Science-Religion QA

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Prabhu, with your permission, can we dive right in? Yes, please. Okay, so we already have a number of handwritten questions. I’ll go to one of these first.
And again, I’ll remind devotees how they can submit their questions throughout the programme. Okay, we already have too many questions that came in. Okay, so Prabhu, the first question on this topic of science and religion, thank you.
The first question that has come in is, what is the best approach, as devotees, to speaking to scientists when trying to share or convince them of Krishna Consciousness? What is the best approach? So, just one point before I start. Last time I answered, it was a little too long. So, I’ll try to keep the answers at five minutes.
Can someone keep time? Can you keep time over there? I will keep time and give them a little waiting. Thank you. Each topic is on its own.
So, what is the best way to approach scientists to share Krishna Consciousness with them? First thing is that we should not position science and scripture as competitors. Science is just one body of acquiring knowledge. English, as a language, is one body of acquiring knowledge.
Arts is one body of acquiring knowledge. Like that, science is one body of acquiring knowledge. Science is very strong in terms of looking for natural explanations for natural phenomena.
For giving us explanations of how things work within this world. Now, with all its measuring and predictive power, science, you know, whenever there is focus, there is clarity on the object that is focused. But there is also things that are not seen.
So, that is why science can’t answer questions for three things fundamentally. That is origin, value and purpose. Origin means where we originally came from.
Where did the world come from? Where does consciousness come from? Now science, there are some theories which do claim to answer these questions. But if you look at serious scientists, they don’t take these theories so seriously. No.
The laws of physics, nobody changes. F is equal to GM1M2 upon R square. Nobody says today what is going to be R cube or R raised to the power of 4. But when scientists talk about the age of the universe, you know, routinely after every few years, the age of the universe sometimes doubles and sometimes halves.
Sometimes it becomes four times. When science goes into prediction about origins, it is an unstable ground. Because there are no repeated experiments possible.
We cannot tell the universe, please originate once again so that we can observe. So, with origins, science resembles more guesswork than science. It is actually going beyond its jurisdiction.
It is very powerful and is doing experiments about repeatability, which can be repeated again and again. So origins, second is values. What is right and what is wrong? This is something which we decide from our own moral sense, which we have acquired from various sources.
Science inherently is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. Amoral means it does not make any moral statements about what should be done or what should not be done.
And morality is very important. Einstein said, we can talk about the ethical foundation of science, but we cannot talk about the scientific foundation of ethics. So ethics, knowing what to do, what not to do, the basis is very important.
Now science can tell us that if I use this machine gun, I can kill someone. Science can tell a young man who has an ageing grandmother who has left her inheritance to him, if I put arsenic in her breakfast, I can get to the inheritance. But should I do that or should I not do that? Science cannot tell us.
So values, ethics are important, but science is silent about that. And ultimately is purpose. What is it that we are living for? When Newton saw the fruit falling, at that time he asked the question, what makes this fruit fall? And the answer that he came up with is brilliance.
At the same time, the very point that he asked this question, that means he assumed that things don’t happen by chance. That there is some causal connection, some causal pattern by which things happen. So science helps us to discover to some extent.
Why do the planets move in their orbits? Why do things fall on the ground? Why do things light up when electricity flows through them? Science gives us explanations for things. Now unfortunately, if we extend it further, if we ask science the question, what is the ultimate meaning of life? What is the ultimate purpose of life? You know a famous scientist Steven Weinberg said, the more we study the universe, the more it seems pointless. So what if we extrapolate science beyond its jurisdiction to answer questions about the ultimate purpose of life, what we end up with is small islets of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness.
Why do planets fall down? Oh, it’s law of gravity. Why do planets move around? It’s law of gravity, laws of motion. Why do we live? Oh, there is no purpose.
So we end up with small islands of meaninglessness, islands of meaning in a vast ocean of meaninglessness. These fundamental questions about origin, value and purpose, these are answered by sources of knowledge other than scientific. So it’s not that we are criticising science when we are saying that science can’t answer these questions.
It is simply objective. That is to say that the President of America is not the king of the whole world. It’s not a criticism of the President of America.
We acknowledge his power, at the same time we recognise that there is things beyond the jurisdiction. So similarly, we, the greatest scientists were recognised. The strength of science and the limits of science.
Einstein himself was probably the greatest scientist of the last century. And he said that the sciences, the arts and the religions, they have all come from the same tree of human knowledge. So science gives us powerful knowledge about certain things.
And we value that and we use that. But there is much more that we need to know to live meaningfully, to live fruitfully in life. And when we present the principles of Bhakti Yoga, we present them not as competitors to science.
It’s not a competitor to science, it’s a complement to science. Science offers us functional knowledge about how to live in this world. Spirituality offers us ultimate knowledge of why to live in this world.
How to live? How to fly a plane? How to manage a computer? All this science will tell us. But what to do with our life? What is the ultimate purpose of life? That scripture tells us. So we are ourselves not scientists nor are we spirituals.
We are human beings in a search for understanding. And we can be open to understanding from whichever source it comes. So if science helps us to function better in the world, we use scientific knowledge.
If spirituality helps us to understand the ultimate purpose of life, the origin of life, the values of our living, then we should be open to accept that also. It’s answering your question? Okay. Can you give a round of applause? Hi! It’s worth mentioning that Krishnacharan who has articles that are regularly published in the Economic Times, the Indian Times, the Times of India, the speaking free column.
And his writings have been translated into German, Chinese, Romanian, several Indian languages including Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Hindi. So Prabhu is known for speaking at length on these topics, aside from of course Krishna conscious topics. So we are very honoured to have Prabhu here.
With that preamble, I have a loaded question. I’ve only had three questions come in on the same topic. So for the devotees that have asked through text message and also writing in, forgive me if I paraphrase.
But essentially they are asking about evolution and this moon landing. And they have asked in two different versions, or three different versions, the devotees have asked, if devotees do not believe in this narrative of modern science, then, and rather in the narrative of the Bible of Purana, how do we manage these two? And then another version of the question is, you know, if personally I don’t mind, I don’t have a problem reconciling these things, evolution and this moon landing theory with my first on Krishna consciousness. Is there a problem? So it centres on these two hot topics that often come up.
So perhaps even some general comments on this or how devotees can navigate these topics. Okay. So we talk about in the Bhagavatam, there is cosmology, there is chronology.
It talks about the universe. Chronology is time scales. And essentially it is about philosophy, about the ultimate nature of reality.
So without getting into specific theories or specific controversies, whether it is about moon landing or about evolution, we have to look at what is the essential teaching of scripture, which actually Prabhupada stressed when he made particular statements. Prabhupada’s point with respect to cosmology was primarily that, what is such a big deal about, okay, going to outer space. Rising up and going to outer space is in terms of physicality, it is dramatic.
But if it is not going to elevate our consciousness, it is not going to change our purpose of life. We all human beings, like other living beings, are driven by four drives. Food, sleep, sex and power.
We all want these four things. And even if we go to the moon, if we are ultimately pursuing the same things, food, sleep, sex and power, what is the difference? So Shri Prabhupada’s focus was on a higher purpose of life. Specifically, as I said that science postulates certain theories and scripture is not necessarily in competition with theories.
The competition between science and scripture can happen in two ways, or spirituality in general, when science goes beyond its jurisdiction and makes claims that are not necessarily scientific. Or when we take spiritual understanding and conflate it or put it in confrontation with material understanding. I will explain both ways.
Say for example, now there is evolution as a mechanism of say species adapting to nature. That has abundance, there is evidence for that. Okay, species do adapt to nature.
Now from this evolution is made into a grand creation narrative which is claimed to explain everything about everything. So evolution as a natural adaptation of modification that happens within species, that is observed, that is observed phenomenon. There is no need to quarrel with that.
The plant breeding and interbreeding that is talked about in the Bhagavatam also. But from there, evolution which is a mechanism to explain observed phenomenon, from there it is extrapolated to ideological explanation for everything in the world. Everything, including our consciousness, our emotions, including the world’s existence.
Now that great evolutionary narrative, it even from the scientific perspective has very scant evidence. So as far as the material world is concerned, there are certain mechanisms by which certain things happen. And the evidence that comes from those, evidence about those mechanisms, there is no need to see scripture as in competition with it.
Scripture also acknowledges that there are material mechanisms by which things happen. So that is one point. So the word evolution is a very slippery term.
Now what exactly are we talking about? So it is only when evolution is seen as a grand ideological narrative for explaining everything about everything. That is not scientific. That is actually an extrapolation of science into the jurisdiction of ideology.
It is what is called as scientism. So material mechanisms, if there is evidence, that’s fine. Prabhupada was primarily concerned about atheism being extrapolated from particular scientific theories.
So we don’t have to make, what is important is the issue. What is the issue? It is not that science and God are competitors. It is when science claims that God doesn’t exist.
Then there is a problem. Or some people feel if because of believing in religion or God, we say we can’t be scientific. Neither of them are really true.
Science does not make any comments about ultimate principles. As I said, Newton himself believed in God. At that time when he saw the fruit falling, he could have said what made the fruit fall? God made the fruit fall.
He could have said that. But that was not the expression he was looking for. The expression he was looking for was what is the material mechanism by which God makes this fall.
So if science discovers material mechanisms, how things happen, that’s perfectly fine. But underlying those mechanisms is something more. Science offers explanations for natural phenomena.
But the explainability of nature requires an explanation. Why is there a cause-effect connection in nature? So God is the explanation for the explainability of nature. So God is not an alternative or a competitor to science.
God is the foundation for science. Science offers, explains nature. But the explainability of nature, the explanation for that is God.
So we don’t have to get into technicalities or specific theories. We have to look at principles. Because we, with all our knowledge, we are not scientists.
We can mew science to scientists. The important thing is when science goes outside its jurisdiction and makes ideological claims, then it becomes a problem. So with respect to cosmology, there are different ways of looking at the universe.
So as far as the moon mission is concerned, Prabhupada’s focus was on that don’t get unduly excited about this. It is not going to make any ultimate difference in terms of life’s big questions. So if we see that primary thrust, then specifically depending on what one’s scientific orientation is, depending on what one’s scriptural understanding is, different devotees may have different understanding specifically about how to approach evolution, about how to approach the cosmological issues.
The important principle is that we keep things purposeful. Science is not here. Science never claims to answer ultimate questions of life.
And scripture is not primarily giving us material knowledge. When Bhagavatam is spoken by Parikshit Maharaj, he is not speaking to tell Parikshit Maharaj how the planets move around. His primary purpose is to help Parikshit Maharaj fix his mind on Krishna.
So when we are approaching science, any form of knowledge, when we approach it with the purpose in mind, when we study scripture, we study it to fix our mind on Krishna. When we approach science, we use it to get natural explanation for natural phenomena so that we can function in the spirit. And if certain things are contradictory or difficult to reconcile, we can consult specific devotees who can answer questions.
So both evolution and the moon landing, there are articles on the scripturescientist.com which elaborately deal with these issues. But here I will focus on the principles. Does it address the question? It does.
I appreciate you again. And I appreciate the way you speak in principle, although I am sure there is a spike on scriptoscientist.com right now in traffic. As devotees either bookmark the site or visit it right now.
I have a couple of questions that came in by text message and it correlates to one that was handwritten. And it has to do with the topic of reincarnation and rebirth. So these are principles that are true to our philosophy.
And they’re asking, all the questions generally ask, how do we scientifically explain reincarnation and rebirth? OK. So how can we scientifically explain reincarnation? In fact, I have a full book on this topic, Demystifying Reincarnation. That is my latest book.
So there are broadly science, there is theory and there is experiment. Now, if you look at reincarnation, the strongest evidence comes from past life memories. So there are out-of-body experiences which suggest that consciousness can exist outside the body.
But past life memories, that means say there is a small child who is born somewhere, in a particular place and one day there are hundreds of cases like this. The child says, mummy, mummy, I want to go to my other mummy. So there was a boy named Nesip, he was in Turkey and one day he just started telling his parents.
And incidentally he said, dad, my name is Nesip. In his previous life also his name was Nesip. And he says, I live in Mansur, another place in Turkey and I want to go there.
So he started getting vivid recollections. He started telling, oh I live in this place. Small 4-5 year old boy says, I am married, I have a wife, I have children, I want to go and see them.
Now for several years his parents did not let him go. But finally, eventually through one of his relatives he managed to go there. So first is recollections.
That is the first level evidence. Second level evidence is recognitions. Not only do they remember facts which are right, they are later proven to be right, but recognitions.
So when he was taken there, as soon as he went there, he recognised the woman who was the widow of Nesip from the previous life. And he went and he started talking with her as if he was a small 7-8 year old boy now. He was talking with a woman who was middle aged as if she was his wife.
And he recognised her, he recognised the children, he recognised several neighbours, he went to that locality specifically. And again there are many cases like this, recognitions. The third is behaviours.
Behaviours means that when, now Nesip’s widow, she had remarried after his death. When Nesip, this boy Nesip in this life, he saw a picture of his wife with her new husband. He felt so angry and jealous that he took up that picture and wanted to tear it apart.
Says you are my wife, not anyone else’s. Although his children were older than him now, he was fondling their hair and treating them like they were his children. So there are behaviours which are precisely according to the previous life.
And then there are also the last and most important, most empirical is birthmarks and birth defects. So Nesip’s childhood he would say that I was stabbed to death and he had multiple birthmarks. So six of his birthmarks, it was found that Nesip in the previous life, Nesiput Budhak had been stabbed to death.
He was a drunk and he had run into a fight with someone, somebody had killed him. So Dr. Jan Stevenson who is a pioneering researcher in this, what he did was he divided the human body into 120 XY coordinates, basically to map how precise is the correlation. Say if somebody has been shot, say the bullet wound is here and the birthmark of the birth defect, how precise is the location, correlation between the fatal wound of the previous life and the birthmark of this life.
And he found precise correlations. In the case of Nesip, he had six correlating birthmarks. That means the probability is not just 1 by 120, it is 1 by 120 raised to the power of 6. It is astronomically low probability.
So he wrote a whole book documenting this evidence called Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. And when we take all these four levels of evidence, recollections, recognitions, behaviours and birthmarks and birth defects, it makes a very strong case for the reality of there being some non-material entity that existed before in Nesip, in the earlier body and has now come to this body. Now some people try to explain this whole away, maybe this whole thing is a fraud.
Maybe investigators made a fraud or the parents made a fraud. Jan Stevenson focused on children because all the children have a vivid imagination. They don’t have the intelligence to orchestrate a whole fraud with many people involved.
So there was a researcher, Tom Schroeder, he is a Washington Post editor. He travelled with Jan Stevenson for about a year and he actually observed first-hand how careful and critical Stevenson was in his research methods. And he wrote a book called Old Souls.
And there he went as a sceptic and he remained a sceptic. But he said that there is no normal explanation that is there. What is the explanation? I don’t know.
So he is open to reincarnation. There is no normal explanation. There is no fraud over here, no guesswork, no prompting, nothing like that.
And most importantly, there is no parental fraud also. Why? Because the parents, some of them, many of them, especially cases in western world, parents don’t believe in reincarnation. So when I say parents, not only they do not believe in reincarnation, they actually disbelieve.
Because in the Islamic tradition as it is presently, reincarnation is considered to be a heretical belief. So they accepted the children’s words not because of their religion but in spite of their religion. Even in cases in India where people do believe in reincarnation, there is a widespread conception among especially rural people that if a child is remembering their past life, that means that the soul is not integrated well into the body.
And therefore parents feel that this child will die soon. The soul will go to the next body. And therefore they discourage their children from speaking their past life memories.
Only when the children insist, then do they try to find out. And there are even cases where the parents, where the children behave in ways that are totally embarrassing to the parents. There was one boy, Jasbir Singh, whose case is described by A. N. Stevenson.
He was born in a Jat family. In India there is a caste system. He was not in a very high caste family.
And at the age of around three, one day he suddenly said, I am a Brahmin and I can’t eat food cooked in this low caste house. And from that day he stopped eating food. And for the next three and a half years, his father had to pay a Brahmin to get food to his house every day.
Now how much more embarrassing can something be that a child in your own family refuses to eat food cooked in your own house? So, this is not, why would a parent do a fraud like that? It’s only at the age of six and a half you are accepting, okay that was that life, this is this life. So he started eating food in his own house. So there are cases where the fraud hypothesis also fails.
So there are strong cases like this. The past life memories provide strong scientific pointers towards the reality of reincarnation. So I’ll take a moment right now to remind all those who have joined us this evening.
You may have come in a little late. Maybe if I get Sakhi Narayan, he’s just going to come forward. We’re taking questions from the audience on this topic of science and religion.
We did this session back in September or October last year with Jitendra Chandra who was here. It was wildly successful. We had too many questions, more questions than there was time for answers.
And so because of the feedback we got, we’re trying this again. If you would like to submit a question, you can just give a little wave to one of these Matajis and they’ll give you a paper. You can write it down and they’ll drop it in the basket.
You can also text message your question into this number. Or if you have a smartphone, you can go to that URL at the bottom and type in a question. This is a great opportunity to ask questions that you’ve either deeply wondered or perhaps comes across through when you’re in the workplace or conversationally with your family and friends or doubts that you always had.
We have time for just about four or five more questions. So we’ll see where we go. The next question that we received was written down.
It has to do with scripture. Thank you for those. I think they’re just setting up for the prasada.
The question goes as follows. The scientific community deeply values scholarly research and work. So scientific papers.
What can be a scientific explanation for our scriptures? Can they be scientifically proven? In other words, anyone can write a book. How do we know the legitimacy of our scriptures? Okay. So how do we know the scientific community appreciates scholarly work? So can we scientifically prove the validity of scriptures? Actually, recently I was in a class after somebody asked a question, you know, can we scientifically prove the existence of God? So I explained that first of all, science cannot even prove that you exist.
Science can prove that your body exists, your heart exists, your brain exists. But you as a conscious centre of awareness, you as a person who experiences emotions, where is that in the body? That’s not there anywhere. According to science, we can even do heart transplant.
We can replace parts of the brain. But that is not you. So science is a very powerful body of knowledge.
At the same time, it is limited. Medical science is all meant to heal people from pain. But in all of medical science, is there something called a painometer? When somebody has got a fracture, how much pain are they experiencing? We can have an X-ray which shows how much the bone is fractured.
There is no painometer. If a boy and a girl want to form a relationship and get married, can they get some, can they place a love-o-metre on their heart? And find out, do you really love me? No. So there is so much in our life, which cannot be, it is real, but it cannot be measured.
Einstein said that, and the others have also said it before him, that all that counts is not countable. All that counts is not countable and all that is countable doesn’t count. So there is much to our life which is irreducible, which is not countable, but it counts.
So similarly, when we refer to scripture, now what exactly are we referring to within scripture? The other said that scripture ultimately gives us knowledge of the origin, value and purpose. What is it that we are meant to learn? So if we consider scriptural knowledge to be a circle, a big circle, within that there may be some sections which agree with science. Some things which don’t make sense with respect to science.
But the major part of scripture is beyond science. It is, so it is not unscientific. Scripture is not unscientific.
Scripture is trans-scientific. It is, scripture is not against science. Scripture is about science.
It is giving us a different kind of knowledge. Now if we look at scripture, the knowledge that it gives, it will, it forms a coherent body of knowledge which explains things systematically. So we shouldn’t, we should value science, but we shouldn’t overvalue science and make it the prison through which, the filter through which we look at everything in the world.
We don’t do that in our normal day-to-day functioning also. You know, then we have great brain surgeon, if he comes back home and he finds his wife is upset with him, you know, will he tell, come let me do a brain scan to find out, why are you upset? She will say, you go and scan where you have lost your brain. So, science has its role and it’s very powerful.
When we study scripture, we study it for values. For values about how to live our life. And as I said, science is amoral.
So it cannot make any statements about values, whether they are right or wrong. Now of course, scripture does talk about reality, such as the soul or god or the spiritual world, the relationship between soul and god. These themselves, because they are spiritual and science looks for material explanations, material phenomena, they cannot be quantified and measured.
But what can be measured? If at all we are looking for scientific explanations, scientific demonstrations, we can see objectively that the values that scripture teaches, if we adopt them in our life, that brings about observable positive transformation in our lives. We can see there are thousands of people all over the world who were addicted to many different things. And just by practising the principles of Bhakti Yoga, they become free from their addictions.
Prabhupada himself, he came at the time of the counterculture when there were many people who were addicted to drugs. And even the US government with all its might did not know how to deal with these people. But Prabhupada inspired them to chant Hare Krishna and they came up with their addictions.
And not just one or two, hundreds, thousands. So if we look for scientific in terms of empirically measurable, the fundamental truths of spirituality are trans-scientific. But the effects of spirituality are empirically demonstrable.
It’s not just one person in remote part of the world. It’s thousands, even millions of people all over the world who have been transformed. So in that sense of verifiability, of repeatability, not of the core truths of spirituality, but the effects of spiritual practise, that is something which is there.
Like I was in Detroit and I had a long meeting with a neurologist. He has just done a whole study of a number of subjects on the effects of mantra meditation on the brain. And he has found objectively documented that the same effect that comes on the brain by if a person is having a panic attack.
And then there are medicines which are given to curb their panic attack. If a person is habituated to chanting, their brain calms down in the same way through chanting as happens through medication by a panic attack. So he is going to publish this in science and other papers, other journals eventually.
And he is at a very respected scientific body, very respected hospital. So there is, I will conclude this answer in two parts. There is ontology which is the nature of reality and there is functionality, how things function.
So the nature of reality is something which is just beyond science. So when we study scripture for understanding the nature of reality, that is not unscientific, it’s trans-scientific. If we study scripture for values, again science we are talking about values, but the effect of living according to certain values, the effect of chanting Hare Krishna, the effect of practising Bhakti Yoga, that positive transformation that happens, that is empirically demonstrable in terms of people’s behaviour.
And now it is also being empirically demonstrated in terms of brain functions. So in that sense, the transformation from scripture to living can be empirically demonstrated, scientifically correlated. The essential principles of scripture, the essential truths of scripture, they are trans-scientific.
I think we have time for one more question because I do want to give time to to try to talk about this little display table we have of these books which are being available this one Sunday. So we’ll do that just after this last question. I do have two confessions.
Number one is that we have a lot of questions that have come in and so I’m trying to pick and group questions as on themes. And I might have to paraphrase some of your questions or kind of work them a little bit. And the second confession is I’m trying to pick questions that are from guests and not so much from our active participating devotees to give our guests who are here a chance to ask the questions.
So I just want to be scientifically transparent. So the last question we’re going to ask is on what’s on everyone’s mind right now. It has to do with Prasad.
So this is obviously a very big theme for us in Krishna Consciousness. And so the question being asked is, is there a scientific explanation behind Prasad? The benefits towards it. So is there a scientific explanation of the benefits of eating Prasad? Again, I said there should not be a conflation of science and spirituality in the sense that science offers better explanation of better phenomena.
Say, for example, when Arjuna, after hearing the Bhagavad Gita, he fought the Kurukshetra War and he won the war. Now, did he win that war with the knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita or did he win that war with the knowledge of archery that he had learned throughout his life? It was both. The knowledge of archery was the practical skills which he acquired, which inspired him, which helped him, empowered him to fight the war.
And the Bhagavad Gita gave him the direction, the vision of why he should fight. So there is the why question, there is the how question. So science can answer the how questions.
The scripture that helps us to answer the why question. Now, this is a broad categorisation. So for the hows, there are material explanations.
How did Arjuna win the war? He was so good at shooting arrows. He was so precise in his archery. That’s how he won the war.
But that is all. That is complementary with the inspiration that he got from the Bhagavad Gita. So as far as prasad is concerned, how this applies is that at a material level, prasad is food that is cooked hygienically, food that is, as the Bhagavad Gita talks about, in the mode of goodness.
So when we eat this food, it actually is healthy for the body. That’s one level of understanding. But the very essence, the very word prasad, that name itself focusses on the transmaterial.
That there is the mercy of the Lord that is coming in through this prasad. So what does it mean the mercy is coming in through the prasad? Actually, when you offer the food to God, to Krishna, what happens? You may say you keep the food in front of the deities and then the food remains as it is. So what has happened? It’s just blind faith you are keeping the food in front of the deities.
No. The food is the medium by which we are offering our devotion. Sometimes, say, if we go to meet some relative and then we carry some box with sweets for them.
So when we are going inside the house, from outside we see, somebody may say, okay, you went in with a box of sweets. And then we offer those sweets, they take them. And normally in cultured families, if they are given a gift, they will also give a gift back.
So they will also pack the box and they will give some sweets. And when we are going, we take back that box with us. Somebody from outside, they may say, the same box, you took it inside.
The same box, you brought it outside. What is the big deal? So the box is not important. What is inside the box? And not just the content of the box, but what was reciprocated? The content of the box was by which we offered our affection to them.
And by the content of the box, they offered their affection. So when we offer prasad to Krishna, what are we doing? We offer bhoga to Krishna, the food that we offer. We are offering our devotion to him through it.
And what he accepts is the devotion. And then, so the prasad itself is like the box. Krishna accepts the devotion and then inside what he puts in is mercy.
So that mercy is what we receive. So externally the food may appear to be like the same. Of course, we find prasad is delicious.
The taste is there. And the important thing is that Krishna’s grace is something that transforms our heart. There are devotees in India in many places where ISKCON provided food to prisoners in prison ministry, to the prison ministry.
There are places where devotees provided food through schools to midday meals, through midday meal programmes to schools where there are children of underprivileged background. So, there was a case in one jail where a prisoner was released and he, after being released, he committed a crime. And he just stayed over there to be caught.
And he came back. He came back. He didn’t do a runaway after committing the crime.
He says, in a jail I was getting this khichdi, Hare Krishna khichdi. I don’t get such good food outside. That’s why I came back.
That was of course one half. But another case, it happened that the school children, many of them were from poor families, slum back, they were coming from slums and they were rough and tough. So, they would give a tough time to their teachers also.
But in the school they started providing prasad. And the children, they ate prasad for about six months. And after that, children just calmed down.
Just calmed down. And the children became so well behaved that there are like private schools where wealthy people go. Wealthy people’s children go.
And the teachers there started asking, you know, the kids from these poor schools, they are behaving better than us. So, some of these wealthy schools, which don’t need free food, they said, you give us prasad, we will provide you money for it. But give us prasad.
We want our kids to be well behaved. So, again I said, ontologically, we can’t see the difference. But functionally, we will see, just by taking prasad regularly, there is a change that happens.
That the heart gets transformed. And that transformation happens in terms of people become more gentle, more well behaved. Just by taking prasad regularly, we find that our anger will go down.
Our self-centredness will go down. Our insensitivity will go down. And we will become better behaved.
That is an empirical test which we can subject to prasad. We all of us can subject it to. And we will find that we will become transformed just by taking prasad.
Of course, taking prasad is bhakti, but it is not the only form of bhakti. So, if we take prasad and also chant Hare Krishna to the other limbs of bhakti, we will experience the transformation in a much more powerful and faster way.