Science Spirituality and The Search for Meaning

[Talk at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia USA]

PPT:

Video:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I thank all of you for coming today evening.
And I will be speaking on this topic of do we need spirituality in an age of science? I’ll start with some reflections on the state of affairs in today’s world. And then we’ll move forward towards what science provides and what spirituality can provide which we need. So, we see that in today’s world, there is extraordinary progress.
Facilities that were unimaginable for people just a few hundred years ago, that were unimaginable even for kings, are now commonplace. Air conditioning is an example. We have more comforts, more progress than before.
And yet we seem to have more distress than before. One example of the distress is that people are killing themselves because their life seems so pointless and so distressful. One million suicides happen every year.
This figure of one million means that one suicide is happening every 40 seconds. I started this talk and already two suicides must have been committed by now. Now there is so much concern in American colleges that there are gun shootings and there are a lot of vociferous protests to try to bring some restraint on the possession of guns among people in general and potentially dangerous people.
That’s definitely a very important concern, but far more than the number of people who are killed by gunmen. Or to speak of gunmen alone, far more than the number of people who are killed in all violent crimes and even wars, if there is no major war, far more number of people killed by others are the number of people who are killing themselves. The World Health Organisation calls this a tragic social health problem.
A few years ago I was at a UNESCO conference in India and there the main topic of discussion was that how do we address this tragic social health problem where people are destroying themselves and we’ve not seen anything of this magnitude in the past. Yes, people have always been dying, but people killing themselves out of frustration, out of distress is unprecedented. So a few months ago I was in IIT, which is the top college in India and I gave some talks over there.
So one of the leading professors, the head of department of the cryogenics department came to meet me and he was talking about how there is an alarming problem of bright students ending their lives and sometimes the solutions that are sought are tragically superficial. So some students in the IIT colleges, a series of students committed suicide by hanging themselves from the fan and the solution that the IIT administration came up with was remove all fans from the hostel and put air conditioners. Now the fans are not making people do suicide.
People will find some other way to do it if the fans are not there. So what is it that makes people act in this way? Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist, German psychologist and he wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning and basically he was a Nazi concentration camp survivor. He lived in unspeakable horrors, subjected to atrocities and there he found that one by one by one people perished.
But this was his conclusion after going through it all, surviving through it all, life is not primarily a quest for pleasure or a quest for power, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. What he found was that as a doctor he could observe how who was living, how healthy a person was, how weak someone was and yet he found that the people who survived in the concentration camps were not the people who were the healthiest or the fittest.
Those people survived who had some strong purpose. They wanted to do something in their life which they felt they had to do and no matter how many difficulties came, they persevered through them all to fulfil that purpose. So when we have a sense of meaning in life, what is life all about? That brings a sense of purpose, what am I meant to do? Meaning refers to the broad understanding of what is life all about.
Purpose means how do I fit into the scheme of things and when we have a purpose, that purpose provides power. We all face problems in life but we can face problems if we know that they are meaningful. If we get caught at a place where there is no food and just by circumstance we are starving, we will be irritated.
Even missing one meal or two meals, it’s irritating. If you are consciously fasting for some purpose, say we have to do some important medical test and that requires us to fast. Now in both cases, the body is deprived of food but in one case, just irritated, why did I forget to take the food? Why did I get trapped over there? In the other case, also the bodily sense of hunger is there but because the purpose is there, we are able to tolerate.
What to speak of just tolerating problems, if we have a sense of purpose, we can even embrace problems. When soldiers fight, then they know that they are risking their lives but they have a sense of purpose. When the twin towers were collapsing, many firefighters risked their lives to enter into those towers to rescue people.
So if we have a sense of purpose, we can rise far above our situations because we feel this problem is worthwhile. Imagine if you are studying for an exam and how many of you have situations where you are studying a subject which you don’t like? Everyone. So we all go through that and at that time, if you don’t like the subject, it becomes very difficult to perceive and study it.
Now suppose that subject is a part of a curriculum, a syllabus which is required for you to graduate in a degree which you want to get, then for this degree I have to do this. So you will study but suppose that subject, say if you are science students and the subject is from humanities and you have no interest in humanities, you are not going to go into humanities, then you will find why do I have to study this? So the subject is the same but if studying that subject is serving a purpose, then we feel, yeah, I can do it. It’s difficult but I’ll do it.
But if studying that subject is serving no purpose, why am I trapped here? Some people are very talkative, just keep rambling and rambling and rambling. Now if you are with them, maybe you’re just looking at the watch, when can I get out of here? But suppose that person is important, that person is your project guide, then they may ramble but in between they may tell something important to you. If you have a purpose over there, then you will tolerate all the rambling so that you can get to what you want.
So life will send problems in all of our lives but if there is a purpose, then we can tolerate it. Sooner or later, we do ask ourselves the question, what is the point of it all? We may not ask the question in terms of life itself but okay, what is the point of it all? I’m in this college, I’m studying, what is the point of it all? You may have some goal in your life. Oh, I want to become an engineer, I want to become a doctor, I want to have a good career.
These are the goals that push us. What does purpose do? Purpose gives us momentum. Imagine if a vehicle is moving very slowly and then some pillar has fallen in between the way, the vehicle just comes to a stop.
But if you have a big truck which is moving very fast and a pillar is in the way, pillar comes, the vehicle just throws the pillar aside and moves on. So similarly for us, if we have a strong sense of purpose, then obstacles may come but we can persevere through those obstacles. Now all of us can have our subjective purposes.
Okay, I want to do, I want to become an engineer, I want to become a doctor, this is my purpose. That is fine, we all need some purpose in our life. But is there an objective meaning to life itself? Is there an objective purpose to life itself? This question is important to ask because we live in an age of science and in science we want to know objective truth.
What is it actually? Subjectively each of us can have our purpose and that’s fine, we are individuals. But does life itself have a purpose? Sometimes we may face say a situation in our lives where we have some purpose for our life but suddenly something happens and that purpose is shattered. If somebody makes the purpose of their life say, I want to become a surgeon and then somehow something happens and their hands lose functionality.
They can’t do surgery. So now they just can’t fulfil their purpose. So what do they do at that time? So sometimes circumstances may come such as when we set an objective purpose for our life, that purpose may not be fulfilled.
So to understand whether there’s an objective purpose for life, let’s see what science tells us. The point which I’m going to draw towards is that why do we need spirituality in the age of science? Because science does not give us a sense of meaning and purpose and we need it and spirituality will provide us that. This is physicist Steven Weinberg.
He said that, would anyone like to read this? It’s a more comprehensible. Now what does it mean? Thank you. What does it mean pointless? Basically as we study the universe more and more, what the world view that emerges from it is that okay how did everything come about? You know everything came from some singularity which is basically like nothing.
So what it means is nothing existed because of nothing. Nothing exploded because of nothing and then gave rise to everything. What is the point of our existence? If we’re just biochemical somehow come alive, then we are existing within two infinities of nothingness before birth and after that.
Suddenly we are flapping around for some time and then we finish off. What is the point of it all? So now it’s interesting Steven Weinberg is saying this but can science actually tell us that there is no meaning? A science magazine on its 125th anniversary issue published a special feature called what we don’t know, what science doesn’t know and there were 125 items that they gave that they don’t know and the first among them was what is the universe made of? That means where does the universe come from? What is it made of? And where does consciousness come from? So now what is the universe made of? The question comes up because according to current physics more than 95% of the universe is made of dark matter and dark energy. So basically by perceiving the observable universe we have had to postulate something which is unobservable.
So what is the universe actually made of? And consciousness is a profoundly mysterious phenomena because our hand is made essentially the same elements as this chair now or this mic. Now does this mic exist? Does it exist or does it exist? Yeah obviously it exists. Now you ask you do you exist? Obviously if I ask you this question do I exist? You’ll probably ask the question does your intelligence exist? Why are you asking a question like that? But why I’m asking this is this exists but it does not know that it exists.
We exist and we know that we exist. So what is the essential difference between this mic and us? Fundamentally speaking the mic is made of the same particles as we are made of atoms, molecules and the fundamental particles that make up atoms. We are also made of the same things and yet we have consciousness.
So where does it come from? So if we understand where the universe what the universe is made up of where it comes from that will give us a sense of meaning and if we understand who we are and what is our place in the universe that will give us a sense of purpose and these two are questions which science as of now does not have answers for. Now before we move forwards okay we might say that okay if science doesn’t know some things they’re just unknowable but let’s try to understand how science knows something. Why science can know what it knows? Suppose we were lost somewhere suppose we slept want to sleep one night we woke up and we found ourselves in an entirely remote place oh god couldn’t make any head or say where am I and as we’re looking around we saw a paper flipping towards us flying towards us and it came and we picked it up saw that paper has some writing on it and that writing is in a language that we can understand and it’s not just a language it has the information we need go this way go this way go this way and you’ll reach home.
Now you naturally get the question hey where did this paper come from and how is it in the language that I understand? So similarly if we look at we are born into this world we wake up in this world and you observe the world the renaissance was a time when man metaphorically woke up and had observing the world to try to understand how it functions. So now nature which is like a book we could say there’s a book in fact the early scientists considered that there are two books that in fact the divine spoke through two books one is the book of scripture and the book of nature. So now if you consider nature to be like a book which contains some messages so then nature follows laws.
Science can function only because nature follows laws. Last year when I had gone to Cambridge University I spoke on science and spirituality over there so on the way we passed by we saw the tree where Newton saw the fruit falling. Now it was Newton’s brilliance that on seeing the fruit falling he asked the question what made the fruit fall? Imagine if instead of Newton a monkey had been sitting there.
The monkey would have seen a fruit falling what do you think it would have done? Aided and gone off isn’t it? So Newton he asked what made this fruit fall that is his brilliance and it’s even more brilliant that he came up with the theory of gravity based on analysing that. But at the same time his question itself what made the fruit fall that implies an assumption. The assumption that things don’t just happen by chance.
There is some pattern there is some order in nature and we try to discern that order. So what is that order? How can we discern it? First of all before we go into those questions why does the order exist at all? If all of nature were simply the result of unguided natural forces then why should there be any order in it at all? Why shouldn’t things happen by itself? Science functions with the assumption that there is order in nature. Without that assumption we could not postulate any theory we couldn’t do any experiment nothing could be done at all there will be no science at all.
Now first there is nature follows laws but secondly if we consider not only are there laws those laws can be expressed in the language of mathematics. Like I said there’s a message which comes flying towards us it’s written in the language that we understand. So what is this language of mathematics? Now if we consider many of the constructs in mathematics they have no direct correlate in nature.
For example we consider the imaginary number square root of minus one. The very name imaginary indicates that it has no correlate in the real world and yet this imaginary number which is a construct of the human mind is very useful in discerning nature. So why should nature work according to the laws of mathematics? When mathematics and many of the concepts in mathematics are simply we could say constructs of the human mind and thirdly we have minds that conceive mathematics in a way that we can understand the laws of nature.
So if our minds were also the results of unguided natural processes why should there be a correlation between the way nature works and the way our mind works and not just a correlation but a correlation of precise mathematical precision. The Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner he wrote a paper very celebrated paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and natural sciences and this is a quote concluding quote from his paper. Would anyone like to read this? It’s a wonderful gift which we neither understand.
So now the language of mathematics say f is equal to g m1 m2 upon r square there’s a law of gravity. Now okay nature follows law that’s one question but why does nature follow laws of mathematical precision? Now if you could say why does nature follow these laws? We don’t know that. As he says it’s a gift it just exists in nature and we are able to tap it.
So we neither understand it nor we deserve it. So the point which I’m drawing towards through all this is that science is essentially a quest for making sense of the world. Science itself is a quest for meaning.
Newton observed the fruit fall in okay what made this fruit fall? When we observe the planets moving in a particular way okay what is happening actually? So we try to make sense of things in nature and why are we able to make sense of things? Albert Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensive. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Meaning why should a universe if it is a result of unguided natural processes be constructed in such a way that it can be understood by the human mind? So this indicates that when we pursue science also we are looking for meaning but unfortunately what is happening? Before I go back ahead we see that okay why do fruits fall? It’s because of law of gravity.
You know why do objects in motion stay in motion? It’s because of law of third law of because of laws of motion. We have explanations for many things in nature. Why did this happen like this? Why does this happen like this? Why does this happen like this? That’s what we study and understand through nature, through science.
But then we ask the question why do I exist? That is no purpose. We just have come into existence by chance. We’ll stay for some time and we’ll die.
Why does the universe exist? Oh it has no purpose. So various phenomena in the universe have a purpose but the universe has no purpose. Purpose in the sense that there is an orderly pattern in the way things in universe are happening at least as science observes it.
So it’s like the way science leads us to is that we find ourselves seeking islands of meaning while drowning in an ocean of meaninglessness. Okay this makes sense, this makes sense, this makes sense but life it doesn’t make sense. What’s going on here? Something wrong? If the falling of objects makes sense then our own life should also be making sense.
There must be some way to make sense. Normally when science encounters a barrier to its exploring capacity then it expands its scope to understand it. So now let’s try to understand the scope of science.
Why questions of meaning and purpose? Why does Steven Weinberg say that the universe appears pointless? So I quoted him but then I quoted how the science is finding meaning in universe and that we are finding meaning is amazing. But why is it that we are not finding meaning about the big picture? So science uses a particular method called as we could call it methodological naturalism and it has a scope. Now if I use a fishing net and go for fishing but if the fishing net has holes of one inch by one inch then no matter how long I fish I won’t be able to catch fish that are smaller than one inch.
If I use a black and white camera and no longer how long I click photos I won’t be able to see colour in the picture. Every method has its purpose, has its strength and also it has its limitation. So when science operates what it does is it looks for natural explanations for natural phenomena.
That’s how science works right now and when it looks for natural explanations for phenomena it leaves out anything beyond that. When science started functioning itself at that time the scientific way of looking at the world divided the world into what was called primary properties and secondary properties. So science considers the measurable aspects of the universe to be primary properties.
So height, width, breadth, speed, mass these are measurable properties and this is what science focusses on and by focussing on the measurable parameters in the universe we can phrase things in the language of mathematics, we can come up with equations and understand and manipulate and change things and science considers that which is non-measurable to be secondary properties and those are not what we focus on in the study of science. Now suppose a friend came back, suppose you stay with somebody else in their room next to you, oh today I met a wonderful person, oh really, tell me about him, five feet two inches, what, okay, okay, tell me something, oh yeah, weight so and so, oh really, okay, what else. Now when we talk about people, if they have a, especially if they are very tall or very short we may notice it, they are very fat or very thin we may notice it, but normally when we talk, when we experience the world we do not primarily experience the world in terms of measurable dimensions.
So what science considers as primary properties are not what comprise our primary experience of the world, isn’t it? If we go and eat some food, delicious food, okay, how was the, okay, what was it, how was the food, okay, you know, and we start telling a list of ingredients, you know, it had this much salt, this much sugar, this much oil, okay, but what was the item, how was it, that is all you would like to know. So here we see a mismatch happening, what science considers as primary properties are not our primary experience in the world. Let us consider further what this implies.
Now medical science is at one level meant to free people from pain and provide them health, and we have phenomenal advancement in medical science now, and yet with all its advancement can we have something like a pain-o-metre, how much pain are you in? Now X-ray can tell that, okay, you had a fracture, your hand is disaligned by this many degrees, your bone, that means you must be in a lot of pain, but whether there is pain or not that is something which has to be subjectively experienced. We cannot have a pain-o-metre because pain is not a quantifiable experience. When we say there is a lot of pain, a little pain, but how do you put a measure on the pain? What unit do we use? Five, six, seven, eight, how do you call it? Can’t do that.
So pain is something which is a vital human experience, not vital in the sense that we eagerly want it, but it is an indispensable human experience, it is a central part of our human experience, and medical science’s purpose is to free people from pain, one of the purposes, but there is no way we can measure pain. We may have some indirect inferences, oh yeah, this fracture, yeah, this disease, you must be in a lot of pain, but it is not a quantifiable measure. Now I recently gave a seminar in Stanford speaking about fear.
I spoke there about the self in the selfie. So there I was speaking about fear. We all have various fears, and throughout many centuries people have had fears.
So while some fears have always been common like fear of public speaking is always there, fear of death is there, but two fears have been added to the list of common fears in the 21st century. One fear is the fear of terrorists, and second fear is the fear of rejection. In traditional societies, people form relationships more or less based on some traditional social arrangements.
Now everybody is in the marketplace for relationships, and most people have to seek out the relationships themselves, and they are rejected. The fear that I may be rejected is an agonising fear, because it makes people feel that their own self-worth is challenged. We feel if we are rejected we are unloved, not only are we unloved, we feel that we are unloveable, and that can be devastating.
So now if say we want to develop a relationship with someone, and now we want to know do they really care for us. With all our scientific advancement, can we make something like a love-o-metre, put it in somebody’s heart, do you really love me, or you don’t? We can’t do that. Why? We may be able to measure certain chemicals in the brain, certain brain states, but love is the driving experience for life for all of us, and yet that driving and defining experience is something which is beyond the scope of science to quantify, to measure.
There can be things associated with love which science can analyse and can help us, but love itself is something which can’t be measured. So the point of all this is not to minimise science in any way, it is just to contextualise what science offers. Every method has its focus, and when the focus goes on one thing, it immediately goes off other things.
Right now if you are focussing on the class, then if somebody is doing something behind, you will not notice it so much. So the spectacle that science uses for looking at nature focusses on the measurable parameters in nature, and this focus takes us off the non-measurable parameters, and the result of this is that by focussing on external parameters we have been able to achieve external control at a phenomenal level, but at an internal level our own emotions, our own inner life has become mismanaged, and we are unable to deal with it. So we need a broader way of looking at things.
The spiritual traditions of India, the yoga texts like the Bhagavad Gita offer us a holistic model of the self, and it says we have our existence as three-dimensional, the body, mind, and soul. So if you compare to a software system, the hardware, the software, and the user, these three are together, and currently scientific advancement is primarily about improving the hardware, and you phenomenally improve the hardware, but if the software is corrupted, then the hardware is not of much use, that will just no use, and that’s why we have some people in say in the western world often if some farmers in India commit suicide, it’s highlighted, oh people are so poor, and so many people are committing suicide because of that, which is true, it’s sad, anybody committing suicide is very tragic, but at the same time the suicide capital of India is not the heartland of Vidarbha where there are farmers, the suicide capital of India is Bangalore, which is the headquarters of India and a large part of the world. So why is this? That means that the improvement of the hardware, in Bangalore we have phenomenal facilities, and there’s a lot of progress, in the rural heartland there’s not much progress, but yet people are afflicted so much that the improved hardware is not offering them relief.
So there is corruption at the level of software. Now I would like to do a thought exercise to illustrate this example of the body, mind and the soul. So you can sit relaxed in wherever you’re sitting, and a three-step exercise this is.
So you can close your eyes now, and you can take with me three deep breaths. One. Now with your eyes closed, try to look ahead of you.
Because your eyes are closed, you cannot see whatever is physically in front of you, but still you will see something. You may see this room, or if you’re tired you may see your room and your bed. If you’re hungry you may see food, you may see a friend, a loved one, you may see a sports match that you have seen, a movie you have seen recently.
You may see various images coming and going on an inner screen, or you may see just a dull pattern of colour on that screen. Now whatever you see, try to, there is an inner screen which you are seeing, and there is you who are seeing the inner screen. Now try to take a step back and look at who is looking at that inner screen.
Take a step back and try to look at the inner seer of the inner screen. Try once again. Take a step back and try to see the inner seer.
No matter how many times you step back, the inner seer steps back with you. What you are looking for is what you are looking with. The inner seer is you the soul.
The inner screen is the mind. You can take one deep breath and then you can open your eyes. Thank you.
You can open your eyes now. So normally our perception happens when the outer scene, the inner screen and the inner seer are in one line. So right now you are looking at me and this inner screen acts like a window on which whatever is outside gets projected and then you can see.
But if instead on the inner screen something else suddenly appears. On the inner screen it appears. Oh you know you had to do this work and you forgot to do it.
What do I do now? Then at that time the inner screen changes into a TV and it takes our consciousness somewhere else and that’s how we become absent-minded. Actually when you say it’s absent-minded, the mind is not absent. Rather the mind is very much active and we are active with the mind.
But the mind is not present where the body is present. Let’s say sometimes how many of you have had this experience that you are talking with someone and then suddenly you feel that person is not there only. You had that experience? Yeah and you can get irritated.
What are you doing? Or sometimes we may say, Earth to you, come back, come back. Where have you gone? Have you gone to some other planet? So what happens is that this inner screen is what we respond to. We don’t respond to the outer scene primarily.
We respond to the inner screen. Now if there is no proper correspondence between the outer scene and the inner screen then there is mismatch. So this mismatch can happen in various ways when we focus primarily on physical things.
I want to get this, I want to achieve this, I want to do that. Then our consciousness gets too invested in physical reality. I was talking with a student a few months ago and he told me that he’s a cricket fan.
So a few, maybe six, seven months ago something, there was a champions trophy final. India and Pakistan is like a, match is like a world war. So at that time in this India Pakistan match, India was expected to win this champions trophy final.
And India lost and lost very badly. So he told me after that for three nights I could not sleep. I told him, you know, players went to sleep, why couldn’t you sleep? So what happened for him was, he was in India, that cricket tournament happened in England.
But he, on his inner screen, that match was being replayed again and again. Why did he play a shot like this? Why did he drop that catch? Why did this ball like this? Why, why, why? And then he was not able to function at all. He couldn’t function in the day, couldn’t function at night and sleep.
So when this inner screen starts replaying something which is unwanted, then we can’t function. Just replaying, okay, a cricket match, it might just seem humorous or frivolous. But the inner world, the inner screen can sometimes replay things which are dangerous also.
How many of you have experienced worry? Everyone of us. Now when we worry, what happens actually? Anxiety is considered one of the biggest mental health problems. If anxiety is untreated, it eventually leads to people committing suicide.
So what actually happens when we commit, when we suffer anxiety? Actually, on the inner screen, instead of the present appearing, the future starts appearing. And all kinds of scary scenarios start coming. This may go wrong.
Worry is like the interest we pay on loans that we haven’t yet taken. Those problems have not occurred only and they may never occur. So no matter how difficult the situation is, say somebody has a relationship and they experience rejection in the relationship, that is not a reason to commit suicide.
But what happens? They think, oh, I was rejected by this person. I was rejected by someone else also. I’ll be rejected by someone else also.
I’ll be unloved. I’ll be lonely. My life is so miserable.
Let me commit suicide. So when the inner screen starts going off into the future, that leads to anxiety. The second major mental health problem that people face today is depression.
How many of you have been gone through phases when you have been depressed? Yeah, all of us. Thank you. Now why does this happen? During depression, the inner screen starts replaying the past.
So, oh no, I tried to do this, but it didn’t work out. I did that, but that went wrong. I did that, that went wrong.
And when it starts replaying again and again, all the bad things that have happened in the past, we start getting disempowered. We start getting de-energised. And we start feeling this is what has happened in the past is what is going to happen to me in the future also.
And in that way, we lose our morale. So managing what appears on our inner screen is extremely important. And it is what appears on the inner screen which determines whether our life has meaning or whether our life has purpose.
Somebody may have the best computer. They have the best internet connection. But if negative images are playing on the inner screen causing anxiety or depression, they will use the best internet connection to search fastest what is the easiest way to commit suicide.
That is one of the higher Google search items. People search how can I commit suicide. So then what is happening here? The technology is there, but the technology rather than helping, it harms.
Why does it harm? Because on the inner screen, unwanted things are playing. So for us, we need to make sure that our inner screen is displaying things that are healthy and helpful for us. And unfortunately, through the technological progress, science ultimately doesn’t give us any ultimate sense of meaning.
On the other hand, it gives us so many stimuli through technology that we can get more and more distracted. And thus, our sense of meaning and meaning and purpose can get completely lost. This is happening here, that is happening here, that is happening there.
Nothing is going to work for me. So just as I talked about this hardware, software and the user. So if the software gets corrupted by a virus, it can’t function.
Similarly, our mind can get corrupted. Now I said the virus, the mind when it gets corrupted, wrong images start coming. And the cause of these unwanted images coming is that the virus that infects the mind is that the idea that the physical alone is real and will provide real happiness.
When say we are getting depressed or when we are getting worried, what exactly is happening? Some things have not worked out at the physical level or some things we fear may not work out at the physical level. And that is causing us anxiety. But actually, we are not that physical reality.
We are distinct from it. When people have a sense of purpose, say for example, somebody, a warrior is fighting a war. Okay, physical, I talked earlier about, there is the inner seer, the inner screen and the outer scene.
So like you are, I am looking at you. So you are the physical reality. And you are, if I am attentive, then you will appear on my inner screen.
So that will be the mental reality, what appears over there. But if my mind is misfiring, then what happens in the physical reality may keep replaying even after it has happened. And that will cause me to misperceive things.
So physical reality means basically I can say the external world, the external world that is out there, bad things happen in that world. But today’s problems are always manageable today. However, when the inner screen starts misfiring, then on top of today’s problems, we add yesterday’s problems and tomorrow’s problems.
And then life becomes unbearable. If I have to lift a 10 kg weight, I can do it. But if I have to lift 10, 10 kg suitcases, I’ll get crushed.
So similarly for us, when the inner screen starts focussing or displaying not just what is happening at the physical level right now, but something else that happened in the past, something that may happen in the future, when our consciousness gets completely riveted to the physical reality alone, then it tends to misfire. And that’s how we get misled. So we need to be able to manage the things that appear on the inner screen.
And that is where spirituality comes into the picture. Spirituality gives us the understanding that we are not the inner screen. What is happening on the inner screen is not what is real.
So yes, something may, some problems may come in the future, they may not come in the future. Let me focus on what I can do right now. So when we learn to focus in this way, so for example, in spirituality, we have the practise of meditation.
Meditation can be done various different ways. We chant, we do mantra meditation, we chant mantras. Now what mantras are meant to do is that they are meant to take our consciousness from the physical level to the spiritual level.
That means, oh, this problem is here, this problem is here, this problem is here. Yes, the problems are there. But I am not those problems.
Oh, I’m worried about this, I’m worried about this, I’m worried about this. Yes, but I am not my thoughts. I am the thinker of my thoughts.
I am not my feelings. I am the feeler of my feelings. The Bhagavad Gita in its 14th chapter asks us to become an observer of our emotions.
So this capacity to become the observer of the outer world and the observer of the inner world is increased by our spiritual knowledge and by our spiritual practise. When we thus bring spirituality into our life, then we can distance ourselves from the physical and the mental and situate ourselves in spiritual self-understanding. And that understanding brings security.
Now somebody may say, you know, who knows whether the spiritual business is real or not? I don’t know. Yes, it’s true. It may be real.
But as I discussed earlier, at the physical level, we are never going to find need. We are never going to find purpose. What is our primary experience of life in terms of emotions, in terms of love, this is not going to be found at the physical level.
So there is some experience that we have and we need an explanation for that experience. So why not look for that explanation wherever we get it? At the start of the 20th century, Lord Kelvin had said famously that for the future generations of physicists, the biggest challenge is going to be unemployment. Because all the physical world has been explained and they have nothing to do.
That’s what they thought. Because Newton and classical physics were working so well. But there were some small shadows on this horizon.
This black body radiation was not being explained. And then from those shadows, there turned out to be storms which are approaching. The whole foundation of physics changed.
And then we have quantum physics to explain the fundamental particles level of reality. And then we have relativity physics to explain the macroscopic level of reality. So the point is that Newtonian physics worked very well at the normal level of experience.
But when we stretch to microscopic or macroscopic, it didn’t work. Similarly, living at the physical level of reality may work in our day-to-day life for normal occurrences. But when we are stretched, when life gives us problems, at that time living at the physical level will subject us to enormous distress.
We need to rise to a higher level. And if we do that, we will experience some security. I’ll conclude with one last experience to lead to the conclusion of this talk.
So last year when I had come to America, I was in Florida. At that time, the Hurricane Irma hit Florida. So I knew it was coming.
So I came the west coast. I came to New York. You just see that area for giving some classes and meeting some people.
One of my friends was in Florida on a writing retreat. And in order to focus, he just cut off from everything else. And one morning, he woke up, came to the window, and saw everything was flooded.
Hey, what’s happening? And he tried to turn on his internet. He had cut that off also. And he said the internet was not working.
He tried to call someone. He found the phone was not working. Then as he was looking around, the power went off.
And then he could see, it was daytime, he could see the water level was rising, rising, rising. He was panicking. He was just staying in another acquaintance’s house, and he had just been focussing on the writing.
So he was looking around, what to do, where to go. There was no way to go. And as he was peering around, suddenly he saw behind a closet, there appeared to be something like a door.
So he pulled the closet aside, and he found there was a door. He opened the door, and there was a small stairway that led to the attic. He went to the attic.
And there he stayed safe. For several hours, the water rose, rose, rose, rose upwards. But it inundated the ground level.
However, in the first level, he was safe. Then the hurricane receded. The hurricane passed away.
The water level receded, and he was rescued. So similarly for us, now normally he was just living at the ground level. He didn’t even know the first level existed.
So the ground level is like the physical level of reality. The first level is the spiritual level of reality. Normally, we live only at the ground level.
But sometimes problems start coming, and the problems can be so overwhelming that there is no solution seen at the ground level. So we have to rise to a higher level. We are very fortunate if we can understand that there is a higher level and we find a pathway to get to that higher level.
So spiritual knowledge tells us that our life has a higher side also. And spiritual practises are like the stairway by which you can rise to that higher level. And when we do that, we can experience peace even amidst distress.
If we become spiritually situated, then life’s distresses may come, but we won’t be shaken by them. Because we will be situated in inner security. And it’s not just a conception.
When we talk about meaning and purpose, spiritual wisdom tells us that we are on a journey of spiritual evolution. We are souls who are meant to expand our consciousness to the spiritual level. And we’re seeking enduring meaning.
Our life is not a hundred metre sprint, succeed or we fail. It’s a hundred mile marathon. And even if we fall back in one lap, in life, it doesn’t matter.
It’s a long journey and we can catch up. So when we get this long term perspective, then if things go wrong at the physical level, we are not that affected by it. We can move forward.
Even if a specific purpose doesn’t work out, we understand our purpose of growing in knowledge, growing in wisdom, growing in love. We are parts of an infinite whole. And finite consciousness and infinite consciousness are meant to be bonded in eternal love.
And that bond is the ultimate purpose of life. So when we understand this long term purpose, then we can actually face life’s problems without getting overwhelmed by them. This long term purpose gives a momentum to our life.
When obstacles come, at that time, instead of the obstacle simply replaying in our mind and causing agitation, causing frustration, leading to self-destruction. Instead, we will raise ourselves upwards. Okay.
I faced many problems like this in the past. I have weathered them. I weathered this also.
With that understanding, when we move forwards, the universe has a purpose. Our life has a purpose. That is our spiritual evolution.
And whatever we do in life, that is all meant to contribute not just at the physical level of reality to the results that we get. It’s also meant to contribute to our inner evolution. And in this way, this higher purpose and meaning can give us power in our lives.
So to conclude, science can make things in the outer world better. But spirituality can make people better. It can help us to manage our emotions better.
It can infuse our life with a greater meaning and purpose. And thus, it can bring supreme positivity in our life. So I’ll summarise what I spoke today.
I started by speaking about why do we need spirituality in the age of science. I said that science, we all need meaning. I talked about Dr. Viktor Frankl who was trapped in the Holocaust in the concentration camps.
And he found that the people who survived, they’re not just the people who are the fittest, but the people who had the strongest sense of purpose. So we see today there is extraordinary progress, but also extraordinary distress. More the number of people who are being killed by gunmen are the people who are killing themselves much, much more.
Why is this happening? Because we don’t have a sense of meaning and purpose. When problems come, what is the point of life? Where do we get the sense of meaning and purpose? If we look at the primary source of knowledge today, which is science, then we have scientists telling us the universe looks pointless. Now why does it think like that? Actually speaking, science itself is a search for meaning.
When Newton saw the fruit fall and he asked, what made this fruit fall? That means he was assuming that there was an order in nature. And we’re trying to make sense of why things happen. Making sense is basically looking for meaning.
So now the fact that science is able to make some sense of the universe itself is astonishing. It’s like I’m lost and I find a paper flying towards me, which has text written in a language that I understand, which conveys the information that I need. So similarly, if everything were a result of unguided natural processes, why should nature follow laws? Why should those laws be in a language of mathematics, which many of us whose constructs are simply constructs of our mind? And why should our mind be able to have the ability of coming up with mathematics, which reflect the way nature works? So I quoted Eugene Wigner and Albert Einstein, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensive.
So the fact is that we have found meaning in some aspects of the universe. And yet the scientific worldview says that ultimately, we exist for nothing. So what’s wrong? It’s like we have found islets of meaning, but we’re drowning in an ocean of meaninglessness.
So could it be that the problem is not that there is no meaning, but the methodology may not be appropriate. I talk about science uses methodological naturalism. That means it looks for natural explanations for natural phenomena.
So with a fishing net, you can catch only fish that are smaller than its size. With a black and white camera, you can see only black and white pictures, not colour. So science, what does science look for? Science at its start, in order to be able to control nature divided the universe into primary and secondary properties.
Primary are those which are measurable. And that’s how we came up with mathematics as a language for understanding. But in our experience, the primary experience is not of measurable qualities.
It is of colours, emotions, and experiences that are rich in their variety. So with all the scientific progress, we cannot have a penometer or a lavometer. But these are what our primary experiences are.
So if the world that we experience is not explained by science, then let us be open to see where we can get the explanation for the world that we experience. So one possible explanation is from the Yoga texts of India, which give us a three-level model of the self. The body, mind, and soul, which is like the hardware, software, and user.
And to conceive this, we did the thought experiment that we can see the inner screen, but not the inner seer. The inner seer is who is seen, that is we, the soul. Inner screen is the mind.
And why is there so much mental distress today? Because on the inner screen, lots of unwanted images are coming. So when the inner screen repeatedly displays dire scenarios about the future, we get anxiety, disorders. When it displays repeatedly the negative scenarios of the past, we get depression.
Now, with all of scientific technology and its advancement, we actually get more and more inputs on the inner screen and they cause more and more distraction. So for us to manage ourselves better, we need to be able to control what appears on the inner screen. And that happens when we understand that I am not the inner screen, I have a self-identity and self-security beyond the inner screen.
That understanding comes by spiritual knowledge and spiritual practise. Just as this friend who was trapped in the flood and found that he could get rescued, find safety at upper level. Similarly, the normal level of living, we may be satisfied with the physical level of reality.
But when distresses come, we need the spiritual level. And just as science, only because it expanded its scope, it could explain normal observable, measurable realities. But for the subatomic and macroscopic, it needed other developments, quantum physics and relativity.
Similarly, for finding meaning beyond our day-to-day routine activities, we need to expand our knowledge sources, not just science, but also spirituality. And science can help us make things better in the outer world. Spirituality can make us better in our inner world.
Thank you very much. Are there any questions or comments? Okay. What happens to people who refuse to rise up to the spiritual level? Yes, I get your question.
There are people who have no interest in spirituality. How do they face life’s problems? Yes, what appears on our inner screen is determined by various factors. It is determined by our upbringing, it is determined by our association and to a significant extent, it is determined by our past karma.
The soul is on a multi-life journey of spiritual evolution. And when the soul goes from one body to another, the mind also goes with it. So, the impressions that are formed in the mind or what pops up on the mind, what inclinations the mind has, that is also shaped by one’s previous life.
So, some people may have positive impressions from their spiritual previous life. And if they have positive impressions, because that means they have good karma from their previous life, then they may not get so distracted or agitated. So, we are not saying that if somebody is not spiritual, they cannot be good people.
We cannot say, we are not saying that somebody is not spiritual, they cannot be successful. But the fact is that even if one is not spiritual, if one is able to, one doesn’t have too many distracting tendencies within one’s mind, then one will be able to function in this life. But what about ultimate meaning? What about ultimate purpose? Live at the physical level and then lose everything at the physical level at the time of death.
And even before that, there are times when people experience ennui. They get disheartened, what am I doing? Especially when some big loss happens in their life, they lose a loved one or they lose a job or they face a serious health crisis. What am I living for? So, we don’t have to experience disruption at the physical level to seek elevation to the spiritual level.
We can do it with proactivity, with intelligence and positive purpose. So, at one level, spiritual knowledge will help us to better face life at the physical level. And even those who are facing it well, if they had spiritual knowledge, they would be able to face it even better, they’d be able to do even better.
But ultimately, spiritual knowledge is not just meant to be a shock absorber for living at the physical level of reality. And this will help you to face problems better. It’s not just meant for that.
Ultimately, spiritual knowledge is meant to be a goal transformer. It is meant to give us a higher purpose to life. And those who are not living spiritually, they will not evolve.
On their multi-life journey, they will not evolve, but they will devolve. They will go to a lower level of consciousness. Yeah, multi-life journey.
If the soul is on a multi-life journey, what is the origin and what is the termination? The origin is that we all are parts of the infinite. And we all have been given free will. And free will means we have to be given the potential to use it or to misuse it.
There cannot be force. So for example, if a boy proposes to a girl, kneels down in front of her, offers her a ring and says, please marry me. And she says, no.
Immediately takes out a gun, marry me. No, that would not be love, isn’t it? So there is the infinite consciousness, supreme, and we are the parts. So we have been given free will.
Although the infinite is all-powerful, our free will is not taken away. So we can choose to love the infinite or we can choose to explore life in alternative ways. So we, the souls who are here right now, we are exploring life in alternative ways.
So the origin of our existence is the eagerness or we could say the daredevilishness to try to experience life separate from the supreme. And the purpose of this multi-life evolution is to be reunited with the infinite. So we explore different options in life.
And as we explore different options, this doesn’t give me happiness, this doesn’t give me happiness, this doesn’t give me happiness. What will actually make me happy? As we explore this, eventually, we turn towards spiritual reality. And that is where we experience the ultimate happiness.
That is where our multi-life journey will end. So when I talk about spiritual evolution means evolution in our understanding of what is the best source of happiness. Yeah, we are a part of a higher energy, not just energy, there is an energetic person also.
There is personal and impersonal, both aspects are there. You see the sun and the sunlight. But similarly, there is a person and there is an impersonal light.
Both of them are there. So the important thing is that we are all having the free will to explore. And this exploration is meant to lead to evolution.
So if our exploration moves forward, it’s like, I choose this option, this option, this option, this doesn’t work. If I have multiple choice question, and okay, this is the wrong answer, this is the wrong answer, this is the right answer. So we can, with our intelligence, choose the right answer, or we can keep exploring all the wrong alternatives and then come to the right alternative.
But that option is there for us. So life is, you could say, like a multiple choice exam, in which we are meant to make the right choices. Yes, please.
We spoke about controlling what appears on the inner screen, right? Could you give us some tips as to how do you recognise the negative shift in your inner screen and then make that transition in a very minimal time? Because at that point, you will not be in a state to medicate or self-aware, right? How do you recognise that? Okay, so if something negative starts appearing on the inner screen, how do we recognise that and rectify that? Yeah, I understand. So generally, in the heat of the moment, it is very difficult to recognise that. But if we are self-observant, later on we can understand, okay, at that time this happened, and I did this.
So suppose we are driving on a road, and suddenly we hit a bump. We didn’t know there was a bump, and there was no mark. Suddenly we hit it.
Next time when we go on the road, be cautious. Oh, I don’t know, we’ll slow down, or we’ll move from the other road, something like that. There’s a pothole, we’ll move on the other side.
So similarly, when, say, we became overcome by anxiety, or we started getting depressed, or we started getting angry, at that time we just do something in the heat of the moment. But afterwards, look back, what exactly happened? Oh, I was here, I was doing this, and suddenly this thought came in my mind. And from that thought, this started, this started, this started.
Oh, you know, at that time, if I stop that thought… So generally speaking, one way to distance ourselves is that instead of thinking, okay, I am feeling angry, my mind is saying, you are feeling angry. Just rephrase what is happening. I am worried.
My mind is saying you are worried. So if, say, instead of the thought of worry coming inside us, if somebody else came and started scaring us, you know, you know, if you don’t pass in your exam, hey, you don’t get a job. If you don’t get a job, how will you pay your, how will you pay your, repay your loan? What will happen to you? What face will you show to others? Hey, stop scaring me.
Stop talking so negative. If somebody else started doing the same thing, we would not just passively accept whatever they are saying. We would evaluate it.
And we would protect ourselves from the negativity. So similarly, if we catch, okay, this is the time this happened. And then this was the time when the mind gave me this thought and I accepted it.
So then next time when something similar happens, we will be more prepared to catch it. It will take time. For a moment, we may fuse with our thoughts also.
But if we practise, and this practise is not just a intellectual exercise, it has to be a spiritual exercise. At that time, we may not be able to but if we are meditating regularly, if we are, if we are raising ourselves a spiritual consciousness by chanting mantras regularly, then we will have the alertness. Oh, I am fusing with my thoughts.
It’s like a firefighter who is new and a firefighter who is experienced. When they see a big fire, both of them may have moments of panic. But for the new firefighter, it’s petrifying.
But for the seasoned firefighter, years of training and practise kicks into action. Oh, okay, let’s attack the fire from this side. Pour the water over here.
Call more reinforcement. It’ll spring into action. So like that, the fusion of ourselves with our thoughts will happen for some time.
But if we have been practising spirituality, then our spiritual instincts will kick in. Oh, I don’t need to do this. We’ll be able to catch ourselves earlier and earlier.
So sometimes we’ll catch, at least we should catch ourselves after it happened. Not just beat yourself. Why did I do that? Understand.
Oh, the mind prompted me and that’s why I did that. At what point did the mind prompt? And what could I have done at that time? One easy way to start managing our emotions is deep breathing. Just take deep breaths.
What happens is the breathing is very connected with the mind. So when the mind starts getting agitated, it starts giving different images. So ideally, to protect ourselves from the mind, the various wrong images that are coming on the mind, we need to rise to the spiritual level.
But rising to the spiritual level takes time. And it takes practise. But if at that time, we can just come down to a specific physical aspect.
The mind is worried, oh, this will go wrong, that will go wrong, that will go wrong, that will go wrong. No, just bring that consciousness down to the physical. Breathe.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. And try to focus the consciousness on breathing.
By this what happens? The train of thoughts, which is going towards the station of panic, the train of thoughts, which is going towards the station of depression, that train of thought gets interrupted. Because it’s going in that direction, I suddenly become conscious of my breath. When we start becoming seasoned practitioners of say mantra meditation, reflexively we will chant the mantra.
And the mantra will become the interrupter of the train of thoughts. So basically, we have to find out which tool works best for us to interrupt the mind’s train of thoughts. And by doing this, we will be able to distance ourselves.
Does that answer your question? You had a question? Someone told me, she’s from bioinformatics. She told me that scientists have started incubating animals in their lab. They take seed from a male and then fertilise it with the egg from the female and then they incubate it in an artificial womb in the lab.
But how do scientists explain the source of consciousness? And how does the soul enter that body? Because they can’t see it, so how do they explain it? Okay, good question. So if incubation is being done externally, then if you’re taking a say the egg from the female, the sperm from the male and uniting it, then where does the soul come into the picture? That way we can ask, where does the soul come into picture in normal reproduction also? Isn’t it? Normal reproduction again, the soul, the man and a woman unite. So the point here is, the soul cannot be perceived at the physical level.
But the soul’s presence itself leads to some significantly different characteristics manifesting in matter. I already talked about how this mic and the hand, what is the difference between the two? I said, this is not aware of its existence, this is aware of its existence. But another way to look at it is that matter normally undergoes three states.
There is creation, there is deterioration and there is destruction. This table was built, if somebody bangs it, it will break. Then afterwards it will break down completely.
On the other hand, if we switch to us conscious beings, we go through not, living beings go through not three but six changes. After we are created, we grow. We cannot have, no matter how sophisticated a computer we have, the computer is not going to grow.
Then we maintain ourselves. If my hand gets cut, it clots and heals itself. Homeostasis is a whole process in the body, it tries to protect itself.
There is no such thing in, you could say, normal matter. Another is reproduction, we reproduce. So, with all our scientific advancement, we do not know why some matter goes through these six changes and why some matter goes through these three changes.
What is it that is different? From our visible perspective, this matter and this matter are made of the same components. So, it is not the process of reproduction that is important, it is the principle that is there which is different over there. So, yes, sometimes the reproduction can happen through normal means, sometimes the reproduction can happen through non-normal means.
In fact, in many of the Vedic texts also, it is described at times how the sperm would be taken from a sage and that somebody else would take that sperm and preserve that sperm and from that some new person would come up. So, that is not a, what is advanced in this is the technology. Earlier, we may not have the technology by which we could incubate outside.
But no matter how much we develop the technology, the point here is, what is the principle? Why is it that this matter is behaving this way and this matter is behaving this way? So, now with respect to the specific question of where the soul is present, actually one of the characters of the soul described in the Bhagavad Gita is that it is Sarvagataha. It is capable of being present everywhere. In our own bodies, more than the number of cells in our body, several times more are the number of germs that are present in our body.
By germs, I don’t mean negative germs, but it is microbes and they are needed for the functioning of this body. So, now each of those microbes is a soul. So, basically, souls are present at various places and wherever they get a suitable biological medium to become embodied, they take that.
So, nature may create that biological medium in the womb or we may create that biological medium in technology in an external level. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that this matter, what matters is that the certain, you could say biological matter, actually matter is that embodied matter or matter that is living that exhibits fundamentally different characteristics from matter that is non-living.
And why that difference is there, that is something which has no material explanation. That is because there is something higher present which animates. Any other questions? I am not talking about all the scientists in general, but some scientists, if God exists, why don’t they believe in them and will science and spirituality converge at some point and the scientists, do they have to rise up to the spiritual level to understand God or is God quantifiable? Okay, good question.
So, why do scientists not accept God? Can science and spirituality converge in the sense that scientists will understand God one day or God, will God become quantifiable? Okay. The word science originally meant knowledge, to know. If you have omniscience, there is also the word science.
So, to know everything, that is omniscience, that is an attribute of God. Now, when Newton postulated the laws of gravity, he did not call himself a scientist. It was his principia naturala philosophia.
He was considered a natural philosopher. The word scientist itself, as we use it and science as we use it, is an 18th century invention, around 18th century. So, the word science itself is used in a particular sense today, that we look for natural explanations for natural phenomena.
Now, as long as we are looking for natural explanations for natural phenomena or to speak of science understanding God, science cannot even understand our own emotions. We may find that, okay, these emotions are associated with this area of the brain, but that’s all. Beyond that, how do these emotions come over there? So, what can happen is that science itself expands its methodology.
Quantum physics has led to the postulation at least that consciousness is a fundamental reality because much in quantum physics is observer specific. The waves of quantum physics, they collapse when there is an observer observing and that’s how we see objects. So, I won’t go into the technicalities of quantum physics over here, but to the extent science can expand to include consciousness as a fundamental component of reality and then it starts exploring consciousness on its own terms, not as consciousness is manifested in matter.
That means exploring brain states is one thing, but exploring conscious experience itself, that’s another thing. So, spirituality itself can be called science in the sense that there is a well-defined repeatable and verifiable methodology. So, now in science there is theory and there is experiment.
In spirituality, there is philosophy and there is practise. So, the philosophy aspect in spirituality is like the theory aspect in science. Philosophy says there is a spark of consciousness.
There is infinite consciousness. These are all postulates and now the experiments are what enable us to prove or disprove the theory. Similarly, the practises are meant to give us higher realisation.
Now, can God be quantified? God by definition is spiritual. So, at a material level, he is not manifest. So, we cannot mathematically quantify.
The idea is that, as I told earlier, this world is given for us to explore our field. So, if in this world, the existence of God were an observable feature or a logically necessary proposition, then we would not have free will because we would be forced to choose that. So, actually, but even now we can make that inference.
Suppose we have somebody managing a particular system, now say if you are later on get a job in a computer company and you make a software and that software works perfectly. It works so perfectly that you never need to call customer care. You enter the data, it processes it right.
Now, somebody who has been using that, who comes to that plant where the software has been used for a long time, they may come and start using the software and they put this data, they get this result. They put this data, they get this result. They do this, they get this result.
It becomes so predictable for them, they take it for granted. The software is always there and nobody needs to manage it, nobody needs to maintain it. It is working automatically.
Now, a naive person would say, oh, the software is just there and it is working there. But a perceptive person would think, this software, if it is working so flawlessly without needing any maintenance, that means it must have been made by a masterly programmer. The brilliance of the programmer can be seen by how little the programmer is required after the programme is made.
Isn’t it? Similarly, nature has been made by God to be causally complete. And somebody who is naive may say, okay, this just exists. See, all systems of thought have to begin with some starting assumption.
So, atheism or non-theism you could say, it begins with the starting assumption that the universe exists with its laws of nature. Now, we can ask the question, why should the laws of nature be there at all? Why should insentient matter behave according to the laws that to understand require a high level of sentience? So, theism holds at the starting point and this programme did not just come by itself. It is working so well that it does not require any maintenance.
But that indicates its brilliance, the brilliance of its maker. So, therefore, we will not perceive God at the physical level because God is by definition non-physical. It is like asking, how much do I have to develop my hearing ability to smell a gulab jamun? No matter how much my hearing ability develops, the methodology is not right for the object to be perceived.
Similarly, material progress won’t lead us to perceive God as a quantifiable reality. But at the same time, for an astute observer, the causal completeness of material nature itself can point to God, just like an excellent programme which requires no intervention points to the brilliant programmer. Yes, do we have time? So, in the Reiki system, there are seven chakras and we try to raise our consciousness, our energy to the highest chakra.
And then when the energy reaches that chakra, then what happens exactly? Is it death or something higher? Basically, the subtle level of reality is physical, physical reality, spiritual reality, and there is subtle material reality. It’s called the psychological or mental level of reality. So, the subtle reality has been mapped in different schools of thought in different ways.
And these are all models of reality. It’s like in quantum physics, there’s a model of reality. In classical physics, there’s a model of reality.
According to quantum physics, this table doesn’t exist. All that exists is waves. But when I as an observer, look at this table, then the wave function collapses and the appearance of a table comes.
So, Einstein just did not like this idea at all. He wrote a letter to Neil Bohr, who was a prominent proponent of quantum physics, he said that, I would like to believe that the moon continues to exist, even when I’m not looking at it. But according to quantum theory, it doesn’t exist.
So, what I mean by this is that the model of quantum physics just doesn’t make sense to our ordinary way of thinking. But it’s the model which in terms of mathematical logic works. So, different now exactly how the model of quantum physics maps onto the world that we experience, the physical object, that is something which even advanced quantum physicists have not been able to figure out.
There’s a thinker who said that, if you think you have understood quantum physics, then you have not understood quantum physics. So, each model of even quantum physics, it works in its own way. And we use it that model for the purpose that it serves.
So, why I’m talking about this is, the Sat Chakra model is a particular way of looking at the world, looking at the human body. And we talk about consciousness as rising from one level to another level to another level. Now, not so much consciousness, it is more like the seat of consciousness, which is the energy centre of the body which rises upwards.
So, essentially this correlates with the elevation of the consciousness from the physical level to the spiritual level. The higher the energy centre of the body, the higher is the elevation of the consciousness also. Now, this elevation of consciousness can happen through the process of, through various processes.
And essentially, when the consciousness comes to the level of the Brahma Randhra, that is called, when it comes to that level, from there, one goes upwards. Now, how far up one will go? From there, one will make significant spiritual evolution. But whether the evolution will attain culmination or not, that depends on the level of our desires.
If we still have a desire, with this higher consciousness, I would like to enjoy material pleasures better. Then we will return to the physical level of reality to enjoy it again. But if we want to enjoy eternal life at a spiritual level, then we get liberated.
So, the important thing is not just the energy centre entering into the head level. It is the overall purpose of life. It is overall understanding of what I want to achieve in my life.
Our consciousness may be raised to a higher level in the sense that energy centre is high up, but we may be looking for, looking still for mundane things. It says that a vulture flies high in the sky, but from there it is looking down at corpses. So, it has risen high, but its conception of life has not really changed.
For, of course, in the vulture’s body, it is looking for food itself and its food is corpses. But the vulture is used as an example to illustrate that going high doesn’t necessarily lead to elevation of one’s purpose. So, through the mechanical system of raising of chakras, we can come to a higher level of consciousness.
But specifically where we will go will depend on what the purpose of our life is. So, there are various systems of yoga. The process of bhakti yoga focusses not so much on mechanically raising the chakras, but on raising the purpose of life itself.
So, when we understand that our purpose is to love the Supreme and to lovingly unite with the Supreme ultimately and to lovingly serve the Supreme in this world, that elevation of the purpose automatically leads to the elevation of the consciousness. Thank you. Good question.
So, I thank all of you for your enthusiastic