Bhagavatam-daily 33 – 11.07.23 – Perceiving the difficult to perceive defines human intelligence

Thank you yukta hetu bhireshwaram griyamane gunai lingai agrayam anumanitah atramam Krishna is speaking to Uddhava and he is saying here in mrugayanti they search for me directly and yukta hetu bhireshwaram the Ishwara, the supreme lord hetu means the indication, the symptoms griya manair gunair lingair griya manair means the gunair griya manair that with which we do grahan, we accept, we perceive the instruments of perception, the fruit of senses, the mind, the intelligence lingair and by indirectly asserting symptoms so agrahayam anumanatah agrahayam is that which is not actually to be perceived anumanatah but can be inferred so here the point that has been made is that humans have the capacity for perceiving that which is not perceivable normally the animals live for eating, sleeping, mating, defending even humans live for that but humans can live for something more and what is that something more that humans can live for? it is for the purpose, it is for enquiring about the purpose of eating, sleeping, mating, defending okay, i will eat, sleep, mate, defend but what after that? i will keep doing this for the rest of my life i will grow old, get deceased, then my capacity to eat, sleep, mate, defend will decrease, decrease and eventually i will die what after that? what is the point of it all? so this sort of enquiry about the purpose of life, about the purpose of existence itself enables us to rise from the physical level of reality to the mental, intellectual, spiritual and emotional level of realities gradually and this capacity for perceiving that which is not immediately perceivable that is the speciality of the human form of life and it is in this human form of life that whatever progress we make, actually we make by moving from the visible to the invisible even science progresses by yes, we may say it begins by seeing but after seeing what does it do? it infers universal principles from specific observations and those universal principles in themselves are not visible, gravity is not visible, a falling fruit is visible but from a falling fruit, from a visibly falling fruit, when an invisible force is inferred, that leads to the progress of knowledge so now Shri Prabhupada explains that when we go backward in the causal chain, then often how far we go depends on our pre-existing framework of assumptions, so that means that Louis Pasteur pointed this out, he said that he reproached the contemporary fashion of trying to explain life in terms of matter of stating that life to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics physics to motion of particles and in that way we reduce life to motion of particles so as a western philosopher put it, this sort of reduction it reduces human existence to nothing more than a set of electrons moving aimlessly and endlessly of course endlessly as long as we live but is there nothing more than the whizzing of electrons to our existence, we all feel our existence is intrinsically meaningful and valuable, it is not just the mechanical motion of fundamental particles so science moves backwards going from visible to invisible but it keeps itself restricted to matter in the field of inquiry and because of that it cannot reach the absolute cause, so Pasteur himself gave the example that if we a person has lived in darkness throughout one’s life and then suddenly while exploring darkness one finds that oh there is light then the person will start questioning oh how did the darkness produce light but actually the darkness never produced light actually light is a natural reality and when the light is less or is absent then darkness takes over that place, so similarly so the point is of course that here the emphasis is not on what is natural but in the sense of what is the relationship of what, it is not that darkness is producing light it is that absence of light is what we call as darkness similarly when scientists start with matter then they move backward from our bodies and ultimately they think that our consciousness is present in the head, so the idea is that if we somehow disconnect the brain then what happens? normally the person dies but then we have near death experiences near death experiences in which people’s brains are completely dysfunctional as can be seen by the EEG’s electroencephalograms and other such sensors and yet people are reported to have clear consciousness with accurate description of the conversations and actions of the say operating team if the person got a near death experience while being operated so consciousness can and does exist separate from the body but when matter centric scientists try to research backwards from the phenomena of the world they come to the phenomena of matter and they stop over there and they try to agonize how maybe in the past some primeval suddenly matter produced life and then life manifested consciousness, so how did this happen? now actually as long as the question that we ask is wrong we cannot get a right answer that’s why Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita does not answer Arjuna’s question directly should I fight or should I not fight he focuses on first demolishing Arjuna’s bodily conception which is the basis of his thinking and replacing that with the most spiritual conception of his identity and life and then talking about the various yogas which could be possible courses of activity for him and culminating in Bhakti Yoga so similarly in the human form as long as we have this conception that seeing is believing which is actually the animal philosophy as long as we consider seeing is believing to be an authoritative way of living till that time we will not be able to make any substantial spiritual advancement and even if we move from seeing is believing as long as we stay stuck to matter and say that actually all explanations have to be given in terms of matter even then it will be difficult for us to move onwards in our life in our quest for knowledge but when we open ourselves that wherever the evidence leads I will follow then we will see that there exists in the cosmos matter which is unconscious and there are also conscious beings so rather than imagining that the conscious beings came from matter we will be able to infer that both consciousness and matter have come from some source which has as its features which has as its energies both matter and consciousness and that source is the supreme lord that is how the searching that is described that is possible in the human form as is mentioned in this verse that by that one will come to mama we will attain Krishna so inference helps us to advance our knowledge by helping us see invisible principles underlying visible events but science often restricts even inferences to matter itself but the Bhagavatam opens us to follow through follow the evidence and its attended inferences wherever they take us and they take us to the forceful reminder of the uniqueness of the human form of life and the capacity that we have over here and by progressing in the search for first things we ultimately come to know the supreme lord. Thank you