I’ve been teaching a course in semiconductor physics here at the Engineering College of Amrita University, a ten minute walk across the new backwaters bridge from the ashram.

The electrons in semiconductors and metals chaotically move around with average speeds of a hundred thousand kilometers per second, first one way, then the other, and then another; changing directions with each new collision. This is their thermal velocity.

When an electric field is present, they drift in the direction of the field with a speed of only one percent of the thermal velocity.

If you could see them, they might look like a crazy flock of crows flying in every which way, or a hectic bunch of monkeys, moving helter-skelter but nevertheless still managing to drift toward a definite direction.

We’re like this too. Our worldly lives bounce us this way and that; we have a chaotic thermal velocity. Then we come into Amma’s field and slowly drift in the right direction surely to eventually reach our goal. We’ve been graced with a positively charged karma to meet Amma and She draws us in despite the chaos of our little worldly lives. (Electrons, by the way, have a negative charge; and so the statement above is wrong, electrons drift in a direction opposite to the way the electric field is pointing. To keep the analogy going, their charge is negative by arbitrary historical convention, but our karmic charge is positive because of the very essence of the Divine Universal Mother)

Mukunda, USA
17 Nov 06