How science points to spirituality

[Science and spirituality seminar, part 3, at ISKCON, Connecticut, USA]

Video:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
That is something that I’m unable to accept. I can’t accept that. So, is Krishna’s telling Arjuna to kill his relatives because it is duty, something like, say, someone telling Hari Truman that you must drop the bomb on Hiroshima because it is your duty to do so.
Let’s look at the context, the content, and the consequence of the Gita to understand what its message is. Now, if you look at the context from the historical perspective, the Bhagavad Gita is a part of the Mahabharata, and the Mahabharata is a long story, a narrative, in which Arjuna’s side, the Pandavas, they have been repeatedly persecuted by the Kauravas. So, they were trying to be burnt alive, trying to be poisoned, their wife was publicly dishonoured, attempted to be disrobed, all their kingdom was stolen away through a rigged gambling match, they were exiled to the forest where they had to live in poverty and humiliating incognito conditions, and they did all that faithfully.
And the terms of the exile was that at the end of it, they will get half their kingdom back. But, when they came back and asked for that, the Kauravas, they said that, what to speak of half the kingdom, we will not give you enough land to put even the tip of a needle through. So, Pandavas had given half the kingdom, gave us five villages, five Pandavas refused to even do that.
And on top of that, Krishna, who had himself God as peace envoy, what did they do? They tried to arrest Krishna. So, if you want to draw any parallel in today’s world, say there is going to be a war between America and North Korea and the American president goes to North Korea to try to have peace. And not only does North Korea reject the peace proposal, but they try to arrest the American president.
It will be an outrage. So, there are different ways in which we can say no. So, we invite somebody for a programme and they say that, I would like to come, but I have this engagement, so I can’t come.
You are saying no to the invitation, but you are not saying no to the person. But suppose somebody says, even if I die, my corpse will also not come to your programme. When they say like that, that is like smashing the door in the face of someone.
So, that’s what Duryodhana was doing. So, he was, when he said that I will not give you enough piece of land, even to put the tip of a needle through, that means he had no remorse, no reformation and no sense of even honouring one’s own word. The terms of the condition the Pandavas had fulfilled.
So, now a person who has had the audacity, brazenness to disrobe an honourable lady in public, in the presence of his own elders, such a person, if he was given untrammelled power, he would break havoc in society. So, the Pandavas fought not because they were greedy for a kingdom. If they had been, they would never have settled for five villages.
They fought primarily because they wanted to establish the rule of law. They wanted to ensure that the unrighteous were not ruling the world. If people like Duryodhana who could, as I said, disrobe a respectable lady in public, what would they do if they got unrestricted power? So, the war was not fought for revenge.
The war was fought for justice and justice means the war was to establish virtuous rulers so that they could spread virtue. Now, there can be shades of grey. Life is never black and white.
But no matter how many shades of grey you bring into this picture, it’s clear that time and time again the Pandavas were wronged. And that the Pandavas sought peace by Krishna himself went as a peace messenger. Normally you send some junior person as a peace messenger.
The top man of an army, top person of a nation hardly ever goes as a peace messenger. But Krishna himself did that. So, the Pandavas sought to seek peace.
Sometimes you say, I have done everything humanly possible. But if you consider Krishna and the tradition is considered to be God, then the Pandavas did everything humanly possible and everything divinely possible. And yet the Kauravas were so brazen and obstinate.
So, the context required at that time war to be fought. I would say the Hiroshima bombing, it’s a very different setting. According to many historians, Japan was already on the verge of being defeated.
And it would probably have accepted defeat sooner or later even without the bomb being dropped. So, in that sense it was an extreme measure and it was in some ways an unnecessary measure. But this was not like that.
This was the opponents were brazen, they were vicious and they had power. They would have wrecked havoc in all of the world. And the Pandavas had done everything humanly and divinely possible to avoid war.
So, sometimes the Mahabharata, sometimes the only way to resolve the issue is through confrontation. Mahabharata is very clear that war or confrontation should not be the first recourse. But sometimes there is some insurgency or disruption somewhere.
The United Nations may send some peacekeeping force. Now just see the word peacekeeping force. So, to keep peace we need to use force.
So, violence is sometimes just necessary in this world. So, we have to look at the context to see what the Bhagavad Gita is, why Krishna is endorsing war. Now when Krishna is saying, Arjuna is saying, I do not want to fight against my relatives and kill them.
So, that is his soft heartedness. But that soft heartedness can have a catastrophic result. The Hiroshima bombing also is not a parallel because the bombs were dropped against innocent people.
Nobody innocent was targeted over here. The war was fought in a battlefield and hostilities were only on the battlefield. No civilians were attacked.
Those who enlisted for the war, they only fought in the war. So, again that is also not a valid parallel. Now if you move from the context, let’s look at the content.
The Bhagavad Gita, it has 700 verses and the reference to the war comes barely in about 10 or 15 verses that Krishna speaks. The first chapter describes the setting. From the second chapter onwards, the Bhagavad Gita’s message immediately becomes philosophical.
In fact, even Arjuna’s question is not should I fight or should I not fight. His question is, pruchhamitvam dharmasamudh chetah, that please tell me what is dharma. Dharma means duty, right course of action, not just duty.
What is the right course of action? And if we see in the Bhagavad Gita, there is not a single verse which directly we could call in today’s world as hate speech. Oh, they are so bad people, you have to kill them. The whole Bhagavad Gita is philosophical.
And only in the few places Krishna tells Arjuna, therefore, Arjuna, rise and fight. Therefore, Arjuna, fight. This is less than 10 to 15 verses in the whole 600 plus verses that Krishna has spoken.
And even that, if you see, there is no description of hate speech, there is no description of war strategies. The Bhagavad Gita starts on a battlefield setting, but it addresses universal human questions. And at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna does not tell Arjuna to fight.
Krishna tells Arjuna to deliberate and decide. And then Arjuna also at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, he does not say I will fight. His answer is karishe vachinam tava, I will do your will.
So the Bhagavad Gita is more a message of transcendental harmony with the divine, not of any political warfare. So in that exceptional situation, that surrender to God and doing the will of God meant fighting. But the Bhagavad Gita has been studied, commented on and taught by thousands of preceptors in India and various parts of the world also.
If you see, the great commentators from the tradition, Ramacharya, Madhvacharya, Shankaracharya, not one of them, they all lived at a time when there were Muslim rulers in India, many of them were quite atrocious. But not one of them has ever commented on the Gita in a way that you should fight a political war. The tradition has understood the Bhagavad Gita as a call for transcendence.
So as I said, look at the content and look at the consequence. The consequence is that millions of people have been inspired to practise devotion to God. The same Bhagavad Gita as I said, which tells Arjuna to fight the war, it also tells him, nirvairah sarvabhuteshu yah samam eti pandava.
If you want to come to me, you give up all animosity to all living beings. So it is not filling him with hate, that person is an infidel, go and kill him. No, be non-envious, be non-animous towards all living beings.
So the message of the Bhagavad Gita is essentially a message of love. A message of, it is a revelation of God’s love, of the soul’s love for the soul and it is an invitation for the soul to love the super soul. So the essential message of the Gita is not of violence, nor is it of silence.
It is a message of transcendence. So from the context, content and consequence, the Bhagavad Gita is very different from any ordinary, any other situation of inducing war. Does that address your question? Any other questions? Okay.
So you asked that, does a devotee not get any karma when we are practising bhakti? So I talked about how destiny works, karma. There is karma plus daiva plus kala leads to phala. Is a devotee not doing any karma? Actually, first of all the word karma can have many different meanings.
The word karma can simply mean action. The word karma can also mean reaction. I am just suffering my own karma.
That means I am suffering the reactions to my karma. The word karma can also refer to the system of action reaction. Nobody can escape from the law of karma.
The word karma can also refer to one particular kind of action. We have karma, akarma and vikarma. So karma refers to action, which is su-karma, which produces good reactions.
So if we consider karma in terms of action itself, just action, a devotee does action. But if you use karma in the sense that action that produces material reactions, that a devotee does not do. But then we also have to understand who actually is a devotee.
That means we are all practising devotion, but what protects us from reactions to our actions is the selflessness of our actions. So how much of our actions are presently driven by selflessness and how much are they driven by self, not necessarily ego in a very gross sense, but a desire for self-indulgence at some level or the other. We don’t know that.
Probably there’s a mixture of both of them. So as devotees, we accept the principle that bhakti frees us from karma. But in practise, we understand that we may not be practising bhakti very purely.
So a devotee never thinks that whatever is happening, I’m beyond the law of karma. A devotee is very humble, very cautious in terms of doing actions properly. And a devotee is also cautious in terms of not of when some bad things happen, you understand this is my karma coming to me.
So now with respect to the sequence of destiny or how actions unfold, we see even different devotees, they may do services, they may get different results. Now one devotee may become a great teacher and they have say thousands of disciples. Another devotee may be also practising and preaching for many years and they may just have 10-15 disciples.
Now does that necessarily mean that somebody who has thousands of disciples is a very advanced devotee and somebody who has 10-15 disciples is not an advanced devotee? Not necessarily. It may be that some people by their past karma itself, they may have charisma, they may have the ability to speak very eloquently, they may have the ability to organise, to delegate, to manage, to counsel and they use that in Krishna’s service. It’s glorious that they have that ability and it’s even more glorious than using in Krishna’s service.
But just because somebody has the ability and it produces the result, that alone does not necessarily equate with spiritual advancement. So some devotees by their karma in the past, they may just have fame as a result of their karma and they get it in the scope, in the realm of devotion and when the devotee gets fame, Krishna also gets fame in this world through that and some devotees may just not have that karma for fame. They may do a lot of service but they may not get any much followers or much admiration by that.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the devotion is defective. Of course in bhakti, you always have to have a vision that is favourable to our devotion. So for example, if I am a preacher and I see some other devotee getting a lot of success in their preaching.
Now I shouldn’t think, I shouldn’t minimise their success thinking just because of their karma they are getting success. We should say, okay, this devotee is glorifying Krishna and it’s so wonderful that so many people are coming to Krishna. And if I can learn something from this devotee so that I can serve Krishna better, that’s good.
If I can’t, we don’t have to dismiss or downplay other people’s success in public. But at the same time if we are trying to do service or trying to also share Krishna bhakti and not many people are coming and we are doing our best and somebody else is also doing something similar but they are getting a lot of results. Then if we are getting discouraged by that, then we can say, yes, the fruit is not in my hands.
I’ll try to become more pure if I can, as much as I can, but let me do my service to Krishna and Krishna has his plan. Even if I don’t get the fruit in this world, if I try to serve Krishna sincerely, I’ll get the fruit of love for Krishna eventually. So we always try to have the vision that is favourable to bhakti.
And sometimes it may be having faith in the principle that bhakti frees us from all karma. And sometimes it may be in the humility to acknowledge that my bhakti is not that pure. Sometimes karma will play in my life also.
Okay. Any other questions? So we’ll move on to the next part of the session. So we are talking about how, in the first session, we all humans require meaning.
In the second session, I talked about how spiritual wisdom can help expand our reference by which we can make sense of things. Now, since our topic is science and spirituality, we’ll discuss how much can science point to spirituality? How much can spiritual truths be confirmed or supported by science? The word science can have different meanings. In the technical sense, science refers to looking for quantifiable parameters in the nature and formulating equations to explain the behaviour of natural phenomena of things in nature.
In a general sense, the word science can also refer to knowledge at large. Science, any systematic body of knowledge can be called a science. So if we consider that at a material level, what can we talk about the spiritual level? By definition, the soul is spiritual.
By definition, the super soul, supreme soul is also spiritual. Therefore, they cannot be directly perceived at the material level. But the results of the effects of their presence can be perceived.
Now in science, we have two branches. There is theory and there is experiment. So the theory talks about, it gives propositions.
This may be what it is. Newton saw the fruit falling and he proposed, maybe there is a law of gravity which makes this fall, force of gravity that is there. And then he did experiments to demonstrate it.
So if we want to look at, since our focus is on the soul going through various lifetimes in spiritual evolution, we consider consciousness. So we could have a theory and we could have some field study or experiment. So theory could be that where does consciousness come from? Does it come from matter or does it come from somewhere beyond matter? So a lot of scientific study has been done in the brain and the more we have studied the brain, the more scientists have been able to correlate.
This area of the brain is associated with this function. This area of the brain is associated with this function. And at the same time, scientists have also found that the brain is remarkably resilient.
For example, if I cut off half my hand, I cannot function as if I had a full hand. If my one hand is cut off, with one hand I cannot do all the functions that I would be able to do with two hands. But with respect to the brain, it doesn’t seem to be like that.
There is a surgery called hemispherectomy. In hemispherectomy, almost one hemisphere of the brain is cut off. Because there is a tumour or some malignancy is there and still people function normally.
So there is no significant change in their capacity to analyse, capacity to behave. Now the small parts of the brain, large sections of the brain can also be taken out. So the brain itself, no matter how exhaustively we analyse it, it just matters.
And electricity flowing through this wire does not produce consciousness. So electricity, electrochemical changes in the brain, why should they produce consciousness? Consciousness is something categorically different. It is not something which is equatable with something material.
So now if consciousness were something non-material, how would we be able to know about it? So one is, if we consider that the consciousness gets separated from the body and then still the person is conscious, then we could say that maybe there is something else going on over there, which I am not aware of. So there are near-death experiences which people have experienced. In near-death experiences, what happens is something very intriguing.
I will first tell the cases and then I will explain how this is explainable using the spiritual understanding of things. So I am just sending you an email, you can demonstrate. So there was this, many of you may have heard of near-death experiences.
In near-death experiences, essentially what happens is that some people when they are about to die, at that time they get an experience as if they are separated from their body. And being separated from their body, they see from outside their body. So there is this case of, there is a whole book written, I will talk about two cases.
One was, there is Cooper and Ring, Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, they wrote a book called Mindsight. That is near-death experiences among the blind. These were people, Vicky Umipeke was one of the cases she described.
She was born blind. During her delivery, when she was born, there were some problems because of which the optic nerve got permanently damaged. And she couldn’t see throughout her life.
And yet she had two near-death experiences. And these near-death experiences were the only times when she could see herself. And first she was lying on the hospital bed and suddenly she felt she has gone out.
She is looking down. She could say, oh, that is me. What am I doing? If that is me, who am I? And then she started looking around.
Those people who are blind, they actually can’t, because they can’t see, they feel their way through things by touching, especially by stick or hands. This was the room which I was there in. And then as the nurses and doctors were talking, oh, this was the nurse.
Their sense of hearing was also very acute. So she described also what the nurse said to a patient or what the nurse said to another patient or the doctor and nurse talk with each other. She described all that.
So now in this case, she had no capacity itself to see. And yet during her near-death experience, when she got to see herself, only those are two occasions she got to see from a perspective outside her body. There is another case of, so how do near-death experiences happen? We can explain through this diagram now.
This side is a little dark, but I deliberately kept it dark like that. So this is the outside world. Normally, how do we see? There is a gross body in which there is the eye.
And then there is the brain. The connection with the eye to the brain is through the optic nerve. And then there is the subtle body.
The subtle body contains subtle senses. It’s like when we close our eyes, we can see on the inner screen. So actually there is a subtle eye which sees.
We can see with the mind’s eye. If we close our eyes, if we love someone, we can see them in our mind’s eye. So there is a subtle eye.
And then there is the soul. So when normal vision occurs, normally when we see, the soul, the subtle eye and the physical eye, they have to be in one line. And that’s how we see.
But now when somebody is blind because of some damage to their optic nerve, that means the channel, the outer channel, the connection between the brain and the physical eye is damaged. So they should not be able to see. They are able to see.
How do they see? Can you go to the next slide? Yes. So in the near-death experience, what happens? The soul has come out of the body. The gross body is there.
The eye and the brain, they are there in the body still. But the soul has come out of the subtle body. And the soul along with the subtle body can look at and see the gross body.
Can see the gross world outside. So this, we could say that the brain is not the producer of consciousness. Rather the brain is the transmitter of consciousness.
And normally when the soul is locked into the body, this consciousness is transmitted through the brain. But when that consciousness, when the soul and the body are decoupled during moments of trauma or during near-death experiences, then the limiting of the soul’s consciousness to the bodily channel is no longer there. And that’s why the physical obstacle is no longer an obstacle for the person to see.
There is another case of near-death experiences in which there was Dr. Spindler who is in Phoenix and he has undergone a surgery called Operation Standstill. This is many cases of this. There was this woman who had a brain aneurysm.
So she had this aneurysm, swelling in the brain, at the bottom of her brain. And to get down to it and to remove it is extremely difficult. So what did they do at that time? So this doctor, to get down to the brain, to remove it is difficult.
So Dr. Spindler has pioneered a form of surgery in which they first induce an artificial cardiac arrest by which the blood flow stops. Then they put the body in a freezer, in a freezing atmosphere. And then after that all the blood from the brain is drained out.
There is no sensation left in the brain. And then the person is of course, because there is no heart beat, slowly goes into unconsciousness. And then after the blood flow to the brain is stopped, the brain is drained out.
Then the brain is opened in surgery. The head is opened and the brain is picked up. And after picking up the brain, then they get to the bottom and remove the aneurysm.
Now for this to be done, it is vital that the patient be unconscious. If a slight trace of consciousness is there, it will create huge complications. So Pam Reynolds was the person who had this brain aneurysm and she had this surgery done.
When this surgery was done, at that time she had a near-death experience. And she saw herself from above and the first thing she noticed was that her hair had been cut in a very odd way. What has been done to my hair? And then she saw that somebody was operating near her groyne area.
It’s a brain surgery, why are they operating near the groyne? And then she heard a female voice saying that the veins are too thin over here. And she heard a male voice saying that try on the other thigh. So basically they had to give a cardiac arrest and they wanted to have a bypass.
They wanted to have the bypass from the thigh to the veins, they wanted to have an access. So this was the actual conversation that happened between the male voice was Dr. Spendler and the female voice was a cardiac surgeon who was assisting him in the main brain surgery. So she was in charge of giving the artificial cardiac arrest.
And like that she described further conversation and then she slipped back to unconsciousness and then she couldn’t remember anything afterwards. And then she came back to consciousness and she reported this. Now what she described was exactly what happened.
Her hair had been shaven because they wanted to open the cranial cavity. And what was significant is that at this time she had plugs in her ears and those plugs would emit huge sounds like the sound of a train whistle and at a very high volume and very high frequency. Why? Because those sounds going on, like if you repeatedly hear this again and again and again dozens of times in a moment, in a minute, then you just can’t hear anything else.
The idea is that when that loud sound is coming in, then even if there is a slight trace of consciousness, that will be reflected in the brain. And they have to make sure that all consciousness goes off. Only then they can do the brain without any unexpected actions from the patients with disrupting the surgery.
So the brain waves were completely flat. So this loud sound was just beating and beating and beating and beating. How could she possibly at that time hear anything? Leave alone hear a conversation that was held at normal room conversational level.
When she was asked how she could hear through the beeps, she said I did not hear the beeps. She said I heard through non-physical means. That means she was not in her body.
She was above the body and she was hearing from above the body. So Dr. Spangler when he was asked about this, he said at that point nobody can be conscious. So I have no explanation for how this could have happened.
But still I am not so arrogant to say that it can’t happen. I have seen many things which were extraordinary in my life. So the point here is that if we consider the brain as a source of consciousness, then experiences like these have no explanation at all.
But if you consider the consciousness as something separate from the brain, then there is reasonable explanation. The source of consciousness along with a certain channel of consciousness got separated from the body and that’s how they were able to perceive. And same way with respect to past life memories, there are many cases of well documented past life memories.
There are some which are very sensationalised. So Dr. Ian Stevenson is one of the pioneers in the research in past life memories. And he focused on cases first of all of spontaneous past life memories.
There are many hypnotically induced past life memories. A regression expert takes a person to the past life. They may be true, they may not be true.
They may just be suggestions by the hypnotic regressor. But he focused on children spontaneously speaking about past lives. And he was very careful not to choose any cases involving celebrities.
Because if somebody is claiming as a reincarnation celebrity, there is an obvious motive behind that. I want to be famous. Now there are at least six girls who are claimed to be reincarnations of Marilyn Monroe.
So he decided that I am not involved in. He did not take any such cases into consideration. So there are many cases.
Now he found four levels of evidences. First is, of course, recollection. Suddenly the child one day starts speaking to mummy, mummy.
I want to go to my other mummy. What other mummy? First the parents can’t make sense, especially if they are from a family that doesn’t accept reincarnation. It just can’t make sense.
But the child keeps insisting. The child also says, if you don’t take me, I want to go there myself. So the second level is when they are taken there, then there is recognitions.
They recognise the mother, father, sister. They recognise people, they recognise places, recognise objects. The third is that there is behaviours.
So they may be a small child, but in the previous life, if they had been married and they had children, the children from their previous life may be older than them now, but they treat them like children, treat them like their children and fondle them, marriage them as behaviour. And last is that there is birthmarks and birth defects, where the fatal wounds which the person had in the previous life, they get reflected in this life as birthmarks or birth defects. So let’s look at one case which described all of this.
I have described almost more than two dozen cases in my book, Demystifying Reincarnation. There is one case of Nesip Ullu Taskiran, which happened in Turkey. So he was a boy born in Adana, which is a city in Turkey, and since the age of, since a small child, he started saying, no, my name is Nesip.
Yes, your name is Nesip. He says, no, my name is Nesip Budak. He says, no, you are Nesip Ullu Taskiran.
Then his parents have an understanding that he is claiming to be Nesip Budak from a previous life. And he said, I live in a place called Mersin. And take me there.
So his parents, not interested, they didn’t believe in it also, but he kept insisting, take me there, take me there. And finally, his mother went to meet her father, who lived in a village near Mersin. And his father had just got remarried, Nesip’s grandfather had just got remarried.
And his wife happened to be from Mersin. And as soon as Nesip saw her, he recognised her. He started telling her, you know, I am this, and his wife was intrigued.
And more than that, her husband was intrigued. So then his grandfather took him to Mersin. When he went to Mersin, he had never been there in his life, he was just a small boy.
And he took him straight to the house. And there, there was a woman who was staying, and she was a widow of a man named Nesip Budak. And then she asked him several questions, he answered all of them properly.
And then, not only that, this Nesip Budak had been a very short-tempered person. He would get angry and he would have fits of violence. And he had been stabbed to death.
So he described that one time he had got very angry with his wife, and he had taken a knife and slashed at her. So she had dodged the blow, but the knife had grazed her thigh. And there was a scar that had been formed on her thigh.
So then Dr. Stevenson, who had been doing this investigation, he asked one of his female aides over there to go and examine this woman in private. And he found that she actually had a scar on her inner thigh. And she said, my husband had attacked me with a knife, that’s how I got this scar.
Now, in a conservative country like Turkey, what is a mark on a private part of a woman’s body, how would a boy living somewhere else, who has never come to that city, even know about it? And not only that, so not only did he have recognitions and recollections, but also behaviours. Now this Nasib, that widow, she had married again. So when this boy Nasib saw her photo with her husband, he was so angry, he took the frame and he wanted to break the frame apart.
He said, you are my wife, not anyone else’s wife. And then he had children and he was very affectionate with them as if they were his own children. And most importantly, Nasib had been stabbed.
So he had got drunk and he had got into an altercation with somebody else also who was drunk probably. And the other person had taken out and stabbed him repeatedly. And Nasib had been taken, in the previous life, Nasib had been taken to hospital and he had succumbed over there within 24 hours.
So now, whenever Nasib Buddha could speak, when Nasib Uddhavdas Kiran would speak about his previous life, he would say that he had been stabbed and he would point to the various marks on his body. This was where I was stabbed. So because that had been a murder case, there are police records of it.
And when Stevenson’s and his associates investigated the case, they found that six birth marks on Nasib’s body correlated with the location of the fatal wounds on the previous Nasib’s body. So now this is, what they did is they divided the human body into, in XY coordinate system say into 160 parts. So if you divide into 160 parts, the human body will, one square coordinate will not be very big.
So it’s small. So then you want to check how much is the correlation. So even one correlation, one location of the fatal wound and one location of the birth mark, for them to be together, exactly the same location, the probability will be 1 by 160.
For six birth marks to be correlating, the probability would be 1 by 160 raised to the power of 6, which is astronomically low probability. So Stevenson, like that he has uncovered many, many cases. And the last book that he wrote was where reincarnation and biology intersect.
Where he talked about how systematically there are so many cases with the fatal wounds from the previous life correlating with the birth marks in this life, along with recollections and recognitions. Now recollections and recognitions, somebody may say, oh, maybe the children may have been prompted to do that. Somehow they were able to recollect, maybe parents fed them with some ideas or whatever.
But birth marks, how can anyone create that? They are just there from birth. And on top of that, how can you get children to behave like that? And why would the parents do like that? So there was a Washington Post editor, Tom Schroeder. He was a sceptic and he decided to himself investigate Ian Stevenson and his cases.
So he travelled for over a year with Ian Stevenson in Libya and India when he went for investigating cases. He wrote a book of investigative journalism called Old Souls. And in that he describes his experience of how meticulous Stevenson was in his investigations.
And he said, there is no explanation for these at all. The information is too intimate in many cases for the children to just guess or to know any alternative. Most of these cases are from 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, many of these cases before the internet came.
So to get information about anyone else was also not easy. Many of these cases are from children from lower income families. So for them to have access to information was very difficult.
On top of that, most of the parents were from families who did not believe in reincarnation. Even parents of families who believed in reincarnation, they are not particularly eager to promote. Because in traditional Indian society or in rural Indian society, there is this notion that if a child remembers their past lives, then that means the child’s soul, they accept reincarnation, but they think the child’s soul is not integrated well into this body.
And that’s why they think the child is going to die soon. The soul is not integrated with this body, soul will not live in this body for long. Now Stevenson has found that this is simply superstition.
There is no correlation. That children who remember their past lives die younger or anything. But still because of that widely present superstition, most parents do not, even if they believe in reincarnation, do not, their parents don’t encourage their children to talk about their past lives.
So it’s only because the children insist and demand vehemently that the parents agree to it. So basically, these cases of past life memories are strong evidences that near-death experiences, sorry, past life memories and near-death experiences are strong evidences that consciousness itself is not material. That it needs something more to explain the totality of conscious experiences.
And sometimes one or two cases might be dismissed as just flukes. But they are not one or two, there are hundreds of cases all over the world which have been found. And that’s why they demand an explanation.
So the best explanation we have is that there is a conscious, the source of consciousness is different from the body, which goes from one body to another. So through the field of past life memories, near-death experiences and consciousness studies, science is strongly pointing towards spirituality. Although science cannot directly prove spirituality because spirituality itself is transcendental.
But certain phenomena can point to spirituality as the most reasonable explanation for those phenomena. And these three happen to be in that category. So I’ll summarise what I spoke today in this session.
You can have a few questions if you like. So I spoke about how science is pointing towards spirituality. So if we say that there is a soul, is there some way we can know the soul exists? I talked about how consciousness is not reducible to brain phenomena.
That ultimately the brain is simply having chemicals and electrochemical changes. They do not constitute consciousness. Electricity flowing through wire does not produce consciousness.
So why should electricity flowing through brain cells? And then we talked about near-death experiences of a person who was born blind and a person who was documented unconscious. And yet they were conscious. The only reasonable explanation is they were conscious because the body was not the source of consciousness.
The brain is the transmitter of consciousness. Similarly, with respect to past life memory, I discussed about recollections, recognitions, birthmarks, birth defects and behaviours. There are four lines of strong evidence which point to the reality of past life memories.
And I concluded that the parents have no impetus to heightening up the cases, to doctoring or making up or exaggerating the cases. But it is the most reasonable explanation for this is that there is a spiritual element of consciousness which is going from one body to another body. So are there any questions or comments? What makes some souls remember the normal system as Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita is that Krishna can remember past lives but we can’t.
Generally, for the soul, each new birth is a new opportunity to move forward in life. And that’s why the soul is not burdened with past memories. But in some cases when death is sudden or traumatic, at that time the soul does not get enough time to process the event of death.
And the soul goes to the new body but because the event of death is not yet processed and assimilated, the memories of the previous life keep coming. It’s like say if you travel from, just travel nonstop from America to India, then the body gets a jet lag. The body is still in America, the body’s biological cycles are according to America whereas the body is physical in India.
So like that we can say that if death occurs very suddenly, then you could say there is a soul lag. The soul goes from one body to another but the soul’s memories remain in the previous body. So most, not all, but most of the cases of past life memories are involving sudden violent deaths.
So that lack of assimilation of the event of death could be one cause of the memories persisting from one life to another. Another point is that most of these memories, they are not pleasant. For the child, for us it may be fascinating, oh this child remembers the past life.
For a child going through it, it is quite confusing and disorienting. Who am I? Are these my parents or is that my real life? So sometimes these children, if they have had violent death, they may also have nightmares or phobias or they may be very fearful. So it’s a way in which by some peculiar karma, some children go through these experiences.
So it’s not that they, it’s not necessarily good karma, it’s not necessarily bad karma. It’s just some combination of good-bad karma because of which they may go through these experiences. So just as we see that in this life also different people have different memory levels.
Some people can remember what they did a few minutes ago. Some people can remember something that they did several months ago also. We may remember what I did just five minutes ago.
So some people may remember what they did five days ago. So memory capacity is variable and why is it variable? That is because of karma. So similarly, some people may have remembrances of past life because of some unusual karma that they have.
Professor, in your lecture you mentioned that subtle body also has capability of seeing, hearing and all that. So if that is the case, then why even have a cross body? Because once you have a cross body, then there is a whole process of realising that we are not just body, we are the soul. So why do we need cross body and subtle body to do most of the things? If the subtle body has also senses, then why do we need a cross body at all? The subtle body and its senses can perform certain functions, not all functions.
Now exactly which functions which subtle body can perform and which cannot perform, that may also be healed by karma. But if you consider say ghosts, now what exactly is a ghost? That is a soul who is present with a subtle body and a cross body. When the soul leaves the body with a subtle body but does not get a new cross body, then this embodied state is called a ghost.
So now the ghost can see. Say the example Prabhupada would give there. A ghost may see a gulab jamun.
I have a desire, I want to eat the gulab jamun. But the ghost does not have a tongue to taste the gulab jamun. So it’s a very distressing condition.
It’s like we come to a temple for a programme and we have severe stomach upset. So we have to take soup and that’s a day when a 15 course feast is there in the temple. It will be miserable for us.
So for the ghost their whole life is like that. They have the senses by which they can perceive but they don’t have the senses by which they can enjoy the sense objects. So similarly we could say that the soul along with the subtle body alone can’t experience this world.
So we want to enjoy particular things in this world. And the material world is a place where we have the facility to enjoy certain things as per our desires. The physical body is a vital instrument for that.
In emergent situations the person may be able to interact through non-physical means also. But most often the physical body is a need instrument. So with the subtle body certain faculties can be done.
But most of the functions require a physical body for that. So which functions can be done by which soul that may also depend on karma. But in general without a physical body soul can’t function in the material world.
The past life memories. Were there any cases where someone said that I was an animal in my past life, I was a dog. I mean why do all these people only remember their past human lives? Why not their animal life? And the second question is all these like some of the cases that I have seen there is a significant lag between when they said that I was such and such person in my past life.
But that person had died quite a significant time ago. That’s true. So do any people recollect their past lives as animals? No, because for many reasons.
Firstly, it requires a huge change of consciousness for the soul to go from one body to another body. It’s the whole experience of life is different. If say somebody is in a hog’s body, the hog is attracted to excreta.
Humans are repelled by excreta. So it’s not just a change of body, it’s a complete radical shift of taste. So there is a whole transition that is required in which practically all the memories will get erased.
Only certain tendencies towards certain activities may remain. But if the specific memories remain, functioning in a new body, functioning in a new body in the same species may be possible. But functioning in a new body in a different species will be almost impossible.
So the basic process of transition itself is quite a taxing process. It requires a significant erase of memories. It’s like say sometimes we erase some data on our phone.
But some data can be got back by using some app softwares. But then we can do a factory reset or a hard reset, a hard erase. Once you do a hard erase, practically nothing can be got back.
So like that the soul goes from one body to another body. So before we sell a phone, we might do a hard erase. So that nobody can get our phone, our data or our bank account numbers or whatever.
So like that, there is not complete erasion of data. Some broad tendencies which are cultivated throughout the life will be there. But specific memories, they can’t be recollected.
It will cause severe impeding in the functioning of the person. It is only in very exceptional cases, if a particular purpose is to be served, then those memories may be given. Like say Jadbharat, he remembered that he had been a deer in his previous life.
That is primarily so that the whole pastime is to illustrate the necessity of caution while practising the spiritual path. Generally, remembrance of past lives will be very, very disorienting. And the transition requires that most memories be erased.
What was the second question? Okay, what happens in between? Generally, the time, as we know, it flows at different rates in different places. So if we try to go into that zone of time correlation, it will be very difficult. Sometimes the soul may stay in a disembodied state for some time.
Sometimes the soul may go to some other species in between. Sometimes the soul may just go to transition to another realm where the soul’s actions are evaluated and the soul comes back. Many of our memories are also circumstantial.
Right now, if I ask you, you used to go to your maternal uncle’s or maternal aunt’s home or grandfather’s home in your childhood. What do you remember? You may remember ten things about it. But if you go there, then maybe a thousand things may come up, may come in the recollection.
So our memories are also circumstantial. So when the soul is in a human body and whatever state it goes again and then it comes back into a human body, then because this human body and that human body are somewhat similar, they are still human bodies only, so circumstantially some memories were recollected. But usually most people don’t have much memories of the transitional stage because it’s a very different stage.
Yes, one or two more questions and then we’ll stop. We’ll come to you. In that same context, how does an animal like this, like does that soul have the same period if it is checked in between or if that animal is killed in between? Okay.
Yeah. So the soul, is the soul meant to live in a particular animal body for a particular period and the soul is killed prematurely when the soul has to go into that animal body again? Yes, that’s what Srila Prabhupada generally explains, that each body represents like a karmic, a term of karmic sentence for the soul and especially the lower species, there is usually no further karma being incurred but it is just karma being endured and exhausted. So if a soul is meant to be say in a pig’s body for 10 years or 18, 12 years or whatever and the pig is slaughtered at the age of whether it is 6 or 7, then the soul may have to come back, will have to come back in the pig’s body once again and experience that karmic state and exhaust that period of karma which it is meant to endure.
Yes, go ahead. Thank you Srila Prabhupada ji. The case of birth marks and birth defects.
So if the subtle body and the gross body are different, and if the soul or the consciousness that traverses towards the subtle body, so how do those… I got the question, yes. So how do the birth marks come on the gross body from one gross body to another when it is only the subtle body and the soul that go from one body to another? Yes, mainly I was expecting that question. Your question is similar? So in general, it is that whatever we experience at the physical level also creates impressions on the mental level.
And whatever impression on the mental level, they also affect the physical level. Now we know there are something called psychosomatic diseases that people who are mentally disturbed, psycho is mind, soma is body. The mind is disturbed and that causes diseases in the body also.
So there is Dr. Jan Stevenson who has written a paper in one of his books, also he provides an example, called Paranormal Modification of Biological Form. That means that how if a person is experiencing something at the level of the mind that causes an impact on the level of the body. So various cases he has given of that.
So what happens is although the soul has got a physical wound, say stabbed or bullet has been shot, but that has also created a mental impression. I was stabbed, I was stabbed, I was stabbed, I was shot, I was shot, I was shot. And that thought stays in the subtle body.
And that soul with that subtle body enters into another gross body, then that thought creates an impact in terms of the birthmark or the birth effect on the corresponding part of the body. So it’s a physical that creates an impression on the subtle and the subtle creates an impression on the physical. That’s how those birthmarks are transmitted.
Yes. So, you can come. Thank you, Chandra.
A lot of the terms that we use when we speak about these things, it’s like a little bit confusing because I think it’s sometimes where we’re talking about consciousness like it is the soul, like it’s the same as the soul. That’s fine on certain levels. And then we’re also talking about the subtle body.
And sometimes I think when we’re speaking, we kind of connect like the soul is similar to the subtle body. So I’m thinking, I don’t know, it just gets a little bit, I mean, you have to have the specifics and the technicality of it like exact so that it makes more sense. I think when we’re talking about this like going from one lifetime to another lifetime, I’m wondering, I mean, to me it seems like it’s just play, like it’s play for the soul because it has that kind of ability.
But then when we’re talking about you’re going from one life to another life or you’re moving forward in a life, it seems like that we assume like an organising principle to that. Of course, I mean, we believe in Krishna consciousness, so we’re saying Krishna is kind of dictating these kind of changes that we do. But I’m wondering if it’s, you know, ultimately what kind of intention is that only something that, I mean, it’s difficult to describe.
You intuit that because of the knowledge that we have about Krishna consciousness that there is some kind of organisation to that. So, I mean, at one level the soul, it’s almost like it’s just play. It’s not really, I wonder, you know, what is the ultimate intention for some souls? What would be the intention of the reincarnating person? Do you understand what I’m trying to say from the level of why would they incarnate again to go back to some place where they already were? I mean, is it just so that everyone else could know? So if a soul, is it a play for the soul to go from one world to another? If Krishna is the organising principle, then what is the purpose of it all? The purpose is the evolution of the consciousness of the soul.
शरीरं यदवापनोति अच्छाप्यूद् क्रामतिष्वर्ः कृहित्वैतानि संयाति वायूर्गंधानिवाशयत् In the 15th chapter, in the 8th verse, Krishna says that the soul enters one body and leaves that body to go into another body, and what it carries from one body to another is the conception of life. So through one life to another, essentially what we carry is the conception of life. And as the conception of life evolves, we evolve in our understanding.
So to differentiate between the terms, the soul is the particle of spirit, which is सच्चितानन्द. Consciousness is the energy of the soul. Sometimes when we are taking more scientific contexts, we may just not use the word soul because it has very religious connotations.
So when you say consciousness, consciousness is not reducible to the brain. Consciousness comes from somewhere other than the brain. Consciousness comes out of the body.
That means the soul is the source of consciousness comes out of the body. So it’s something like we have a bulb or a light over here, and that is light bulb, the tube is one particular object and from it light is coming out. The tube or the bulb is the soul.
The light coming from it is consciousness. And say if I may have a white bulb over here, but around that I have a red film, red covering, and the light that comes out of it from is red. So similarly for the soul, there is a covering around it and that is the subtle body.
And that subtle body is what shapes the conception of life that the soul has. So we are all eternal as souls and we are meant for eternal life and eternal love. However, based on our current conception of life, we desire various things.
I may crave to enjoy this, I may crave to enjoy that. And by experiencing various pleasures in various lifetimes, ultimately the soul is meant to understand that actually there is no real happiness except in loving and serving Krishna. So the soul keeps coming back so that it gets the point that actually I am meant to love and serve Krishna.
When our love for Krishna becomes greater than our love for this world, then Krishna takes us out of this world and takes us to his abode. Yes, come. Okay, yeah.
Okay, what happens to subtle body when we sleep? There are two broad possibilities that subtle body can sometimes travel out of the physical body. But sometimes the subtle body, because it is subtle, it can also imagine. So sometimes, say for example, if we just imagine I am at this place.
In our waking state we imagine and if the imagination is very vivid then we can experience it. So basically, it’s in my computer, I don’t have it, I have a diagram over here. This is a soul, around the soul is there is a subtle body, around it is a gross body.
So our consciousness goes through four different states. When the soul’s consciousness comes to the subtle body, through the gross body, to the outer world, that is called the Jagruti stage. When the soul’s consciousness comes out till the subtle body, but not the gross body, that is the Sapna stage.
So sometimes we are in the Sapna stage. Right now we are in the Jagruti stage. Hopefully.
Sorry? 80%. Barely. So when the soul’s consciousness is withdrawn itself, that is called the Sushupti stage, the deep dreamless state.
And then when the soul’s consciousness goes to the spiritual level, that is the Turiya or Samadhi stage. So now in the Swapna, both possibilities are there. The soul’s consciousness just stays at the subtle level and at the subtle level it is in the body but the imagination is going everywhere.
But another possibility is the subtle body can also go out of the body to another place. That is relatively not a common occurrence, but that possibility is there. You had a question? Not a question, Guruji, but I remember reading Mataji.
The book was titled Simple for Simple. And it was about Mataji from Manner. And she had contracted cancer.
And when she was very close to leaving her body, she lost her eyesight. But she could see the deities and she could tell them. Yeah, she could see the deities and when devotees brought, like she had stopped, like she was at the stage where she stopped consuming everything.
She couldn’t eat or drink anything. But when the devotees would bring the Maha, she would honour it. Nobody told her that this is Maha, but she would honour it.
And one time I think devotees brought her some cake or something and she could tell the colour, she could tell like clearly what it was. So it’s an example of subtle body functioning. Subtle body functioning.
And one time she started crying and I think her husband asked her, like what happened and she said, I don’t want to sound like a sahajiya. But he still encouraged her and she revealed something which would be like a spiritual identity. Where she mentions that she was serving in her eternal body in Vrindavan.
And I think her husband or some devotee asked her, are you packing Krishna’s lunchbox? And she said, no, I am helping Yashodamayi pack Krishna’s lunchbox. Something like that. And that book clearly explains that there is consciousness not limited to the bodily functions.
It goes beyond this gross body. Yes. Thank you.
It’s a very good example. Within our tradition itself, some devotees experience something special. Do you remember the name of her name? No, not Jayavatarani.
I think Bhaktivallabhateer was her husband’s name. She asked him, when she was very close to her deathbed, she asked him to take Sannyas. I don’t remember the book but I remember her name.
Thank you, Prabhuji. Such a fascinating portion of the discussion. I don’t know how to frame this question yet but I am going to try to bring it out.
This is about the soul moving forward and going backward to Krishna. What happens there? What happens to the subtle body which is being relieved by multi billions or billions of souls individually? What happens to those impressions? Those impressions? Because subtle body is taking impressions according to Ayurveda and Yoga. We have physical body which is under my kosha, near my kosha, beyond my kosha, on my kosha.
All of these are taking impressions and we move it forward or backwards, whichever way we are going. So Prarabdha is again one of the questions where it is attached. Is it attached to physical body or with the soul? And when we leave this body and we leave this subtle body individually, what happens to those impressions which we accumulated? Are they just go puff in the air or they are just accumulated? So you are talking about when we get liberated? So now when we depart from the world to attain Krishna’s fold, at that time I described that firstly we leave the gross body behind.
But while we are travelling through the universal coverings, the subtle body and its comprising elements, they dissipate from the soul and they merge into the universal subtle elements. So our mind merges with the subtle mind, the mind covering of the universe. Our intelligence merges with that and our ego merges with the universal ego.
Not the Brahman aspect, the universe is like an egg and the egg has its shells. Just as the soul has a body which is made of the eight elements, similarly the universe at one level is considered to be like the body of Shiva, Daksha, Vishnu or of Vishnu basically which are manifesting also. So the universe also has all the eight elements on its coverings.
So the gross body we leave behind, the subtle body, the elements merge with the subtle elements in the universal coverings. That’s how we go to the spiritual world. We will have a break for 10 minutes and then we will assemble for last session which will be about 30 minutes.
We will try to finish by 5.15. So it’s 4.37 now. We assembled around 4.47. Is that ok? Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
Haribol, take care. Wonderful to see you. And whatever discouragements come, just keep marching ahead.
If you go on the spiritualscientist.com, I gave in Alachu a series of classes on spiritualising our relationships. That might help. If you face some difficulties from some other devotees, how to deal with that.
I will try to attend your Bhagavad Gita classes.