandhi Bhawan, Delhi University (India), on 1 February 1979.
In this lecture I should talk about the creation. I would switch on from the time, when we were just amoebae. Every scientist who is open minded can see for himself that this universe is a beautiful cosmos, is very well organized and has run very smoothly and can also deduce that the creation of this particular universe has led to the creation of this Mother Earth.
About five billion years back, this Mother Earth which was in gaseous form condensed & was cooled down. How was it cooled down to the extent it did ? Scientists accept this fact just as it is, they cannot find out because they have limitations. Why this thing happened ? How it was started ? It is easy to say there is no God but very difficult to explain many things without saying that there is God, e.g. the time that was taken for this universe to create a human being, is so very short, that nothing else can explain it.
If you use the law of chance, we can find out how many times the permutations and combinations have to work to create even a living cell. For example, in a test tube if you have 50 red pills & 50 white pills, all arranged in such a manner that all the red ones are at the bottom and that white ones are at the top, You have to go on shaking them, and the arrangement of the pills gets disorganized completely. Then to organize it back fully into the original arrangement, how many times one has to shake ? They have discovered a formula, that is -n raised to power something, something. According to
this formula, if human beings are created by chance, it seems an impossibility ; because the time that is taken so far is so short that only, at the most, may be, some living cell could have been created.
Why a complicated human being has been created and so beautifully it is organized within himself, that it is hard to believe that some juggler was not behind the show. There must have been some scientist who has achieved these results. It could have only been possible by some special hand to do these things; I mean if there was no organization, no thinking, no planning, no powerful personality, The Almighty behind it, it could not have been possible.
As science has its limitations, of course, we cannot find out how was it expedited, how it took place ? But we can see, that we have achieved something in the field of science, by one method, perhaps similar to one that was used to trigger our evolution so fast.
When I was a young student in school, at that time I could never have believed that we could ever react the moon; none could have believed. If anyone would have said that, the people would have laughed at such a conjecture. Even today if you tell my grandmother, she does not believe it. She thinks it is just a story you are telling. But we have reached the moon, no doubt.
In this system, we have used a very wonderful system of putting 5 capsules one to another & the first capsule, the lowest one explodes and triggers the movement of the rest of four eapsules. When the second one explodes, it gives an acceleration many more times than that with which it was already moving; the speed increases in such a tremendous way that suddenly we find that the acceleration is a very high multiple of the first one; then the third one when it explodes gives another push to the capsule. Next, the fourth one explodes; then the fifth one which contains the spacecraft. Through this kind of explosions from one to the other, through that built-in mechanism, we have been able to achieve a very high acceleration for the spacecraft.
In the same way our evolution has taken place. We got this idea without even knowing about our evolution from the UNCONSCIOUS. We have come to know how it has happened, but we cannot correlate both these together. So, in the same way a human being was created out of amoebae or amoebae was created out of all the elements. In the same manner we can say that we were made again of 5 capsules. The first one is the physical, our physical being. Inside the physical being was kept the emotional being. Inside the emotional being was kept the spiritual being & inside the spiritual being was kept the spirit or our attention.
We can say, KUNDALINI is the one that triggers, that is the one that explodes. So Kundalini force is in everything, but in the most affective, the best, the highest form, it is in human beings. It is this force which exists in everyone and evolves everything, say from carbon to the amoebae stage and from amoebae to animal stage & from animal to human stage. Even in elements it exists because the elements also evolve. We do not know how they evolve but it happens in Nature, that elements start changing their forms & mass and they become different elements; we have no idea of this because we have no way of measuring the quantity of this change that is taking place. Then the animals also change, from fishes, many become reptiles, out of reptiles many become mammals, from mammals, many become primates, monkeys and then human beings. All this happening takes place. How many are destroyed, how many remain, how many are transformed, nobody has kept any account of it.
Today, we talk of population problem, perhaps many animals have taken birth as humans. You can ,see the effect of that, the way people are behaving; you can be sure that many animals have taken human form and they have yet to go through lot of evolution & training as a human being to understand the value of human life. A human being starts evolving within himself.
Now we have been human beings, as they say, for 14,000 years and we have been growing inside through our freedom, Human beings are the only people who get freedom to evolve themselves to understand what is wrong & what is bad. This freedom is granted because without freedom you cannot go any further. For example, when you start studying in a school, you are told to learn tables 2 x 10-20; you learn by heart and do not question why it is so, but just go on and on. But when you reach a certain standard of education, say graduation or post graduation standard, then you are given freedom to write on this subject-why is it that when you multiply 2 by 10 it is 20 ? It is because you have reached a certain stage of development. At this stage you are given freedom to find out for yourself. That is how you are developed and then by this development only you can teach the other people who are coming up.This is the way the evolution has been.
So far you have not felt your evolution from amoebae to this stage. You do not know how you became a human being, you take it for granted. Even if you see your eyes, they are so complicated. It is such a complicated organ that if you start studying them you will be amazed how things are made. If you just prick a pin in my finger, immediately there is a reflex action. It is so nicely built, it is so nicely arranged; it is so quick, it is so efficient, that one is surprised and amazed at the wonders of this kind of organization, that is this human body. But you see what human beings are, they are inefficiency personified. I sent four telegrams to my daughter and today she says, she received one telegram after one month.
Human beings have been given freedom to understand, to develop their own efficiency, to receive the ultimate knowledge of the Creator of this creation and the powers of the Creator. That is why, the Kundalini is placed in the human beings alone though there is Kundalini force and there is Kundalini in another form in everything that exists. Only in the human beings, this force is kept in the triangular bone in dormant state, to trigger their last jump into the unknown. Now this Kundalini exists, this is there.
But to begin with, if I say before starting all this creation, who was created first, it is most interesting & may not be very congenial to the mind of a scientist. It is much beyond science I am talking now, that much before anything was created on this Earth.
Holiness was created, that we call the Pavitrata. Sri Ganesha is the deity of that Holiness, God has created this Holiness to protect this creation. This atmosphere of Holiness. He created to protect all the people and all the creativities which are there and which are being created by Him, otherwise nothing would work out, Just think if one of the Oceans was deeper even by 10 feet the balance of Earth would have toppled down ; just imagine what a speed this Mother Earth has, it revolves with such a tremendous speed goes round the Sun regularly in a proper way, not in a round way, but in a special style as you know. She creates day and night for you. Day to work and night to rest. How she herself has created this beautiful atmosphere for you and has maintained the balance and the temperature that was given to Her, is only done by the power of Holiness that was created first.
Now, man in his foolishness is challenging that Holiness. He thinks he can challenge God, that is the sign of his dwarfness. If he bad risen to that height where he could feel God pulsating in every thing he would never have done that. But before he could reach that state of perfection he has started talking about God. Who is going to challenge his authority of this stupid man, who does not want to achieve his perfection and wants to talk big.
All pervading power is of Holiness which corrects, which guides which co-ordinates, which loves and which organizes everything for you to get this awakening within you. So one must understand, how Kundalini awakening is the most important thing that has to happen. Kundalini awakening is the only way you are going to know your spirit. This is the most important happening in the history of creation.
It is like laying out the garden, then you plant the, trees, the trees have flowers and now the time has come, the fruits must appear. It is the most important thing and has to happen. Every individual who is seeking the TRUTH will know it.
The trouble with truth is, that you have to seek it with all humility in your own being. No body can hypnotize people for seeking truth, those who are hypnotized cannot understand. In all your awareness, in all your dignity you have to get the knowledge of truth.
But it is,., not just giving, you a lecture that you are going to understand. It is not brainwashing that has been done by all nonsensical people throughout. It is the happening, the actualization by which you reach that state of awareness ‘ by which you develop the dynamics of collective consciousness, by which you become collectively conscious, is an awareness which develops within you – is real actualization.
As you are a human being, you know that when this capsule of human being was triggered you got lots of things, e.g., your awareness is more than that of animals. ‘][he University itself, animals do not have any universities. Animals don’t understand gardens, they don’t understand dirt and filth, they don’t understand beauty. All this his come to you, deep within you manifested as soon as you become human beings.
So, as soon as you become super human being through Kundalini awakening you become aware of yourself within and you become aware of others within. This is the collective consciousness, this is what Sahaja Yoga is. Sahaja Yoga is the system of nature.
The way this creation took place is also Sahaja. ‘Sah’ means with, & ja means born, Sahaja means born with. Every thing is built in within you like in a seed.
If you see a seed it has a primule within it to sprout. Seed has the complete power of tile tree it is going to be. The whole thing is in the seed, in the same way in the human seed the whole picture of what he is going to be, is built in the whole mechanism, is placed within.
Now there are the undercurrents of your being, which I will be describing to you. What are the forces built up inside human beings ? Only thing I would like to say that you are like a computer, you are already made like a computer, only thing is that you have to be put to the mains. If you are put to the mains then the computer starts working by itself, but it is not the way you understand a machine, You are a human beings, you know what is love. To a scientist I cannot talk of love, I am talking of Divine Holiness, the love of God which has created you, which wants you to know Him. Through science you cannot do that. Every scientist must be loving somebody if not his children at least, his dog. He must be loving flowers, if not flowers he might be loving his horses, but he knows what is love. And if he can understand that spark of love, from where it has come, love that I am talking about is a synthesis of all these powers.
Science deals with only a very little portion, I will also tell you which part of this power deals with our physical being and out of which how much a scientist knows. You will be surprised that if knowledge is an Ocean, the scientist knows only a drop. And to know the Ocean, the drop is to be dissolved in the Ocean. But a drop cannot by its own effort, become the Ocean, the Ocean has to dissolve the drop. And that is what Ocean has to do, it flies creation has to have its fulfillment and His beautiful creation is manifested in the human being. The human being must find out his fulfillment. If he cannot find out his fulfillment, he cannot reach perfection in anyone of his endeavors. God, Himself will not rest till he does that. For, who would like to destroy one’s own creation. In thousands and thousand of years of time this has come to its fulfillment and if it is to be done by me, if I am the person who is supposed to trigger your Kundalini, why should you have any objection? Thank God, I was not a scientist, otherwise I would have finished my life making an atom bomb. Thank God, I am not a psychologist, otherwise I would have gone mad, listening to mad people. Thank God, I am not a politician, you know how they are.
Thank God, I am none of these, I am just your Mother, concerned, absolutely concerned, about your ultimate well beings and not about superficial things.
May God bless you all.
H.H. Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

Yagnya

$${\displaystyle E=mc^{2}}$$

, wrote Einstein and ever since then, it's imprinted in popular imagination that energy occupies a prime position in the universe that we live in. But that's physics. In an extraordinary new book, The Vital Question , Nick Lane, researcher and lecturer in evolutionary biochemistry argues that, rather than information being the fundamental currency of transmission in biological processes, it's actually energy.

In a tour de force of creative visualisation, the author takes the reader by the hand into the inner workings of cellular energy exchange involving food, photon gradients and ATP.

The sense given by these descriptions is that: 'As above, so below' , an axiom of Fluddian hermetic alchemy and given a modern restatement by Neil Shubin as 'The Universe Within'. For all intents and purposes the biological cell is a mini- universe, where analogous energy processes to those going on in the macro universe, play out.

As science makes it's halting way along the path of discovery, checking and then rechecking her steps, she may arrive at the destination only to discover that it  is already occupied by others who came up by a different route. 'Not fair!' may be her objection, 'You're supposed to have your feet tied together like this as you walk; and certainly no wings allowed'.

There's an ancient hymn called the 'Purusha Sukta' from the Rig Veda, the world's first 'scientific treatise' in so far as it gives the detailed methods for reproducing an 'experiment', in which it is declared that the universe is created from 'yagnya'.

Briefly stated 'yagnya' means sacrifice, in which fire is the prime mover and is so important as to acquire the status of a god, named Agni in the rig veda ( the word 'ignite' likely a derivative of this).

Yagnya is the process of consumption where there is a consumer(representing fire) and something is consumed. When viewed like this it is easy to understand how this process may be all-pervasive; covering a day in the life of a star in inter-galactic space, to the ups and downs of the global economy, to how well you're digesting that bowl of pasta you had for lunch.

 

On the subject of lunch, it's for no small reason that in Ayurveda, traditional Indian medicine, the state of an individual's health and vitality is directly correlated with the strength of their 'digestive fire' ('fire in the belly').

 

In the final chapters of Nick Lane's book there's speculation about human ageing and the limits of longevity. Again, in Ayurveda, yagnya is the key*.

 

* see National Institute of Health - Concept of Ageing in Ayurveda) 

and Future of Ageing - letter to Atul Gwande et al    

Fire Worship down the Ages

Ever since early humans discovered that by rubbing two sticks together you could start a nice blaze which could be used to cook the sunday roast – the hind quarter of a woolly mammoth; not to mention, keeping your semi-detached cave warm on blustery winter nights , frightening off the odd sabre-tooth tiger and giving the kids some fun and laughter by making shadow animals on the cave walls; humans have developed a healthy respect for fire.

So much so that , when we first learnt to write grafitti, the first thing we wrote about was a hymn in praise of fire . This came to be called the Rik Veda and fire, now raised to the level of a god, was called ‘Agni’ . Notice how we’ve held on to this name down the millennia. The word ‘ignite’ still means to spark a fire.

The hymns in the Rik Veda included, amongst many verses in praise of the fire god Agni, this particular verse:

“Through Agni man obtaineth wealth, yea, plenty waxing day by day,

Most rich in heroes, glorious.”

This advice was taken seriously by many cultures of the ancient world , particularly the Greek , Persian and Indus valley civilizations who developed the injunction into a formalised ritual complete with a set of standard operating procedures.

As with all good things that spread far and wide , variations on a theme crept in and soon the praise of sacred fire included the concept of burnt offering and sacrifice .

Clearly there must have been something in it because it withstood the test of time and survives in India today . The practice is called variously , yagnya, homa , havan and has a place in Indian life, particularly during auspicious undertakings such as marriages, starting a business or seeking ongoing prosperity for a business or in family life.

When economists look into why the Indian economy is galloping along while many other world economies are not doing so well , they might , in secret curiosity, try correlating the prevalence of the practice of havans with GDP growth.

But isn’t this specifically a hindu religious practice?

Maybe, but not necessarily so; for two reasons.

Firstly, tracing the practice back through it’s antecedents, it has clearly been around longer than the set of practices recognised to be specifically hindu practices ,

Secondly, as any one will tell you who is still lucky enough to live in home that has a roaring open fire during winter months , there is a psychosomatic buzz to be had from these creature comfort far more basic to our human nature than religious affiliation. Abraham Maslow alluded to this with his pyramid of human needs.