Retrotransposons as Engines of Human Bodily Transformation

The historical literature suggests that there are unusual physical, as well as psychological, consequences in humans to the attainment of the exalted state of mind known as enlightenment, nirvana or samadhi. These reported changes include, but are not limited to, sudden reversal of aging, emergence of a light body and observed bodily ascension into the sky. This paper proposes a “jumping DNA” or transposon-mediated mechanism to explain rapid and large-scale cellular changes associated with human bodily transformation. Only 3% of human DNA encodes the physical body. The remaining 97% of the 3 billion base pair genome contains over a million genetic structures, called transposons, that have the capacity to jump from one chromosomal location to another. Transposons that jump to a new location via an RNA intermediate are known as retrotransposons. The three main classes of documented or putative retrotransposons in human cells are SINEs, LINEs and HERVs. SINEs and LINEs have been unambiguously shown to transpose in humans and there is indirect evidence that HERVs are active. A 1700 base pair DNA sequence was isolated from purified activated human T cells (Kelleher et. al, 1996). The sequence of this DNA contains a novel combination of all three transposon families (SINEs, LINEs and HERVs) arranged like “beads on a string”. I describe it’s structure and I propose that this DNA sequence, because of its cassette like configuration and its transcriptional expression and regulation, would be an effective participant in large scale transposon mediated genetic change that eventually results in transformation of the human body. The hypothesis is testable by using the DNA sequence as a molecular probe to monitor transposon activity in the blood cells of individuals undergoing profound psychological transformation as a result of advanced meditation, near death experience (NDE) or close encounter experiences with UFOs. The relevance of these proposed experiments to the study of survival of human consciousness after death is discussed.