Life Force and the Looming Paradigm Shift in Science
Dec 20, 2025
There's a book called The Holy Science written in 1894 by an Indian yogi named Sri Yukteswar. In it, he describes something called the Yuga Cycle, an idea that human civilization goes through cycles of growth and collapse that has been going on for millions of years. These cycles have been described in many diverse cultures, it's where the idea of the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages come from. Yukteswar writes from the Indian Vedic perspective, where the ages are called the Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dwapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga. In all of these cultures, there are four stages of progressive and regressive growth, where in the lowest stage humanity lives like crude barbarians who are constantly at war, and in the highest stage have advanced knowledge and abilities and live in harmony.
Sri Yukteswar tells us that we are currently ascending into the second stage, the Dwapara Yuga. In this stage, it is said that humanity discovers that reality consists of more than just crude, hard matter but also abstract quantities we would describe as "energy." Sri Yukteswar says that the current age began in the year 1900, where the predominant mode of science transitioned from mechanics to the exploration of invisible forces like electricity, magnetism, and the nuclear forces. We also discovered how energy can live in potential forms and be interchanged by these forces, like how gravitational energy can be transformed into electrical energy, or nuclear energy transformed into thermal. Sri Yukteswar tells us that these are only the crudest, physical forces though, and that there are subtler, non-physical or spiritual ones that we will discover but are undetectable by our current methods of science. He tells us that in the Dwapara Yuga, we will discover a particular force that has both physical and spiritual components, so there will be some component of this force that is detectable by normal scientific methods but will also be a bridge to understanding a subtler, spiritual dimension to reality. He calls this the "life force."
The life force is well known in ancient eastern cultures and spiritual circles, in India it is called "prana" and in China it is called "chi." Practices like acupuncture and breathing exercises are said to work on this type of energy, and meditation teachers can actually show you to feel the energy in your own body. It is said to correlate with breath, and if one learns to focus their attention enough they will notice a subtler sensation of currents running through the body. This is the life force.
Many ancient cultures describe something like this life force, they say that all living creatures have it and in fact this is energy is what animates life. But what Sri Yukteswar tells us in the Holy Science is that there should be a physical, material component to this energy that is detectable by our normal scientific instruments, but no one has yet been able to detect prana or chi in the body. So where is this material component to the life force energy?
The Second Body
There's an interesting idea that recurs in esoteric fields like UFOs and the paranormal that there is a missing component to the electromagnetic force. We know today that electricity and magnetism aren't two forces but actually two aspects of this one force, and that's why magnets induce electricity and electricity creates magnetic fields. In the lore of UFO antigravity research, it is said that there is actually a third unknown component to this force that can be used to create antigravitic effects, often called "scalar waves" or "longitudinal waves." Similarly, Robert Monroe (an astral projection researcher who worked with the CIA) theorized the astral body (which he calls the "Second Body") was made of an energy that has some relationship to electricity and magnetism:
This is the energy-means by which the Second Body operates and is quite probably fundamental in the thought process. It is not known whether this force is generated by living entities or is an ever present field force, modulated in some manner by such beings. It does, however, have some notable characteristics. It bears a distinct relationship to electricity and magnetism. It might be conceived of as a third of a triad, which is cyclic. Electricity is to magnetism as magnetism is to Force X as Force X is to electricity.
These recurring descriptions of a third component to the electromagnetic force are fairly specific and come up in a large variety of different topics. But can we find this force or study it somehow in a lab?
This brings us to some cutting edge research in regenerative biology from Dr. Michael Levin at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Levin and his lab have done research controlling the growth of limbs on various bodies purely by manipulating the electromagnetic field around the bodies cells while they grow. They can grow two heads on a planarian worm, and when they cut it in half it regrows the two heads again, without any manipulation of the worms genes. This is groundbreaking research because the prevailing belief is that the blueprint of the body is stored in the DNA, but Levin shows that it is actually encoded in an electrical field around the body. Levin is also able to turn on and off cancer growths by manipulating these fields. It is as if this field somehow integrates the trillions of cells of a body into one cohesive unit, and when this field is disrupted the cells around the disruption lose their connection to the whole and grow in unintegrated, malignant ways.
Now if you've ever seen illustrations of astral bodies from people who claim to see them, they have roughly the same form as the material body but fuzzier, like an aura that surrounds the physical body. Does this sound like the field that Levin is researching, a force or potential that surrounds the body and maintains its form? I believe Dr. Levin's research could be pointing to exactly what Sri Yukestwar described, a new force whose physical component can be measured in a lab but points to a non-physical component that will lead science to the study of non-physical aspects of reality.
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