Gita 02.26 – Materialism makes meaning meaningless and lamentation pointless

Bhagavad Gita 2.26 Krishna is now continuing his instruction to free Arjuna from grief from shock so that theme continues theme is same don't grieve, don't lament but the reasoning is diametrically opposite in the previous verse the reasoning was that because the soul is eternal the soul is not going to be destroyed therefore do not lament in this verse Krishna considers the possibility that the soul does not exist at all now the various philosophies that exist have always more or less existed but they have never been the misleading philosophies the wrong conclusions such as that we are nothing but material creatures these are never been prominent the way they are in today's society so Krishna is addressing certain world views present at that time and refuting them which we will focus on how this argument will apply in today's context Krishna is non-specific about whom he is referring to so we can look at how if somebody considers there is somebody considers this soul it is always born and then it is always destroyed that means what the nitya here refers to the point that actually whenever there is life seen at that time the soul is created and whenever life ends at that time the soul ends that means there is no soul separate from the bodily life and this is of course today's establishment conception of the self much of the intellectual world today considers that there is no self as a separate locus of identity and personality that our conception of self is just a illusion that is created by the firing of the neural cells in the brain so all that exists is matter and that matter may as epiphenomena as some sort of further occurrence produce consciousness but consciousness has no independent reality and it certainly doesn't have any independent source consciousness does not come from the soul consciousness just emerges from the firing of the neuronal circuitry and the resulting electrochemical states and as long as the circuitry is firing then there is consciousness so that means that nityatam and timrtam it is created whenever there is this fire whenever the chemicals become active in a proper way and it ends whenever the chemicals become inactive now we are putting aside the fact that no one has demonstrated this that chemicals can produce consciousness and beyond that no one has been theoretically explained how unconscious matter can become suddenly conscious unconscious matter can produce something that experiences matter it is consciousness so leave alone absence of empirical or theoretical support for this idea we can look at the internal incoherence of the idea so internal incoherence means that actually we try to make sense of things the whole scientific endeavor is an attempt to make sense of things newton saw the fruit falling and wanted to make sense why has this fruit fallen and the reasoning he came up with was that it fell because that is gravity and then he came up with a mathematical formulation f is equal to gm 1m2 upon r square but the whole of science essentially is a quest for meaning and try to understand the order in the natural phenomena that we encounter in the world around us but if there is nothing except chemicals which are just running around the brain changing their states then the state of comprehension and state of incomprehension both are basically just chemical states and being just chemical states there is nothing special about one or nothing undesirable about another so that means coming up with the theory that f is equal to gm 1m2 upon r square is one electrical state in newton's brain and not having that is another electrochemical state and these electrochemical states in themselves have no meaning because they are just electrochemical states and they themselves don't have any meaning and there is no one to perceive their meaning at all so just like if there is a squaggle of text some squaggle of patterns some squiggle something shapey on the ground now or on a paper now we may say that only the letters and they are having some meaning it is written in some unknown language but if we know for sure that there is no one who is no one exists who knows any language there is no such thing as a language then the pattern that has come on the paper cannot have any meaning meaningfulness of the pattern comes because there is someone who has imparted its meaning and someone who can interpret its meaning but if there were no one like that then the concept of meaning itself would become meaningless so materialism makes meaning meaningless and because even materialism is a search for meaning and the materialists argue that it doesn't make sense to believe in something which we can't see, something like a soul therefore we will believe that we hold that matters all that exists so materialism is also one way of making sense of things but the idea of sense itself becomes nonsense because there is no one to see it as sense or to see it as nonsense and if meaning itself is meaningless then even grief is meaningless there is no need to lament for anything going wrong because actually everything is meaningless there is just neuronal firings which are happening and ultimately our whole life is reduced to a state of utter meaninglessness this is the grave consequence of materialism put it another way materialism makes our conception of I-ness our sense of I-ness itself an illusion there is no I who is observing because the sense of I-ness the sense of subjective observer which we all have that I am a person, I am observing things, that whole sense of a subject is an illusion because there is no I who is observing that is brain chemicals and none of those brain chemicals are conscious and none of those chemicals have a sense of I-ness so now our consciousness is the basic root to reality it is because I exist and because I perceive that I can sense the world outside and I can try to make sense of it even if it is by considering the philosophy of materialism but materialism makes the I who is trying to make sense of things itself meaningless, non-existent so by this way all emotions become meaningless because the foundation of emotions, the person with emotions is itself an illusion so therefore if if we accept materialism then there is then actually the materialist itself is rejected by the acceptance of materialism because there is no independent observer at all that sense of being not even an independent observer, subjective observer there is no subject at all and if there is no subject then there is no subject who can propose the theory of materialism so in this way materialism makes the materialist non-existent and it makes meaning meaningless and it makes all emotions meaningless and therefore even the emotion of grief becomes meaningless so the feeling of happiness or grief is nothing but just an electrochemical pattern and there are many prominent scientists who have pointed out the absurdity of such an explanation so for example Heisenberg and Schrodinger said that although science can offer us remarkably consistent patterns and put our experience in remarkably consistent pattern and enable us to manipulate it but questions generally hold to us science is completely science doesn't give any satisfactory answers to them and many other eminent scientists have pointed out the limitation of the scientific world view when science weds itself to materialism but science doesn't have to weds itself to materialism and now as quantum physics has come up now more and more science is recognizing not only the reality of consciousness but the reality of consciousness as an independent reality that gives us access to other realities so the science is becoming more and more open to spirituality but the point here is that if one considers materialism we consider that there is no soul then there is no need to lamentation because lamentation itself is nothing but a just a firing of chemicals in the brain cells and then just as the chemicals are just going from one state to another and there is no tangible difference between one chemical state that is the state of grief and other chemical state the state of happiness so therefore from a intellectual point of view there is no need to lament because lamentation meaning and life all become an illusion so by using the word Mahabaho, Arjuna uses the word over here Krishna uses the word Mahabaho Arjuna you are a powerful person so you can fight the enemy of this fallacious conception and there is no soul different from the body that is implied in this verse but the direct assertion of this verse is that if at all you accept materialism then also there is no reason to lament this argument will be continued in the next verse also which we will discuss in our next session thank you.