________________
70
COSMOLOGY: OLD AND NEW
to be emanating from the brain...... The encephalogram (electrical record of the brain-waves on paper) taken under standard conditions seems to be quite characteristic for a given person...... The brain and nerves, stated Professor, Davis, generated electrical waves which could be detected by means of sensitive amplifiers.165
That the body's electrical impulses are connected with a chemical activity, the electrical impulses being associated with the secretion by the nerve-endings of a powerful drug known as acetylcholine, was brought out in a paper by Dr. V.E. Henderson of the Department of Pharmacology, Toronto University. It was for work in this field that Professor Otto Loewi of Graz, Austria, and Sir Henry Dale of London received the Nobel Prize in medicine last winter.
Professor Leo Loeb of the Department of Pathology, Washington University school of Medicine, St. Louis, presented a paper on the 'Biological Basis of Individuality.' He offered evidence for the existence of substances in each individual higher organism, man as well as animals and birds, which bring about the unification of its many parts.
"These individuality differentials' are genetically determined and therefore transmitted by heredity but they are represented by substances which develop in the course of phylogenetic and embroynal evolution," said Dr. Loeb.
These reports of the American doctors establish the fact that our thoughts and emotions give rise to electrial waves in the brain which tune in foreign energy waves just as the waves generated in a radio receiving set tune in electrical waves of foreign stations. This is what a Jaina would call asrava (i.e. influx) or kanic matter into the soul. That the influx of these electric impulses is connected with chemical activity is a clear index of the fact that our karmas accumulate round the soul in the form of fine dust. Thus the existence of karmic matter is to a very great extent established by experimental science.
The extra-fine matter Süksma-suksma we have interpreted as streams of indivisible elementary units of matter called electrons, protons, positrons and neutrons of modern science. The reason for this is this:
165. Reproduced from Hindustan Times, July 3, 1937. William L. Laurence's article under the caption 'Man's Mind Traced by Electricity."