Electromagnetic Human

First published 9 May 2012 · revised and expanded 29 September 2026 · rewritten and extended to Vāstu 18 October 2026 · a ferrocell film added 2 November 2026. The 2012 text stands as it was, apart from spelling. The pictures are back where the text refers to them, the magnetosphere drawing restored from the old site’s backup. Everything after the rule is mine, of 2026.

Meditation is a wonderful thing.

I’ve lately begun to feel the connection of the suṣumnā nāḍī to my crown cakra above and my root cakra below. A magnetosphere phenomenon happens. In other words, the first picture plus meditation is the second picture.

A human in meditation looks like a magnetosphere in the shape of a torus, the shape of the universe.

This might explain why groups of meditators practicing together “cohere” enough to change the environment.

Don’t believe in macroscopic coherence? Here is mainstream proof.

Note how the heart is the core of the torus.

Did you know that the earth’s magnetosphere correspondingly looks like a human?

Plus, by extension, there is this: Rattling Earth’s Force Field, a truly awesome video that basically explains the foundations of Vāstu.

Fourteen years on

I know a good deal more now about what that shape is, and I have come back to this page twice to say so: once in September, fresh from writing about the most beautiful torus mathematics owns in the hypercubes essay, and again now, because the last line of 2012, the one about Vāstu, was a wave of the hand, and it deserved better. So the note has grown into an essay. It goes from the torus every magnet makes, to the heart’s, to the Earth’s; then to the Vāstu-man that Varāhamihira lays face down on the ground with Brahmā at his heart; then to the two norths, the one the Sun gives and the one the compass gives; and only then to the twist that turns a torus of loops into a torus of linked circles.

The torus every magnet makes

The torus in the second picture is not a property of meditators, or of hearts. It is what the field of every dipole looks like: a bar magnet, a loop of current, the Earth. Each field line leaves one pole, swings out, and returns to the other, a flat loop lying in its own meridian plane, and the loops of all the planes together make a surface pinched at the axis, a torus whose hole has closed to a point (figure 3). For the Earth, a line that crosses the equator at L Earth-radii follows

r = L sin²θ,

McIlwain’s shell, θ being the angle from the axis; and the shells nest one inside another around the axis, each the shape of an apple. The axis of the drawing is the suṣumnā of the picture.

A computed drawing is one thing. It is worth seeing the shape once with the eyes, and the short film below, which Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) posted on the morning I am writing this, does it with a ferrocell: a film of ferrofluid, oil carrying grains of magnetite finer than dust, sealed between two discs of glass and lit from the rim. Set a magnet on the glass and the grains string themselves into chains along the field, the light from the rim catches the chains, and the field arrives as arcs of light: first for a small cube, then for a ring magnet, with the dark eye of its hole where the lines dive through. Two cautions, both in the spirit of this essay. What glows is not the field but the light the field has arranged; the physicists who have studied the device call the pictures luminous mandalas and treat them as an optical effect, a scattering from the chains, so the bright curves follow the field’s directions in the plane of the glass and are not the same thing as the loops of figure 3, which are seen edge-on, and they are not quite the pattern iron filings draw of the same magnet either. Still, the thing figure 3 computes is there in the dish, bent round the magnet like the meridians of an apple, and once seen it is hard to unsee.

The heart’s torus, woven the other way

The heart really does make a torus, and in September I wrote as if it were the same torus. It is not quite, and the difference is worth a paragraph. A magnet’s field lines are loops through its poles; the heart has no poles. What it has is a run of current: a wave of charge sweeping through the muscle with every beat, the same current the electrocardiogram reads at the skin. Close to it, a run of current makes a magnetic field the way a wire does, in rings around itself. So at the chest the heart’s field lines are not loops through an axis but rings around one, the axis being the direction of the current, and the rings of every size together make a nest of surfaces pinched at the axis just as the dipole’s loops do: another apple. On the dipole’s apple the field lines are the meridians, running pole to pole. On the heart’s they are the parallels, running round. Figure 7, below, has both, and the third weave that this essay is finally about.

The field is real, and small. It was first picked up in 1963 by Baule and McFee with two coils of two million turns each on a volunteer’s chest, and it is measured today as the magnetocardiogram: some tens of picotesla at the skin, on the order of a hundred times the brain’s field and about a million times weaker than the Earth’s, which runs from 41 microtesla at India’s southern tip to 50 in the Himalayan foothills, and 51 here in Boulder. Keep that ratio; I will need it below.

And the heart’s axis leans. The direction of its current, what cardiologists call the electrical axis, runs from the right shoulder toward the left hip, about sixty degrees below the horizontal in most people, which is to say about thirty degrees off the spine. The heart’s rings therefore do not go round the body; they slant across the chest (figure 4, right). The upright torus of my 2012 drawing is the body’s axis with the heart’s field idealised onto it. I still think it is the right picture to sit with, as long as one knows which liberty it takes. The Earth’s magnetic axis leans too, nine degrees from the axis it turns on (figure 4, left), and that lean turns out to matter for Vāstu, so I will come back to it.

The Earth’s, and the plasmoid

The Earth’s field would be figure 3 if the Earth were alone. It is not: the solar wind squashes the sunward side to about ten Earth-radii and draws the night side out into a tail hundreds of radii long, which is the shape in figure 2. The drawing’s three N’s are neutral lines, places where the stretched field lines pinch and reconnect, and the plasmoid is a blob of the tail let go downstream when they do. The video I linked is that process in motion, the whole shell shivering as the wind gusts.

One more thing about the shell, which I did not know in 2012. It is not fixed to the Earth. Its nose points at the Sun and its tail away from it whatever the Earth is doing, and the Earth turns inside it once a day: a house stands under the squashed dayside at noon and under the tail at midnight, and the field lines it threads at one hour are not the ones it threads at the other. The shell is pinned to the Sun and to the Earth’s axis; the ground is not pinned to the shell.

The body laid on the earth

Now Vāstu. In 2012 I wrote that the video of the shivering shell “basically explains the foundations of Vāstu” and left it at that. Here is what I meant, said properly.

Vāstu begins by laying a human being on the ground. Varāhamihira tells it at the head of the Bṛhat Saṁhitā’s chapter on the science of dwellings:

That man, the Vāstu-puruṣa, is the plan of every house, and the plan is a grid. In the eighty-one-square form, “ten lines run east and ten run north; thirteen gods are within, and thirty-two stand in the outer cells” (verse 42). “In the middle is Brahmā, lord of nine cells” (46). The thirty-two of the rim each have a cell, from Śikhin at the north-east corner round by Anila at the south-east, Pitṛ at the south-west and Roga at the north-west. And the man lies in the grid with his face to the ground and his head to the north-east:

Brahmā is at his heart. The centre of the plan is the heart of the man laid in it, and the rule that governs the centre is a rule for a heart: “Wishing for happiness, the householder should take care to guard the Brahmā that lies within the house; from injury there, by leavings and the like, the master of the house suffers” (64). Brahmā’s nine cells are the brahmasthāna, the open middle of a Vāstu house, which is not to be built over, not to be dirtied, not to be pierced by a post.

And the text is explicit that the house is a body in more than a figure of speech. “The crossings of the lines, and the centres of the squares that fall on them: know these as the marmas, and the wise man does not press on them. Pressed by unclean vessels, by pegs, pillars and the like, or by things left in the ground, they give pain to the master of the house in the matching limb” (57–58). Marma is Suśruta’s word, the word for the points of a body a surgeon must not cut; Varāhamihira uses it for the points of a plan a builder must not load, and says that loading one hurts the owner in the limb that corresponds. He even says where the worst of them lie. Six lines are to be drawn across the plan, from Roga to Anila (the verse calls him Vāyu), from Pitṛ to Śikhin (Agni), from Śoṣa to Vitatha, from Mukhya to Bhṛśa, from Jayanta to Bhṛṅgarāja, from Aditi to Sugrīva, “and the nine crossings of these are called the great marmas” (61–62). Figure 5 draws them. Two of the six are the diagonals; the other four run parallel to the diagonals, their ends two cells in from the corners; and every one of the nine crossings falls either on Brahmā’s block or in a cell touching it: at the centre, on the four corner squares of the block, and on the four cells, Aryaman’s, Vivasvān’s, Mitra’s and Pṛthivīdhara’s, that lie against its sides. The vital points of the house gather round its heart.

Set this beside the pictures of 2012. I had drawn the Earth’s field around a sitting human and said that the heart was the core of the torus. Vāstu, fifteen centuries earlier, had laid the human on the Earth and put Brahmā at his heart, at the centre of a grid whose lines are the Earth’s own directions, with the vital points gathered round it. The two moves are the same move made in opposite directions: mine takes the Earth’s shape and puts it on a body; Varāhamihira’s takes a body and lays it on the Earth. Each has an axis, a centre, and the heart at the centre. That is the foundation I was gesturing at in 2012, and it does not need the video to stand.

Two norths

But oriented to what, exactly? The grid’s lines run east and north, and a Vāstu text takes real trouble over how to find east and north. Not with a compass: no text of Vāstu knows the compass, which came to the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages, after the handbooks were written. The directions come from the Sun, by the gnomon. Set a rod upright on ground levelled with water, draw a circle round it, and mark where the tip of its shadow crosses the circle in the morning and again in the afternoon: the line between the two marks runs east and west, and the “fish” drawn across it, two arcs centred on the marks, gives north and south. The Sūrya Siddhānta gives the method in four verses at the head of its third chapter; the Mayamata and the Mānasāra each give the gnomon a chapter of its own, the sixth in both; the Śulbasūtras, older still, know the same circle and shadow. North found this way is the direction of the axis the Earth turns on, the direction of Dhruva.

A compass finds a different north. The Earth’s magnetic axis does not coincide with its axis of rotation; this year it leans about nine degrees from it, with its northern end over the Canadian Arctic (figure 4, left). A needle follows the field, which leans with that axis, and so disagrees with the gnomon by an angle that depends on where one stands: in Boulder by nearly eight degrees east, in Anchorage by fourteen. Over India the two norths happen, at this moment, to all but coincide: half a degree at Ujjain, a degree and a half at Rishikesh, a degree the other way at Kanchipuram, and at Mumbai the line of no disagreement passes almost exactly overhead. But that is luck, and it is passing. The dip pole, the one a needle points at, has lately been running toward Siberia at some forty kilometres a year; the field has flipped end for end many times, the last full reversal about 773,000 years ago, and swung nearly over and back again in the Laschamp excursion some 41,000 years ago. A Vāstu that took its north from a needle would have had to redraw its maṇḍalas with every age. A Vāstu that takes its north from the Sun has not had to redraw anything.

And yet the two norths are not strangers. The magnetic field is shaped by the Earth’s turning. It is generated by liquid iron convecting in the outer core, and the rotation organises that flow into columns parallel to the spin axis, which is why the field comes out roughly aligned with the spin axis rather than pointing anywhere at all. Averaged over some ten thousand years, the magnetic axis and the rotation axis are the same axis; the nine degrees is this century’s lean about a long-run alignment, and that alignment is the assumption that lets a palaeomagnetist read an ancient latitude out of a rock. So when Vāstu orients the house to the Sun’s north, it orients it to the magnetic field’s north as well, in the only sense that lasts: to the field’s mean axis rather than to this year’s. The shell in the video hangs on that axis and leans a little from it. The house is set on the axis itself.

The head to the north

The rule everyone knows from Vāstu is the one about sleeping: do not lie with your head to the north. It is older than Vāstu’s handbooks. The Mahābhārata has it, udakśirā na svapeta, not north and not west, east or failing that south (Anuśāsana Parva, 107.72 in the edition I used, section 104 in Ganguli’s translation), and so does the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa (34.50). The explanation on every website is magnetic: the head is the body’s north pole, like repels like, the iron in the blood is dragged about. I will not defend that version, and the ratio above is why. The body’s own field is a million times weaker than the Earth’s, the heart’s rings a few tens of picotesla at the skin; and the iron in blood is bound inside haemoglobin, which is barely magnetic at all. A hospital scanner at three tesla, sixty thousand times the Earth’s field, holds a patient for an hour and the blood goes on flowing as before. Whatever the sleeping rule is about, it is not the Earth pushing on a magnet in us.

Whether the Earth is telling something in us which way is north is a different question, and an open one. That animals sense the field is settled: migrating birds, sea turtles, salmon; and for the birds a mechanism, a light-triggered pair of radicals in the eye whose chemistry depends on the field’s direction, has been worked out in considerable detail, though not yet proved in the living bird. For humans the record is thin and odd. In 1980 Robin Baker drove blindfolded students out of Manchester by winding routes and reported that they could point home, and could not when wearing magnets; Gould and Able tried it in America the next year and could not make it work. In 2019 Joseph Kirschvink’s group at Caltech sat volunteers in a shielded, darkened chamber, swung an Earth-strength field about them, and watched the EEG. The alpha rhythm dipped, repeatably in some volunteers, when the field swung counter-clockwise and pointed downward as it does in the northern hemisphere, and not when it swung the other way or pointed up. It is a careful study; it has not yet been independently repeated; and I report it as exactly that. If the head-to-the-north rule has a physical ground, it would have to be in a sense like this one, in something the body reads, not in anything the body emits. The rule, in any case, was written down by people who knew nothing of fields and were sure of their directions, which they took from the Sun.

Where the torus leads

Since 2012 I have learned that there are two kinds of torus made of loops, and that the difference is the whole story. The dipole’s is a torus of loops that never link. Each lies flat in its own plane, and two of them, in two planes, pass by one another without catching (figure 6, left). The other kind is the one in the hypercubes essay: the torus that the Hopf fibration fills with circles, in which every circle is linked with every other, once, like two rings of a chain (figure 6, right). There the loops are circles still, each flat in its own plane, but the planes no longer pass through the axis; each winds once around the tube and once around the hole, and holds every other.

There is a cleaner way to say it, now that the heart has given us a second weave. Take any torus. A curve on it can go round the tube, like a hoop round a barrel: that is a meridian. It can go round the hole, like a belt: that is a parallel. Or it can do both at once, once each, and come back to where it started: that is the diagonal. The dipole’s field lines are meridians of their apple. The heart’s are parallels of its own. The Hopf circles are diagonals, every one of them, on every torus of the nest, and that is why they link: two meridians never link, two parallels never link, and two diagonals on the same torus link exactly once (figures 6 and 7). The whole difference between the field of a magnet and the field of a hopfion is the difference between going round one way and going round both.

It is not an idle distinction, because physics has fields of the diagonal kind. In 1982 Kamchatnov had found a knot of this kind in the equations of a conducting fluid; in 1989 Antonio Rañada found one in empty space, a solution of Maxwell’s equations with no charges and no currents, light and nothing else, in which every magnetic line is a Hopf circle and every electric line is one too, the two families threaded through each other: the electromagnetic knot, now called the hopfion. Irvine and Bouwmeester showed in 2008 how a beam of light could carry one, and Kedia and colleagues tied further knots into it in 2013. In the last five years magnetic hopfions have been made and imaged in the laboratory, in stacked magnetic films by Kent and colleagues in 2021 and, as rings, in a chiral magnet by Zheng and colleagues in 2023. And in a plasma, Smiet and colleagues showed by simulation in 2015, a tangled magnetic field left to itself relaxes toward very nearly this: nested tori of linked lines around a core ring. Figure 8 is that field, cut open.

Set the two pictures side by side. The dipole has an axis and an apple of flat loops around it. The hopfion has an axis, a core ring, and between them an onion of tori, each woven from circles that hold one another. The second is the first with a twist put in, and the twist is what makes the loops link. That twist is the quantity the plasma people call helicity, and it is conserved: a field that has it cannot shed it by relaxing, which is why the tangle settles into the onion rather than into nothing.

About coherence

The diamonds were real. In 2011 Ian Walmsley’s group entangled a single quantum of vibration between two diamonds three millimetres across and fifteen centimetres apart, at room temperature, and the Nature report I linked still stands. What it shows is that entanglement is not confined to the cold and the small. What it does not show is that people entangle. The group-meditation studies, I should say plainly, are contested, and I will not pretend the diamonds settle them. The leap of 2012 stands as a leap, and I am content to have it seen as one.

So

What I felt on the cushion was an axis and a donut. Fourteen years and a good deal of geometry later, I can say what that shape is, and what it is not. It is the shape of every field with an axis, the Earth’s and the heart’s, the one woven of meridians and the other of parallels, each leaning a little from the axis it belongs to. It is one twist away from the torus of linked circles, the most beautiful object mathematics has; that twist is there in light, in magnets and in plasma, where I can now cite it, and whether it is there in a meditating body I have no way to measure. And it is, I now think, the shape Vāstu had in hand all along, from the other side: a man laid on the Earth, head to the north-east, his heart at the centre of a grid whose lines are the Earth’s own directions, found from the Sun. I drew the Earth’s field around a sitting human. Varāhamihira laid the human on the Earth. The heart is the core of the torus either way.

Related: On the Jyotishical Arrangement of Hypercubes (the chart as a torus, and the Hopf fibration) · Two Skies, One Word — Ākāśa and Diś (direction as a substance) · The Circle of Varuṇa (Varāhamihira tested on the earthquakes) · The Sacred Geometry of Jyotish Redux · How Astrology Exists.

References

1. Varāhamihira, Bṛhat Saṁhitā, the vāstuvidyā chapter (52 in the Sanskrit e-text used here, 53 in M. Ramakrishna Bhat’s translation, Motilal Banarsidass, 1981–82), verses 2–3, 42–50, 51–54, 57–58, 61–62 and 64–66. Sanskrit from the Tripathi edition as input by Michio Yano and Mizue Sugita, sanskritdocuments.org. The translations on this page are mine.
2. Mahābhārata, Anuśāsana Parva 107.72 (section 104 in K. M. Ganguli’s translation, where the line reads “One should never sleep with head turned towards the north or the west”): udakśirā na svapeta tathā pratyakśirā na ca | prākśirās tu svaped vidvān atha vā dakṣiṇāśirāḥ. Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa 34.50: nodakśirāḥ svapej jātu na ca pratyakśirā naraḥ.
3. Sūrya Siddhānta 3.1–4, the gnomon, the circle and the fish; tr. Ebenezer Burgess, Journal of the American Oriental Society 6 (1860). Mayamata, chapter 6 (tr. Bruno Dagens, IGNCA and Motilal Banarsidass, 1994); Mānasāra, chapter 6, śaṅkusthāpana (tr. P. K. Acharya, 1934).
4. G. Baule and R. McFee, “Detection of the magnetic field of the heart,” American Heart Journal 66 (1963), 95–96. For the size of the field today, R. Fenici, D. Brisinda and A. M. Meloni, “Clinical application of magnetocardiography,” Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics 5 (2005), 291–313.
5. C. E. McIlwain, “Coordinates for mapping the distribution of magnetically trapped particles,” Journal of Geophysical Research 66 (1961), 3681–3691.
6. On the ferrocell and what its pictures are: A. Tufaile, A. P. B. Tufaile and M. Snyder, “Horocycles of Light in a Ferrocell,” Optics & Photonics News 32 (December 2021). The film is Massimo (@Rainmaker1973), “The invisible force made visible,” X, 2 November 2026.
7. The International Geomagnetic Reference Field, 14th generation (IGRF-14, 2024). Dipole tilt and pole positions from the World Data Center for Geomagnetism, Kyoto, “Magnetic North, Geomagnetic and Magnetic Poles” (geomagnetic north pole 80.9° N, 72.8° W for 2026; magnetic dip pole 86.5° N 162.9° E in 2020, 85.7° N 138.6° E in 2025). Declinations and field strengths on this page were computed from IGRF-14 for October 2026 at the places named.
8. R. T. Merrill, M. W. McElhinny and P. L. McFadden, The Magnetic Field of the Earth: Paleomagnetism, the Core, and the Deep Mantle (Academic Press, 1996), for the geodynamo and the time-averaged axial dipole.
9. B. S. Singer, B. R. Jicha, N. Mochizuki and R. S. Coe, “Synchronizing volcanic, sedimentary, and ice core records of Earth’s last magnetic polarity reversal,” Science Advances 5 (2019), eaaw4621 (the Matuyama–Brunhes reversal at about 773,000 years). A. Cooper et al., “A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago,” Science 371 (2021), 811–818 (the Laschamp excursion).
10. P. J. Hore and H. Mouritsen, “The radical-pair mechanism of magnetoreception,” Annual Review of Biophysics 45 (2016), 299–344.
11. R. R. Baker, “Goal orientation by blindfolded humans after long-distance displacement: possible involvement of a magnetic sense,” Science 210 (1980), 555–557. J. L. Gould and K. P. Able, “Human homing: an elusive phenomenon,” Science 212 (1981), 1061–1063.
12. C. X. Wang, I. A. Hilburn, D.-A. Wu, Y. Mizuhara, C. P. Cousté, J. N. H. Abrams, S. E. Bernstein, A. Matani, S. Shimojo and J. L. Kirschvink, “Transduction of the geomagnetic field as evidenced from alpha-band activity in the human brain,” eNeuro 6 (2019), ENEURO.0483-18.2019. doi:10.1523/ENEURO.0483-18.2019
13. K. C. Lee et al., “Entangling macroscopic diamonds at room temperature,” Science 334 (2011), 1253–1256. Reported by Philip Ball, “Entangled diamonds vibrate together,” Nature News, 1 December 2011. doi:10.1038/nature.2011.9532
14. A. F. Rañada, “A topological theory of the electromagnetic field,” Letters in Mathematical Physics 18 (1989), 97–106; “Knotted solutions of the Maxwell equations in vacuum,” Journal of Physics A 23 (1990), L815–L820.
15. W. T. M. Irvine and D. Bouwmeester, “Linked and knotted beams of light,” Nature Physics 4 (2008), 716–720. doi:10.1038/nphys1056
16. H. Kedia, I. Bialynicki-Birula, D. Peralta-Salas and W. T. M. Irvine, “Tying knots in light fields,” Physical Review Letters 111 (2013), 150404. arXiv:1302.0342
17. N. Kent et al., “Creation and observation of Hopfions in magnetic multilayer systems,” Nature Communications 12 (2021), 1562. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-21846-5
18. F. Zheng et al., “Hopfion rings in a cubic chiral magnet,” Nature 623 (2023), 718–723.
19. C. B. Smiet, S. Candelaresi, A. Thompson, J. Swearngin, J. W. Dalhuisen and D. Bouwmeester, “Self-organizing knotted magnetic structures in plasma,” Physical Review Letters 115 (2015), 095001. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.095001
20. A. M. Kamchatnov, “Topological solitons in magnetohydrodynamics,” Soviet Physics JETP 55 (1982), 69–73.
21. Renay Oshop, “On the Jyotishical Arrangement of Hypercubes” (2002; revised 2026), for the Hopf fibration, the Clifford torus, and the film Dimensions.

Figures 3, 4, 6 and 7 are computed line drawings (dipole lines r = L sin²θ; Hopf circles on the Clifford torus; the heart’s rings as circles about its axis; the three curves of figure 7 drawn on ring tori). Figure 5 is drawn from the text of the vāstuvidyā chapter. Figure 8 is a computed rendering: the stereographic images of the Hopf fibres over three circles of the sphere, at 45°, 90° and 120° from the pole, as thin shells, the outer two cut by a meridian plane. Figures 1 and 2 are the 2012 pictures.