The Monk’s Podcast 1 with Shyamananda Prabhu – Corona crisis and unnatural living

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Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.

Thank you for joining for this session. So, what we are planning in this is to have a candid discussion on various contemporary spiritual topics. So, today we will be discussing on the Corona crisis as a pointer to basically unnatural living and the Corona crisis.

So, we will talk about this in my understanding in three parts. One is, is there some unnatural living that we might be doing which has caused it? Is there some unnatural living that we are doing that we can change so that we can prevent the recurrence of such events even if we can't say establish a causal connection? And, how much is this is beyond the way we are living it is beyond human control and we are just victims. So, is unnatural living the cause? Is stopping unnatural living going to be the cure? Or is our living, whatever way is it, irrelevant to the occurrence of this crisis? So, at a time like this when we when suddenly within a matter of months the whole world has been brought down to a standstill it jolts us out of our comfort and complacency and at one level crisis triggers some immediate action but they also stimulate ultimate contemplation immediate action in terms of if somebody doesn't have medical masks, somebody doesn't have food immediate action has to be done to deal with that at the same time not everybody is in the crisis where they need some immediate action to deal with the issue so then for most people it's an opportunity for contemplation on bigger truths, on ultimate realities so there is that question are we so powerless as to be just victims of an invisible entity a virus is supposed to be so tiny that not only is it invisible to us humans but actually it is invisible it would be invisible even to bacteria which themselves are invisible to us so such a tiny being has brought us to a state of panic and almost powerlessness so is this a reflection on something that we may be doing wrong which we can correct so what would you like to say on this so this could very well reflect the world view which humanity under the leadership of mainly politicians or scientists or a combination of them over the last few hundred years and I'm also trying to find out whether today Wikipedia can give you a whole understanding of a timeline of pandemics and I think some of us found out that something happened in 1720 then 1820 and 1920 and 2020 so obviously 1720 we didn't have so much of ozone layer depletion or factory farming or the kind of corruption whatever we have perhaps political corruption could be but at least the world was not industrialized so obviously there seems to be something beyond just what we see around us I'll just briefly touch this one point and leave you to take it furthermore I was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Bhumi Gita is the third chapter where she talks about how arrogant kings are trying to exploit her to tell you the truth I was trying to see whether any parasite virus or any pandemic is mentioned there but it just talks about pollution it says that Kali Yuga so basically the Bhagavatam takes this view that Kali Yuga means everything is highly polluted now with just that clue how do we remove this pollutants and what exactly could be a pollutant be so since there are now doctors there is something called Paleo-Virology that means whether viruses existed even in the ancient times so taking that clue I would say that Bhagavatam takes it to this subtle thought level as to what could be a pollutant thought not to put too much of a fine point but the fact is that to have disregard for nature's laws and to feel that I can do whatever I want and still I can arrest a solution from material nature that is one point where I feel that your heading for this was a disaster waiting to happen which means that given the fact that we could be close to a vaccine in 22 months and let's say by the year 2026 COVID-19 is passé it is history there is no trace of any contagion on planet earth but we could be still having due to our lifestyle paving the road for another visit by some other virus in the 100 years where you and me surely won't be there if we survive COVID-19 of course but the understanding is I am trying to take this view as to what can we learn and are there natural laws which are being flouted now laws are laws if we have disregard for them and just like in our material laws if it says no parking which means no parking and there is a fine so is there something like this which we have done and so this could be as you rightly said a disaster waiting to happen it could just be a reaction just waiting to happen and what we can learn from that so your thoughts on this now so paleovirology hasn't been able to find out anything where virus is there in the remote past not exactly they are just trying to see whether there is botany but then you find fossilized things and try to find out whether there could be anything we can learn so they are trying to see whether are there patterns one thing is for sure the behavior of COVID-19 is completely like stumping them royally they cannot predict it, they cannot catch the pattern of the protein and how exactly and why is it so aggressive it's almost like the only scriptural comparison coming to my mind is when Bali seeing Sugriva is again calling him for a combat Tara tells him how come somebody who was behaving and defeated by you a few days ago what is the strength that is making him call you out again is there somebody who is backing him it's a far fetched thing but this is what I feel like people in America they say we have flu season every year and it is a mutational virus so every year our scientists are so expert in mapping it understanding it, being prepared for it before the season begins and that's it and only the few who are unprepared or unlucky they die but they are not ready for something like this which is a surprising element just to share something on this it seems that if the speaker operates the screen and if they remove the screen then zoom the sound becomes distorted so if you want to look for something maybe while I am speaking you can look for it and then later on you can speak it, while speaking if you are not on the computer while speaking it seems your audio gets blurred so generally whenever things go wrong we basically have two options one is the world is a terrible place and that's why this has happened to me or there is something that I am doing wrong and in some way that has caused this and I can fix it or I can change that wrong and in some way fix it so the first world view is it might help us just feel like a victim and there is some amount of perverse joy in feeling that I am a blameless victim of an unfair world but it's also very disempowered so we could have if we consider that maybe there is something which I am doing that might be causing this so then although it makes us it can make us feel burdened or guilty but it can also empower us with a sense of agency not just the agency to do what it takes right now to deal with the crisis whether it is social distancing or if we are a part of the medical force then we act in that way but beyond that humanity can get a sense of agency if we consider at least the possibility that maybe there is something we are doing which needs to be fixed so if we consider this second perspective and humility will have us admit that the universe is too complicated for us to definitely arrive at one perspective or the other that everything is happening just the universe is a hostile place or the universe is in some ways reciprocal so if we from the perspective of self empowerment if we consider the second perspective then we can compare ourselves with history and see what we could be doing wrong what we could fix there is an increasing awareness of environmental consciousness and sometimes any good ideology can also be taken to an extreme level where sometimes there are eco-fundamentalists who say that this is nature's revenge on us this is the environment's revenge on us for the way we have exploited it for the way we have disrupted ecological balances for the way we have caused climate change we have caused the eradication of biodiversity now for those who subscribe to that ideology I am not using the word in a negative sense but for those who are environmentally conscious that might be a reasonable explanation but for others it can seem that you are just using the environmental you are using the current crisis to promote your environmentalist agenda so if we try to avoid foisting any agenda at an objective level we can't correlate this particular crisis with climate change is it because of the temperature in the prison is it because the air pollution is more that the coronavirus is spreading we can't really correlate that way so as far as the cause is concerned a certain amount of humility is required because even in our scripture Bhagavatam is discussing in the first canto when a cow and a bull are being beaten and the king Parikshit asks what is the cause of your suffering so at one level the cause of suffering there is a demoniac person beating him but the bull says the cause of suffering is very difficult to assert so when there is a huge amount of evil a huge amount of suffering there is some epistemological uncertainty about the cause of evil and that is a matter of humility which is seen in our tradition also so rather than focusing on the cause of the problem is there something we can do to cure the problem not just in the immediate sense but in the long term sense so one thing we could correlate at this stage is that there are hardly any diseases that are caused through the eating of vegetarian food so we don't have rice disease or wheat disease or something like that but we have mad cow disease, swine flu and the widely accepted hypothesis about how the coronavirus came into the human beings is through the wet market in Wuhan so if we consider that whenever there is any genetic mutation the coronavirus has been present for a long time in other species but through a mutation it came into the bats and from the bats somebody probably consumed the bat and from there it came into human beings that is the most probable pathway that is being traced right now so it could have been through not just consumption it could have been also through contact but the idea is that it seems a lot of diseases are associated with the consumption of flesh consumption of meat and not just the consumption of meat but the extreme destruction of fauna, of animal life for the sake of satisfying the human urge for meat if we consider that today factory farms which is a euphemism for slaughterhouses where millions and millions of animals are harvested to be slaughtered then this is definitely unnatural even if we agree that meat has been a part of the human diet across history and geography and we humans have been given canine teeth by which we can eat meat but not all our teeth are canine and our teeth are not like carnivorous animals so in history meat has been one part of the human diet and meat has not been a staple of the human diet where it is had constantly and certainly never before has humanity systematically cultivated animals to be slaughtered so that we can have them for food consumption in fact a number of animals slaughtered every year if we include fish it is more than the population of humanity itself so this is definitely unnatural so even from an overall perspective we can say that this is something radically different from what was done earlier and from an immediate causal perspective we can see that this is a pathway through which many diseases are coming upon us so we could say maybe this unnatural thing which we are doing excessive meat consumption if we decrease that we could even from an immediate perspective decrease or cut off one channel through which pathogens come into the human system yeah those are my few thoughts on this issue yeah just to add a few things I also read somewhere ok lets begin with this whenever we talk with people who are feeling that why should you impose your food choice on us if you are vegetarians lacto-vegetarians or whatever why should we be deprived of meat because we just like it so even a cursory understanding of world scriptures now I primarily say that because don't eat this, don't eat that doesn't primarily come from the science book because right now the Chinese government is saying don't eat cats, don't eat dogs but that's not like a religious edict it is just that if you eat them you will be spreading COVID-19 so sometimes these people may concur with what religious scriptures are saying but that's only because it's an emergency now so mostly scriptures talk of compassion and we have to like they may allow some animals to be eaten but they also in a bigger picture tell that you should love other animals you should have pity on them even some of the most diehard carnivore diet promoting religions they have examples of Jesus is called like he is called a sacrificial lamb but he also is shown as very compassionate to everyone, St. Francis is shown as compassionate to all the animals in the forest so on and so forth so when you compare that word of compassion to the factory farm today now this is something which people have to understand the inhumane conditions in which pigs or chicken are raised, it is a proven fact that these animals always have I mean they have totally lived their days in fear and terror which lowers their immunity and when we consume that product we are finding that we are also losing our immunity so in one sense just for the sake of satisfying your palate you are also taking a toll of your own immunity and just like our Indian proverbial Sheikh Chilli Sheikh Chilli was given the task of cutting the branch of a tree and he thought that what is the best way other than to sit on the same branch because it is very advantageous so he is sitting on a branch and is cutting the branch from its connection with the main trunk and when he falls and breaks his bones he says what bad luck or my stars are bad or somebody willed bad for me or who is to be blamed so we need to take a hard look at our food choices, our lifestyle choices our world view choices in order to take a stock of such a pandemic as we have today I am just looking for some statistics which I have found it seems that more than 200 million animals are killed for food everyday and if you consider wild caught and farmed fishes then the daily total is 3 billion animals killed so 3 billion killed everyday and the human population is around 8 billion so it is almost one third of the entire humanity is being killed by humanity everyday I don't think any time in human history even if majority of humanity was at one time hunting we would never have killed this many people so it is brutal there are multiple threads of thought which can point in this direction one is the humane aspect the other is the health aspect it is not just a subjective thing it is quite well documented that animals who grow in natural settings they live healthier for example cows they give more milk and they give healthier milk and their milk is an indication of their overall state of being if we are doing factory farming we are not only causing suffering to animals nor are we providing pathways for pathogens to come into our body but otherwise we are consuming food that is unhealthy and it is unfortunate that these practices are stopped only when first of all an epidemic or in today's case a pandemic comes and then suddenly we realize that maybe I have to trace back all my steps something like a mathematical equation at a particular stage you should be arriving close to the answer and when you know that you are far off it is not that particular stage of a quantitative equation that you have to sort it out you have to go back to the first step itself because that first step had something which kept on compounding the error and now you are so far away from your desired objective yes this first step is very well put there are if some aliens came to this planet almost all the alien fiction that is there in movies the aliens themselves are of various forms some of them are depicted as humans just like us but whatever forms they may be the default assumption in all alien fiction is that when they come to earth they interact with human beings so we presume that we humans alone matter on the earth but that presumption itself is open to question and it is that presumption that we cannot live in our own self-created ecosystem independent of the fragile biosphere of which we are a part so till now we have been taking from that biosphere and we live in our own world but we don't think that can intrude upon us and that can affect us but now we are seeing that it does affect us in various ways and it can overpower us at times so there is a school of thought called Anthropocentrism which holds that Anthropos is humans Centrism is that we are the centre of existence or at least centre of the earth so we have operated whether it is through a Judaeo-Christian worldview which considers humans alone are to be delivered or subsequently scientifically driven world view of colonialism or whatever it might be it might be communism, fascism but the whole idea is the earth is there for us for our taking and that world view has had the toll is that we have just exploited the earth so maybe we need to consider the earth doesn't belong that we alone don't matter on the earth and we need to live more cooperatively with the other species on the earth otherwise there will be infection Two things, one from a strictly Hare Krishna devotional point of view somebody sent me a picture of the mother of the river Yamuna it never appeared so glistening black and her name is Kalindi so for the first time we saw how she looked in her pristine beauty maybe a few decades ago and all her previous pristine glory and people from Jalandhar could see a view of the Himalayas which is say 200 or 250 miles away or kilometers away just because of no industrial pollution so seems like a hard choice for 21st century that why are we working so hard, why are we neglecting environmental care because there is an economic price to be paid for it but right now with trillions of economic dollars being lost our hearts and minds are not occupied with that now basic survival is at stake so George Monbiot is a guardian columnist and he wrote a column saying that all the horror movies were wrong like horror movies show how contagion spreads viruses spread and then people start becoming very selfish but in his column he is drawing that people are willing to give away whatever extra food they have, there are people who are delivering groceries at the doorsteps of elderly people who cannot understand the whole situation or go out and do something so we are caring a lot it is just that those thoughts or the idea of a caring mind gets attacked by the virus of exploitation and a physical virus when it invades us somehow that internal mental virus gets vaccinated and the good thoughts come out like I need to share somebody showed me a small picture where an Italian old person was told that so now you have been declared COVID negative you can go back and since you were here everything is free but we had to rent outside ventilators so that would be $500 for your ventilator charges only and he starts crying and the medical people are thinking are you worried that you cannot pay therefore you are crying he said no I am 76 years old and all these years I just took the free oxygen which nature has sent and she has not sent a bill beautiful, it's moving actually this is just one thought I had there is the rigidly evolutionary world view which says that we are driven we are basically survival machines so we just live to survive now humanity itself we do want to survive but there is survival value and there are things that have survival value and there are things that bring value to survival things that bring value to survival so now both matter but unfortunately in today's world we are caught neither here nor here, we are caught in superficial things so what is the next movie being released, who is going to win this election or who is going to win this lottery so superficiality is that we normally get caught in they actually don't have any survival value nor do they bring any value to our survival so when the superficiality is taken away then we focus on survival value and value to survival so if we don't look at the things that bring value to our survival then we just get caught in this bestial struggle for survival so without a higher purpose or without a higher meaning the animal side within us comes out and then adversity can actually bring out the worst in people or it can bring out the best in people so if we don't go to think about what brings value to my survival then we just blindly focus on getting things that bring survival value then it can bring out the worst but it can actually bring out the best and that best can be not just in terms of caring for, valuing the gifts of nature as this gentleman said that I have been taking oxygen from nature for so long it can be caring for our neighbours it can also be thinking about the ultimate questions of life what really counts in life what is our life meant for and in that way this can prompt some spiritual enquiry about how we can ultimately belong to the universe in a more harmonious and healthy way so you want to say something about that or should I move ahead no no no we will begin with 3 core points so we haven't covered them yet right we have talked about the cause there is a cause, there is a cure and is there no correlation so I started by saying that if there is no correlation that is a very disempowering world view and that is not provable that there is no correlation empowering is that there might be some correlation between our actions now in a linear one to one causal way we can't find it out but in terms of what can we do to cure we discussed from various angles that firstly not only decreasing less animal consumption but also in terms of considering the higher values of life so that can be a part of the cure immediately as well as in the long term so just going back to the earlier point in all alien fiction humans are said to be the ones that matter but it is ironic that if we consider there is the left and there is the right and often the left is quite liberal and environmentally conscious and the right sometimes has extreme rights and some of us who are climate change deniers who say this is just an exaggerated thing but one finding which the left often presents is that, among other biologists E.O. Wilson has said that every species on the earth contributes to the ecological balance except for one species and that is the human species so we disrupt the ecological balance and we don't seem to contribute in any way and I have seen right wing thinkers they say this is a horrendously misanthropic statement so what are we suggesting? that humanity should annihilate itself so that the ecology should live? is it that it is a mentality that is worse than genocidal it is almost omnicidal there is one Harvard biologist he has this doctrine that we should all commit suicide only then the world will be peaceful and happy actually he says that so then I was thinking that from the Bhagavatam's perspective there is an interesting passage that the lord creates all living beings and finally he creates humans who have the capacity for spiritual enquiry for enquiry about the purpose of existence and then after creating humans the lord of all beings becomes satisfied so the narrative flow within this suggests that humans exist to pursue a higher purpose beyond mere survival the way we contribute to the ecology is by pursuing a life of ultimate meaning is there something spiritual something enduring some lasting aspect of life and if we don't use our faculties that means the purpose of human life is not just to get the things that have survival value but to enquire about the things that bring ultimate value to our survival to the extent we don't do this the things that bring value to our survival then we get obsessed with superficial things and even the things that are having survival value we may binge over them and we may create problems for ourselves by that so for example food is a necessity but when there is no higher purpose to life then we don't eat to live we live to eat and then people don't even live to eat sometimes we eat in such a way that there are nutritionists who say that people are committing suicide with their forks the way we are eating so that higher purpose if we enquire about it then that can lead to a significant elevation of human consciousness there is a very significant in the history of the environmental movement one of the leaders he gave a speech to the religious and spiritual leaders of the world and he said that initially when the data about the grave nature of the environmental apocalypse that was awaiting us came forward we felt that if we just educate people more and more about this then people will desist from high energy or high environmental expense kind of behaviour but that has not happened and he said that what we need now is that there has to be a cultural and spiritual transformation within human beings so that they will live in a more harmonious way and he says that science doesn't know how to do that that is a very beautiful quote science doesn't know how to bring about a cultural and spiritual transformation in people how to change the driving values and purposes of people that's why the religious and spiritual leaders of the world have a very important role to play in preserving the environment and another prominent thinker he said that we need to cultivate a less materialistic lifestyle based on a cause of non-material enrichment so non-material enrichment basically will come when we start looking for things that bring value and meaning and purpose to our survival and then we don't crave for the other things so to the extent if people can have a more meaningful and purposeful life then even the craving for various superficial things that have a high carbon footprint and even for the indiscriminate consumption of meat that can be decreased there is something which I read and I was fascinated by that treating this whole world or even the whole material experience at the university so there are students from kindergarten level right up to PhD level and post PhD you go out and do something in the outside world like you graduate so if human beings are at the PhD level students and all the animals are kind of we see man has dominion we can control them, we call them dumb animals we call somebody who has done a very bad thing brutal, so brute is an animal animalistic behavior, bestial all our adjectives are bees, point a finger at them so if humans start looking at other animals as undergrad students or high school students or school students and we are also like them slowly slowly we are now here, now our job is to finish our studies and graduate and while doing so we also help them in their process of slowly evolving spiritually, we are not talking just of the bodily level evolution so the fascinating part about this analogy is after this college my life actually begins I need to do something out there when that prospect is not there then why do I care whether I preserve this university or whether I like the 1960s saw the anarchist students in universities, they were so frustrated by their professors, they gave a world view which was simply inhealistic and it was full of bleak there is nothing, this life is meaningless, everything is meaningless so if everything is meaningless why should we preserve something and then the Gita kind of warns the mode of ignorance takes over and one of the pleasures of the mode of ignorance is to destroy the pleasures of the mode of passion is to somehow preserve passion is to create and mode of goodness is to preserve something but unless the Shuddha Sattva the transcendental kind of star on the horizon doesn't appear this is where we have to go so in our stage it is funny but the most popular youtube videos or instagram videos or tiktok videos are about cats jumping from the roofs or cats or dogs showing behavior just akin to human children so somewhere deep down below there is this feeling that these animals are also part of my life but right now that wisdom is lacking as to how do I respect them how do I take care of them in the western world you will find people dogs have their own saloons dogs have their own weight loss clinics does it mean that people love animals they love animals only if they serve them in one particular way so its not like an enlightened world view about animals its a very narrow niche kind of thing so that love always is love the dog at the cost of a pig or a cow the cow also is loved but because she gives me her flesh to eat and the dog also is loved because he jumps at me and licks my face when I come home so we haven't yet dislodged human beings from the big pedestal of rulers or conquerors, caesars or whatever samaraths of the world only when human beings step down from that and see everybody as a cooperator like we always see this statistic about a honey bee goes 15 kilometers for a few grams of honey and when she doesn't even taste it so today's education, today's culture doesn't make me stop on my tracks why is she contributing so much who told her this is her role and only when because of so much mobile phone technology we find honey bees missing we find its not just honey which is going low in the grocery stores but a whole flora and fauna is affected just because one link in the chain becomes weak so I think that this kind of lockdown time may give at least a few thinking people that much needed respite and ability to go inward understand what our role is and hopefully something good just like the Himalayas becoming very clear and just a pleasing sight to behold or just as the Jamuna again becoming a pleasant sight to behold something good can come out of this I pray, hope and think we can do something like that and that is the sense it can give all of us a sense of agency that if we make some micro changes then something good can emerge from nature and the beauty of nature that is manifesting at a particular level in terms of the cleansing of the rivers that is indication that maybe we can move in this direction right now we are forced to move but maybe we can voluntarily move after this current forcible shutdown there is something called as intentional degrowth we are all talking about growing but maybe we need to consider that we need to grow more holistically so thank you very much for this stimulating discussion thank you.