“Mystic Powers and More” (SB 3.23.34)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 23, Text 34. “Mystic Powers and More.” Alachua - February 26, 1997 / (083)

[Text 34]       

When she thought of her great husband, the best of the sages, Kardama Muni, who was very dear to her, she, along with all the maidservants, at once appeared where he was.  

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda: 

It appears from this verse that in the beginning Devahūti thought herself to be dirty and dressed in a very niggardly way. When her husband asked her to enter the lake, she saw the maidservants, and they took care of her. Everything was done within the water, and as soon as she thought of her beloved husband, Kardama, she was brought before him without delay. These are some of the powers attained by perfect yogis; they can immediately execute anything they desire.

om ajñāna-timirāndhasya

jñānāñjana-śalākayā

cakṣur unmīlitaṁ yena

tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ 

śrī-caitanya-mano-'bhīṣṭaṁ sthāpitaṁ yena bhū-tale

svayaṁ rūpaḥ kadā mahyaṁ dadāti sva-padāntikam

So the translation:

When she thought of her great husband, the best of the sages, Kardama Muni, who was very dear to her, she, along with all the maidservants, at once appeared where he was.  

Here we have a description of activities involving yogic mystic power. So a number of points can be made about this. I was just writing an article on religion and science for a periodical. I was requested to write the article. So, I was looking into the question of the relation between religion and science. And it's interesting to see the way things have worked out. 

Basically, the approach taken by science has been to consider reality from the point of view of mathematical models, that is, simple formulations that you can manipulate using the human mind. So, from the time of Isaac Newton up to the present, this approach to understanding nature has been very prominent. And the idea has been that: Well, this is rational, and that things that cannot be understood using this approach have to be dismissed. So, this has had the effect of cutting out a great deal of the material found in religious texts. And ultimately it leads to elimination of the position of God as an active agency within the material world.

Basically, the reasoning is quite simple. God cannot be reduced to a formula or understood in terms of some simple theory. So, therefore, if you're going to explain nature, you can't have God playing a role in it because in that case, simple theories aren't going to be adequate. So, therefore you eliminate God from nature. This, of course, eliminates most of what the śāstras are saying because they describe the activities of God within nature: Kṛṣṇa coming within the material world and performing all kinds of amazing activities. And of course, it's also part of the śāstras to describe what you might call “secondary extraordinary activities,” which are connected with different appearances of the Lord. So, in this case, we have this story which is leading up to the birth of Lord Kapila, and the story seems to have rather remarkable features.

So, it is said here by Śrīla Prabhupāda, that this illustrates some of the powers attained by perfect yogis. But of course, even powers attained by yogis have to exist in some kind of context that is already there. In this case, Devahūti was sent into a Lake, Lake Bindu-sarovara, to get fixed up so she was presentable to her husband. And, this is a little bit unusual. You enter into a lake, and lo and behold there's a house there inside the lake, and there are all these maidservants there. So how does that work? 

[5:03]

Normally, you would expect that if you entered into a lake you would get wet, and you might see some fish and water plants and things like that. So, what happens? What were these maidservants? And when they weren't dealing with Devahūti, what did they do anyway? Did they live in the lake? What was going on? So, of course, we see other examples of things like that. Arjuna was looking into the river Yamunā at one point along with Kṛṣṇa and he also saw a dwelling there which belonged to Kālindī, another personality who it seems was living within water.

It turns out there are a lot of examples of this kind of thing. I was looking once at the description of Kashmir and the history of that country. There's something called Nīlamata Purāṇa, which describes the history of Kashmir. And it says originally this was a dwelling place of the Nāgas. And according to the descriptions, the Nāgas would live within lakes and springs, and there are stories about how people would visit them there. So, the person goes into the lake and lo and behold, instead of just being underwater, there's a place where beings are living and so forth. Let's see, I think in the Mahābhārata, Bhīma was dumped into a river after being poisoned and he drifted down and entered into one of these places. 

Then again, Arjuna was taking bath in the Ganges up near Rishikesh. Or was it? Yeah, somewhere in that area. And he was abducted by Ulūpī, who was the daughter of a Nāga king, and dragged down into the river. But lo and behold, there was a palace of the Nāgas. So, you see this kind of theme repeatedly described. If you look at other cultures, you also see this sort of thing in old traditions. If you look, for example, at the story of King Arthur, there was the Lady of the Lake who provided all kinds of things for him. So, somebody is living within a body of water. So, that's one aspect.

Another aspect here is that things are moving from one place to another in an unusual way. So, it's described here that Devahūti appeared suddenly before her husband. It's not that it says that: Well, she got out of the lake and traveled some distance to where her husband was. But it seems to be an abrupt appearance.

Now, there's something called prāpti-siddhi, which seems to be what is involved here, in which you can go from one place to another without crossing the intervening space – sort of an instantaneous mode of travel. If you look in folio under pomegranate, you can find a reference to this. Śrīla Prabhupāda told a story that apparently when he was young, he had a sort of family guru, whose guru was a mystic yogi of sorts. And so, this guru said that his guru demonstrated for him the power of prāpti-siddhi by obtaining some pomegranates from Kabul. So, they were in India somewhere and Kabul is in Afghanistan. But the yogi was able to somehow grab a hold of some pomegranates in Kabul and bring them there to India where Prabhupāda’s guru was able to see them. So, this was an example of prāpti-siddhi.

So, the question could be: how do these accounts relate to reality as we know it? And that's an interesting topic. They certainly don't fit very well into the known laws of physics. And for that reason, most mainstream scientists, of course, would dismiss these kinds of stories out of hand. For example, the idea of something moving from point A to point B without crossing the space in between. That would have fundamental implications concerning the geometry of space-time. 

[10:18]  

Basically, these kinds of phenomena imply a different model of physical reality. And it appears to be that a model is required in which there are different, you might say, levels or dimensions of inhabited territory within the material world. For example, how can it be that in a lake, you can find beings living, other than aquatics, who are of course adapted to living in the water. But you find it's a general theme that such things exist. So, the implication is that you have some sort of higher dimensions of physical reality, and you also have physical laws above and beyond the kinds of laws studied in modern science. So, this creates a great conflict, then, between science and religion. In fact, many people at the present day and age have trouble relating to these kinds of accounts, because it just seems fantastic. And one can imagine that: Well, people long ago basically had pretty fantastic imaginations, and this is what they came up with. But today, we know that this kind of thing is not true.

Well, it turns out that things aren't quite that simple, as you might expect. For one thing, there is the whole topic of empirical observation of nature. There are scientific theories which are based, to a certain degree, on observation and comparison of observation with theory by precise calculations and so on. But there is a large body of empirical data that basically has been left out by modern science and you can trace this historically back to about the time of Isaac Newton in the 17th century. Actually, it's interesting to see what was going on in the 17th century.

If you go to the early part of that Century, you'll find, for example, that learned people in Europe typically believed in the reality of witchcraft. Now, if you go to the end of the 17th century, you'll find that learned people in Europe typically denied the reality of witchcraft. They thought there's nothing real there, it's all superstition. Of course, the very word superstition has changed its meaning. Now, by superstition, we mean something false, whereas it used to mean something superior to our own order of experience.

The turning point there was Isaac Newton, as a matter of fact, who for the first time introduced a mathematical theory showing how the planets would move in their orbits, very precisely. And this theory seems to apply to all matter. And it was quite an impressive accomplishment. Before his time, physical science was somewhat vague. People speculated in various ways, but basically, they just had verbal descriptions of things. Galileo dropped weights off the leaning tower of Pisa, so it is said, and made conclusions about how gravity works and how things fall. But it was all very vague and qualitative. But when Newton's theory came along, it was so impressive that people decided that all of reality must obey equations such as Newton had. And so, they threw out the old ideas. 

Another aspect was that it seems that in this period of European history and for a couple of centuries before, there were actually quite a few problems with witchcraft. People got quite, you might say, uptight about that subject matter. And it was customary to burn people at the stake on the suspicion that they were witches. Actually, a great deal of paranoia was generated. And in some cases, thousands of people would be literally burned at the stake. This, in fact, created such a problem that one can argue that in one sense, what the development of Newtonian physics did was provide a way to stop this kind of insanity. People were given an option of denying witchcraft and thereby saying that: Well, we don't have to burn witches because there really is no such thing anyway.  And in this way, they solved what was actually quite a severe social problem.

[15:44] 

It's interesting to note by the way that our belief in witchcraft still exists in some parts of the world. I was reading about a case in India that occurred not too many years ago, in which, in fact, someone was killed on suspicion of “diabolical activities.” So, this kind of thing still goes on in the background.

In any case, what were the claims of the people who believed in witchcraft? Well, you can read some interesting things. If you look at the early, as I say, 17th century. For example, there is a fellow named Glanvill who wrote a book entitled Saducismus Triumphatus, basically, “Triumph over the Sadducees.” In those days, the word “Sadducee,” which is from the Bible, was used to refer to a person who denies the reality of witchcraft and supernatural events. So, this book was intended to defeat such people, and it contained all kinds of examples of supernatural phenomena. And, it's interesting to see that these types of examples are very similar to the type of thing that you read about in the Bhāgavatam. Not exactly identical but nonetheless similar. For example, the idea of a person being suddenly transported to another location comes up. The idea that there are different kinds of beings existing on another stratum of existence is there and so forth.

In fact, if you look at the general world literature, you might say, of humanity, you'll find basic themes coming up over and over again. So that the kind of thing described in the Bhāgavatam does not seem to stand out as that unusual. It merely stands out as unusual when contrasted with the viewpoint of modern science. But modern science acquired extreme prominence through the great success of Newtonian physics, and then the different theories that followed that. So basically, that's been the history.

So the question is, is it possible then for science to break out of the rather narrow framework in which it is essentially imprisoned itself and consider a larger class of natural phenomena that have been reported throughout the ages? So that's a question that comes up in connection with these different topics.

I just thought I would mention another interesting thing about the Bhāgavatam, which I've been investigating recently. One may tend to think that the Bhāgavatam, basically, has a lot of far-out stories like this, which are a little bit hard to relate to. But there's nothing in there that is scientific in the modern quantitative sense. But I was discovering recently some examples which indicate that in the Vedic civilization, there was, in fact, a great deal of very precise quantitative knowledge. This thing that I ran across recently has to do with the unit called the yojana. Of course, in the Bhāgavatam, whenever distances are mentioned, they're given in yojanas and a yojana is about 8 miles. That's the length that Śrīla Prabhupāda uses.

[20:00]

Actually, for many years it appeared to me that the yojana was defined in a relatively unscientific or inexact fashion. For example, one definition of a yojana is that it's 4 krośas where a krośa is a shout, that is, the distance over which you can hear somebody shout – I guess on a clear day – which seems vague and adjustable. Or then again, a yojana has been defined as 32,000 hastas, where a hasta is the distance from your elbow to the tip of your fingers – it’s called a cubit. So, that also is quite vague because people's bodily measurements vary. But what I found out was actually inspired by a scholar who argued that in the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Near East and so forth, units were defined in very precise ways based on measurements of latitude.

Basically, what you do, is you measure the length of a degree of latitude and that's something that's defined astronomically in terms of the earth. So it's a permanently defined length. You define your unit as a fraction of that. Well, it turns out that the yojana was defined as a fraction of the degree of latitude at the equator. In fact, there were two different definitions of the yojana. One was that it's 1/8 of a degree of latitude at the equator and the other, shorter yojana is 1/15 of a degree of latitude at the equator.

And investigating this, I found quite a number of interesting things. To make a long story short, it turns out that if you look at the different definitions of the yojana, you can obtain a formula for the ratio between the circumference of the earth measured through the North and South Poles and the mean diameter of the earth. 

Now, if the earth was a perfect sphere, this ratio would be pi. How many people know about the number pi? It's a famous number. Well, it turns out the earth is not a perfect sphere. It's slightly flattened at the poles. So, it turns out that ratio is not exactly pi. It’s slightly different. It turns out that this ratio that you can calculate, simply based on the definition of the yojana, agrees with the modern value for that ratio out to five decimal places. So, it's an almost exact value. And this is entirely based simply on the definition of the yojana that you find in the Bhāgavatam and other Vedic literature. 

So, the indication is that people back in the old days, the old Vedic times, actually did have precise quantitative knowledge. Otherwise, how could one simply come up with a formula like that? So, that's another aspect. So, I should stop there; we're supposed to not go beyond 8:45 and maybe there'll be some questions. Yeah.

Question:  [unclear]

Answer:  Well, the problems involving the soul in biology already come up before any consideration of modern gene splicing and things of that nature. Basically, you can take an earthworm, cut it in half, and – if you keep it so that it doesn't die – it will grow into two worms. Also, the flatworm, the planarian, can be sliced up in this way and it will grow into duplicate copies.

[25:03]

Of course, you can do this with plants very easily. You can break off a twig from a plant, and plant it, water it properly, and it will grow into a whole new plant. So, there's always the question of: Well, where does the soul come in? So, evidently, there is a system for introducing souls into bodies. One has to postulate that if one is going to attribute any reality to this whole idea of the soul and transmigration and so forth. It's not something that just happens automatically in a mechanical way, but it has to be controlled by some kind of higher administrative system. 

So, basically for lower animals, there are various modes of reproduction. Sexual reproduction is only one of them. There are animals actually who alternate between sexual reproduction and splitting of the body into different parts. Then there are animals who sometimes reproduce by what's called parthenogenesis. The egg produces an embryo without being fertilized. And then they switch back to sexual reproduction where the egg becomes fertilized, and so forth. In the natural world, there are all kinds of different modes of reproduction. 

So, if you propose that a soul is there in the body, then there must be some kind of control system for introducing the souls. So, in fact, this actually can be related to what I was saying previously about higher dimensions of existence in which this world of our direct sensory experience is embedded. There must be a lot going on that we don't directly see. Of course, we don't directly see the soul or the subtle body, at least in normal states of consciousness. So, basically, that's what is involved. 

So, you can even ask what happens, for example, with identical twins. Identical twins in effect are what you could call natural clones. Because what happens is, when the fertilized egg makes its first cellular division, normally the two cells stick together and they continue to divide into 4, 8, 16, and so forth and it eventually forms the embryo. But if something knocks the two cells apart, then they can begin to divide, and they will produce two embryos which have exactly the same genetic material, and so, you get identical twins. But then one would have to say: Well, if one soul at conception had been introduced into the original egg, and now it's split apart into two eggs, you have to bring in another soul.

So, evidently that is done. There's some way of doing that. And it is presumably done according to some karmic accounting system. That is, the souls are placed into different bodies according to their karmic situation. Yeah.

Q:  [unclear]  

A:  Well, it's true enough. Sounds like a cop-out. But the fact is, just as in the Bhagavad-gītā, it says that the body is a machine made of māyā: yantrārūḍhāni māyayā. So, what you have is the subtle body and the soul riding in this machine. And in fact, when biologists study the living cell, they find that it's an incredible machine. Actually, it's beyond any machine we could possibly design at the present time. Molecular biologists are studying it and oddly enough, they tend to advocate a theory of materialism based on their studies of the living cell.

But it should perhaps dawn on them that they're studying the ultimate in nanotechnology. Actually, nanotechnology is one of those buzzwords that has gotten a lot of publicity. It's based on the idea that: Well, we're making computers smaller and smaller and more and more powerful. So, what if we build machines directly out of molecules, the ultimate building blocks. Then you could take a computer of today and instead of having a chip that's maybe this big, you could actually make a microchip the size of a living cell and the thing would be much faster than existing computers. 

[30:32]  

Then just imagine making them self-reproducing, just like living cells. Then you could produce a computer in which, in one square millimeter you had hundreds of thousands of microprocessors. Just imagine what you could do with that. So, there are dreams like that. 

The thing is, the living cells have already done it. Nanotechnology is already there. So where is the technologist that created that? But they'll say: Well, that just happened by chance. We have to work very hard to engineer all these chips and so forth, but the living cell, well, you know it just happened. Yeah. 

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  Now the question is, in these higher dimensions that I was referring to, are there gross bodies, or is that just subtle? Well, it would appear that it's gross. After all, presumably, you know, basically you get the idea that Devahūti had a gross physical body which had gotten rather bedraggled-looking because she'd been spending years doing austerities and so forth.

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Yes, ghosts don't have gross bodies.

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  …reassembled and broken again and…

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  Well, it seems that… the basic point is we don't even understand gross material energy very well. There's more to it than one might think. Just like moving the pomegranates. Well, those are gross pomegranates. They're not subtle pomegranates. How in the world does it move from Kabul to New Delhi? For that to be possible, you have to totally rethink your ideas of gross material energy. 

I would propose that there are higher dimensions on the gross level. And in fact, the indication is that Devahūti was getting beauty treatments and so on for her gross body. It wasn't the subtle body that was having those treatments. Of course, there are a lot of very interesting phenomena involved in all of this. It would appear, first of all, that subtle energy can affect gross energy in very remarkable ways.

One example would be the famous stigmata of different Catholic nuns and so forth starting with Saint Francis of Assisi. In some cases, not only do the wounds of Christ appear on the hands and feet of the individual – and not where they historically should have occurred, by the way, because it's been argued that Christ must have been nailed through the wrists or else the nail would pull out – but they get these stigmata on the palms of the hands where it's traditionally thought that the nail went in. But, actually the flesh, in some cases, generates a nail. That is, a black elongated thing shaped like a nail that goes through from one end of the hand to the other. And this is just tissue forming this, but how in the world does it happen? You could ask: Well, are there genes for producing nails that go through your hands? It seems a little bit doubtful.

Q:  [unclear] 

[35:23] 

A:  Cells from the body, skin probably. But how in the world does the body decide to do that, based presumably on a mental conception of what the crucifixion was? But then when you look at this you find it’s a more general phenomenon. You can put a person under hypnosis and get different physical manifestations to develop on the person's body based on suggestions. There are examples of this kind of thing. 

Then to take another curious example, in the cases of reincarnation studied by Ian Stevenson: it seems that nearly in all of those cases, not all but a very large percentage, the people died violently in their previous life. It seems like this may have something to do with the fact that they remember the previous life. But in any case, it turns out that they very often have birthmarks corresponding to the injury that caused death in the previous life.

For example, there was a boy somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, I forget exactly where, who remembered a previous life as a dacoit. And he was a genuine guṇḍā in the previous life. And, as is appropriate for such persons, he died by being shot through the head. The bullet went in about here, through a very small hole and came out here through a big jagged hole.

Well, the boy had a birthmark here and an irregular birthmark on the other side of the head. And they were able to actually find medical records showing the autopsy results for the previous personality that matched up. In any case, this is a whole subject. But one sees an indication here that somehow subtle energy can affect the gross energy in remarkable ways also. Yeah.

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  There is the story – I think it may have been Narottama dāsa Ṭhākura; it's in one of Satyaraja’s books – but he was meditating on cooking sweet rice for Kṛṣṇa and he burned his hands in the course of that. When he came out of the meditation, his hands were burnt.

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, there's one like that too. Yeah.

Q:  My question about that is, I can see that they're able to send a rocket ship to Mars and come back. So, they have instruments that are capable of so much. How is it that if in the scripture, it says that there's only one source of light in the universe, why are scientists, with all their instruments been able to aim at these other things and have the temperature come back and all these ways that they're able to know everything else. How is it that this has slipped by? “Oh, I have to come up with this idea too” if only one source of light remains within the universe?

A:  Are you referring? So, the question is: If all light in the universe is merely a reflection of sunlight, then why haven't scientists figured that out with all their instruments and so forth? The whole issue of cosmology comes up. What is meant by “sun"? Śrīla Prabhupāda even said that the stars could be of the same quality as the sun, namely radiant entities. And of course, we have small radiant objects right here like these. After all, that's not reflected sunlight. Of course, we can say that that is derived ultimately from sunlight, probably due to burning of coal somewhere, but it's certainly a very indirect connection between that light and sunlight.

[40:39]

So, certainly, there are many sources of light within the universe. And Śrīla Prabhupāda did say that the stars could be of the same quality as the sun. So, it comes down to a question of why one would distinguish between the sun and the stars?

Now, interestingly enough in the Mahābhārata, there is a story about how Arjuna went to the kingdom of Indra and he passed through the region of stars before reaching Indra’s kingdom. And it stated there that the stars are self-luminous, but they're very large and they look small like oil flames from the earth because of the great distance. And it also stated that the sun and the moon cannot be seen there. 

Now I thought that was an interesting description because that agrees quite well with what scientists say you would see if you traveled out into the region of the stars. So, at the same time, that description contained a lot of things that they would not expect to see. It said that the stars are the hearts of kings who had died in battle and then elevated to heaven.

 

It also described them as habitations of Apsarās and so on and so forth. So, it could be argued that in many ways there is compatibility between the scientific description of the stars and the accounts you have in Vedic literature. But then, the accounts in Vedic literature also say many additional things which don't jive with the scientific picture. So that's basically it. So, all glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.