Reason can’t reach beyond reason, but it can give us reason to reach beyond reason Gita 07 07

Transcript

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Hare Krishna.
Reason can’t reach beyond reason, but it can give us reason to reach beyond reason. Reason refers to our rational faculty, and with our rational faculty we can know a lot about the reality around us. But reason alone can’t tell us many things which we learn by other means.
For example, the heart has reasons that the head knows nothing of. When you want to look at the beauty of a natural scenery or smell the fragrance of a flower, it is not our rational faculty that helps us, it is our aesthetic faculty that helps us. And for the aesthetic faculty to help us, what do we need? We need that faculty to be active.
Similarly, reason can’t give us experience of transcendence. Reason can’t help us to experience the sublime spiritual fulfillment that comes when we learn to love the ultimate reality, Krishna. So that is the limitation of reason.
We live, especially because of the age of science and technology, in an age which has enshrined reason almost like a god. So do we need to reject the god of reason to ultimately attain the supreme god? No, not at all. We don’t have to reject reason, but we need to connect reason with the ultimate reality.
Reason can give us reason to reach beyond reason. That means if we look at the world around us and we consider why does reason work at all? Why is there a rational order to things? Why does our brain work in a rational way to perceive that order? Now, all this has no answer within purely a rational worldview. Because rational worldview, if we consider there is no organizing principle, because we don’t ultimately accept anything spiritual simply based on reason, then we can’t experience anything spiritual.
But what we can perceive is there is an underlying unifying intelligence. As Albert Einstein said, that is the religious experience for me, the underlying intelligence which is manifested through the laws of nature. So the Bhagavad Gita says that there’s a unifying thread that brings together and keeps together the various things that are there in the world, the various manifestations of the world.
Krishna says everything attractive in this world, that is like the jewels in a necklace, I am the thread, he unites and keeps everything together. So when we discover rationality in the world, that discovery can prompt us to look for the underlying reason for that rationality. And that can be learned not through reason alone, but through devotion and to search for a reality beyond what reason shows us, that reason we get when we let reason guide us fully.
And where the head points, the heart takes. Thank you. Hare Krishna.