Status :: Done
Desire :: 3
Medium :: Book
Rating :: 4
Completed :: 2024-08-23

Review

What if we tried to use physics to explain Spirituality? Or more specifically, tried to explain the physical possibility of certain phenomena, like "aha moments", telepathy, and connection with "higher beings" in meditation?

If the following (mild spoiler) makes you curious, I would highly #recommend the book.

There are things in nature that oscillate - like fireflies blinking on and off, your phone screen changing as you play a video, or clams opening and closing. These all have a frequency, measured in "cycles per second" or "Hertz" (Hz). "Rhythm entrainment" is a mysterious phenomena whereby things with the same frequency will sync up; a bunch of fireflies that meet up in the same bush will eventually start to blink on and off in time with one another; clams in the ocean will open and close in sync with the tides.

What do they synchronise with? For fireflies, I'm yet unsure; it might be the electrical field, which is an invisible but detectable fluctuation in electricity in the air. You can measure the electric field using a voltmeter. But for clams, we know the answer to how they sync up, and it's surprisingly not the tides - it's gravitational waves.

The moon creates tides on earth, and the tides on earth "lock" the moon in place. This happens because there is a gravitational field, some vibrations given off by both the moon, the ocean, and in fact, everything with mass! We can't normally measure gravitational waves, but some smart physicists in Australia once used special equipment to detect the gravitational waves of two blackholes merging in a galaxy far far away.

So if the clams aren't just feeling the tides, what are they feeling? Well, a scientist who was curious about this ordered for a bunch of clams from the other side of the world to be shipped to their office. They were kept alive in a closed box with seawater, but were not put back in the local ocean. After two weeks, the opening-closing pattern of the clams were all synced up with both each other and the moon! This means that, inside their little box, they were able to detect the presence of the moon, which they must do via gravitational waves.

Thus, life is capable of detecting gravitational fields! And perhaps even other subtle fields, like electrical or magnetic fields. We know this to be true for birds, who use the earth's magnetic field to reliably navigate during migration. I have heard recently that dogs will spin around before pooping in order to line up with a magnetic field.

So the natural question is, are we humans capable of detecting waves in these fields, which must feel like much subtler sensations than the air or temperature we easily feel on our skin? What would these waves even feel like? And if we can detect waves, can we emit them too? The answer is almost certainly, that you likely experience some of these fields when your body awareness is tuned out, like during meditation (or perhaps Psychedelics, if you're into that). As for emitting waves, this might be the means by which we communicate telepathically with other living beings who are synced up with us via rhythm entrainment.

I'll leave it there, but if you're interested, pick up this book!

I'd totally #recommend it to anyone for Spirituality, Yoga, Kundalini or Physics.

Notes

The epilogue and appendix of this book are perhaps more practical than most of its contents. Amazingly, the author developed instruments and a theory of the brain to explain physio-Kundalini syndrome, which is a combination of progressive paralysis, headaches, depression and many bells and whistles. This syndrome commonly affects people who pursue meditation to great depths, or do a lot of Hatha yoga, but it also occurs spontaneously.

For anyone pursuing their Spirituality, this section is a little cautionary tale as well as reassurance that it's just your body trying to heal itself; the author describes Kundalini as a mechanism for cleansing stress from the nervous system (and therefore the body and mind). It's also apparently extremely pleasurable, and often has strong sexual overtones.