When spiritual growth requires faith, what can we do if doubts keep coming?

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Transcript

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Shri Prabhupada ki Shraddha which is the first requirement in bhakti, faith will that lead to naivety doubt start coming in doubts are also a sign of intelligence it’s like a small child sees an advertisement and believes it that’s why in many countries there are restrictions about you cannot target advertisements for children who are very small recently there is a new word that has come up there is pornography pornography means children who are new born all the media that targets them is that real Prabhu well it’s a there is a it’s called neologism neologism is a new word that has come up it’s not really mainstream circulation but there is there is a lot of targeting for children who haven’t developed any critical factor or they say believe it infants, buy this toy play with this, get this, get that but there are definitely restrictions on what can be at what age ads can be used for targeting so when people are a little older hopefully they have a little critical factor they don’t believe in this so we do need, actually spiritual life requires a certain amount of cynicism because at one level as you said how can I believe something which I don’t see that’s a good question but spiritual life requires not just faith that something exists beyond what I see spiritual life requires also doubt that what I see is not the way things are so it requires sometimes atheists say we are skeptics we don’t believe the way religions people just believe but actually religious people are skeptical skeptical that the world as it appears is not what it actually is so skepticism also requires no doubt if we start believing whatever we see we feel the world has so much pleasure, why do you think about something else but the world’s pleasures are temporary it requires intelligence so we don’t have to think that it’s like reasoning will lead to doubts about spirituality rather reasoning can lead to doubts about materialism also and doubts about materialism are required to practice spirituality so in that sense the reasoning faculty can be used I did a seminar for IIT students in India talking about atheism and theism so I said that I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist so what do you mean by that basically if you look at atheism, what is the life story of the universe life story of the universe would be that nothing existed because of nothing nothing exploded because of nothing and gave rise to everything that is spectacularly rational so atheism also requires a significant amount of faith yeah atheism also requires faith that from matter consciousness came, from nothing everything came, from disorder, order came, from an explosion construction came and none of these things we have seen anywhere so we require faith over there also so faith is required in every walk of life even materialism requires faith spirituality requires faith so what we need to do is, if we have doubts we direct them properly so if we tend to get a lot of questions, we need to associate with devotees who can answer those questions not like-minded devotees not all devotees will be able to answer those questions we have to find out who are the devotees who are also having that rational faculty more so I had a lot of questions since the start of my bhakti I was introduced in Pune I was traveling with one of my spiritual guides to Mumbai and we were going in a train can I ask you some questions yes, and at that time I had like six full-scale papers filled with questions I was surprised, how many questions did you have? 189 questions so of course we finished only like 12 questions within the 3 hours the point is that I had a lot of questions and I had to search not just the devotee who introduces us they need to answer all our questions so if their rational faculty is higher than us, we can contact those, try to seek out those devotees who can give answers to our questions on my website there are almost like 6000 questions I can answer www.thespiritualscientist.com I have several of my books also which are question answer books so you can find out the resources and third thing is that reason should be our minister, not our master in our spiritual path, reason is important but it’s like a king has a minister so reason is minister I use my reason to understand things but in every walk of life we go beyond reason to do things even in science which claims to be rational quantum physics actually just doesn’t make sense quantum physics holds that everything is just wave forms there is no such solid object it’s just waves and when I observe then the waves collapse to form an object Einstein was very skeptical about quantum physics he said I would like to believe that the moon continues to exist even if I am not looking at it now he said that’s common sense quantum physics doesn’t exist so quantum physics requires a lot of faith there is another quantum physicist if you think you have understood quantum physics that is proof that you have not understood quantum physics so science also requires faith now you could say that faith is reasonable because there are models and the models work but it is faith they don’t use the word faith they use the word assumptions but essentially it is the same thing that we make certain propositions about the nature of the things that are unknown to us that is the essence, what is faith mean that which is unknown to me I make some hypothesis about what is the nature of the unknown science also does that so scientists when they are using quantum physics they are not irrational but they understand the rationality they don’t understand all quantum physics but we use it and we get some rational results similarly we may not be able to understand all of spirituality by rationality but the major spiritual truths they do make sense probably and if some specific things don’t make sense then Jiva Swami says that that inconceivability of the absolute proves the transcendence of the absolute that means if we could understand the supreme with our intelligence then our intelligence would become supreme so that means there will always be something about the supreme which we will not be able to understand and that is not that is not irrationality there is irrational there is rational and there is trans-rational so spirituality spirituality is not irrationality it is trans-rationality except rationality there are many things in spirituality which are more rational than materialism but there are some things which need us to go beyond rationality so if we keep reason as our minister not our master then we can move forward thank you