Reincarnation Research – Science Pseudo-Science & Scientism

[Talk to IIT Kharagpur students, Kharagpur, India]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna.
So today we will discuss on the topic of reincarnation. And I think that research in reincarnation has a foundation for discussing about what exactly science is and what science is not. And how spirituality can also be a science.
So who is operating the PowerPoint? You are operating. Please go ahead. So in reincarnation research there is the question, the mystery that is there are many times children who suddenly one day while they are living their normal lives they tell mummy, mummy, I want to go to my other mummy.
And you say sure, what is this? And they start telling precise details about somebody who had lived somewhere else. And I will discuss the specific case soon. But the question that is, the mystery that is to be probed in every scientific research involves a problem that has to be solved, some observation which needs to be explained.
So the observation which needs to be explained is how can children know that which they don’t know. These children they start speaking things and they are barely 2, 3, 4 years old. And at that time there is just no way they could have known some details about somebody else’s life.
And serious researchers have focused primarily on past life memories that are spontaneous. There is also some past life memories which are acquired through hypnotic rituals. So there is prominently a researcher Brian Wace and he tries to treat people.
Somebody has got hydrophobia or fear of water. Then he takes that person back through hypnosis. Remember when you were 10, remember when you were 5, remember when you were 1. Remember when you were in your mother’s womb.
Remember something before that and immediately say, Oh, you know I was a 33 year old young man and I am drowning in a river. Like that he takes them back to their previous lives. And then many times people recollect, oh I drowned in my previous life, that’s why I have this fear of water.
Then they are able to overcome that fear. So he has treated many people through hypnotic regression. And as far as the treatment is going, treatment goes, it’s fine.
But it is very difficult in such hypnotic regression cases to know for sure whether what the subjects speak during hypnosis, whether they are authentic recollections or they are reflected suggestions. That means in hypnosis, if the hypnotizer, the regressor, the regressor is searching, yes you know, remember a previous life, that’s why just because it influenced them to recollect something. So the hypnotically induced past life memories are questionable.
Are they really memories or are they results of suggestions? But there is spontaneous past life memory. There is no hypnosis, the student automatically starts speaking. And these are evidence that call for an explanation.
Let’s look at a specific case. Go ahead. So the pioneering researcher in this was Dr. Jan Stevenson and he found that actually there are four levels of evidences.
There is recollections, children remember a past life, and there are recognitions. If they are taken to that place, they recognise this person, this place, like that. And then there are behaviours.
The children behave in a way that is similar to the way that previous life would have behaved. And then there are birthmarks. So Jan Stevenson did research for almost 40 years.
Next please. Hare Krishna. Next please.
So he did research for about 40 years and he wrote many books. 20 cases of history of reincarnation, first book. And the last was a multi-volume, several thousand page book where reincarnation biology intersects.
That is where he focused a lot on the birthmarks involved. So let’s look at one case. Go ahead.
So this is an example of a birthmark. Sometimes some people have just some pimple on their face or some scar. This is not.
The birthmarks that the children have are very very unusual. This was the birthmark a child had. And that child said that in the previous life he was a person who had died in a fatal accident where he had been knocked down by a truck and a truck had run over his leg.
So the place where the truck had run over his thigh, that’s where his thighs got contracted. It’s a very distinctive birthmark. Go ahead.
So this is a case of an inter-religious reincarnation. A Hindu was reborn as a, a Muslim was reborn as a Hindu. Naresh Kumar Raidas was born in Bajnagar which is in Uttar Pradesh.
And at the age of 2, he started using the word Kakoli, Kakoli. And Kakoli was a village a few kilometres away from Bajnagar. Both of these are close to Lucknow.
And he started using Kakra, Kakra. Kakra in the local language means cart. Cart, cart.
Now he was a small child. Why is he using these words? His parents didn’t know. And then his parents noticed that whenever he was alone, he was born in a Hindu family, but whenever he was alone, he would kneel down as if he were offering Namaz prayers.
And then as he started increasing, he started saying that actually I am Mushir Ali Shah. And I am a Muslim and I live in Kakoli. And there I have my parents.
And I have my brothers and I have my sisters. I have a house with 5 new trees. I want to go there.
Now Mushir had, had been a young man in his 20s. And he had been a fruit seller. So he had a cart which he would take from Kakoli often to Lucknow or other places.
And he would sell fruits and vegetables. So once when he had been doing this, a truck had rammed into him. He had been travelling.
And a truck had rammed into him and his chest had been crushed. And he had died in that accident. And about a year after that, Naresh was born.
And now Mushir’s father Haider, Haider Ali Shah, he was actually a Fakir. A Fakir means, it’s considered a Muslim holy man who sings the praises of God and who lives as a mendicant. Like we have sadhus.
So Haider Ali Shah, he would go to different villages every day. And there he would seek alms. That’s how it was.
So every day, every week, once a week, he would come to Naresh’s village. And whenever he would come to Naresh’s village, and Naresh would see him. And as soon as he would see him, he was just a three-year-old boy.
And he would call him Abba, Abba. Now his mother would tell him, you know, call him Baba. Now Baba means, you know, a sadhu is the Indian terminology.
It’s called Baba. This Baba, that Baba. So call him Baba.
But Abba in Muslim language, in the Urdu culture, call him Abba. Although his mother would tell him, Baba, not Abba. But he would keep calling him Abba.
And then as soon as he started walking, every day when Haider Ali Shah would follow, come by his house and go, Naresh would follow him. He is small, three, three and a half years old. He would go to three, four houses and try to catch him.
He would say, I want to come with you, I want to come with you. He says, what is this? And then finally when Haider would walk away, then Naresh would come back to his home. Then by the time he came, he was six, he became very insistent.
He said, no, Haider Ali Shah is my father and I want to go and meet him. And the next time Haider came by his house, he said, don’t you recognise me? He said, I’m your son, Mushi. And we live in a house that has five new trees.
And he gave several other identifying marks about the house. Haider said, what is this? He said, no, my son Mushi is dead. You are not my son.
He walked away. The next morning, Naresh told his mother, either you take me there or I’m going there alone. I want to meet my family.
And his mother reluctantly took him there. And they came to Kakori. And he straight led her to a place, to an area of Kakori, where neither of them had visited before.
And he took her straight to the house of Haider Ali Shah. And then he again saw him and ran and caught his legs. Abba, Abba.
Then his wife Najima came out and says, Ammi, he ran and hugged her. He was taken aback. Who is this strange boy coming and hugging me? He says, don’t you recognise me? I’m your son, Mushi.
And then he was talking with them and he recognised. See this box, this was my box. That was the trunk in which my items were there.
Now because the son had died relatively young, so they had kept everything as a memory. So he told them, what all are the items in that trunk? He says, this dress is there, this toy is there, this item is there. And they were amazed.
And actually when they opened the trunk, all those items were there. And then he asked, where is my brother Naseem? And he said, he is sleeping. He says, I am to him.
And he woke him up and hugged him. Who is this strange Hindu boy coming and hugging me? Before he could gather, he says, I am your brother, Mushi. And then he recognised.
Many Muslims have big families. You have five brothers, six sisters. He recognised all of them.
And then he had one sister, who had been, his mother had been pregnant at that time. And actually Haider had an earlier wife who had passed away. And then he had remarried.
So Najeema was his second wife. So he said, there is this girl, Nadia. He says, she was in your stomach at that time.
When Mushi had died. And then he recognised all of them one by one. And then finally he recognised some items.
There is one woman, Mushi had lent some money to a friend. And that friend’s wife was there. He asked her, did your husband give the money back to my father? And nobody except Mushi and that man knew about it.
Yes, yes, he gave it back. He had actually given it back. And then as he was going back, they talked with him.
So Haider and Najeema were completely bewildered. They finally talked with him. And they said that they gave him some money.
That’s hospitality. Some child comes to you and gives you some money. He said, what? He said, how can you send me without giving me tea and eggs? Because he would love tea.
And now Naresh was born in a Hindu family. They would not take eggs. But Mushi would love eggs.
So he took those eggs. He insisted on taking eggs. And he went back.
And after that… So Antonia Mills is the researcher who studied this case. And she is one of the persons trained by Jansz Jemelczyn. And she reported this in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
And she later on interviewed both Najeema and Haider. So Haider said, that day when Naresh said, I am your son. He said, I was very disturbed.
He said, what is this? How can you be my son? Because in the current mainstream Islam, they don’t accept reincarnation. So he said, what is this? I was very disturbed. That night I prayed to Allah.
I said, Allah, what is this mystery? Please help me understand it. Please solve this mystery for me. And next day, when Naresh came and recognised all these things.
Recognised people, recognised things. Identified so many precise and behaved in a particular way. Not only that, they noticed that… Go ahead please.
Yeah. So he recognised so many things. So he felt that as if the mystery was solved.
He said, he is actually a Mushi who is reincarnated. So one of the significant things was that he had a depression in his chest. At the same point where the cart had hit Mushi.
So Naresh had a depression in his chest. And that depression was from his birth. So now, after this, there are, as you see, there are all these.
The recollection is there. Then he goes there, recognition is there. Then there is, there is behaviour also is there.
The unknown boy is waking up his mom and hugging him. And then there is other kind of behaviour also. There is dietary preferences also.
And then on top of that, there is a physical mark also. The birth marks in some cases are very distinctive. So how distinctive, how specific? He understood this and did some research.
And he divided human body into 160 grids. Like XY coordinate. And he found how much the correlation between the fatal mark on the, between the fatal wound in the previous life and the birth mark in this life.
He found this extremely precise. The probability of location of the two matching, if you just divide the human body into 160 grids, it will be 1 by 160. So there is one case of one boy in, one boy in Turkey, Nesekundu, Tashkiran.
He had six correlated birth marks. That means the probability is 1 by 160 raised to the power of 6. It’s astronomically high probability, no probability. So now, when this whole research was done, so Antony Adams has published a whole paper on this, on especially inter-religious reincarnation basis.
And she said that normally, whenever they try to do some research, Muslims would not allow the research to be done. It was only because Haider was a respected Fakir in his community. And because he supported the research, that’s why everybody cooperated.
And Mushir’s sister, when she heard about the whole thing, she came to met him also. And she also acknowledged when she was interviewed that he recognised everything. He recognised her, he recognised Nesekundu.
But when she was asked, what does that mean? We don’t believe in reincarnation. So she refused to accept it. You go ahead.
So, can someone read this? So, here obviously the parents are actively trying to suppress the memories. So, they even beat the child. For a small child to be taken to an exorcist, that is as if some ghost or spirit has entered into him and his ghost has to be removed.
These are all scary experiences to put in a child in a potter’s wheel and have him moved round and round and round. These are all superstitious ideas. They think if something bad has happened to the child, you want to undo it.
So, the point of this quote is that actually the parents were not promoting the research. Parents were not promoting the story. Parents were trying to oppose and suppress the story.
And when this evidence came up, it was primarily because the children were so insistent. And finally the parents accepted not because of their religious belief, but in spite of their religious belief. That’s why now I started just talking about reincarnation research, science, pseudoscience and science itself.
So, many times when such research into the existence of soul or anything which is called as supernatural or paranormal, then often sceptics dismiss this with the derogatory label pseudoscience. It is not science, it is pseudoscience. But, labelling something is simply a way of emotionally manipulating people.
Now, why emotionally manipulating people? You don’t let them think objectively, think rationally. So, there are many mainstream scientists who have tried to find out how do we demarcate between science and pseudoscience. But, that has been an ongoing debate and there is no clear criteria of what comprises science.
And what are the borders of science. So, if we say that there should be experiments conducted. Only if something is observable and there is a theory and there are repeated experiments which can be conducted and only if repeated experiments are conducted, only then that will be considered science.
Then, even theories like the theory of evolution or the Big Bang theory, most questions about the origin of existence, they would be considered unscientific. But, they are taught in mainstream texts. So, they are considered mainstream science by many scientists.
So, the point is that science and pseudoscience, to just label this kind of pseudoscience is to dismiss it without examining it. It’s to emotionally manipulate people against it. So, here we see that there is no question over here of the objectivity of the facts.
It’s not that the subjects are unblocking it. In spite of the subjects’ opposition, still the facts exist over here. So, now how Stevenson does not give, Stevenson and the research office, they don’t give any money to the parents for giving any reports.
That’s why there is no monetary motive for them to prop up the research. Nor do these children claim to be some celebrity in their previous life. Some people might get fame by saying, I was a wrestling star, I was a cricket star, I was this, I was this president of this country.
But, that kind of celebrity reincarnation cases serious researchers are sceptical about. So, most of these spontaneous past memories are about ordinary people. And even we discussed religious belief.
There are people who do not accept. There are people who disbelieved in it. So, they are not trying to prove their religious belief.
Rather, they actually, eventually when they accepted it, they accepted it in spite of their religious belief, not because of their religious belief. So, they had no bias towards it. If at all there is a bias, it was against it.
Go ahead. So, I discussed about how, in this case also, children, they have embarrassing behaviour. They exhibit behaviour which embarrasses their parents.
Now, Naresh’s mother did not want to establish any reincarnation connection between her son and some Muslim boy. And that’s why she and her husband, they tried to discourage Naresh. They were embarrassed by the idea.
They were scared by the idea. Because there is so much misunderstanding among the Muslims. And they don’t want to establish any reincarnation connection.
So, there was this case of this one boy, Jasbir Singh. When he was just very young, he was barely a few years old. One day, he told his parents.
They were Jats. They were not in a Brahmin family. He told his parents, I am a Brahmin.
I cannot eat food cooked in this low caste house. His parents were shocked. And he refused to eat food.
And his parents had to actually, for the next several years, pay a Brahmin to daily get meals for their son. Now, which parents would make up, hook up a fraud like this, where they would be embarrassed and they have to pay someone else and they have to tell the world that our son doesn’t take food in our own house. Go ahead.
Go ahead. So, Jan Stevens’ research was reported in the journal of JAMA. Journal of the American Medical Association is the most influential journal in terms of size, number of readers, in terms of prestige, as well in terms of tradition.
It has been there for a long time. And Jan Stevens’ research was reported there. What was it said? Can someone read it? Yes.
So, here, it is actually unemotional. It is not being sentimental. Objectivist place is investigated.
Objectivist place data, which cannot be explained in another way. And this is not just one case and not one research. There are scores and scores of scientists all over the world and there are thousands of cases like this which have been uncovered.
And what are the challenges raised by this? Go. So, William James is a prominent Harvard psychologist and he said that if you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are. It is enough to prove one single crow to be white.
What does it mean? It is giving a criteria. That. So, you may say that, okay, past life, if we are all incarnated, then why is it that everyone doesn’t remember their past lives? Why only a few people can remember their past lives? Yes.
Even if one person is remembering a past life, that challenges the theory that consciousness and life come from the body. Life begins with the body and life ends with the body. That means that if one case is documented like that, then that means that one white crow has been spotted.
So, to challenge the theory that all crows are black, we don’t need to have all crows who are white. One crow white is enough. Similarly, to challenge the idea that life comes from the body alone, just one case of a person who has memories beyond body and death, surviving and going on, of one person who remembers something which they could not have.
There are literally hundreds of cases like this. Go ahead. Somebody may say that this is actually just so far away.
This is not mainstream science. This is real science. That mainstream science is used to do artificial intelligence, to do computer science, to develop technology.
Yes, that’s fine. But actually the history of science shows that the most important scientific developments have happened at the fringes, not at the centre of science. That means if you consider the start of the 21st century around 1896, Lord Kelvin made a statement that actually most research in physics is already done.
They have understood nature. And the biggest problem for future physicists will be unemployment. They will have nothing to do.
They have already understood matter. But there is two small things which were not understood at that time. One was blackbody radiation which they could not understand.
The other was the motion of particles which move at very high speed near the speed of light. And these seem to be not very important details which were not understood. But in trying to understand these details science revolutionised itself.
So in understanding blackbody radiation, quantum physics came up. In understanding the motion of celestial objects moving at the speed of light, near the speed of light, relativity physics was developed. And classical physics, classical physics refers to the physics, that was developed by Newton and went on to go further develop after that.
Classical physics had explained many things to them. But science expanded and came up with relativity and quantum physics because scientists confronted the evidence that was not explainable by mainstream things, by classical physics and quantum physics. So if science only keeps studying those things which it already explains, if knowledge does not expand, if science tries to explain the things which are not explainable, then scientific knowledge expands.
So here this is actually an opportunity, an opportunity to expand the frontiers of science to gain deeper, greater scientific knowledge. Go ahead. So now there is scientific scientism.
Some people have unquestioning faith in science. So what does Einstein say here? You tell a man that there are 300 billion stars in the sky, he will believe you. Tell him the seed in a garden is newly painted and you want to touch to find it.
Is it really true? So what happens when it comes to very huge distances or huge figures, the people almost uncritically believe whatever a scientist has written. How can I know whether this is right or wrong? There is science and there is scientism. Science is a way of acquiring knowledge.
Science basically looks for natural explanations for natural phenomena. Scientism on the other hand is an ideology. It’s an ideology which holds that science is the only way to acquire valid knowledge.
All knowledge in order to be valid has to be scientific. If it is not scientific, then it is not valid. And that’s how concepts such as, any spiritual concepts such as soul, god or anything like that is dismissed in advance as unscientific.
But science has its scope and science has its limit. As I said, science looks for material explanations for material phenomena. Now, why does it do that? Because material explanations are controllable, they are applicable.
And then material causes can be adjusted and it can improve things. But that does not mean that anything non-material doesn’t exist. Three examples I will give for this.
Suppose somebody takes a picture, looks at a scenery in the black and white camera. No matter how many hundreds of photos they take in the black and white camera, they are never going to get a colour image of it. Why? Because that is the scope of the apparatus.
So now, just because the image is black and white, does not mean the scenery is black and white. The scenery has been taken in through a particular apparatus whose equipment is black and white. So like that, nature, the world around us is very complex.
When science studies the world, what science does is what are the material phenomena going on over here and what are the material explanations for those phenomena. So that is what science focusses on. So it is like a camera which is looking at one thing.
It is looking at, it is taking a black and white picture of the scenery. Like that it is taking in a, looking for material, material things only. Whether there is something non-material existing or not, that is outside the scope of science study.
But when some atheists claim based on science that nothing non-material exists, then that is not a scientific statement. That is an ideological statement. And that is, a scientist may be making that statement, but that does not mean that that is a scientific statement.
To make any statement about the, about being spiritual as it doesn’t exist because science can’t prove it. That is, that is scientism. That is not science.
It is ideology. It is ideology that is drawing its prestige from science. Another example to illustrate this is, say a person is at the foothill of a mountain and a person starts looking up at the sky and looks up at the mountain.
It is majestic scenery. But then there is a sun over there. The sun is very bright.
I can’t look at this. The person starts looking down. And then as the person keeps looking down, you can see clearly.
The sun’s glare is not there so much. Now, this, if they look down and they see things clearly, that is good. But if based on the capacity to see things clearly here, they say, actually there is nothing up there.
Then that is wrong. Okay, you can see clearly here, that is good. But by lowering our gaze, if we say that there is nothing above our gaze, that is a mistake.
So what science does is, it studies material phenomena. While studying material phenomena, non-material phenomena, it simply lowers its gaze. It doesn’t look at non-material phenomena.
So why are we saying this now? Because there is a tendency to label anything spiritual, even if there is strong scientific evidence pointing towards it, to dismiss it as pseudoscience. There is science, there is pseudoscience, there is scientism. Scientism is the ideology which goes on taking prestige, drawing on the prestige of science.
But scientism itself is not scientific. Let’s move on. So Copernicus, he said that to know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is knowledge.
So with every tool for acquiring knowledge, we gain certain knowledge. But along with that, that too, say for example, if a person is sick, and we do x-ray, we do a CT scan, by all that, we can get a lot of sound understanding of that person’s physical state. But by a CT scan, can we know the personality of a person? No, we can’t.
So, to know what we know, and to know what we do not know, that is knowledge. By CT scan, I can get the biological health parameters of a person. But I cannot know the personality of a person.
I need a different tool for that. I need to sit with that person, talk with that person, observe how that person acts, how that person interacts with others. Then I can come to know their personality.
Science is a very powerful way to acquire knowledge. But there are certain things which are beyond the scope of science. And for that, we need to be open-minded.
When I say something beyond the scope of science, that doesn’t mean it is unscientific. It is trans-scientific. Unscientific means it is illogical and irrational.
Trans-scientific means science can point to it, but it is beyond the scope of science. So, there can be some pointers. Like we discussed the evidence and scientific researchers have done this research.
It points to the existence of the soul. But the soul, because it is spiritual, we cannot do any experiment. Experiment is set up to prove the existence of the soul.
So, there has to be an appropriate methodology to understand the soul. So, there is a spiritual science. In science, there are two aspects to it.
There is theory and there is experiment. Similarly, in spiritual science, there is philosophy and there is experiment. So, philosophy postulates, philosophy tells us, just as theory, when you saw the fruit falling, the theories, maybe there is a force that attracts, that exerts itself between two objects.
And experiment is okay, the fruit fell, the other objects fall. And do they fall here? Do they fall in other parts of the world also? That’s the experiment. So, similarly, philosophy, like theory, it uses propositions about the nature of reality.
And religion is not a set of rituals. It is a series of practises that enable us to check whether the philosophy is for real or not. So, whether the philosophy is true or not.
So, when we have philosophy, religion, Buddhism, spirituality becomes a powerful transformational science. And what is the transformation that it brings about? Primarily, it brings about inner transformation. Just like material science can help us tap external energy.
There are things outside us and we can tap them. External thing, external energies can be tapped by material science. Internal energies can be tapped by spiritual science.
Internal energy means that when we understand spiritual knowledge, then we learn how best to manage our thoughts, how best to direct our desires, how best to focus our intentions, and how to be productive in our work. And spiritual science is a science which helps us to understand who we really are and how we can become truly happy in life. And this ultimately is the most important thing that we all wish to know.
We all need to know. We all actually long to know even if we don’t realise it right now. Right? So, spiritual science can lead us to the ultimate leap in knowledge.
Because I think positive. Yes. Spiritual knowledge helps us think ultimately positive.
We understand that no matter how many negative things happen in my life, how many problems come in my life, I at my core as a soul am indestructible. I am indestructible. Even the biggest problems cannot even scratch me because I at my core am indestructible.
And people say think positive. Yes, thinking positive is not just a matter of re-existing. Spirituality actually helps us to see how the reality is positive.
Yes, there is actually this world with its problems but we are spiritual. We are existing at a level of reality beyond these problems. So, for example say, if we are caught in our flood, we will fearfully panic.
But, if a helicopter comes and lifts us above the flood, then what happens? Then we look down. Now, we are not so disturbed because we understood, I am not caught in the flood. I have been uplifted.
I have been rescued. So, although the disaster is there, we will be concerned. Maybe our friends are there, relatives are there but we will be so disturbed because we know that we are safe.
So, like that, as soon as we understand spiritual knowledge, our self-understanding rises. We understand that we are spiritual beings. By understanding that we are spiritual beings, we become, I am above all these material things.
We will be disturbed so much. We can actually gain greater maturity, greater clarity, greater serenity. And with that, we can respond properly to situations.
So, science, when it extends in the material realm, science can make things better. Science, when it extends in the spiritual realm, it can make people better. It can make all of us better.
It can make us better human beings, better in our relationships, better in our activities. And ultimately, it can help us to achieve the best destination in life. So, I will summarise.
I spoke today about reincarnation research, science, pseudoscience and science in itself. So, the mystery that reincarnation research is to solve is how can children remember that, how can children know that which they do not know. I discussed four levels of evidences with students, researchers and young students and I found out the connections with the missions.
Behaviours and birth marks. And then I discussed laboratory case of Mushir Ali Shahab who was reincarnated as Naresh Kumar Rayudas and who had all four in his exhibiting life. And then we discussed over there how the parents in both cases, from both previous life and this life, are reluctant to establish reincarnation connection.
And Antonia Mills, she talked about how many parents, both Hindu and Muslims, try to suppress the memories of the children, not blow them up. So, lastly, or that was the first part and then we discussed about the inference from this. So, is this all scientific? Yes, the scientist who is doing it and the scientific methodology being followed, there is observation and there is a theory which is proposed to explain it.
Theory is that there is some non-material being which has gone from one body to another and that’s how Naresh is able to remember life as a machine. And then we discussed the underlying principle that to prove that all clothes are not black, just one white cloth is enough. So, to establish that life doesn’t come from the body, consciousness doesn’t come from the body or brain and so on.
Just one person who is able to remember something which they could not have known at the bodily level, that is enough. They are not that one, there are hundreds of cases. Although this kind of research is not mainstream in today’s scientific world.
Today, we don’t get big research grants to do research in mainstream world, but still it is science. And science truly advances not in its centre, but its fringes. When it confronts head on the data which its current theories can’t explain, then it comes up with new theories and it expands the understanding.
Just as it happened with in the case of quantum physics and related to physics, it expanded the understanding like it was earlier available in classical physics. And then, we discussed that scientific so, labelling something as pseudoscience is simply a way of emotional manipulation. Understanding that actually something is based on rigorous research.
You saw the JAMA, General American Medical Association, appreciated the calibre of students’ research. And we discussed about scientism is scientific imperialism. Claiming that science alone can have all kinds of knowledge.
And that’s like saying that I should be with a black and white camera, I should be able to see the colour scenery. If you can’t see the colour scenery, that means the scenery is black and white. Science looks for material exclusions or material phenomena.
And then, if somebody claims this is authoritative science, then nothing non-material exists. That is, like seeing through a black and white camera and therefore concluding that nothing colour exists. Or, somebody lowers their gaze, it becomes too bright on top and then says, I can see this clearly, I don’t see anything over there.
So, it doesn’t exist. And, I discussed spirituality is a science of another kind. That is, just as in science there is theory and experiment, in futurity there is philosophy and religion.
And, the spirituality is a science which brings order and harmony to our inner world. It transforms internally. It enables us to become purified.
It enables us to become elevated. It helps us to become better. It is just like a person trapped in a flood.
The person feels relieved like that. We understand they are spiritual. We feel relief of the immediate problems which are facing us and all that.
And, we can respond to them with greater clarity. Science in the material world, material science can do things better. Spiritual science can do things better.
Thank you very much. So, are there any questions or comments? If there is so much knowledge given in scriptures, why in India no one follows it? It is not that no one follows it. Very few people follow it.
That is because primarily the philosophical or the educational, the intellectual aspect of scripture has not been communicated well. In society, the Brahmanas were meant to share this knowledge. Brahmanas are meant to be teachers, primarily spiritual teachers.
But, unfortunately, many of the people who were Brahmanas, they simply became paid priests who do certain rituals but they would not explain any philosophical significance. So, that rich tradition of philosophical education is lost. And the culture is there but when the culture is not rationally explained then it becomes neglected or even rejected.
Sometimes it is reviled, it is criticised by people. So, because people feel this is a mix and when somebody, when people think simply this is cultural or traditional if I like it, I will practise it, if I don’t like it, I won’t practise it. But, when they understand that this is not just cultural or traditional, this is transformational, this will transform my life, this will empower me, then they practise it.
That’s why Sri Prabhupada would say that the temples are meant to be educational centres. It should be like universities. So, to the extent we can have the philosophical knowledge being shared, to that extent people will appreciate the wisdom given in scriptures and they will apply it, they will share it.
So, we need to restore the tradition of brahmanas teaching scripture and to the extent we can also be a part of, we understand scripture knowledge, we share scripture knowledge, then we will find that there is a spiritual reawakening that will take place. Is there an incarnation proof from animals to human beings? First of all, there is evidence, there is no proof. Proof means something is confusion, evidence means a pointer.
Now, there is a major difference between different species. When a soul goes from one species to another species, its whole set of conceptions needs to be changed. So, for example, say when humans, they see excreta, run away, they want to flush it away, go away from here.
When a hog sees human excreta, it runs towards it. If a soul is going from a human body to a hog body or hog body to human body, there has to be a complete reconceptualization and that reconceptualization, the memories of the previous life get pushed way way back into the background. So normally, the reshaping of conceptions is so substantial going from one body to another that recollection is almost impossible.
At the same time, there are cases of animals behaving in extraordinary ways. Say for example, there is Janardhan Swami. Janardhan Swami is a sannyasinist.
He has travelled all over the world. He has written a book called Animals in Krishna Consciousness. And he talks about how say, there is a temple in Malaysia and every evening at the time of Gaurarti, a dog would come and sit outside the temple, at the door and just take darshan.
For the full Gaurarti, it would sit peacefully. And if somebody would shoo it away, it would just go off, sit in the distance and again take darshan. Every single day, for years and years it came till the day it died.
Another case is actually, this was featured in NDTV also, both in the newspaper as well as in the TV. There is a temple in Kerala where there is a vegetarian crocodile. It’s a crocodile which stays in a lake associated with the Vishnu temple and it eats only vegetarian.
People who come there, it doesn’t harm any human. And many pilgrims come over there and they offer rice generously in the deities and then they want to see, they take this rice and they give it to the crocodile. The crocodile eats the rice.
So this is not just one. There are many cases like this in different parts of the world where animals exhibit religious inclinations. Animals inherently cannot have a religious inclination.
But if a soul has been in a human body and after that somehow the soul goes to an animal body, then that religious inclination that was there cultivates a new body that can continue to an animal body. Just like the story of Bharat Maharaj. When he became a deer, he got a deer body because he had practised spiritual life.
So he did not get deer consciousness. He got a deer body but still he had human consciousness. That’s why he just eats simple grass and is associated with the sages and you will hear Vedic mantras.
So in that sense, there is some evidence like that which suggests the presence of a soul who has been in a human body has gone to an animal body. Any other questions? Yes. Come again.
How many reincarnations does one go through? As much as is required for our purification. For our redirection of love from the world to Krishna. The purpose of reincarnation is basically to give a soul an opportunity to experiment and to learn.
We all have come to this world. We are all in this world for trying to enjoy various things. This will make me happy, that will make me happy, that will make me happy.
So when we think in this way, this or that will make me happy, then we experiment with that according to different species. To the extent we think this world will make me happy, to that extent we will have to come back in this world. When we understand that Krishna alone is the source of happiness.
When we learn to love Krishna more than the world, then Krishna will take us out of this world. It is a goal. So that can happen in one lifetime.
If in this lifetime we practise bhakti seriously and devote ourselves to Krishna, then we can end reincarnation. We don’t come back again. We will go to Krishna’s world.
Can the soul be considered a form of energy? The soul is not material. So when we use the word energy, we can’t use it in a scientific sense like say physical energy or hydroelectric energy or electrical energy. The soul is, first of all it’s not material.
So it’s not energy in the material sense. Secondly, whenever we talk about energy, usually the association is impersonal. Energy just exists.
Energy does not have personality. Energy does not have consciousness. Soul is a person.
Soul has consciousness. The soul is sat-chit-ananda. So the soul is in a sense the source of energy in the body.
The body is alive and active as long as the source is present. So in that sense soul is definitely energetic. But if we call the soul as a form of energy, we have to be careful that we don’t impose material conception on the soul.
It’s far better to say that the soul is a spiritual unit of consciousness. It’s a spiritual particle which is sat-chit-ananda which is eternally existing, which is conscious and which is by nature blissful. So it has immense energy but it is not energy of the material.
It is a spiritual person who is energetic and who radiates the energy of consciousness by which material bodies become animated. Does that answer your question? Yes or no? We’ll come back to that. Yeah, I got the question.
So if somebody said that in scriptures we go to 8.1 million species, human form is very rare. So in this case, for example, Naresh was born as Naresh and he was already a devotee. See, you have to understand that the next life is not determined by the previous life alone.
Previous life is important but the next life is determined by this life’s karma as well as our past karma. Some people may have done some good karma in their previous lives and that’s why they are meant to get a human body in this life as well as the next life. So human form is rare in the sense that if you compare the large number of species or if you consider the number of germs, the number of flies, the number of plants, it’s immense as compared to that number of humans is not anything.
So humans, if you consider totality of creation, human form is exceptionally rare. At the same time, in such cases, a soul may have done some karma by which it is meant to get a succession of human beings. And further we see that Mushi was not irreligious.
Yes, according to Islamic culture, he might be having some dietary preferences. But still, he was a religious person. His father was a fakir who would sing songs of God.
So he surely had religious impressions himself. So it’s that in general, there is the human form was rare. But at the same time, the rarity doesn’t mean that every time a person enters the human form, they have to go through the 8.4 million species again.
It simply means that as compared to the totality of all living beings, human beings are very rare. Sometimes by some past good karma, a person may get a number of human lives in succession. Does the soul inside the body have a form? At present, it is a particle of consciousness.
It is this tiny antimaterial particle. Kesha, Krishna, Bhargo, Siddhartha, and the rest. Very, very tiny.
1,10,000 million power ahead. So at present, the soul does not have a form. The soul is basically a particle of energy.
The soul does have an eternal soul. The soul becomes liberated and the soul comes, attains the spiritual world. There, the soul definitely has pure spiritual form.
And that will be gained. Then we become purified and liberated. At present, that soul, which is a person, is existing as a particle of consciousness.
The spark manifests as the body. It’s not so much that it gets a body. It manifests.
So the body and the soul are non-different at that time. It’s a complete spiritual person. Is there a question here? One or two last questions.
Please repeat the question. Is it necessary to gain more and more knowledge of scripture? Or is it enough to serve other devotees and go keep them, chant the holy names? What is necessary is that we develop our love for Krishna. Now, how each of us is an individual and because of that, how our love for Krishna will develop will be different for each of us.
So if we feel more inspired to do service, it’s wonderful. If we feel inspired to chant the holy name of Lord Krishna, that’s wonderful. If we feel inspired to study scripture, that’s wonderful.
The important thing is that we do those activities which help us to become attracted to Krishna. To become not just attracted to Krishna sentimentally, in the sense that Oh, this feels so good. This feels so nice.
So let me do it. Devotees are so sweet. Let me serve them.
That’s good. But what if tomorrow we have some difficulties with some devotees? Just because a relationship or such a thing, sometimes we are ups and downs. Just because there are difficulties with some devotees, that doesn’t mean we have to stop practising bhakti.
So we need intellectual conditioning. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu said in the Chaitanya Charitamrta that don’t think this is philosophy. It’s not important.
Don’t be lazy about it. Why? Because when you understand the philosophy, by understanding this, our consciousness will become completely fixed on Krishna. So therefore, we should get philosophical conviction.
Now how much deep we want to go in scripture study, that is up to us. We all should regularly study scripture, regularly hear classes, so that our basic philosophical conviction remains strong. Beyond the basic philosophical conviction, how much we want to hold the technicalities of scripture, how much we want to scientifically understand scripture, how much we want to go into the specifics of the philosophical philosophies, that depends on our inclination and our surveys.
But basic philosophy, we should always understand because that will stabilise us. Jiva Goswami says that for those who love Krishna, they will stay on the spiritual platform because of their priti, because of their affection for Krishna. But for our sadhakas, what will keep us on the spiritual platform is not our priti, but our priti, our intelligence.
In this way, Arjuna, using your intelligence, understanding your transcendental and situate yourself on the spiritual platform. So that’s how we should intelligently practise Bhagavad Gita. So intellectual conviction is important for studying and practising Bhagavad Gita.
And Krishna also says in the Bhagavad Gita that those who study this knowledge, Krishna says that those who study this knowledge, they are worshipping His very essence. So, just like we will do aarti, where we worship Krishna with a lamp, like that, when we study scripture, we are worshipping Krishna with our intelligence. So it’s important for us to use our godly intelligence in Krishna’s service by studying scripture.
How much you study, that depends on our intuition and our service. Serving devotees and chanting is also extremely important. Ultimately, all of us will come to know Krishna.
So, thank you very much. So, one quick announcement.