ANIL K RAJVANSHI
Swiss scientists have recently discovered that sending a very weak current to the back of the right side of the brain triggered an out-of-body experience (OBE) for the patient.

This OBE could be produced at will whenever a particular part of the brain was stimulated by an electric current. OBE is also one of the major outcomes of yoga and is mentioned in the vibhuti pad of Patanjali's Yoga Darshan. Naturally a yogi has to practise years of tapasya or meditation before she can achieve an OBE and sense of levitation. Interestingly, technology seems to allow this pleasurable experience quite easily.

Scientists say the human body has a natural weak electric field. Its disruption causes disease, so drugs are being designed to help restore this weak field though the exact nature of this field is still not fully understood. This is like acupuncture practitioners' claim that disease is caused when the equilibrium of forces called yin and yang are disturbed — and by inserting needles at strategic places in the body this equilibrium is restored. Indian yogic scriptures describe this as disturbance in Sukshma Sharir or ethereal body.

Most societies regard out-of-body experience, levitation or ethereal body as being in the realm of spirituality. OBE is viewed as an attribute of the self or consciousness, and so is differentiated from matter. However, scientific experiments have shown that consciousness is a product of physical matter. An accepted definition states that consciousness is a higher order of thought, a product of the physical brain — so it must have a physical basis, governed by scientific laws. But they cannot be excluded from the realm of science since we need to know more about laws of thought.

Thought can be described as a hologram, produced when several neurons get fired in the brain. For mundane thoughts like — what is the colour of the rose? — this hologram exists in four dimensional space-time. Since the energy of a mundane thought is not very high it dissipates rapidly and cannot be transmitted to large distances. But for deep thought in which nearly 100 billion neurons are getting fired in a laser-type fashion for a long time on a single idea, this hologram possibly exists in higher dimensional space-time. Patanjali calls this deep thought Sanyam.

Deep thought could travel great distances, interacting with matter in a spooky way. This has been the basis of clairvoyance and psychokinesis. Besides, this deep thought also has the ability to extract knowledge and information from the higher dimensional knowledge space. All great discoveries in science and spiri- tual realms have come from people who were able to plug into knowledge space via very deep thought.

Everything in the universe is interconnected. Hence a theory of human thought should likely explain the interaction of human thought and matter and nature of matter itself. Possibly, gra-vity and deep human thought are related. Both are weak forces but are transmitted through great distances because they are geometric in nature and bend the corresponding space-time continuum accor-dingly. Indian scriptures recount stories of rishis who left their body based upon the conjunction of planets.

Quantum jumps in our understanding and knowledge have taken place when a great thought has been produced by persons like Buddha, Christ, Kepler, Newton or Einstein. A similar quantum jump may take place when a relationship is discovered between human thought, consciousness and matter. It will then explain two of the major mysteries of our times — consciousness and gravity.