There are no ready-made laws and no ultimate physical laws pertaining to our bodies. There are only entrenched behavioural habits and there is a freedom within ourselves that enables us to rise to a higher form of life. Evolution, in my opinion, is a loosening of the hold onto one’s beliefs because no belief, good or bad, is healthy since it creates a calcification of mind in one’s defence of said belief.

Satprem, a student of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo and the Mother from Auroville, writes:
‘After breaking through all those evolutionary layers, you suddenly emerge, in the depths of the body, into something where the old laws of the world no longer have power. And you realize that their power was nothing but a huge collective suggestion –and an old habit. But just a habit! There are no “laws”; there are only fossilized habits. And the whole process is to break through those habits. (…) But that state has to come to a point when it’s experienced spontaneously and naturally by the body, which means freeing it of all its conditioning. Then you emerge into something fantastic. But really fantastic! Although I suppose that the first gliding of a bird in the air also was fantastic. Yet there was a moment when an old reptile took off and became a bird.’

Living temporarily in Bir Billing, the Paragliding World Cup venue in the foothills of the Himalaya in Himachal Pradesh, I am reminded every moment of flight as every moment is speckled with the view of dozens of kites (the nylon and the feathered) drifting through the sky with a backdrop of snow streaked peaks.

When looking up terms for paragliding, I am affirmed in my decision to cancel my booking (four times over the past year!) when given this meaning of paraglider in English:
A paraglider died after hitting a crag and plummeting to the ground.

Perhaps evolution will be guided by extreme sports and anti-gravity pursuits but my entrenched behaviour pattern is inclined to stay grounded for now.