The UNIVERSE within our cells

On the body as an expression of the cosmos, the science the rishis already knew, and the morning practice that returns you to both.

You are reading this in the middle of a war.

Maybe several of them. Somewhere, as your eyes move across this sentence, a city is burning that was whole six months ago. A family is deciding which border to cross. A software engineer in Bangalore is refreshing a screen, waiting for a notification that will tell him whether his role still exists by Friday. A woman in a suburb of any major city on earth is sitting in her car after dropping her children at school, hands still on the wheel, going nowhere, because she cannot remember what she was supposed to do next. She has plenty of tasks. None of them feels like they belong to her.

Every screen delivers the full inventory of what is going wrong. The Middle East. The layoffs. The algorithms that once recommended products now recommend your replacement. Agentic AI is already here, already reconfiguring what it means to earn, to contribute, to be needed. The ground is shifting, and the institutions that were supposed to hold it steady are shifting with it.

The Bhagavad Gita addressed this condition precisely. As a field manual for a man standing in the middle of a war he did not choose, surrounded by people he loved on both sides, paralysed by the sheer moral weight of what was being asked of him.

In Chapter 6, Verse 23, Krishna speaks:

Tam vidyad duhkha-samyoga-viyogam yoga-samjnitam. Sa nischayena yoktavyo yogo ‘nirvinna-chetasa.

Know that state which is the severance of the union with suffering: that is what is called Yoga. And it should be practised with determination, with an unwavering mind.

Read that again. Yoga, in Krishna’s definition, is something far more precise than a posture or an app. It is the deliberate disconnection from the architecture of suffering. And Krishna says practise it. With determination. With a mind that holds steady.

This is a diagnostic statement about the human condition and a prescription for addressing it. The suffering Krishna names is universal. It is the suffering that arises whenever a conscious being has forgotten what it is and has mistaken its temporary conditions for its permanent nature.

The shloka is scientific. In the way that a map is scientific: it describes the territory accurately enough that you can navigate by it. The territory Krishna is describing is the human being itself, and the four observations that follow in this essay are the coordinates.

The question, then, is: WHAT ARE WE?

The psychic scientists of the Vedic tradition, the rishis who composed the Upanishads and the Vedas, spent lifetimes investigating this question. From inside. Through sustained awareness of the body’s own processes. They were experimentalists of consciousness. Their laboratory was the human system. Their method was direct perception refined across generations. Their findings were recorded in the most precise language available to them: Sanskrit verse.

And when you lay those findings alongside the most current physics, biology, and neuroscience, the correspondence is so consistent that it can mean only one of two things: either the rishis made the luckiest guesses in human history, or they were observing something real.

Four observations. Four facets of a single recognition about the nature of the body you inhabit. Each one has been held by the Vedic tradition for millennia. Each one is now confirmed, or being confirmed, by the instruments of modern science. And each one pointing toward the same word: divinity. Felt in the body. Verifiable in science. Present right now, in the cells reading this sentence.

WE ARE LIGHT IN MATTER

Let me ask you something simple. Where did the iron in your blood come from?

You might say food. Spinach, maybe. Red meat. Fair enough. But where did the iron in the spinach come from? From the soil. And in the soil? From the rock. And in the rock? Here it gets quiet, because the answer is: from the death of a star. The iron atom sitting at the core of your haemoglobin molecule right now, carrying oxygen through your bloodstream as you read this, was forged exclusively in the final explosion of a massive star, a supernova, billions of years before the Earth existed. There is no other process in the known universe that produces iron. Every iron atom on earth, in your blood, in every bridge and building and kitchen knife, was born in the death of a star.

The carbon in your DNA? Built in a stellar furnace. The oxygen in your lungs? Stellar. The calcium in your bones, the nitrogen in your muscles, the phosphorus in your ATP? All of it, every bit, assembled inside the cores of stars through a process called nucleosynthesis and scattered across the cosmos when those stars died.

In 2015, the SDSS-III APOGEE project confirmed this by surveying 150,000 stars: the human body and the Milky Way share approximately 97% of the same elemental atoms.

The Chandogya Upanishad records a conversation between Uddalaka Aruni, a father, and his son, Shvetaketu. The young man has returned from 12 years of formal study, full of learning and confident in his knowledge. His father asks him one question: Do you know that, by knowing which, everything else is known?

Shvetaketu does not.

What follows is one of the most extraordinary teaching sequences in any literature. Uddalaka takes his son through the nature of reality, layer by layer, until he arrives at the single statement that holds the entire Upanishadic vision in three words:

Tat tvam asi.

That, you are.

The essence of the cosmos is the essence of you. Literally. Right now. In this body. The rishis had something other than a spectroscopic survey. They had a method of observation that moved inward rather than outward, and arrived at the same place. The boundary between you and the cosmos is a habit of perception. A useful one, for navigating traffic and paying bills. A misleading one, for understanding what you are.

Approximately 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced each year. You are a flowing pattern, a river of cosmic matter temporarily arranged in a form that can read, weep, and chant. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad puts it with characteristic directness: Aham Brahmasmi. I am Brahman. The totality. Already. Now.

When the tradition says you are divine, this is what it means. The stuff of your body is the stuff of the cosmos. There is no boundary. There never was.

A BODY OF LIGHT

Stay with me here, because this is where it gets extraordinary.

The sun emits light through nuclear fusion. Hydrogen atoms fuse into helium at the core, releasing enormous energy. And we think of the sun as this blazing, impossibly hot furnace, right? Millions of degrees at the surface?

Actually, no. The sun’s core is about 15 million degrees. But the moment that light leaves the surface and enters space, something changes completely. Space is a vacuum. Heat does not travel through a vacuum. So the light of the sun crosses 150 million kilometres of space as radiation, as photons, without heat. Cold. Silent. For eight minutes.

Only when that light reaches our atmosphere does the energy begin to convert into warmth. It hits the atmosphere, the Earth’s surface, and then plants. And here is where it becomes personal, because the plants do something miraculous with that light. Through photosynthesis, they convert light energy into chemical energy, into the sugars, starches, and nutrients that form the food you eat. When you eat that food, your body metabolises it. The energy enters your cells. And inside those cells, tiny organelles called mitochondria, ancient organisms of bacterial origin that have lived inside our cells for 1.5 billion years, take that energy and produce ATP, the currency of cellular life.

Here is the fact that should change how you see yourself: per cubic centimetre, the human body produces approximately 10,000 times more energy than the surface of the sun. This is a verified volumetric comparison. The sun is powerful because of its sheer mass. But per unit volume, the metabolic fire inside your liver, your heart, your brain, outperforms the nearest star.

You have approximately 37 trillion cells. Each one is burning. Can you hold that image for a moment? Thirty-seven trillion tiny suns, each one outperforming the actual sun by four orders of magnitude per cubic centimetre. That is what you are.

And it goes further. Those mitochondria emit light. Actual photons. Biophoton research, pioneered by Fritz-Albert Popp at the International Institute of Biophysics, has confirmed that every living cell emits coherent light at extremely low intensities, as detected by sensitive detectors. Your cells are glowing. And that light moves through your body, which is approximately 70% water.

Now, here is where it gets really interesting. That water molecule you learned about in chemistry class, H₂O, one oxygen, two hydrogens, it seems so stable, so fixed. But the hydrogen bond in liquid water, the bond between the hydrogen of one water molecule and the oxygen of the next, is breaking and reforming approximately a trillion times per second. A trillion. When something oscillates at that frequency, it appears completely still. Solid. Dense. That is why your body looks so solid to my eyes, why it seems like this heavy, physical, bound thing. But at the molecular level, it is a field of light moving through a medium of unimaginably rapid vibration.

The Mundaka Upanishad said this thousands of years ago:

Na tatra suryo bhati na chandra-tarakam, nema vidyuto bhanti kuto ‘yam agnih.

Tam eva bhantam anubhati sarvam, tasya bhasa sarvam idam vibhati.

The sun does not shine there, nor the moon, nor the stars. Lightning does not shine there, much less fire. When that shines, everything shines after it. By its light, all this is illuminated.

The Katha Upanishad repeats the same verse, placing it in Yama’s mouth as he teaches the young Nachiketa. The repetition across Upanishads is deliberate emphasis. The tradition says: pay attention. What illuminates the body is more fundamental than any external light. The sun borrows its light from this. The stars borrow their light from this.

When you understand the chain (sun to vacuum to atmosphere to plant to food to cell to mitochondria to biophoton to water to vibration to the appearance of solidity), you begin to see what the Upanishad was pointing at. You are a body of light, appearing as matter. That is divinity. And it can be felt.

THE DARK THAT BURNS LIFE

So if we are light, where did that light come from?

Before there was light, before there was matter, before there was space in which light or matter could exist, there was something the human mind has no category for. The Rigveda’s Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation (10.129), opens with what may be the most honest sentence ever composed about the origin of everything:

Na asad asin, na sad asit tadanim.

There was neither existence nor nonexistence then.

Think about that. The Vedic seer is saying: before creation, there was a condition beyond “something” and beyond “nothing.” Beyond being and unbeing. Beyond matter and void. Beyond even darkness, because darkness requires a space in which to be dark, and space had yet to arise.

Ambhah kim asid gahanam gabhiram.

Was there water, deep and unfathomable? The image is the closest language can come to pointing at the fertile void from which all things emerge.

Now, let me bring in the physics, because it’s astonishing here.

Every atom in your body contains protons. You know this from school. Inside each proton are quarks and gluons, held together by the strong nuclear force. In December 2024, a landmark paper published in Reports on Progress in Physics provided the first direct experimental evidence that those quarks and gluons inside protons exist in a maximally entangled quantum state. Maximally. Meaning: they share the maximum possible amount of information throughout the interior of the proton.

And here is the bridge: the theoretical framework known as ER=EPR, proposed by physicists Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind, suggests that quantum entanglement and wormholes (the tunnels through spacetime predicted by Einstein’s equations) may be the same phenomenon expressed in different mathematical languages. If this holds, then the interior of every proton in your body participates in the same deep geometry as black holes.

Your body contains approximately seven octillion atoms. In each one, this entanglement. In each one, a connection to the deep fabric of spacetime.

The Taittiriya Upanishad traces the descent of reality from Brahman through akasha (space), vayu (air), agni (fire), apah (water), prithvi (earth), and into the body. At each stage, the gross emerges from the subtle. The visible from the invisible. The full from the void. The quantum vacuum, which physicists describe as the most energetic thing in the universe (despite appearing empty), is a modern instrument pointing at the same reality the Nasadiya Sukta pointed at with language alone: the fertile darkness from which all things arise.

The Gita says it with the economy that only Krishna seems to manage. In Chapter 9, Verse 4:

Maya tatam idam sarvam jagad avyakta-murtinah

By Me, in My unmanifest form, this entire universe is pervaded.

The unmanifest is the most present thing there is. It is the field in which your body exists, the ground from which your atoms arose, and the silence that holds every sound you have ever made, including the sound of a mantra at 6:10 in the morning.

The darkness is the womb. The void is full. And you, at the deepest level of your physical structure, are continuous with it. That is divinity.

BIOLOGY UNLIMITED

One more step, and then we bring it home.

The Gayatri Mantra, the most recited verse in the Vedic tradition, is addressed to Savitri, the generative solar principle. Its closing request is: dhiyo yo nah prachodayat. May that luminous intelligence impel our minds into motion.

This is a prayer for the activation of Dhee, the faculty of discernment, through the agency of light. And the Vedic rishis placed this prayer at the junction of dawn because they understood, through generations of direct observation, that light is the master regulator of biological intelligence.

Let me show you what I mean by “master regulator.”

Your genome encodes multiple families of light-sensitive proteins. You know about opsins, the ones that let you see. But there are others. Melanopsin in your retina regulates the circadian clock. Cryptochromes, which evolved from ancient photolyase enzymes, originally used photon energy to repair DNA damage directly. Read that again: enzymes in your cells that use sunlight to fix your DNA. They have since evolved into core components of the molecular clock in every cell. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for this discovery: that light-responsive proteins are woven into the genetic clock mechanism of every living cell.

LIGHT INSTRUCTS THE BODY

The Isha Upanishad calls the sun ekarshi, the sole seer, the one who traverses the sky and by its movement orders all life. The Vedic calendar, the daily rhythms of practice, the insistence on specific times for specific sadhanas were built on this understanding: that the human organism is an open receiver. It is coded, in its DNA, to receive the intelligence of the sun and translate it into the rhythms of sleep, wakefulness, immunity, mood, memory, and cellular repair.

And here is the consequence of ignoring this: circadian disruption, the severing of this relationship through artificial light, screen exposure, and modern work schedules, has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 2A probable carcinogen.

The tradition that insisted on rising before dawn and beginning sadhana at the Brahma Muhurta, the hour of Brahman, approximately 4:00 to 6:00 AM, was maintaining the alignment between the human body and the cosmic rhythm on which its health depends. This was chronobiology, practised for millennia before the word existed.

The science of vision itself is quantum. A single photon absorbed by a single retinal molecule is sufficient to trigger a neural signal. Your eye can detect individual photons. The body is built, at the molecular level, to transduce light into biological intelligence with a precision that approaches the theoretical limits of physics.

Dhiyo yo nah prachodayat. May it impel our minds. The prayer is to the same force that the cryptochrome proteins in your cells respond to every morning at dawn.

Your DNA remembers the sun. The morning sadhana is the act of honouring that memory, of aligning the individual rhythm with the cosmic one, before the noise of the world disrupts the signal. The Vedic tradition and the molecular clock are the same story, told in different centuries, pointing at the same body.

The body listens to the light. It always has. The tradition of keeping the appointment. That is divinity.

THE OCEAN AND THE CUPPED HANDS

Four concepts. Four facets of a single recognition: the human body is an expression of the cosmos. Continuous with the stars that forged its atoms, the light that regulates its genes, the quantum geometry that connects its protons to the deep structure of spacetime, and the consciousness that illuminates it from within.

You are Stardust. You are burning brighter than the sun. You are connected to the deepest fabric of spacetime through the entanglement inside every proton in your body. And your DNA is coded to receive the intelligence of the light.

When you understand this, really feel it, the word “divinity” stops sounding like religion. It starts to sound like a reasonable description of what is actually happening inside you right now as you breathe.

The darshanic tradition of India, Sanatan Dharma, has held this recognition for 6,000 continuous years. The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Tantras, the Samkhya, the systems of Yoga and Ayurveda, the living lineages that carry these teachings from teacher to student across millennia. This is the most sustained investigation of human nature ever conducted, tested in bodies, verified by the coherence of lived experience across continents and centuries.

What we offer in the morning mantra sadhana at OMJOOMSUH is a cupped handful of water from this ocean. Three mantras. Twenty minutes. The Mahamrityunjaya for the body. The Gayatri for the mind. The 32 Names of Durga for the psychic substrate beneath both. These are the instruments of a tradition so vast that a single human lifetime can only receive a fraction of it. But a fraction, received with sincerity and practised with discipline, is enough to change the architecture of a day. And a changed day, repeated, changes a life.

If you have read this far, something in you is looking for ground.

The ground is in the body. In the breath. In the recognition that what you are is something far vaster than what your conditions have told you that you are.

The practice runs every weekday morning at 6:10 AM IST, live, in the community. If the tradition described here speaks to something you have been carrying, the door is open.

The only miracle in the world is you standing on your own two feet.

Hari Om Tat Sat.

Arjun is a 30-year practitioner in the Bihar School of Yoga tradition under the guidance of Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati. He founded OMJOOMSUH in 2022 as a for-profit wellness platform rooted in the Vedic sciences. The Morning Mantras practice runs live, Monday through Friday, at 6:10 AM IST.

For a detailed exploration of the three mantras and their word-by-word meanings, see Three Mantras, Three Planes.

To understand the neuroscience behind the practice, see Before The World Claims You.