When we can’t even be sure whether this world will exist tomorrow, why bother thinking about some other world that is anyway held as inconceivable?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
while studying capacity to think about things beyond the knowledge, beyond the immediate animals, they are simply driven by the body urges, food, sleep sex, shelter that’s what drives them humans also are driven by this but humans have the capacity to think of things beyond these urges. Newton saw the fruit falling like there was a monkey who has seen the fruit falling, monkey just picked up the fruit, ate it and gone.
Many humans would have done the same thing also but Newton, what he did was he asked the question, what made this fruit fall? And that question led to the whole development of, not just the theory of gravity but it sort of set off the engine of modern science so basically it is the capacity to think beyond the immediate that is what distinguishes humanity and that is what enables humanity to make special progress. So now the same in our same capacity we can science basically takes it deeper into the material level and tries to understand the functioning of the material world better. Spirituality takes that same question beyond the material to the spiritual Einstein said that all sciences, religions and arts are proofs of the same tree of human knowledge.
The same human intelligence requires a particular direction, it comes up with science, another direction comes up with art, another direction comes up with the spiritual direction so it’s possible that this can, that the exploration of things beyond the immediate can just be idle speculations or idle lectures but when they are guided or when they are complemented by some methods for transformation and realization. Now I may sit here and speculate, maybe God exists, maybe God doesn’t exist, maybe the spiritual world exists, maybe the spiritual world doesn’t exist. This way Prabhupada said philosophy without religion is just mutual speculation so that means if there is a translation of religion, Newton has just proposed some theory but there is no experiment to prove that it’s true, it will not be of much use.
So similarly if along with the philosophical understandings there are some practices which we do the practices give us understanding, deeper understanding and realization of higher spirituality and from the perspective of those practices or from the perspective of philosophy even if in the future humanity will exist, we will be as souls will continue to exist. Bhagavata explains that we are our, that we are bigger than our biology. We are basically the body, the mind and the soul.
So the body we have destroyed and it is considerably possible let’s say some weapons of mass destruction come up, they are used by some hot-headed people. Humanity may wipe out but still the soul will continue to exist and the soul’s spiritual evolution will go on. Later on when this planet becomes habitable again or according to any cosmos this is not the only place where life exists.
Basically the soul’s spiritual evolution will go on irrespective of whether this earth is habitable for humans or not or humans existing or not. So your soul, my soul is on ongoing spiritual journey and to the extent it requires spirituality and to the extent we can practice spiritual processes for raising our consciousness to the extent we are moving forward in this journey and for some of us this journey will be completed in this lifetime for some of us this lifetime will be a part of the journey and will continue on in the next lifetime. So there is the possibility of the feeling that ultimately all this is futile, what is the use of feeling of all these things.
But then we can look at it in another way and say that okay, even if I don’t think about the spiritual, still everything is futile. I am going to grow old, get diseased and die. So that way if I see if I don’t enquire about spirituality I live materialistically, I am going to lose everything.
So what is the use of it all? If you just think of the pointlessness it is not just spirituality that is pointless, even materialistic life is pointless because I am going to lose everything ultimately. So you know we, skepticism is good, but you know we have to be skeptical about skepticism also. That means I have to evaluate skepticism can only tell me what is wrong skepticism can never tell me what is right for understanding what is right I have to go beyond skepticism to exploration.
This makes some level of sense, let me explore it to find out what it is all about. So Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita Vita Raga Bhaya Krodha that there are three obstacles to your path Raga is attachment to this world Bhaya is fear of what is out there and Krodha is not a sign, that is frustration born of born of inability to decide whether this is right or that is right or what is right. So Prabhupada was in that sense very pragmatic once in New York after a class some young man came to talk to her and asked, Swamiji your philosophy sounds like that of Buddha Prabhupada did not get into an elaborate discussion about which one is better Do you follow Buddha? Follow Buddha, follow Jesus follow Krishna, follow someone don’t just talk So if we move from, we do philosophical analysis to the best of our capacity and we move on to some experiential practice then we will ourselves realize whether the path is giving us access to higher reality or we need to explore some other path but by endeavouring in this way even if we don’t come to a right path right now, that endeavour itself is actually expanding our consciousness, that endeavour itself comprises a step forward of evolution and eventually we will come to the path that is right for us and we will progress much much more rapidly and as we teach it