Throughout the history of human civilization there have been large number of instances where so called “miracles” have been performed. These have included levitation, production of material things from thin air, physical healing, etc. The nature of these miracles is same, irrespective of religion and different civilizations. Some of their accounts have been exaggerated but a large body of information shows remarkable consistency in their nature and reporting. To my mind these events have come because of interaction of human thought and material surroundings. After all, a thought produced by physical brain has to be physical in nature and hence governed by scientific laws. Thus the curiosity arose about which laws of science operate to make these things happen. I have tried to explore these issues in my first book called “Nature of Human Thought” which was published in 2004 and its second edition in 2010. Recently I have written another book “Spirituality + Technology = Happiness” which extends and explores the issues of mind-matter interaction further.
Besides I have been writing on these issues quite regularly in Times of India (Speaking Tree section); Huffington Post and recently in Thrive Global. All these essays are also available at one place in my writings.
The ideas contained in the books and writings have evolved intermittently over a long period of time and have been written in a diary form and posted on the web. I have been writing on these matters since 1977. Most of them are however intuitive and speculative in nature and hence are not exact in the formal sense. It is my hope that some bright reader will help in providing a rigorous formulation to some of them and do further research on these ideas.
My own journey of spirituality started at the age 13 when on my thirteenth birthday in 1963 I was given a present of a Hindi translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. Reading this book completely changed my life and propelled me on the path of spirituality. I became obsessed with it and read it continuously – in the process neglecting my studies and other activities.
Gandhi’s early years simply caught hold of my imagination and there arose a great desire to know about the religions of the world. How this leap took place I don’t remember but it must have been triggered by reading Bhagwat Gita since this was Gandhiji’s favorite book. I therefore embarked on the journey of reading all the religious books that I could get from the local library – Gita Koran, Bible, Rigveda, Upanishads, Patanjali Yoga, Vivekchudamani, etc. As can be imagined, how much can you absorb at the age of 13 or 14, but the desire to read all these books was intense. Nevertheless reading of Patanjali Yoga Darshan created a tremendous impression on my teenage mind since it showed that one could gain superhuman powers by practicing Yoga!
Together with the reading came the desire to practice some of the things that Gandhiji did. Thus I became totally vegetarian, started eating mostly boiled food and also started meditating. Meditation was done as described in Shri Ramakrishna’s biography. The meditation, which sometimes lasted for one to two hours, produced wonderful feelings and dreams.
I remember starting an experiment of meditating on my heart and visualizing that it contained a small earthen lamp. This resulted in a tremendous feeling of love and good feelings for everybody. If I remember correctly this must have lasted for a month or so but I got frightened by the experience and hence stopped the heart meditation. I tried repeating the same meditation many years later but was never able to duplicate the experience.
The meditation and intense reading produced wonderful and remarkable dreams. Some of the vivid ones I can remember were :
- I am running in the courtyard of our house in our village and a bright beam of light descends from the sky and hits my right side. My face and shoulder are totally engulfed by it. There was no fear – just a feeling of well-being.
- In another dream I saw a fire breathing dragon which would have killed me. I immediately recited the name of Lord Shiva. He appeared and gave me a bow and arrow with which I killed the dragon. I am sure both these dreams may have been influenced by some of the movies on holy people that I saw as a child.
- One dream was really strange. I saw my younger brother and myself all alone in a desert. The skies suddenly opened up and an intense beam of bright white light bathed us both. The beam gave a sense of comfort and warmth. But besides the light I also heard wonderful western classical music. Since at the age of 13 or 14, I had no access to western classical music, this dream was something very strange.
- One dream was of an out of body experience where I am in the battlefront and “killed”. However the “I” remained in the shape of my body form and it could go anywhere and pass through walls and obstacles.
- Another dream showed that I am travelling in a spaceship in deep space and witnessed the formation of spiral galaxies in an egg-shaped envelope. This dream was really fantastic and psychedelic with varied colors and forms – almost like soap bubbles except very brightly colored and could have come out of almost any science fiction movie.
- In one dream I saw myself levitating by climbing with tremendous effort on invisible steps. This dream came at the time when I was thinking deeply about gravity. A thought therefore came that probably gravity is quantized.
These types of dreams continued even later and there was a time (sometime in early 1970s) when I continuously had dreams of having discussions about the future of India with leaders like Mao, Trotsky, Lenin and above all with Gandhiji. There were many dreams of Gandhi. In one strange dream he even merged into my body!
The whole idea behind describing this is to tell you, the readers, that these events did remain at the back of my mind and did help in preparing it for the work outlined in the thought book and my writings. In fact it goes to show that once the mind gets prepared then it can tune into the relevant dimensional space and can start receiving the knowledge.
Such knowledge did come out of the blue one day. I was doing my research for Ph.D. at University of Florida, Gainesville, USA in the area of thermal applications of solar energy. After lunch I was walking back from my home to the office through a thick pine grove when suddenly a thought came that gravity and human thought are somehow related. The idea (which occurred in later part of 1977) was so powerful that it caught hold of my mind for next 4-5 months and I could hardly concentrate on anything else.
Since this idea came suddenly and so powerfully, I was convinced that it was true – otherwise it would not have come. Obviously I can be charged with delusional thinking (I have not been able to provide a foolproof relationship between thought and gravity) but the idea seemed intuitively true that day and feels so even today after more than 45 years later. I am sure my readings on gravity and attendance of lectures on cosmology at the University of Florida must have helped, but the idea came in a flash.
This single idea propelled me to start writing on mind/matter interaction which is in the diary form. Somehow I also felt that the pine groves acted as antennas for this thought and have written essays about how trees may act as antenna for higher thought.
In 1981 I came back to India from US to work on rural development in Maharashtra and somehow the work on thought, gravity and spirituality was again put on the back burner. Hence I did not do any serious study or write on them till 1991.
In March 1991 I had gone to give guest lectures at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay when I slipped in the IIT Guest house and nearly fractured my spine. The pain was the most severe I had in my life. Fifteen days later I started writing on spirituality and have never looked back. Strange are the ways of the Lord! Thus you will see that after 1979 the next entry in diary is from 1991 and then there are continuous writings.
The diary has provided ideas which have been distilled in my writings and books. It has 112 pages and is a work in progress.
Happy reading and thinking.