“Summary of Worcester Polytechnic Institute Presentation” (SB 3.14.41)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 14, Text 41. “Summary of Worcester Polytechnic Institute Presentation.” Alachua - Spring, 1996 / (032)

[Text 41]

At that time the Lord of the universe, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who is the well-wisher of all living entities, will descend and kill them, just as Indra smashes the mountains with his thunderbolts.

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda: 

As stated in Bhagavad-gītā (4.8), the Lord descends as an incarnation to deliver the devotees and kill the miscreants. The Lord of the universe and of everything would appear to kill the sons of Diti because of their offending the devotees of the Lord. There are many agents of the Lord, such as Indra, Candra, Varuṇa, and Goddess Durgā, or Kālī, who can chastise any formidable miscreants in the world. The example of mountains being smashed by a thunderbolt is very appropriate. The mountain is considered the most strongly built body within the universe, yet it can be easily smashed by the arrangement of the Supreme Lord. The Supreme Personality of Godhead does not need to descend in order to kill any strongly built body; He comes down just for the sake of His devotees. Everyone is subject to the miseries offered by material nature, but because the activities of miscreants, such as killing innocent people and animals or torturing women, are harmful to everyone and are therefore a source of pain for the devotees, the Lord comes down. He descends only to give relief to His ardent devotees. The killing of the miscreant by the Lord is also the mercy of the Lord towards the miscreant, although apparently the Lord takes the side of the devotee. Since the Lord is absolute, there is no difference between His activities of killing the miscreants and favoring the devotees. 

So, the basic principle being discussed in this verse and purport is that Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, sometimes descends into this world for the sake of His devotees. But He also has many agents with which He can carry out his activities within the material universe. So these agents are described as persons. So you have a cosmological situation in which the universe is created by conscious control on the highest level. And it is inhabited by a hierarchy of beings, who are organized to act in the service of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. 

So this conception of the universe is quite different from the conception that you will hear about if you, say, go to a university and study modern scientific subject matter. There the basic conception that is presented is that matter is the ultimate basis of reality. And matter transforms automatically according to certain laws; and as a result of an evolutionary process of transformation of matter, personalities are produced in due course of time. Mainly this requires a lot of chemical reactions. So after many chemical reactions occur, over billions of years, you have the evolution of persons who can then observe the universe and finally come to an understanding of it. So these are the two contrasting pictures of reality from the modern standpoint. The idea that the various forces of nature are personified by actual conscious living beings with will and different limbs and organs and so forth is very much out of fashion, let us say. It's a concept that does not at all fit into the modern conception of things. Yet, it is possible to draw on both modern scientific ideas and empirical evidence to support this picture of the universe. So, I thought I'd just say a few words about that – we don't have too much time for the class today. 

[4:54]

Recently, just a couple days ago, I gave a lecture up at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, that's up near Boston. And this was part of a symposium that some students were organizing. The students, it seemed, were hoping to enlarge their educational opportunities a bit. They had heard about many far-out topics such as evidence of ancient civilizations going far back before what is accepted in their academic courses, and they had heard about UFO entities, and all kinds of far-out things of this nature. So, they had organized a symposium to basically go over some of these topics. So as it turned out in the end, it was a slightly disorganized symposium, but there were two speakers: one of them was this fellow Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who has given about 600 lectures to the effect that UFOs are real. So he is a person with what you could call a nuts and bolts persuasion. He believes that UFOs are actual spaceships coming from another planet. And he hopes that we can reverse-engineer them and figure out how to build such things ourselves. So, that was his perspective. But what I did was, basically, make a case for this hierarchical picture of the universe, that you find in Vedic literature using modern scientific material as the basis or foundation for making that case. 

So, the basic presentation was to first of all present some anomalous evidence. Essentially, I presented anomalous evidence in three different categories. The first anomaly that I presented was consciousness. It's interesting – consciousness has become a topic of controversy among scientists in recent years. There was a book by a philosopher at Tufts University named Daniel C. Dennett entitled Consciousness Explained, in which he tried to eliminate consciousness from the picture. But there was quite a bit of rebuttal to his book. Some people said “Well, this is just consciousness explained away!” So recently in Scientific American a fellow wrote an article, which is actually in response to Dennett; but it's very interesting that it got published in Scientific American, which is very much a mainstream scientific mouthpiece, you might say. 

But anyway, the essence of the article was to say that we really can't understand consciousness in terms of patterns of material elements. So this makes it an anomaly in a very fundamental sense, because the most fundamental principle of science as it exists today is that everything can be understood in terms of patterns of material elements. You have basic elements, such as atoms and molecules, and if you put them together in a certain pattern, you get different manifestations of phenomena in the universe. And that's the sum and substance of what exists. So everything can be explained in terms of patterns, but this fellow was arguing in Scientific American that consciousness cannot be explained in terms of patterns. So it's a total anomaly – it just doesn't fit into the picture. So that's one observation. 

The next observation is that we really can't account for where the patterns come from. I gave some examples showing how the theory of evolution doesn't work. Scientists will try to account for the very complex patterns you find in living organisms by evolution, but it doesn't work. It is perhaps possible to explain some things by an evolutionary process, but there are many different systems of organs in the body, especially on the molecular level of living cells and so forth, which you can't explain on the basis of evolutionary theory. So that's another anomaly. 

[9:53]

So then I touched on the UFO topic which was very prominent in this symposium. The students wanted to hear about this. So I pointed out the connection between the UFO phenomenon and paranormal phenomena. Now this is something that is not found in the typical university education, but there is a vast body of material concerning what could be called the paranormal. Basically, in the context of Vedic literature, what this refers to is subtle dimensions of reality and the mystic siddhis, just to give an example. There is something called prāpti-siddhi. Actually, recently in Folio I looked up Śrīla Prabhupāda’s comment about the pomegranates from Afghanistan. He actually said it. You can find it in Folio if you like by looking under pomegranate. I think there are two references and that is one of them. So anyway, Śrīla Prabhupāda said that a sort of guru, or instructor that he had when he was young, said that his guru was actually able to use this mystic siddhi called prāpti. And he demonstrated it by reaching out and taking some pomegranates from Afghanistan, which then appeared there in the room, somewhere in India. 

So that's an example of a mystic siddhi. So it appears there that a material object in one place goes to another place, but it doesn't cross the space in between – it sort of skips over the space. So how is that possible? Well, we understand from Vedic literature that that is indeed possible. It's very commonly mentioned in the context of Vedic literature, that this kind of thing can happen. It turns out there's a huge amount of empirical data which people have collected indicating that this kind of thing can happen. For example, in the field of parapsychology the word ‘apport’ is used, that's A-P-P-O-R-T, and that refers to an object disappearing from one place and appearing in another place. Sometimes inside a closed container, people have tried to do experiments to get good examples of this sort of thing. One thing that apparently can happen is the following:

Imagine that you have two rings made of wood. And they're made by carving wood. Let's say one is made of oak and the other is made of pine, just for the fun of it. Now suppose the two rings are interlocked and suppose you can examine the piece of wood and you can see no one ever cut the wood or glued it together or anything like that. It's continuous wood. So, how would you explain the two rings being together like that? Well, if matter can move through space without crossing the space in between, then you can see how it could happen. You just bring the rings together and you sort of jump over some space there and then they're together. So there are cases like that. I have some photographs of this kind of thing. I even have a videotape of it happening. So there's actually a very large amount of empirical data. But if you go to college, go through an entire University course of study, practically you'll never hear about such things. And if you do hear about them, you'll find that they're just dismissed out of hand as something simply bogus, some kind of nonsense. So, there's a large amount of material. I won't go into the details, but this all ties in with the UFO phenomenon, which is very much in the same category as the paranormal phenomena. So, this was a third category of anomalies.

So, then what I did was look into some theoretical anomalies. That is what you could call anomalies of theory. It's very interesting to see what some very advanced scientists come up with. So I started with a fellow named John Wheeler – he's an exceedingly eminent physicist. In fact, you can't even begin to list all his glorious qualifications. At this point, he has become emeritus, however. I think he's simultaneously an emeritus professor at Princeton University and University of Texas. But anyway, he was reflecting on some of the peculiar features of quantum mechanics, and he arrived at a rather unique picture of reality. So according to his picture, here's the way things happen: Let's start with the primitive universe, before there was any life. So an evolutionary process produces life. Life gradually becomes more advanced and spreads throughout the universe. Finally, the universe is pervaded by advanced living beings. Through their observational process in accordance with quantum mechanics, they bring about the existence of the universe, including the past history of the universe. This is what John Wheeler came up with.

[15:48]  

I'm just mentioning this to show you what a very advanced physicist can come up with. Now it was very interesting to see some of the details that he introduced to substantiate this. For example, he proposed that reality as we directly see it is not fundamental, even space and time are not fundamental. This was a key to his idea that the observations in the future create the past, because he thinks that time ultimately is illusory. Actually, Albert Einstein also had that concept. He once consoled a widow by trying to convince her that time is really an illusion. I don't know how successful he was. But in any case... so Wheeler introduced ideas of this nature. There is another fellow named Frank Tipler, who's a physicist at Tulane University and who works with Stephen Hawking. I guess that's his main claim to fame, because Stephen Hawking is exceedingly famous these days. 

In any case, he also proposed a theory in which you start with evolution in the primitive universe. Life expands throughout the universe until the universe is pervaded by life. But in his theory, the life organizes itself into an ultimate supercomputer. And at the end of the universe, the supercomputer simulates the creation of the universe. You can imagine the ultimate supercomputer saying, “Let there be light!” And there was simulated light. Right. Yeah, I know. I think I read it myself back in the early 60s or something. 

But he's worked this out in great detail; he applies it to Christian eschatology: the idea of the resurrection of the dead. He says that the ultimate computer will create the universe and then resurrect everybody within the universe in very nice bodies with which they can enjoy their ultimate reward. So this was just to show... actually, one can easily ridicule these ideas, but I think a serious lesson can be drawn from them. Namely, if you look at the presentation of Wheeler or Tipler, you'll see that they're proceeding very logically, step-by-step. In fact, they're drawing conclusions that you can draw out of modern physical science. The conclusions can be presented in a very rational way. So, if that can be done, what further improvements might you make? Well I would suggest that first of all you can easily eliminate a lot of superficial and extraneous features from the models presented by Wheeler and Tipler. You can take Tipler’s model, for example, in which an ultimate computer simulates the universe. And you can propose that, you see, Tipler is saying this will happen in the future. But of course a logical consequence of what he's saying is that it might have already happened, because we could be in the simulation, at this point. 

[19:42] 

Now if you're in the simulation, you cannot easily see that which is running the simulation. This is actually a consequence of computer science, that I think people haven't really contemplated too carefully. With computers very often, if you have one computer you can run another computer on that computer through a simulation. It's called a virtual machine. So, if you have software for the second computer, it may not run on the first computer; but by running a virtual machine of the second computer, on the first one, then you can run all the software for the first computer. This is something that is very often done in fact, in practice. And you cannot tell that you're actually running on a different computer, if the simulation in fact is perfect. That is, if step-by-step, it simulates the second computer. So likewise, in a perfect simulation of the universe, you wouldn't be able to know what was running the simulation. So now let's say, just for the sake of argument, that what is running the simulation is some entity capable of processing vast amounts of information in a logical way, that is, something that has the capacities that computers have on a universal scale but which might have other properties and capacities as well – we couldn't rule that out. 

So, you can come to the idea that: well, maybe this ultimate substrate with great information carrying capacity, could be, let us say, the mahat-tattva. In that case, what you arrive at is the Vedic model, in which the universe is a manifestation of māyā or illusion, and it is being manifested through the programming of this substrate called the mahat-tattva. Now, in this model, it's interesting, Tipler would say that his ultimate computer evolves the capacity to do all these amazing things, but the problem is, if you look at the theory of evolution, you find that it doesn't work. And if you examine computers, you find that nobody has yet had much luck getting a computer to evolve its programs. You can try it yourself. Just zap your hard disk a bit, and see if the program improves. There's a… after all, there's a chance that it will improve. So, you can try this method of evolving programs, but I wouldn't put in very high hopes for it, really. So... but we do know that an intelligent pre-existing being can program a computer. So in this case, if we suppose that our ultimate substrate is the mahat-tattva, we just happen to have on hand Mahā-Viṣṇu, who can act as the ultimate programmer. He can organize the mahat-tattva by transmitting into it data representing the karma of unlimited living entities and thus set into motion transformations through the agency of eternal time, which manifest all kinds of different illusory life situations within the universe.

So, one can introduce these ideas. Then you can circle back a little bit and consider the original point that I made, namely, that consciousness cannot be understood in terms of patterns. Now this fellow Tipler is of the persuasion that life and consciousness can be understood in terms of patterns, so his model involves pure reductionism. And that is in fact why he is able to propose the resurrection of the dead – it’s because it's very simple. If you are essentially a pattern, then you can make a copy of the pattern. It's just a matter of putting all the little pieces together. So, he proposes that we are essentially patterns, so therefore we could be resurrected in the Christian sense just by making a copy. So in this sense resurrection of the dead is the ultimate application of the Xerox principle. But there's a problem there: what about consciousness? Tipler doesn't really deal with this question because consciousness really cannot be understood in terms of patterns. So the solution there is to say, “Well, our consciousness seems to be a fundamental irreducible principle. You can't break it down to something lesser than consciousness itself.” So, let us suppose that we have some fundamental irreducible conscious entities and we link them up with this illusory world, produced by this ultimate computer-like substrate, so that they have experiences generated within this illusory world. Basically, this gives you a virtual reality model, in which you have conscious entities, a world of illusion created by some computer-like process and some kind of sensory interface or link. 

[25:09] 

So this is once again bringing one back to the Vedic model, in which you have spirit souls, who are of a completely different nature than the material energy. And basically, the spirit souls never really enter into the world of māyā, but they get linked up with it so that their spiritual senses are channeled through material senses. And then they identify with illusory bodies within the world of māyā and undergo different experiences. And all of this is controlled by the ultimate programmer, which in this case would be Mahā-Viṣṇu. So this is a basic model that you can build taking ingredients from the thinking of modern-day scientists and making a few corrections in some of the lines of reasoning, and what you get is basically the Vedic model. You can then apply that also to a discussion of the paranormal evidence and point out that this model should incorporate such things as mystic siddhis and so forth, and also different categories of living beings within the universe. And essentially you wind up with the picture which is being presented in this verse in purport, namely, you have a universe being controlled by a hierarchy of conscious living beings with an ultimate conscious creator, who is outside of the universal system. 

Now, the final detail of course is that this ultimate conscious creator can actually personally enter into the universe as an avatar – that would be an additional feature of the model. Actually, I didn't introduce that feature. But anyway, it was interesting; the students were quite receptive to all this. I think that a lot of students are quite ready at the present time to investigate and delve into ideas that you don't find in their ordinary university education. There were a couple of professors who were duly outraged. One... I had quite a debate with one professor and then a student made the comment that, “I think that you're introducing a religion here.” And the professor immediately started applauding and saying “Yay, that's right.” So, anyway, he was right. 

Actually, another point that I made in the presentation, though, is that you ultimately cannot separate religion and science. And actually, the comments made by this professor would have... were along the lines that religion is basically something to be rejected from a scientific discussion. Actually, the question came up in a very natural way. After I presented all these things, I was basically asked the ‘origin of the jiva’ question by one student. The students said, “Well, if these conscious entities are entangled in this world of illusion, and you have this supreme intelligent controller who's behind the whole display, then how did this come about? And why did this controller bring about such a situation?” So it's the good old ‘origin of the jiva’ questions, or not the ‘origin of the jiva’ exactly, but the origin of the conditioned state of the jiva. 

So, I briefly summarized the basic position on that. I said, “But what you've asked here is a theological question, so I have no recourse but to give you a theological answer.” And then I pointed out that, “Well, what can I do?” So immediately this lady professor said, “Is that your agenda? Your agenda is just to say how the soul got into matter!” and so forth. And so I just pointed out to her that, “Well, these questions do come up. This fellow asked me this question which does come up very naturally in the course of the discussion. So, what should I do, not give an answer? Or maybe we shouldn't even ask such questions.” Actually, that would be more or less the standard approach within science – you don't ask questions like that. But since we exist within one reality, the fact is all these questions come up. And they come up in a way that is interrelated, that is, one thing leads naturally to another and if you just follow the different lines of reasoning to their conclusion, you wind up asking fundamental questions such as, “Well, if we're conscious entities, how did we get into the world of illusion? Then what do we do about that?” And you can go logically step-by-step. So, I’ll stop there. Are there any questions? Murli?  

[30:25]

 Question:  [unclear]

Answer:  Yes, I would say so. It's illustrated by my point that... when I answered his question about the origin of the jiva, essentially, I said, “Well I have to give you a theological answer.” I didn't mention paramparā and all that kind of thing, although that fits in logically also, because if you have an ultimate information source, then the concept of descending knowledge is also there as something that's at least possible in principle. But I could not have answered that question on the basis of a merely logical progression, within the framework of the model. I had to introduce a theological source of knowledge in order to answer that question. So, that's true. One more question? Yeah?

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, quite favorably. I would say on the whole. My impression was the students are ready to hear about these kinds of things. 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Oh, yeah, we had a discussion that went on for about 45 minutes. Question/answer type discussion. 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, there were a lot of questions about free will, and we got into a whole discussion: well, what is free will? And how does that come into the picture? And if you have a purely mechanistic picture of reality, what would free will be in that context. All kinds of things like that. Jaya, all glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.