Yogis Without Borders 83
time that both men made their claims about the unity of all material mani-
festation, the Michelson- Morley experiments of 1887 had already cast severe
doubt upon the accepted notion of the luminiferous ether. The concept had
certainly not been abandoned, especially given that no other scientific expla-
nation for the propagation of light existed, but it was clear that a new theory
was needed.
Tesla wrote “Man’s Greatest Achievement” only three years after Albert
Einstein first proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905. In doing so, Einstein
accomplished a version of what Tesla had promised Vivekananda a decade prior,
proving the equivalence of mass and energ y (E = mc^2 ) and eliminating the need
for the ether as a universal frame of reference to explain electrodynamics. Einstein
also belonged to a cohort of quantum physicists who observed that light can in
fact be understood as particles that exhibit a wave- like nature— the beginning
of modern quantum mechanics— thereby effectively eliminating the require-
ment of a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. By 1946, when
Yogananda published his Autobiography, it was no longer scientifically tenable
to refer to a material ether. This only meant, however, that the cypher of subtle
materiality represented by ether moved yet another step farther from material
reality as we see it. Indeed, as late as 1920 Einstein himself insisted in his famous
Leyden address that “there is a weighty argument to be adduced in favour of the
Aether hypothesis” since “to deny the Aether is ultimately to assume that empty
space has no physical qualities whatever,” and finally concluded that “according
to the General Theory of Relativity, space without Aether is unthinkable.”^68 Of
course, this new ether had few of the same characteristics as its predecessor, yet
the general concept persisted. Eventually, however, theories of electromagnetism
relying on the dual nature of light radiation and the role of its speed as a universal
constant ushered in a new era of metaphysical theorizing that would attempt to
establish light, rather than its now defunct medium, as the raw material of all
creation.
In this new age of electromagnetic theory, the spiritual telegraph of the
medium became the mental radio of the channel. The language of energ y and
light as representative of the spiritual is overwhelmingly characteristic of New
Age metaphysics.^69 Here we begin to see a transition in registers. Although the
first wireless radio transmissions were achieved in the late 1890s, it was not until
the early 1920s that radio broadcasting truly entered the public sphere. With the
advent of technolog y capable of carrying the human voice over long distances by
invisible but incontestably real and scientific means, energetic transmission found
a new foothold in metaphysical thought. Albanese traces the language of chan-
neling to the technological shamanist of the UFO contactee movement of the
1950s,^70 but the basic language of mind as radio begins well before this.