Gross & Subtle

======================================================================

An'oran'eeyaan mahato maheeyaan

Atmaasya jantornihito guhaayaaan

.......Kathopanishad

Subtler than the subtle, greater than the great

the Self is set in the heart of every creature

 *******************************************************************************************************

Over the past four centuries the progress of physics has been a rapidly escalating irreversible journey from the tangible to the intangible, visible to the invisible, thinkable to the unthinkable, and exoteric to the esoteric.

Stop.

Wow! I guess I wrote my grandest sentence ever...let me dedicate it to Nirad C. Chaudhury.  Nirad Babu and I have a kinship: he wrote the Autobiography Of An Unknown Indian...a polemic enterprise of first waters. And I have been writing the Autoblogography Of An Even Less Known South Indian. He was from the village Kishorganj and I from Muthukur.


In our school at Muthukur there was this very lovable student two years senior to me. His name is Narahari Nageswara Rao (NNR). He was my Father's pet. He was not brilliant...there were more brilliant kids in his class. But he was a gentleman...an unknown species in Village Schools. He never played rough and tumble games. He used to walk five kilometers from the neighboring village, Gopalapuram, to the school and walk back. But, while in his Final Year, he took a small room on rent in our neighborhood to save time for reading. While in his village, he used to take his books into the nearby jungle, sit in the cleavage of a neem tree and read so that he was undisturbed. And his favorite subject was Social Studies aka General Knowledge. And he always used to come first in that subject. After his Final Exams were over, he told my HM Father that he was expecting State First in SS.

But when his SSLC Register arrived and my Father opened it, he found NNR failed in SS getting just 22 marks. My Father told NNR that his Register didn't arrive yet and he would be 'wiring' the Board for it. Instead, my Father sent back his Register by Express Delivery asking for a Revaluation. After a month of tense waiting, his Register arrived with the 22 corrected to 72 (State First).

Anyway, during that year when he was in our neighborhood, my Father asked NNR to coach his son (me) for a few minutes a day in SS (my weak subject). And I used to go to his room and bother him. By and by we liked each other and he became my very close friend. After he passed, we lost touch, and twenty good years later, while I was in Gudur on a summer vacation he came down to see me. It was all good nostalgia...he was married and was working as a Block Development Officer after his BA (Geography).

One day in 1955 I asked him what was so great about one Einstein who was constantly in the news (he died a few days back). And NNR made a cryptic remark:

"Einstein showed that space is curved"

I didn't pursue the matter further. It was so charming a notion. Much later, I came to know that when I turn from right to left and left to right lying supine on my bed, which I do a hundred times a day nowadays, I am making a wrinkle in the curved space in the right and am jostled to my left till I make a counter-wrinkle in the space to my left. That is how I turn. Like a baby in the 'cloth-swing' that used to be hung from the hook in the roof during our infancy.

Coming to modern physics, I know roughly what happens to me when I am caught in the explosion created by an Atom Bomb (the real one...not the Diwali cracker). If I were close by, I would be incinerated without the need for a cremation. If I were in a safer distance from Ground Zero, I would be blown to smithereens, brain and all splattered here and there. Not all the King's horses or the King's men can put me back again.

But that is not my present worry...a known and tangible end is less worrisome than an unknown and unthinkable one. They say that after creating the God-Particle successfully (there are some doubts about it), the physicists at CERN are going to create a black hole. And that I would be sucked in. Imploded. I would shrink like Alice in Wonderland without let till I become a Point without Parts. Then my worry would be that I would carry my brain with me...blogs and all. So, I get to retain my mind (whatever is left of it). It is the weirdest thing to happen to me.

And they say I was evolved in a reverse process they call Big Bang abut 15 billion years ago...just yesterday by cosmological standards. So, I was always there in a subtle form...the Kathopanishad is rather fine, as far as it goes.

Now no one should doubt that matter and mind interact with one another inseparably. Listen to Feynman:  

******************************************************************************************************

"I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While I was hypnotized she said, "I'm going to light a match, blow it out, and immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain."

I thought, "Baloney!" She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were closed throughout all of this, but I was thinking, "That's easy. She lit one match, but touched a different match to my hand. There's nothing to that; it's a fake!"

When I came out of hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.

So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you're saying to yourself, "I could do that, but I won't" --- which is another way of saying that you can't."

*******************************************************************************************************

All these thoughts came up to trouble me because of a strange experience I had yesterday. My son and myself parked by the side of the  local Supermarket here and my son got down asking me to stay seated, which I happily did (scope for woolgathering). 

Then I saw a thirtyish gentleman smoking his cigarette on the sidewalk. Nothing strange about it. But the sight of the chap inhaling and exhaling like a bloody whale took me thirty two years back when I myself was a chain smoker and went through the drill a thousand times.

And then my son returned and we drove home and I forgot all about it. During my afternoon siesta 'I had a Dream'...much like Martin Luther King, sorry.

Apparently I took out a cigarette from my pocket, lit it and went through the  succulent experience all the way to the fag end of the butt. And I was experiencing the rush and exhilaration that goes with a smoke after that long a while. My dream-brain was full of nicotine and I was on a high.

Suddenly a plate fell on the ground in the kitchen and I woke up. And found that my body and my brain were going through exactly the same 'rush'. And the thrill. And the high. And it lasted all of five good minutes.

And then i recalled a true story that Prof MSS (the one who never lies) told me. Apparently he was present at a demo by a well-known Yogi at Delhi who was sitting in his room surrounded by his chelas and cynical onlookers like MSS. And it was mid-winter and everyone was wearing their pullovers and coats but the Yogi sat bare-bodied. And someone asked him if he didn't feel cold. And then he said that he can make summer within himself. And he went into a yogic trance  for a few minutes. And his body slowly started sweating till by and by the beads of sweat gathered into a full-fledged stream and rolled to the floor beneath him...

Should you have a doubt about the interplay of the subtle (dream) body and the gross (waking) body, you can find irrefutable proof in the First Play of the Shakespeare Theater Company mentioned in:

  http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/03/physics-of-sex.html


**********************************************************************************

Here is the latest pic of Ishani with her cousin:

======================================================================