Do People Of Particular Skin Colors Belong To Particular Castes

Wow I am loving this class and all your answers I'm learning so much I had a question related to actually your last answer I love how you actually categorized it into four different parts and ultimately that at the identity level we're all spirit souls and we're all equal there but then you do see that there's inequality at the level of abilities and perhaps qualities and that's perhaps the Varanasi system which was not meant to put anyone down but it was just some sort of distinguish of your abilities in society and perhaps what you were by nature best to do I'm curious then that for example today we call it race and perhaps just what we call the machine, the body and we identify by the color, for example I'm Asian body so I'm yellow and Indian is called brown and then black and then white did Krishna also mean to distinguish that type of body that you've taken to also perhaps different qualities or abilities I had heard for example that those who take Indian bodies are very good at austerities and so does the type of I guess the skin color or the type of body you also take which we call race which seems to be identified by the color of your skin also meant to suggest certain types of qualities or abilities or is it just simply just the color of the machine like blue versus pink versus yellow and they're all the same Thank you. That's a good question Does the skin color also indicate some kind of ability or attribute or psychological nature also There are some random statements which might indicate like that say Prabhupada has made in some of his commentaries at some places but overall if we see that this fourfold division Varnashram, Krishna says that it is he who has created it in the sense that it is natural Chatur Varnam Maya Srishtam Gunakarma Vibhagya Maya Srishtam means that through the arrangement of nature these four kinds of people are there across society So now imagine a society where everybody say Africa or some other part of the world where everybody is black then if let's say the black was associated with the particular Varna then does that mean everybody in that society will be of a particular Varna only and how would that society be managed It's not going to be like that So there is or say if a fair complexion is associated with a particular Varna then does that mean say if a fair complexion is associated with say Brahminical Varna, presume but does that mean that there are no Kshatriyas, no Vaishyas, no Shudras in that society again the society won't function So if we consider that skin colour is now see the Darwinian theory of evolution we don't accept it entirely in terms of its idea of origins of how everything originated but the principle that evolution the basic principle of evolution of adaptation to nature that is something which is observed phenomena and that's reasonable, acceptable So based on the kind of atmosphere that are there in particular places based on weather, temperature and other factors the human body is evolved in a particular way you could say now evolution could also be a product of design evolution doesn't have to be what we call a natural evolution just like we have say artificial intelligence systems which if you say have speech recognition now when you get a speech recognition device, initially it recognises some words but then some words it gets wrong and once it gets it wrong you correct it at one time and once you correct it, then oh ok this is the word, then it learns it and next time when you see that word so now a system which has a fixed vocabulary and a system whose vocabulary expands artificial speech detection system which would be which would be more useful, obviously the second one now the capacity of a system to adapt to its environment or to learn from its environment that does not mean that there was no intelligence behind it actually it means there is a greater intelligence that means it doesn't just have a fixed level of learning with which it functions rather it has a fixed level of learning also it can learn more and more further so the point I am making is that our body is designed in such a way that there is a basic template but it also adapts it also adapts to situations so we could say that based on the particular environment people are living in over centuries, over millennia certain skin colors were found to be best adaptive for that environment and that's how those skin colors became predominant in those particular areas and do they indicate innate psychological disposition I haven't seen any particular statement associated with that because at one level we understand that the soul gets a body according to one's own karma so now in every society there will be diversity of karma in the sense that sometimes people have this idea that say Africans were they were brought to America and they were made slaves well it's not entirely true because slavery was there in Africa also and it was African blacks who sold other African blacks to the whites so the point I was making is we can't just equate all blacks or all whites to one category so even in blacks there is a hierarchy there might be some blacks who might have been kings tribal heads or whatever and there are others under them who were slaves so so why is this there if we say the black body or a white body is a result of karma well you could call it but even within black and white there is so much diversity there could be whites who were wealthy and there could be whites who were terribly poor, same with blacks so we can't really equate one physical attribute with any innate psychological quality which is especially favorable or unfavorable for spirituality now as far as India being Indians being more capable of austerity there is a certain understanding that because India is a place where a lot of saints were there, a lot of avatars of the lord were there so there is a certain amount of sanctity in the land of India but that is not a material ability, it is more of a spiritual inclination so we could say that rather than putting it this way that Indians have a greater capacity for spirituality we could say that souls who are already spiritually evolved are born in India rather than souls who are born elsewhere so it's not that the body makes them capable of austerity, it's rather they are already capable of austerity and then they are born in a particular area, of course then because they have already an inclination for austerity they might also have a body which is more inclined for austerity but to say that the body is the cause of the capacity for austerity might be putting the cart before the horse.