What science can provide – and what it can’t

[Science and spirituality seminar, part 1, at ISKCON, Connecticut, USA]

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
realizations. Thank you so much.
Thank you for coming today for this seminar and I will speak this in four parts. First, I will speak on what science can provide and what it can’t. The second session I will talk about what is spirituality and why do we need it.
Then third session I will talk about how science points towards spirituality. And the last session will be how we can tap both the science and spirituality together. So, do we have the power point? So, we live in an age where science has dramatically transformed the world around us.
It has luxuries which were unavailable or even unimaginable for people even a few decades ago or a few centuries ago. They are now common place. We consider the internet by which anyone can communicate with any person in the world, air conditioning by which we can adjust the air and the temperature as per our needs.
these are things which have become very common place. The whole world has changed significantly because of the effect of science and technology. So, as far as what science can provide, we can see it every day in the dazzling changes that have happened in the world and that are happening also.
So, if you had to look at what science can’t provide, you will be operating it or should I operate it? How do you want me to do that? You can keep it next to you. I have the BPD here. You can sit comfortably here.
So, you can go ahead. Yeah. So, if you look at this whole purpose of the session, the purpose is not to criticize science.
It is to contextualize science. Contextualize means to understand in what context science works, what is the world that it actually views. So, we will try to understand this.
while we are understanding, sometimes people think science and religion, science and spirituality is to end conflict. Well, there are some aspects which might involve some tension, but overall if you understand the scope of each of them, then we can move forward harmoniously. So, when we want to say that what science can’t provide, that itself might seem like a put down of science, that is not the point.
That is, every branch of knowledge has its purpose, and that purpose, it serves very well. Say a simple example of contextualization is, the president of America is a very powerful post, and the president of America deserves respect as a president of America. But if somebody starts claiming the president of America is the king of the whole world, well, the president may think he is the king of the whole the president of America has a very powerful place.
So, similarly for us, when we look at science, it is extremely powerful in approaching a certain aspect of reality. So, let’s look at this, move forward. So, the whole idea of scientific progress was fueled by the dream that there will be more and more comfort, more and more happiness, and more and more well-being among people.
And while we have more comforts than ever before, while we have phenomenal progress, we seem to have, along with a terrible distress. Terrible distress means that, for example, at a mental health level, unprecedented number of people are facing serious problems, anxiety, depression, suicide. So, one million people commit suicide every year.
That means almost one suicide every 40 seconds. And since I started this talk, about 10 people have committed suicide. So, I was recently at a mental health care center, in Hindi we may call a mental health care center as a pagal khana, but it’s not exactly like that.
That is a very blunt word. So, many people are mentally disturbed, but that doesn’t mean that they are mad. So, anyway, there was this, after my talk, there was one counselor, he came and was talking with me.
So, he said he works in the suicide intervention, the suicide helpline. So, if somebody becomes suicidal, I just make a call before that. And if somebody speaks some good words, encouraging words, hope giving words, they might just avoid committing suicide.
So, he said that there was this girl who called him after she committed suicide. Not that she died, but after she took the pills to commit suicide. Fortunately, she was not very far from a nearby ambulance, so the ambulance was rushed there and she was saved.
Now, why did she take those poison pills? She was in a relationship with some boy, and she called that boy, and that boy didn’t pick up her phone. From that, that was a trigger that she committed suicide because of that. So many times we would not pick up each other’s phones.
What happened in her mind, a whole story started off. Maybe he doesn’t love me. Maybe he’s with someone else.
Maybe he’s rejected me. Maybe in the future also, none of my relationship will work out. Maybe I’ll always be alone.
Oh, my friends will all be in relationships. I’ll be all alone. People will have pity on me.
I’ll be so lonely. I’ll be so miserable. Instead of living like that, such a pitiable and lonely life, better to end my life now.
So now, here, what happened is a small trigger caused such a big reaction. we will talk about how science operates by assuming that the world is law-bound. I’ll come back to this incident towards the end of this session also.
But here, from a logical perspective, it seems bizarre. Why would somebody commit suicide just because somebody didn’t pick up a phone call? The trigger seems to be so small. Normally, we assume that the world operates according to cause-effect correlation.
So, for example, if I just tick this, just tick this and say this flies off. Hey, what happened? It’s a small stimulus. How did this cause such a big impact? Such a small stimulus, why such a big impact? So this is where the mind comes into the picture.
So, how the world that science reveals is true, but at the same time, it is different from the world that we experience. I’ll come back to this incident later, but this is an example of how the scientific promise or the technological promise of paradise on the earth has not been fulfilled. From the history of science, when science started progressing more and more, initially the idea was that scientists, many of the pioneering scientists, they all believed in God.
And it was in the western world, Europe. So it is Christianity, which is prominently there. So many of the early scientists, they saw that just as Christianity offers God’s grace in the spiritual arena, so science offers God’s grace in the material arena.
So just as Christianity will deliver us spiritually, science will deliver us materially. So the idea was Christianity will take us to heaven in the other world and science will create heaven in this world. In many ways, science has improved conditions in people’s lives.
Science has improved our living conditions. But science, but overall people’s happiness level has not improved. So the psychological distress is one reason which will make us think, is there something more that is needed in life.
So this is a long quote by Arvind Schrodinger, a prominent Nobel laureate scientist. Would anyone like to read this? I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order but it is ghastly silent about all and sun dry that is really near to our heart that really matters to us.
Yes, thank you. So, what does it do? What science can provide and what it can’t provide? This is in the words of a scientist himself. It is a lot of factual information.
We can now say we can know from here, if you want to go to another place, exactly how far that place is. You want to go by plane, you can know exactly if I go at this speed, in this much time I will reach here. You go by spacecraft, you can go into various, we can cover very precise factual information it can give and it can put all our experience in a magnificently consistent order.
That means that if I hold this object, say if I take up this phone and I drop it, I won’t drop it, but if I drop it, it will fall down. Now, it will fall down and not only will I make it, if I drop it, it will fall down, if you take it and drop it, it will also fall down. So, your experience and my experience, we can put in a consistent order.
That means it makes sense. This is how this happens over here, this is how this happens over here. So, we understand the underlying principles and we can get consistency in our experiences, but it is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our hearts.
Now, what does he mean by what is really near to our heart? This is the second part. Who would like to read the second part? Yes? Yeah? Can you see it? Okay, sure. To not tell us a word about where physical pain and physical delight, it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad.
God and eternity science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not in line to take them seriously. Noble Laureate Erwin Schrodinger Thank you. Good.
So, now, science cannot tell us a word about red or blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain, physical delight. Now, what does he mean by this? Actually, these are what we experience in the world. This is what we say, this color is beautiful, this tastes good.
This is how we experience the world in terms of its color, its taste, its shapes, the sensory experiences that we get. But science cannot tell us about it. Say, if I use Photoshop to make an image.
Now, you can use Photoshop and you can tell in this image how much percent red is there, how much blue is there, how much green is there, and that precise percentage it can tell. But, whether the image looks good or not, that is something which the device itself can’t tell you. Because whether it looks good or not, that is something which is experienced by the observer.
So, it cannot tell us about physical pain or physical delight. We all sometimes go to doctors. Some of us may be doctors also.
So now, when we go, the whole purpose of medical science is to treat people’s pain. And yet, there is no device which can measure pain. You can measure, okay, you’ve got this degree fractured, and that means you must be in a lot of pain.
But, you can’t actually tell how much pain a person is feeling. There is no way to measure the pain in a quantifiable way. Because the pain is something which is experienced internally.
So now, why is it that science can’t tell these things? Because at the start of science itself, science adopted a particular methodology. And that methodology centered on dividing the world into what it called primary properties and secondary properties. So it considered primary properties are those which are quantifiable.
So length, breadth, height, mass, speed, velocity, all these are the science considers the primary qualities. And secondary qualities are, okay, beauty, taste, those which are aesthetic, those which are experienced in our consciousness. This is delicious.
And somebody else may say this is not so delicious. Now that doesn’t mean, although there may be some relativity in who says how delicious what it is. That is still an experience.
And for us that experience is important. That’s what actually shapes our lives. So now these, because they are not so easily quantifiable, science decided that we will not bother about this.
We’ll put those aside. And by focusing on quantifiable aspects of nature, science then came up with equations, with mathematical equations to explain how these quantifiable parameters within nature correlate with each other. And through this, through the equations, what is considered laws of nature, we are able to develop a lot of technology.
But, when focus goes towards one thing, it goes away from another thing. So right now you are hearing what I am speaking. So now, if you become focused on one thing, then the more you become focused on this thing, other things you may not pay that much attention to.
If somebody is coming in, you focus on who is coming in, then naturally what happens is, what else is going on in the room, the focus goes away. So now, century after century, as science focused, kept more and more on the quantifiable aspects of nature, the non-quantifiable aspects within the world started getting relegated into the background. But the non-quantifiable aspects are what we experience.
Say for example, we all want to be happy in life. Now can happiness be quantified? Can I go into some machine and stand in the machine and say, how much are you happy? Measure the happiness level. Sometimes they do world happiness survey but that is very subjective.
That is actually based on maybe people’s personal testimonies of how happy I am and some other questions which might indicate well-being. But they cannot directly measure that. That’s why things which really matter to us, we can’t explain them using science.
So this bifurcation of the world into primary and secondary properties that began as an operational tool. That is the way we can find equations, we can make things, we can device equations and then develop technology. So that is good as a tool but the result was the non-quantifiable aspects are getting more and more neglected.
And ultimately we all need a sense of direction and purpose in our life. Can you go ahead? So this is again Albert Einstein saying that you know in the West we have built a large ship, beautiful ship, it has all the comforts in it but one thing is missing. It has no compass and does not know where to go.
So we have enormous technology, enormous facilities but what is the purpose of life? What are we living for? What are we ultimately meant to do with life? This is a question which science does not answer. You may learn through science, okay if you do this, this will happen, but why we should do anything at all that any ultimate purpose, any overarching narrative which gives meaning to our life, that is very much deficient. Can you go ahead? So Victor Frankel, he was a famous psychiatrist, he wrote a celebrated book called Man’s Search for Meaning and in that he says, would you like to read this? So, thank you, find meaning in his life.
So he was a Jew and he was trapped by the Germans during the holocaust and he was in the concentration camps and he suffered terribly over there. And as a psychiatrist he was also observing people and he found that those people who survived the humiliation and the deprivation of the concentration camp, it was not necessarily the people who were the strongest, the healthiest, the fittest who survived. It was rather the people who had the strongest sense of meaning and purpose for their lives.
So for example, somebody said, okay, I have to survive this and then I have to go and meet my wife, I have to find my wife, I have to take care of my child, I am an author, I want to write this book and no matter what happens, I will stay alive and write this book. So if they maintained a sense of purpose, somebody was a this paper and it can cure this disease, I want to make sure I survive and I do this. So then those who had a sense of purpose for their lives, those whose life had some meaning, that those are the people who internally continued to fight and they are the people who survived.
So we all want pleasure, we all want power. Power means we want to influence things around us, we want to control things around us. That’s just human nature.
But that’s not what we fundamentally want. What we fundamentally want is meaning in our life. What is life all about? This is a very deep need and let’s understand this in a different way.
Next slide. Actually, the sense of purpose that brings power to us. If we consider that if we are doing some needlework at our home or if a needle is just lying in the house and we put our hand on it, suddenly it pierces us.
Yes, we are annoyed. Oh, this blood is coming. We are irritated.
We may shout at somebody who put the needle like that over there. But if we have a disease and we go to a doctor to get an inoculation, then at that time we ourselves go, tell the doctor, OK, give me an inoculation. Now the sensation is the same.
The same needle is piercing our body. But in one case, that needle piercing the body is just meaningless. Why this inconvenience? Why this pain? But in another case, because we know it is meaningful, it’s purposeful.
This is going to treat a disease in my body. Therefore, I’m ready to go through it. So we can tolerate even great problems if they are part of some meaningful pursuit.
But if they’re not a part of some meaningful pursuit, we just can’t. Why should I tolerate it? So it just becomes like that, that we need something higher to tolerate something lower. So, OK, my health is a higher value than the discomfort of a pinprick.
So for the sake of my health, I’m ready to sacrifice this. Now, all of us need some meaning. And if we are not provided some transcendent, transcendent means something beyond material, some higher source of meaning, then we try to find that meaning in something around us.
So going back to that earlier example of that girl who attempted suicide. Now for her, her whole sense of meaning and purpose, what she had invested in that relationship with that boy. If I don’t have this relationship, then what is the value of my life? Sometimes, you know, if people are too invested in a sports, say, seven, eight years ago, when India, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, there was the World Cup finals, which India won.
So after India won the World Cup and Sri Lanka lost, around five people in Sri Lanka committed suicide. Now, many people get frustrated. Sometimes in India, people, if the red team loses the cricket match, they may make effigies of the cricketers and burn those effigies or garland them with chappals, with footwear.
But here, people committed suicide. The players did not commit suicide, but the fans committed suicide. Why is that? Because we all need something to live for.
And if we are not provided something to, some purpose to live for, we put our heart into something which we think is important. So for them, their cricket team became all important. And when they found out, cricket team lost.
It was two, three finals, Sri Lanka had reached and lost it, one after another. So frustrated, they committed suicide. So basically, if our need for meaning and purpose is not fulfilled, it is not that we will have no meaning or purpose.
Rather, we will try to find our own meaning and purpose. And sometimes we may find meaning and purpose in something which is not really very great, which might be very small, and that small thing, if it goes wrong, it does not seem small to the person who is emotionally invested in that. For them, this seems to be the most important thing in their life.
So, I was once going in a train, and then in India, and suddenly, I saw somebody walking along in the train, very cautiously. He had something in his hand, it seemed like a beady bag. So, I approached him and said, Oh, are you also chanting? I asked him.
What, chanting? What is that? I asked him, what is this? Hey, don’t touch it! I said, what is that? He said, actually, he was trying to enter into the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest nail in the world. So, he had a long nail, and he had put that in a glove. So, he was wearing that.
So, now, for him, if he is walking very slowly, sometimes, even we don’t treasure our bead bag so much, as he was treasuring that bag. If that nail breaks, that means the record is gone. So, for him, he had invested himself completely in, Oh, I want to have the record, the longest nail in the world.
So, people can invest themselves in so many things. Now, it’s not that we can’t seek meaning in various things in this world. Yes, these things are also meaningful.
But, they cannot be the source of ultimate meaning. And, the scientific worldview does not provide us any knowledge about any intrinsic meaning in the world. And, we are left, all of us, to find subjectively whatever meaning we may find in our life.
And, if we don’t find meaning in something higher, then whatever circumstantial we might have, we might use that to find meaning. A few months ago in India, there were several young people who committed suicide. Because of, there is an online game called the Blue Whale Challenge.
This Blue Whale Challenge was, some Russian who had invented this game, and in which, you challenge the kids to do various painful things. You know, mark your body with some tattoo kind of object, which actually involves cutting your body. And, you post pictures on Facebook.
And, when you win in a particular level in the game, you go to a higher level. Now, in this higher level means, you cause more pain to yourself. And, the last level of this was, you commit suicide.
Now, you may say, to win some game online, who will commit suicide? But, there are several kids who did that. And then, parents were alarmed. Indian politicians said, ban this game.
And, they tried to find out who has done this. But again, what is happening? If people’s life does not have a higher meaning, they will try to find meaning somewhere. So, okay, you know, in this game, I came number one.
That is the purpose of my life. That is the success of my life. So, from an objective person’s perspective, I don’t know why end your life just to get some rank in some game.
But, no, when there is no higher meaning to life, somehow the mind may think, this is the meaning that I want. This is what I want to do. So, we all have various goals in life.
And, they are all important for us. At the same time, we have to have a broader context by which we will be able to understand which goal is how important. If we don’t have the broader context, then something trivial, we might make it very consequential.
So, when we talk about huge amount of mental health problems that people are suffering today. Of course, there are mental health problems. But, in a sense, they have always been there.
Relationship issues have always been there. You may say, oh, now we have more job insecurity. Well, yes, we have job insecurity.
But, in the past, what to speak of job insecurity? Farming is not always a very stable job. Friends don’t come, there is insecurity because of that. And, there were wars being fought.
There were some tyrants who would come and destroy kingdoms. So, life has always been troublesome. But, in today’s world, life’s troubles have become aggravated because we have been deprived of a sense of meaning.
How does life count? How does it all matter? Once that is deprived, in small problems, the mind can make them very big. We will revisit this point later when we talk about spirituality. But, can we move on? Now, somebody may say at this stage that actually life does not have any meaning at all.
It’s just you are imagining that life has some meaning. You have a need that you need some meaning and purpose. But, intrinsically, there is no meaning and purpose.
And, this is what some scientists also say. This is a paradoxical statement by an atheist. He is a physicist, again a Nobel laureate.
Steven Weinberg, he says, the more the comprehensible the universe becomes, the more it also seems pointless. That means, the more we understand, why do the planets move like this? That’s because of gravity. Why did this happen like this? This was thermodynamics.
Why did this happen like this? This is because of optics, rules of optics, laws of optics, whatever. So, the more we start making sense of the universe, the more it seems pointless. This is like saying, say, sometimes if you go to some ancient ruins, say Mohenjodaro or Rapa, or some ruins of ancient civilization, and there something is written in a script.
Now, we have to decipher what script is this? What does it mean? So, as we keep deciphering the script more and more, Oh, you know, this symbol means this letter. This symbol means this letter. And it’s very intricately, artistically carved, very beautifully written over there.
But the more we understand the script, the more the message seems senseless. Okay, this symbol means this, therefore, this is this word. This is this word.
This is this word. As we start making more and more sense of the script, the more what is written in that script seems senseless. This doesn’t make any sense.
If somebody has gone through the whole trouble of writing in a particular script, writing it very artistically, then there should be something meaningful said over there. So, it’s paradoxical that the more we start comprehending the universe, the more it seems pointless. So, what does it mean? Okay, what is the point of this? Why do apples fall? Why do planets move? Why does a river flow like this? All this is explained.
Why do we live? Oh, our life has no point. So, universe seems pointless means there is no ultimate point to it all. So, can you go ahead? So, what happens with the scientific worldview is, if science restricts itself to materialism, materialism means like I started by looking for quantifiable aspects of the universe.
Then science gives us islets of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness. Islets of meaning means that, okay, this makes sense, it’s like an islet. This makes sense, this makes sense, this makes sense, this makes sense.
But life? Oh, it makes no sense. Why do we exist? Oh, we are just lucky accidents. We just emerge from a primordial soup as lucky accidents.
We live for some time and we die. Now, what is the lucky accident which sometimes is used for the emergence of life? That is a very deceptive word. A lucky accident, it just means something destructive was about to happen and didn’t happen.
A lucky accident doesn’t lead to anything constructive. Oh, it is, you know, if, say, we were in a car crash, you know, we had, say, we had a sedan and we had a car and then it crashed another car. A lucky accident means, okay, nobody died or there’s not much damage to the car also.
But a lucky accident doesn’t mean, oh, you know, I had a sedan and I had a lucky accident and my sedan became a Rolls Royce. That doesn’t happen like that, does it? So, if life is existing and with our life we can pursue this means this, this means this, this means this, then what does, what is the point of everything in an overall sense? That is something which science itself does not answer this question. So now, if we say that, okay, there is no meaning at all, but then why are there islands of meaning? If somebody says there is no meaning to life, then why is it that science is able to find out that, okay, this means this, this means this, this means this, that means, why does nature obey certain laws? So this is again a question which is raised within science itself.
Can you go ahead? So, I think you can go ahead two more slides. I’ll come back to the slide later. So, why can science know what it knows? If there is absolutely no meaning in the universe at all, then why does nature follow any laws? Say, Newton saw the fruit falling.
What makes this fruit fall? And he found the law of gravity to explain this. But if we consider that everything is just unguided natural processes, then why should the world out there follow certain laws? So, if we consider three things are there, nature follows laws, those laws can be expressed in the language of mathematics. And not only that, we have a mind that can conceive mathematics.
See, mathematics, especially if you go to some abstract concepts, say, like, imagine a number, i, you know, square root of minus one. There’s nothing correlated with actually existing nature. But to understand that nature, it’s a very useful construct.
So, what does this mean to understand this again? We are discussing, the point is, is there some meaning or purpose to life? So, we are discussing, is there meaning in nature? If there were no meaning in nature, science itself as a search for knowledge would become useless. Because science assumes when Newton saw the fruit falling, he asked the question, what made this fruit fall? That means there is an assumption that fruits don’t fall by chance. There is some mechanism which makes them fall.
And if we understand that mechanism, then we can make sense of things. So, this capacity to make sense of things is what animates the scientific quest for knowledge. So, Albert Einstein is attributed to have said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Means that, if we consider that, say, the world out there was a result of unguided natural processes. The brains in here are a result of unguided natural processes.
Then why should the two correlate? Can you go back to the previous slide? Suppose we are lost in the forest, in some deep dark forest. And suddenly we look around and see a paper fluttering by. And that paper just comes by where we are.
And that paper has something written on it in a language that we understand. And that contains a message that we need to know. You know, go left, go along this road, cross this river, go across this mountain and then you’ll come home.
Hey, where did this message come from? First of all, that paper coming there itself is unusual. That paper having a message, it could be in any language. Why is it in a language that we understand? And thirdly, not only the language we understand, it is containing a message that we need to read.
Similarly for us, if we consider nature to be like that paper. We are in this world and we are trying to make sense of the world. And then we observe the world and we find certain laws by which it works.
So we use mathematics to express those laws. And why does nature work according to mathematics? Why should it? So the very fact that nature works according to certain laws suggests that there is some inner meaning in it. If there were no meaning in it, then we would not be able to make sense of anything in life.
So this last part will be a little technical. If you don’t understand it, you can understand the principle of it. So science tries to make sense of the world.
And when sometimes science is not able to make sense of the world, then what does it do? Say for example, Newtonian physics was… Can you just go straight ahead? Go ahead, go ahead straight. So this was the problem. Why should science work according to the laws of nature? This was the Nobel Law at Eugene Wigner.
Can somebody read this? Yes. Yes, thank you. So what he is saying is, why should nature be explainable in terms of mathematics? Now we didn’t make nature to work like that.
But it somehow helps us to make sense of things. So which we neither understand nor do we deserve. We didn’t do anything to get it.
So it is just there in nature and helps us to understand nature. So in the history of science, if you see A, when Newton developed the laws of physics and the laws of motion and the physics that developed with Newtonian ideas as the bedrock was called as classical physics or Newtonian physics. And this continued till the start of the 20th century.
In fact, Lord Kelvin has said that in the future generation, the biggest problem for physicists is going to be unemployment. We have explained the whole universe. Now they have nothing to do.
But sometimes we think the sky is very peaceful. It is such a nice weather. But in the distance, there is one dark cloud.
But that dark cloud indicates a big storm is coming. So like that, Kelvin saw the big, nice, peaceful sky. But there are two dark clouds.
Now one was blackbody radiation. Scientists couldn’t explain why blackbody radiation patterns occur in a particular way. Now to explain that, quantum physics came up.
And then very distant objects moving at very high speeds, their motion, Newtonian physics couldn’t explain. So for that, relativity came up. Now, without going into technicalities of this, the important principle is that if science cannot make sense of something, science was using Newtonian physics to make sense of things.
But when it couldn’t make sense of things using Newtonian physics, then what did it do? It didn’t. Nothing makes sense. With this theory, we are not able to make sense.
Now we need some other theory to make sense of things. So that theory works at a particular level. For our normal observational level, Newtonian physics works very well.
But if we expand our perspective to a bigger picture, then Newtonian physics doesn’t make sense. So then they came up with, as I said, relativity and quantum physics. So when science is not able to make sense of things, it doesn’t assume that nothing makes sense.
It assumes that things must make sense, but there must be some other theory with which to make sense of things. So similarly for us, if today we don’t know what is the purpose of life, if with current scientific knowledge we say, oh no, who knows what is the purpose of life? That doesn’t mean there is no purpose, that life doesn’t have any meaning. Maybe we need a broader worldview with which we can make sense of the purpose of life.
And it is that broader worldview that is provided by spirituality. So what spirituality is and how it provides us that broader worldview, I’ll discuss in the next session. I’ll summarize and then we can have some questions.
So I spoke today about what science can provide and what it can’t provide. Science can provide us technology with which we can amazingly transform the world around us. We have transformed the world around us.
But at the same time, something seems to be missing, because of which although there is so much progress, still there is so much distress. Millions of people every year are committing suicide. So what exactly is missing? We discussed that science approaches the world in a particular way.
So Arvind Schrodinger said that science doesn’t tell anything about physical pain and delight. It doesn’t taste of red or blue. So basically science looks at the primary qualities, that is measurable qualities and neglect the secondary qualities.
And the secondary qualities are what we primarily experience. Happiness, distress, taste, beauty. These are what make our life worth living.
So when these are divorced from the study within science, the result is a fragmented worldview. Wherein we may make sense of one aspect of reality, but the big picture remains ununderstood. And we discussed how we all need meaning and purpose.
We can tolerate suffering if it is meaningful. So if the pinprick is a part of the inoculation campaign, it’s bearable. A pinprick is just an accident, it feels irritating.
So for all of us, we face problems in our life. And if we have some worthy purpose and meaning in our life, then we need to tolerate those problems. But if we are seeking meaning and purpose in something very small, and if something distressing happens, it disrupts that.
We may just be unbearably distressed. Like a girl who committed suicide because somebody didn’t return her phone call. Or like fans who commit suicide because their team loses a World Cup match, World Cup final.
So they invest their meaning in that and just get disrupted by that. So if we don’t have some higher understanding by which we can invest, we can get a higher meaning, then we will seek meaning in something trivial, and that can have disastrous consequences. So somebody may say, actually there is no meaning, you are just imagining there is some meaning.
But science, it is paradoxical that it looks for meaning, it looks for pattern, it looks for order. And it finds them in nature. But the problem is that when we look for order everywhere, we find islands of meaning, but in the ocean of meaninglessness.
So the question comes then, why are there islands of meaning at all? It’s like, if something is written in a very carefully artistically drawn script, then why does it not make sense? If somebody took the trouble to rewrite it, it must have some sense to it. So if nature works according to laws, if everything were ultimately meaningless, then why would nature, which had come from unguided processes, have some laws according to which it works? Why should our brains be made in such a way that those laws can be understood? And why should the brains construct, which is mathematics, correlate with the nature’s functioning? If I get a paper which is written in a language which I understand, having a message that I need, then where did this paper come from? That’s a valid question to ask. So if science is able to find meaning in some aspects of life, then that indicates that there is probably bigger meaning also.
And if we are not able to find it, then we need a newer, broader theory of life. Just as in science, when classical physics stopped making sense of things, then science expanded its scope to quantum physics and relativity. Similarly, when we expand our scope with spiritual understanding, then we can get a sense of meaning and purpose that will make whatever problems we face in life bearable and that will make our life ultimately fulfilling.
So what spirituality is and how it brings meaning in our life, we’ll discuss in our next session. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
Are there any questions or comments? How to identify a pointless problem? How to identify a pointless problem means, how to identify what is the point of a problem? I think I’ll answer this elaborately when we bring in the broader worldview. But basically, in the spiritual understanding, there is the principle of action and reaction. So we are souls on a multi-life journey of spiritual evolution.
And everything that happens in our life, it may not always be because of an immediate cause. That means, say, I, you know, I just make some small mistake in my life. I just, I say, I speak one false word to someone, one wrong word to someone and that person just explodes at me.
The stimulus is small, but the reaction is very big. You say, why is this happening? So actually, the results that we get, the situation that we meet, are not just because of the immediate cause. I’ll talk about karma more now.
Karma is what? Karma and reincarnation, what enable us to make sense of life. But the idea is, you know, why something happens, there’s a difference between cause and purpose. Cause is why this happened.
Purpose is for what this is meant. The two may be related, but they’re not exactly the same. We can’t always find a specific cause of why particular things happen.
But we understand generically, the purpose of everything is our spiritual growth, our spiritual evolution. So sometimes we might be able to find a specific. Okay, why did this happen to me? Because maybe in the past I did like this to this person.
That’s why this person is so angry with me. And now the small thing I’ve done wrong, but they’re hitting back at me so severely. It could be like that.
So when we talk about a purpose for life, we understand purpose means not so much why this happened, but what am I meant to achieve in life? And how can I go towards that? Like I said, when I give the example of the pinprick coming in my life, say the injection, I’m taking inoculation. So at that time, it is not that I necessarily know why I got that infection. What I know is that by taking this, that infection will go down.
My health will be better. So similarly in life, if we consider life to be like rowing a boat in an ocean, then having a sense of purpose does not mean that we know specifically why a particular wave hits us. That is not known.
The ocean is so vast, which wave will come from where and why it comes, we don’t know. But we do know where we are meant to go. Okay, this wave has come, it has hit me.
I may get off course temporarily, I may be disoriented. But as soon as this wave passes, I reorient myself. So we can’t go into that micro analysis of trying to find out the cause of everything, why particular things happen.
But what we can do is, we can have an overall purpose for our life. And once we have that overall purpose, say the Bhagavad Gita tells us that overall purpose is our spiritual evolution, the deepening of our spiritual realization, the strengthening of our connection with Krishna, the purification of our heart. So when we focus on that purpose, then no matter what goes wrong otherwise, still we can keep moving forwards.
Okay, this happened, I don’t know specifically why this happened, but I’m going to move on in my life. So that’s how devotion gives us a purpose, which takes us beyond the specific causes of the particular problems we will face in our life. If a person is committing a suicide, so that means the purpose of his or her life is very limited.
It is just like the Newtonian physics. And then because he or she is not able to deal with that problem, so it is not making any purpose in his or her life. So in that case, before ending their life or committing suicide, they should think of making a higher purpose, like in quantum physics, that example you gave.
So similarly, if a person wants to make a meaningful life, if that small purpose is not fulfilling, then spirituality comes into picture. Yes, correct. Any example of spirituality, of how somebody can find meaning through spiritual growth? Yes, at one level, if we say Shrila Prabhupada started this Krishna Consciousness movement this way itself.
There were people who just felt that, the hippies were people who felt that the normal materialistic way of living was just meaningless. Oh, have a job, have a career, have a family, what’s the point of it all? So they felt there’s no meaning in it. That’s why they’re looking for something higher.
Somehow they’re misled into believing that through drugs you’ll get some higher sense of meaning. And they just got addicted by that. But Prabhupada came and told them spiritual knowledge.
That’s how they got higher meaning. While sharing spiritual knowledge all over the world, I get this experience of how people get capacity to face life’s problems through spirituality. I often hear many stories like that.
I can share a couple of stories. One I’ll share right now, maybe another I’ll share later. So first time I came to America a few years ago, I had gone to a college, I spoke there on the topic of regulating our mental diet.
And after I spoke there, an American boy came and told me that just before this class, I was contemplating suicide. So I had been in a relationship with a girl, and that girl had suddenly broken up. She was very depressed.
So as I was gloomily moving along in the campus, at that time, I saw a poster of this program. Something within me said, just go for this talk. It says, now, after hearing your talk, I’ve understood that it’s not I who want to commit suicide, it is my mind which is prompting, commit suicide, commit suicide, commit suicide.
So I said, yes, it’s a very good understanding. The Bhagavad Gita can help you better understand the difference between you and your mind. I encouraged him to read the Bhagavad Gita, to come to the vegetarian society that was there, where the program was happening.
And I told him also about Gita Daily. I write every day on the Gita, on a blog, gitadaily.com. I encouraged him to read that. So every year when I, once or twice when I come to America, and I go to that college, I used to meet him.
So last year when I had come, he met me again and told me he faced a similar situation. Again, he was in a relationship with a girl and she unilaterally broke up. And she said that, no, I don’t want to talk with you.
I’m going to block your phone. Don’t try to contact me. So he just went numb when he got those news.
He just went straight to his room and he locked the door, shut the windows, pulled down the drapes, curtains, and then turned off the lights. And after that, he liked to sing. So he picked up a violin and started singing Hare Krishna.
He said, I was singing continuously for six hours. Just calling out, pouring out my heart to Krishna. And he said that that time, I felt as if I was enveloped in some divine presence.
I felt as if I was bathed in some sublime light. I felt a comforting, soothing presence all around me. So he said that actually that which could have been a very depressing time of my life, it became one of the most enriching experiences of my life.
So what happened over here? He still needed relationship. But when this didn’t work out, he had something higher. So bhakti gives, it’s not that we reject whatever, whatever our sources of meaning and purpose in our life at the immediate level.
We need them. We have jobs, we have families, we have responsibilities, and we are invested in them. We can’t just be indifferent to them.
But we don’t make them our ultimate source of meaning. And if something doesn’t work, then we don’t get so disoriented that we feel I can’t do anything. But we turn towards spirituality.
We turn and take shelter of Krishna. And there we can find higher meaning. Any other questions? Yes.
So now, like Prabhuji said, I’m a neuroscientist. Scientists can’t understand what is the basis for consciousness. Krishna explains that it is soul that pervades all over our body.
They don’t accept soul. They say that mind is here. Our philosophy explains mind in the heart.
But they don’t accept it, so they can’t explain that. Prabhupada explains in one place in the Bhagavatam that they also have, they have seen their material, they also have the path. So now they are speaking your way, giving you spirituality.
So spirituality can explain consciousness. So now they are giving, I think Prabhuji and I talked in your last meeting, that now they are giving a theory, a spiritual theory of consciousness. So it is where science can’t have anything to explain.
Now they are thinking to use a theory explained in Bhagavad Gita that everything is conscious. Last Krishna is in every proton, in every particle. Thank you, that’s a good point.
Science is recognizing more and more the need for consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality. We’ll talk about that in later sessions also. Thank you.
Prabhuji, Hi Krishna. So, I know we are getting late to Dharavi, so wait for the next session. But this is one question which I was thinking right from the time when the discussion started.
So being about the point of the life and all. So, at this point in time, on this earth, there is so much happening, right? There are people, millions of people are dying, maybe there are thousands of people maybe taking birth. There is somewhere some distress is happening, somewhere some marriage is happening.
So there is a lot going on at this point in time. Is this all happening automatically? Is Krishna controlling it? Does he know why that is all happening? I mean, I cannot know, nobody can know. How do we explain that? Okay.
So, there are hundreds of things happening, maybe somewhere there is a war, somebody is dying, somewhere somebody is getting married. So is everything controlled by Krishna? Does Krishna know everything, why it is all happening? We have to understand what we mean by whether Krishna controls everything. Krishna has given all of us free will.
And by our free will, we can choose what we want to do. So, if Krishna were the absolute controller, that would mean we would have no free will. So, the most graphic example of how it may appear as if God is not in control or something which raises questions about God’s absolute control over the ship is say, the Mahabharata incident where Krishna goes as Shanti Doot, as the messenger of peace to Duryodhana.
And Krishna tries in various ways to persuade. I have whole series of classes on that. Krishna uses Saam, Daam, Bhed and Danda, all possible methods to try to dissuade Duryodhana from fighting that war.
And yet Duryodhana does not listen. So, when Duryodhana does not listen, Krishna is God. And Duryodhana is just one tiny soul.
So, can a soul defy God? If he can, and if Krishna had gone there to seek peace, he did not succeed. So, can God fail in something? Actually, what it means over here is that Krishna is a supreme controller. But that doesn’t mean he is the absolute controller of everything that everyone does.
We all have free will. यथा आकाश्यस्तितोनित्यम् वायु सर्वत्रगोमहान् तथा सर्वानिभूतानि मज्ठानित्योपधारया In 9.6 in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that just as the wind forever stays within the sky, similarly, all living beings reside within it. If we envision the sky to be like an upside down bowl, then the sky doesn’t restrict the movement of the air.
It restricts the area of the movement. The air can move up, move down, move left, move right, but within the scope of that bowl. Similarly, God has given each of us free will.
And with that free will, we can choose to act in particular ways. And sometimes or many times, we as souls, being driven by our lower desires, we may act in ungodly ways. So, if somebody commits suicide, is it that God wants them to commit suicide? Obviously not.
God has given us life. Why would he want us to destroy our life? When some terrorists blow up some innocent people, does God want that? No, it is they misusing their free will because of which they are doing it. So, when things happen in this world, God is the ultimate controller.
But it is not that he is immediately orchestrating every person like a robo. But God’s plan is so inclusive that even if people make wrong choices, still he will arrange for his plan to move on even through his wrong choices. I’ll give two examples to illustrate this.
First is say, in a school, some students fail in their exams. Now, is it that the school wants the student to fail? Is it the school’s purpose that the students fail? No. So, the students failing, we could say, is within the school’s plan.
That means, if the students fail, the school has a plan. If you fail, then you give this exam again. And if you have only one or two papers remaining, you go to the next class, but you do this also.
But if you have a lot of papers remaining, then you do this class again. So, there is a plan for them also. But that does not mean that the, that is the, so we could differentiate between plan and purpose.
The school’s plan includes students failing. But the school’s purpose is not that students fail. Similarly, everything that happens is within Krishna’s plan.
Even if somebody does something wrong, somebody hurts someone, somebody angers someone, this person this, this person that, some people just do terrible things. Is it that God wants those people to do those things? No, they are using their free will. But the way they use their free will can also be integrated into God’s plan.
God’s purpose is that all of us use our free will properly, all of us do good things, all of those things which elevate us spiritually, and ultimately we become spiritually conscious and we become joyful. But we have free will and we can choose to act differently. The other example could be, say, Google Maps.
Say, if I, today morning I came from Tobacco to Connecticut. Now, we had a map, Google Map said, okay, go this way, go this way. If the Google Map is saying go right, and if I go left, then what happens? Google reroutes and gives me a path again.
Now, again it says turn right, again I turn left. What happens? Again Google reroutes. Even if I take a hundred wrong turns, Google will still reroute and give me a path.
So, no matter how many wrong turns I take, I am still within the plan of Google. But that doesn’t mean Google wanted me to take all those wrong turns. Isn’t it? So, no matter how many bad things people do to us, or no matter how many bad things we ourselves do, we are still within the plan of Krishna.
But every wrong thing that anyone does, that will also have consequences. Google will give me a path back from wherever I go, but if I have taken a wrong turn, I will have to cover that much territory more. It is going to take more time.
So, the wrong turns will have consequences. But that doesn’t mean that Google wants us to take the wrong turns. So, similarly when people do bad things, it is not that God wants people to do those bad things.
But if they do those bad things, then there is a plan. That is within the plan by which even those bad things can be used ultimately for pointing people and getting people to the right end. Does that answer your question? Any last question? Maybe after that we will have a break.
Hare Krishna Guruji. So, I have a question regarding soul and the body, and how they are kind of related to death. So, we say that the consciousness in the body is because of the soul, and death means that the soul has left the body.
So, the question is, do we die because soul decides to leave, or the soul decides to leave because the body is dead? So, let me give an example. Sometimes, if soul is what is the reason of consciousness, then why does death happen because of physical injury? We see there are accidents and the physical injury happens, and because of that, death happens and soul leaves. So, now if the soul that is the source of consciousness and life, then why does bodily injury cause death? The relationship between soul and body is complex.
Broadly speaking, we can say that the soul is like the driver, the body is like a vehicle. But the soul is also in the vehicle for a particular purpose. So, we could say that there are three possibilities.
Let’s consider this car and driver analogy. One is that the driver is driving the car, and the driver decides to leave the car. Why they decide to leave the car? Well, they had hired the car for a particular amount of time.
They had hired it for one day. Now one day is over, they have to leave the car. Then, when the driver leaves the car, the car will stop moving.
That’s one. So, the second is that the driver wants to go somewhere, and they are using the car to go there. But the car crashes into another car or a tree or whatever.
The car gets damaged. And the car can no longer move any forward. Then, again the driver will get out of the car and go to another car.
Third is, suppose both these happen at the same time. Like the persons, the time for which they had hired the car, that gets over, that time the car crashes. Then also, the person will leave the car and go out.
So now, if we consider the relationship between the soul and the body, the soul is in the body for a particular purpose and a particular period. Both. So, the period for which we are in the body is determined by our past karma.
And when that period gets over, the soul leaves the body. And when the soul leaves the body, that is the time when we say the person has died. The body stops functioning, just like the car will stop functioning when the driver leaves.
So, we think we are the body, but not only are we not the body, we are not even the owners of the body. We are tenants within the body. And we stay in this body for a particular period, which will end when we don’t know.
But it will end at some time. So, the period ends at a particular time. Conversely, another thing is, the body meets with an accident.
There is a disease, there is a heart attack, there is a stroke or whatever. And the body gets irreparably damaged. Then again, the body becomes useless for the soul to continue in.
And the soul leaves the body. And what about the third situation? The period ends and the purpose is also no longer served. So, normally nature works in a way that the material level of functioning is complete in itself.
Not ultimately complete, but functionally complete. The Isopanishad says, ओम् पूर्णमदा पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात् पूर्णमुदच्चते पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादायः पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते That the absolute truth is complete. And whatever emanates from the complete whole is also complete in itself.
So, the material world has also emanated from the supreme. So, therefore, the material world also appears complete. Of course, it cannot exist without the transcendence.
It has to have a source higher. And it has higher source and it has to be sustained by the higher. But in itself, in terms of functionality, it does not need anything higher.
So, usually how things function at the material level is, there is a material cause and a material effect. So, when the body gets damaged, then it is irreparably damaged and the person dies. So, in the sense that both these things, the person’s time duration of living in a particular body ends and the body’s capacity to function also ends.
Normally, both these go together. So, that’s why it is that the person, the soul leaves the body when the body is irreparably damaged. But there are converse cases, there are exceptional cases in both ways.
Sometimes the person’s body is irreparably damaged, but still the person lives. It’s what are called as medical miracles. You should have, say, this much level of this particular chemical in your body.
But people have far higher level. You can’t be living, but the person is alive. So, these are not many, but they are there, such cases.
And conversely, some people just die and there is no diagnosis. This person was healthy and sometimes some people die in their sleep. And then why did they die? We can’t find out any specific cause that triggered their death.
So, these exceptions. So, these, we could say, most cases can be explained by normal phenomena. But these fringe cases, they actually point to the limitations of the standard explanations.
So, in science also it is said knowledge expands at the fringes of knowledge. Now, the cases which are not explainable by the normal theories, they are what cause us to expand our knowledge. So, normally we can explain at a material level, this cause, causes effect.
This, but damage to the body, cause death. And that’s why person is no longer living. But that alone is not the complete explanation.
Does it answer your question? Thank you. So, we’ll stop here. And it’s 11.46 now and 47.
So, by 12.05 we’ll assemble again. And then we’ll have a session and we’ll have question and answer after that. Thank you very much.