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.

Superhumans are really coming - unpacking 'Junk' DNA

 Superhumans are really coming. Remember where you read this first.

Like pieces of a jigsaw, advances in the understanding of the human genome, chronicled in two recent books: The Gene and Junk DNA are rapidly giving a clearer picture of how illness and aging can be tracked back to genetic malfunctioning.

This does tend to suggest that if the malfunctioning was not there, then illness and aging need not be the inevitable facts of life that we currently assume them to be.

Although, the likes of CRISPR gene-editing would suggest that it will be as a result of break-throughs in medical technologies that will move us along the path to an illness-free youthful old-age, what has been discounted is the evolutionary free-pass to such a state that Nature herself may be trying to hand out.

In his book, the Gene, Siddhartha Mukerjee, using his own family history as a framing device, traces the development of the science of genetics ; touching along the way , ideas about the perfectibility of human beings that surfaced in Eugenics, a field permanently tainted by it's many negative associations.

Nessa Carey, in her book, Junk DNA looks at the DNA that make up our genes. She shows that human biological complexity is not down to the superior number of genes that we have compared to lower animals, since we share roughly the same number of genes as them. But rather our difference rests on the much higher percentage of DNA in our genes  that apparently do no useful work, compared to the DNA which code for protein and are thus the building blocks of our bodies. The ratio is 98%: 2% . That 98% is what is to referred to as 'Junk' DNA.

Professor Carey then goes on to explain how this non-coding Junk DNA in fact has a regulatory function ; telomeres being one example. The function of telomeres has been implicated in cell senescence and therefore has a direct connection to the human aging process.

So from these two books we get the possibility of the perfectibility of human beings via the genes and that the place from which this is likely to come is the 'dark matter' of our genes, the junk DNA.

If Nature built us with a certain biological potential, visible within the genes, then, like the process of fetal development or the development of a rose bud into a rose , Nature must have a device in situ for realising that potential. No human  intervention required.

That in situ device, knowledge of which has been gained from the pursuit of a science of another sort, is called the kundalini.

The sanskrit meaning of kundalini is 'a coil' , which by association with 'snake' is suggestive of a potential energy that can convert into a kinetic force.

The kundalini is said to reside at the base of the spine in the sacrum* (latin for 'sacred') in three and a half coils - a detail carrying some mathematical significance.

When 'She' ('kundalini' is a feminine noun in sanskrit) is 'awakened', in a manner similar to the spontaneous germination of a seed, She travels up a central channel corresponding to the spinal column and 'pierces' the bone at the top of the skull, through the fontanelle* (latin for 'little fountain').
 
The feeling a lot of people immediately get when this happens is of a cool breeze (pnuema ) above the head - a kind of subtle 'baptism'.

That this process is linked to curing, health, wellness and rejuvenation is hinted at (or hidden in plain view) in the familiar symbol on the side of medical emergency vehicles or ambulances in some countries. That symbol is the Rod of Asclepius (Greek god of healing and medicine) showing a snake entwined on a rod:

Published medical research on Sahaja Yoga Meditation, which is based on kundalini awakening, shows it's positive effect on:

• Depression
• ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)
• Drug addiction
• Epilepsy
• Asthma
• Menopause
• Anxiety

 And this could be just the beginning of the noticeable effects of  kundalini.
 
Here are two quotes from two separate texts in the yoga tradition that refer to the anti-aging and rejuvenating effect of kundalini . The first is about 400 years old and the second could be over a thousand years old.

"..fragrance in the Prana enters the central (Sushumna) nerve along with the Kundalini. Then the spiritual nectar situated at the crown of the head spills into the mouth of the Kundalini and then gets absorbed throughout the body including the ten Pranas. (6:246-248).

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."

- Gyaneshwar

* 106 * Sudha sarabhi varshini - She who makes nectar flow in all our nerves from sahasrara i.e. she who gives the very pleasant experience of the ultimate

* 745 * Jaradwanthara viprabha - She who is the suns rays that swallows the darkness of old age

- Shri Lalita Sahasranama

So since aging and illness are in the genes , the kundalini appears to be using the Junk DNA as her box of tricks to pull out hitherto unknown human potential and capability.

The following is an excerpt of the transcription of an audio recording from January 30th 1982, where the founder of sahaja yoga, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi(1923 - 2011) was live translating a 2000 year old sanskrit text about the future of humanity. 


"...that will be the state of human beings. Their old age will disappear, their body will remain as it is and they will have a body which is divine. What a promise! So don’t worry too much about your bodily comforts. All right? Then maybe some of you, if you want, you can fly in the air also, with that, with that body. Also they can become subtle and can enter into the body(of others to cure them)"

It's time to unpack that Junk DNA.
*************************************

 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:....click here to read 'I Believe I Can Fly'

   * See Gray's Anatomy





 

The 100-Year Life.

If the prospect of hang-gliding in your 60s, dating in your 70s or acing a term paper in your 80s, grabs you, then there's some solid academic backing for the idea in the form of a recent book, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, by Lynda Gratton (co-author: Andrew Scott), Professor of Management Practice at London Business School.

Citing evidence that we are not only living longer but also remaining in better health as we do so, Professor Gratton goes on to argue that as a result of this youthful old-age, we, as a society, need to rethink our 3-stage life playbook of  education-work-retirement.

That may be the difficult part. Life is so fast-paced and everything has become so short-termism that it's the rare individual who manages to live their life based on a 5-year plan, never mind a 10, 20 or 30-year one. We live as chance and opportunity dictate.

Inevitably, then the only real actionable ideas offered in this thesis is around the familiar subject of financial planning. Think Pensions. Mckinsey carry an interview with Professor Gratton about her book here.

Ultimately, perhaps, the books main success may be in lending legitimacy to two current fringe  debates(depending on where you stand).

The first is anti-aging and the possibility of real biological youthful old age, suggested by the work of people such as Aubrey de Grey, who is mentioned in the book. The second is the possibility of a peaceful and adaptive change to the social order. An example being the advocacy for a Universal Basic Income - not mentioned in the book (See the result of the  recent Swiss referendum on UBI - Wall Street Journal 05 June 2016).


All this goes to show that, given a sufficient passage of time and accumulation of collective experience, even the most initially laughably farfetched ideas gain acceptance. This has been particularly noted in the realm of the advancement of scientific knowledge.

In an NIH published essay entitled: "Paths to acceptance. The advancement of scientific knowledge is an uphill struggle against 'accepted wisdom' " , author, Howard Wolinsky notes:

Unfortunately, scientists do not always follow a path of pure logic, as the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) once observed, “[a] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

That this holds true outside of science is shown by even the journey of the idea of UBI. In a recent FT article, Money for Nothing, the origin of the concept of a basic income is traced to 15th century Humanist Scholar , Thomas More. And the title of his book? Utopia: a word that has come to carry a ring of ridicule about it.

Thomas More could have just as well described his idea of a perfect social order using any of the dictionary synonyms for Utopia, such as 'Shangri-La' , 'Nirvana', 'Heaven on Earth'. But by the measure of his 7th century South Indian antecedent, Shri Kaka Bhujandar, who had ideas along similar lines, Thomas More's version would have been lacking in both conviction and visionary imagination. Why?

Whereas Thomas More confined his fantasy to a social, political and legal restructuring and couldn't have believed it would come true, Kaka Bhujandar makes the biological potential of human beings central to his projection into an ideal social structure (envision Aubrey de Grey championing UBI). And, as a practioner of a reputedly highly accurate form of ancient Indian astrology, believed it would come true.

Here's a translation, including some commentary (by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi) of part of the writing of Kaka Bhujandar on an end to illness and old age and the coming about of  an ideal society:

"Then all your diseases will disappear so fast with this Yoga that you won’t need anything like a hospital. In the beginning, these great yogis, you people also, only by touching people, you can cure people. It’s a fact. Like the Ardhanari Nateshwara is the Shiva that will be the state of human beings. Their old age will disappear, their body will remain as it is and they will have a body which is divine. What a promise! So don’t worry too much about your bodily comforts. All right?"

“In the new Yoga system, when it will manifest in the different countries, in the new age, the administration will be governed by people who have their own powers of Yoga. Depending on how far you are in your Yoga, and their qualities as Yogis, that will be the determining fact. They will be able to create a society, which will completely fulfill their desires and their necessities and people won’t need to have money accumulated with them. The poverty and sickness will be completely finished and in their absence the country, the samada, the society will be healthy and restful and without any anger."

 (The extended 20 minute 1982 audio recording of this live translation is here )

Reasons for anchoring these predictions in the present times are based on a short extrapolation of current trends such as UBI, technological-enablement(Robotics & AI), anti-aging & longevity, meditation/mindfulness, sahaja yoga and China geo-politics. Yes, China. Apparently the bright sunshine of a happy human future may be temporarily obscured by China geo-politics and one can't help but cast the mind to present territorial disputes in The South China Sea which are simmering away in the background at the moment but could burst on to centre stage. Let's hope not.

A few explanations of terms may make the above excerpted passage clearer.

The term 'Yoga' does not refer to the physical exercises commonly associated with the word yoga. It refers to a changed state of human awareness ie an evolutionary refinement of CNS (human central nervous system).

The clue to this is to be found in the original source book of yoga, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, wherein, yoga is definitively described thus:

योग: चित्त-वृत्ति निरोध:
yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ

— Yoga Sutras 1.2

That is : ' The cessation of the flactuations of the mind generated by thinking activity is yoga'.

In Sahaja Yoga, this non-thinking awareness comes about by the spontaneous working of an innate but initially dormant energy of kundalini. This energy is understood to reside at the base of the human spine in the sacrum and emerges, on awakening, at the fontanelle at the crown of the head.

The reference to 'new Yoga system' indicates a prior version that perhaps may not have been fit for mass evolutionary purpose. And indeed in the secretive, historical practice of kundalini yoga it was just a few people who were able to achieve it's goal. Two notables were , Dnyeshwar , a Marathi mystic poet and  Baba Shri Chanda, the son of the founder of sikhism. ( See letter to Atul Gawande : The Future of Aging - prevention, reversal and palliative care).

Sahaja Yoga, on the other hand, could be an example of Nature doing a massive-scale parallel processing computing problem in evolutionary terms to scale-up a local solution (unique incidences of realisation of kundalini potential ) to global level ie en-masse kundalini awakening. (See: Cool Breeze above the head ).

"Ardhanari Nateshwara is the Shiva" refers to the iconic representation of the idealised individual having perfect balance and integration  of the gentle (feminine) and strong (male) characteristics also represented in the symbol of yin-yang.

"Then all your diseases will disappear so fast with this Yoga that you won’t need anything like a hospital" ( See Sahaja Yoga medical research: here )