"Science and Krishna Consciousness" (Sunday Feast)

TRANSCRIPT:  Alachua Sunday Feast. “Science and Krishna Consciousness.” June 19, 1994 / (532)

So what is the story on Kṛṣṇa, consciousness and science? Well, science, the word science, comes from a Latin word meaning knowledge that should refer to true information about reality. So how can we arrive at true information about reality? Well, the course Śrīla Prabhupāda had a lot to say about that.

Basically, there are different ways of obtaining knowledge. One is direct sense perception. That's pratyakṣa, directly preceding things with your senses. You can attain knowledge in that way. Then there is something called hypothesis, anumāna. That refers to a whole process. Generally in the modern day and age the idea is that you come up with a theoretical idea of how things are, and then you test it out. You see how well it relates to what you observe and experience. So pratyakṣa and anumāna go together. 

And then there is śabda, which means to accept from authority. Now, there are different ideas about what constitutes authority. The fact is that the knowledge that most people have is based to a very large extent on śabda or acceptance of authority. That's certainly true of what we call book knowledge. One studies certain books which are authorized, hears about their subject matter from authorized teachers in schools and so on. And one accepts what one is taught. One follows the authority. This is pretty much standard even for scientists. This is the way knowledge is normally acquired. 

Now, the knowledge which is presented by authority may have come from a process of hypothesis and sense perception. That is, some scientists may have made certain observations and then made hypotheses about what they were observing and developed theories and so on. And finally, these things were all written up in books after they had been accepted by a community of scholars. Because of course, one could ask, “Well, if things are written up in books, well, who decides what books are to be accepted and what books are not to be accepted?” How does that come about? Well, what you find is there's a social process. Authority exists in the context of a human society. 

So we see in practice that there are schools with authorized teachers; there's a system whereby these people are hired; there's a system whereby their qualifications are evaluated, and so on. So in the context of this system, the books that are officially used for teaching people are accepted as having authoritative knowledge. And other books may be rejected in this regard and regarded as not being authoritative. So it's a social process.

So most people, as I was saying, acquire a great deal of their knowledge through this social process. Of course, we also learn a lot through direct perception. We're always perceiving things. We learn to walk by a process of direct perception. A child experiments and falls over and stands up again and so forth, and eventually learns to walk. And this is all through direct perception. Of course, dogs and cats do the same thing more quickly than humans, generally. But intellectual knowledge expressed in symbols and language and in books and so forth, that's normally accepted through authority. Now, many people, at first glance, if you make this very simple elementary point, they may question that. They'll say, “Well, our scientific knowledge is based on experiment.” 

[5:00]

But you can ask a simple question. How many experiments have you ever done, say, if you study chemistry? When you are taking your courses, you may do some experiments in the lab, a handful of them, but that's only a tiny fraction of the totality of experiments in chemistry on which the subject matter is supposedly based. So you have to take people's word for what took place in the rest of those experiments. It's not physically possible for one human being to do even a small percentage of all the important experiments that make up, say, chemistry and physics and other scientific fields. It's just not humanly possible. So for the rest of them, you have to take people's word for it. And that means you have to accept what is authoritatively stated in the texts. 

So also, if you do even a few experiments, you learn a very interesting thing, namely, it's not so easy to do an experiment and get the right answers. How many here have done an experiment in, say, physics in college? Did you get the right answers? It's interesting. I did a few. I remember once we were supposed to measure the ratio between the charge and mass of an electron, E over m. So you can look up in the books and see what the right answer is. So we were handed a stack of apparatus and told, “Okay, here's the apparatus and here's a book that tells you about all the mathematics you need and all the procedures you have to follow. So go ahead and do it and calculate what the ratio of the charge to the mass of an electron should be.” 

So you start fooling with the apparatus consisting of a cathode ray tube and a bunch of vacuum tubes and circuits and various things of that nature. And finally, you get a number for the charge to mass ratio of the electron, and you find out: Alas, oh dear, it's way off! And you know that if you turn in results like that, you're not going to get a very good grade. So then you sort of work at it, and you keep working until you get an answer that's reasonably close. Now, if you were an honest scientist, you would record all of your findings. But if you did that then the record would show that first you were way off, and then you kept working at it until finally you got closer to the answer. And then when you were reasonably close to the right answer, you stopped. 

Now, that's obviously bogus because it just means, actually you're just accepting the authoritative answer from the book and you're fooling with your apparatus until you get the answer, which means you're not learning the answer from the apparatus – you're learning it from the book. So what's the use of doing the experiment? So therefore, you don't do that. You erase all your results except for the last things that you did that gave you the right answer. You say, “See, I did it,” and you turn that in. This is known as cheating. Now, it's a fact that most students in school do this. I mean, if you're realistic, the fact is they cheat in order to get the good grades. Now, what do big scientists do?

Well, I can give you an example. There's a physicist named Milliken, American physicist, who is very famous. Let's see. He didn't measure the charge to mass ratio of an electron. He measured the charge of the electron, how much electrical charge each little electron has. So he had a way of doing it. Basically, you've got an electric field, and you have little droplets of water, actually of oil, floating between two capacitor plates across which an electric field is placed. Now, inevitably, these little droplets have a charge, and depending on the charge they have, they drift. And because they're very tiny, the air resistance is quite great. You can see, if you drop a big, heavy object, it falls really fast. But if you drop a really tiny object, like a little particle of dust, it drops very slowly. So a really tiny droplet gets a lot of resistance from the air. 

And so what he would do is observe the droplets moving, and you would observe that the droplet may change its speed suddenly. And the explanation is, well, it either gained an electron or lost an electron. So based on the change in speed, you can calculate the charge on that electron. But it may have been two or three were added or subtracted, so you deal with that. 

[10:00]

So to make a long story short, Millikan was recording his results in his notebooks. And he was convinced that the electron would have a certain charge. So next to certain results he would put a big star, and he would say, “Excellent! Beautiful! Publish!” And next to other results, he would say, “Way off! Something wrong!” And he put a big X next to it.

So later on, he published his results. And the only results that appeared in his publication were the beautiful ones. The ones with the X's didn't show up. And he got a Nobel Prize for measuring the charge of the electron. Now, it was years later that some historian of science dug up the notebooks of Millikan that were still there in his personal effects and read them and realized what had happened. But by that time, Millikan was part of history, where he still remains. So this is known as cheating. 

Now, you might ask, “Well, wait a minute. But still… the physicists are right about electrons.” They have true knowledge of electrons. So Milliken was right after all. I mean, his findings are in all the textbooks today, which everyone accepts on authority. So he was right. So even though he cheated somehow, he was still right. So how could that be? Well, the answer is right means what is accepted by authority in actual practice. Now, you might think “right” means what's really true, what's out there in the real world. But in practice, “right" means what the authority says. And the authority still says what Millikan said.

Now, it so happens that at the same time Millikan was doing his work in Austria, there were some scientists who were doing the same experiments with much better equipment. Now, these guys made, then, a strategic mistake. They reported all their findings, and they said, look, our findings are going all over the map. It must be that you can't really learn very much about electrons using this method. And they published a paper saying, so what do you suppose happened with those scientists? Anybody have an idea? 

Audience:  They went into oblivion. 

RLT:  They went into oblivion. Yes. This is exactly what happened.

You know, a publication like that gets you nowhere. In fact, they went nowhere, and that was the end of that. So Millikan got the prize by cheating, and these guys went into oblivion by being honest. And that is the history. 

A lot of things happen like that. For example, there's the Michelson-Morley experiment. There's a whole history behind what this is. But that was performed by some guys, naturally, named Michelson and Morley back in the late part of the 19th century. And it became an important cornerstone of Einstein's relativity theory. So then in the 1930s, a fellow named Miller decided that he would repeat the Michelson-Morley experiment, because, after all, one thing you're taught in science is experiments are supposed to be reproducible.

So what's the use of the idea of being reproducible if you never reproduce them? So he built an apparatus that was much better than what Michelson and Morley had. He had better technology anyway. And so he repeated their experiment. And lo and behold, he got completely different results than their results.

Briefly, Michelson and Morley claimed that they showed there's no ether drift. Maybe later I'll say what that is. But anyway, Miller said that there is an ether drift. He measured it, significant ether drift. Now that would cause real problems for the theory of relativity.

And when Einstein was told about Miller's findings, he just said, “Well, he did something wrong.” Now you might say, “Well, what kind of response is that?” Well, it was a very effective response because everyone agreed Miller did something wrong. After all, he got the wrong results. So therefore Miller went into oblivion, where he remains to this day. And  the original findings, which are accepted, continue to be accepted as they still are today. 

[14:45]

So one might ask, “Well, are these just a few isolated examples? How often does this kind of thing happen?” If it’s just a few isolated cases you might say it doesn't really affect what we know in science very much. But in fact these aren’t just a few isolated examples. Science as we know it today is pervaded with this kind of cheating. And this is a very shocking thing to say. But if one wants to be realistic, one can see that it's true. One has to do some detective work to trace this out.

Now, occasionally spectacular examples of cheating come up in which the person is caught and duly chastised. There's the famous Spector case at Cornell University. There was an extremely eminent professor, I believe his name was something like Epriem Racker. Anyway, not sure about the first name, but Racker was his last name. Very eminent biochemist and he was studying all kinds of things involving enzymes and so forth from living organisms.

So this fellow, Mark Spector I believe is his name, a brilliant graduate student, it was said that he had golden hands. He could make experiments work that no one else could make work. And he proved all kinds of amazing things with his experiments. And this became very… Well, he became very famous, at least for a short time.

It's interesting to see what happened here. People at other laboratories who were eminent scientists were to a certain extent astonished by his work, but they couldn't really find any fault with it. Finally, an inside man discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, in this case. This inside man was also a scientist working right there in the same laboratory. And he just did Sherlock Holmes style detective work and tracked down what Spector was doing, found that he would do these electrophoresis measurements in which you get a… well, it's a way of measuring certain things about molecules moving through a gel; and he'd be marking them with ink to create a false record and doing all kinds of ridiculous things. And so he was thrown out in total disgrace. And Racker was racked with sorrow as a result of this. It destroyed his reputation. So occasionally there are cases like this, and there are cases of people who totally manufactured data.

David Baltimore, who was a famous Nobel laureate in biochemistry, had his name on one paper in which the data was apparently manufactured. And this caused him eventually to be kicked out of his position as, I believe, president of Rockefeller University in New York. So there are spectacular cases like that. But it's really the undercurrent of undetected cheating that has really the profound effect. Now, Śrīla Prabhupāda emphasized that this cheating propensity does in fact have a tremendous impact on our mundane knowledge.

A lot of it is really based on cheating. And it's really hard to believe that, especially if you have been brought up in modern society thinking that science means real knowledge obtained in honest ways. So we did, in the Bhaktivedanta Institute, we did an investigation basically as a case study to see what is really going on. We took archaeology as our subject matter. Specifically, just to narrow down the field, we took archaeology as applied to human origins.

We weren't concerned with the part of archaeology that deals with ancient civilizations. That's a whole subject in itself. Nor were we concerned with the part which deals with all kinds of different animal species, dinosaurs and mammoths and so on and so forth, because it's a huge subject area. You could spend your lifetime just wading through the literature without even getting very far. So we took a fairly circumscribed area just to do a case study.

So this is archaeology as applied to ancient man and the origin of man, supposedly from the ape. Of course, this is a topic that's of great interest to people. So we took that as our subject area and tried to do a thorough investigation. The idea was to get a really good grasp of all the evidence related to this subject matter. And we found very interesting things.

[20:00] 

One thing we found was that a huge amount of data has been thrown out by the scientific community. Basically, you could say that, it's really fair to say that more archaeological evidence has been buried than has been practically dug up and kept. And it's quite amazing. We found that there are whole schools of thought that ran afoul of leading paradigms and were completely consigned to oblivion. And these schools of thought are accompanied by physical evidence that was excavated from the ground and analyzed very carefully by scientists in the past.

Now one could say, well, maybe this evidence deserves to be cast into oblivion because it's bad evidence. These scientists just did bad work. Or maybe later findings showed that what they discovered was not really what they thought it was or wasn't really important. So we did a comparative study of some of this lost evidence with evidence that is accepted today. And we found that basically the two sets of evidence are of comparable quality.

So the result is one has to say, well, if this lost evidence is to be rejected, then the accepted evidence which is of comparable quality should also be rejected and you wipe out the whole theory of human origins from the apes. On the other hand, if the modern day accepted evidence should be accepted, then likewise this lost evidence, which is of comparable quality, should be accepted. And that wipes out the whole theory of evolution of man from the apes, because it gives you a completely different picture of what was going on in the past. So that is the situation. One thing one finds in science is that huge amounts of evidence that do not fit the accepted theory are simply kicked down.

And furthermore, it's even worse than that because you can see that all kinds of different investigations that could be [unclear], which would yield all kinds of different results contrary to the existing theories, are essentially eliminated. So this means that we don't get a clear and proper picture of reality by these kinds of investigations. If you just go back to Miller's experiment duplicating the Michelson-Morley experiment, well, that was kicked out. So you can ask yourself, well, what other investigations along those lines might have been made. Miller said he observed something called an ether drift, which means basically, just to tell you briefly what's at stake there, there's the idea that there's something called ether and light is a vibration going through ether.

And just like if you go to a river and you throw a pebble in the river and ripples spread out, you'll see the ripples don't go upstream as fast as they go downstream. They're carried by the water. So ether drift is an idea like that. If there's this ether and the ether is moving so there's like a wind of ether going past us, then light should grow slower upstream than downstream, just like ripples carried by the water of the river. So Miller said that he measured that.

He said, well, light does go more slowly in a certain direction and more rapidly in the opposite direction. So that has a lot of implications. You could really get into studying that and maybe learn a lot about something that you could call ether. Well, if you study modern physics, you'll see ether isn't there. There is no ether in modern physics – that doesn't exist.

Basically, that was kicked out at the time of the acceptance of Einstein's relativity theory. So you can see then a whole category of investigations has been essentially cut off. Also, the point can be made that in one sense this is inevitable because people are limited in what they are able to do. You can only investigate so many different things. For example, for Miller to do his experiment, that took a huge amount of work and to build all the apparatus required a lot of money. So to do research you need money and you need time, which also means money, because to pay for people's time you have to have a lot of money. So that means there are limitations as to what you can do. 

[25:00]

Now actually, in science today, you'll see that funding is an extremely important thing. In order to do science, you've got to have funding, which means you have to get government grants, basically speaking. That means you have to submit grant proposals explaining what you're going to do.

And then a board of men has to make decisions as to what grant proposals are worthwhile and what ones aren't. And naturally they make decisions based on what they believe is true. So if you submit a grant proposal in which you're going to investigate some, you know, off the wall crazy idea, you won't get funded because you know, there's so many sound research for proposals that are worthy of funding. So therefore only certain kinds of experimental investigations are ever conducted. So you can ask, well, what would we learn if we conducted some of the others? But we don't know what we might learn because it just hasn't happened and it's not likely to. So these are a few observations about science. 

Śrīla Prabhupāda made the point that there are four defects of the conditioned living entity, four defects of the senses. First of all, there are imperfect senses, and there's a tendency to make mistakes, there's a tendency to be in illusion, and there's the cheating propensity. So the comments I've been making actually relate to all four of these.

First of all, your senses are imperfect and you can see in a practical sense what a problem this is if you consider how difficult it is to study things scientifically. For example, suppose I want to really know about archaeology. Well, what do archaeologists do? Well, they go out there and dig or they just wander around looking at what washed out of the ground in the last rainstorm. Actually, that's pretty much the method that's used.

Somebody like Donald Johansen will go out to the Afar Desert region of Ethiopia. And you know, in 110 degree weather he will just wander around looking at what washed out, looking for something. And then he discovers something – the bones of Lucy – and with this becomes extremely famous. Well, now think about the number of cubic, well, cubic miles of sedimentary rock that are there on the surface of the earth. Now how much of that has been observed by anyone?

You know, it's a tiny… [end side A]

[27:30]

So you have the phenomenon of illusion. We saw that he sent a copy of our book to Richard Leakey and Richard Leakey wrote back a note and he said that “Your book is pure humbug. It would not be of interest to anyone but a fool! Unfortunately, there are some. This is due to selection. There's nothing that can be done about it.” So that was his automatic response to the book. And I'm sure he's sincere. I'm sure he fully believes in that. And he probably thought, “Well, I put down that piece of rubbish, very effectively.”

So, but that's illusion. So all these things have their impact. So then what to do? So then there's the concept of knowledge coming from an ultimate spiritual source. Now this is indeed a shocking concept: Knowledge coming from an ultimate spiritual source, oh, dear. How does this knowledge come to us? Well, it comes to us in the form, let us say, of documents that are being handed down. And these documents originally came from the spiritual source. Well, how does that actually work in terms of real world events? 

Well, the Bhagavad-gītā, for example. How has the Bhagavad-gītā come down to us? Well, the story is that there was this person named Sañjaya who was talking to Dhṛtarāṣṭra. He was linked up telepathically with another person named Vyāsadeva. And through the mystic power of Vyāsadeva, Vyāsadeva was able to hear what Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna were saying on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra. And he transmitted this to Sañjaya who was speaking to this king named Dhṛtarāṣṭra. And so Sañjaya was able to tell Dhṛtarāṣṭra what was happening. And that's what you read in the Bhagavad-gītā. Sañjaya speaks and gives the whole story to Dhṛtarāṣṭra.

So, this could be called mystical transmission of information. So eventually Vyāsadeva broke this down. And that's how we come to have the Bhagavad-gītā. It's a chapter in the Mahābhārata. In general, Vyāsadeva wrote down all kinds of different information about the spiritual world. And this was transmitted to him because he was linked up with the spiritual reality. And he was able to obtain this information and then convey it to others. Now this involves something called paramparā. Vyāsadeva is a guru in the paramparā which we follow in Kṛṣṇa consciousness. So Vyāsadeva had his guru and that was Nārada Muni.

Nārada Muni is a personality who is able to travel throughout the universe by mystic potency. He visits Vaikuṇṭha and has conversations with Lord Viṣṇu and so on and so forth. So Vyāsadeva is accepting Nārada Muni as his authoritative source of information. Nārada Muni is accepting Brahmā, who’s his father. And Brahmā is the chief demigod who created the universe. And Brahmā obtained his information through the agency of Viṣṇu, who communicated that to him through his heart. So this is the process by which the information is coming down to us. 

Now, going back to the Vyāsadeva, Vyāsadeva, according to the traditional chronology, was writing down Vedic literatures and so forth back in about 5,000 years ago. So the next guru in the disciplic chain in our paramparā system is Madhvācārya, who was living about in the 10th century AD. So that means about a thousand years ago. 

[32:26]

So what happened from 5,000 years ago to about a thousand years ago? You have a 4,000 year gap. Well, the answer is that Vyāsadeva is still living. In fact, we know where he's living. It's up in the Himalayan region in a place called Uttara Badarikāśrama. And in fact, in about the 10th century, Madhvācārya went to see him at āśrama of Vyāsadeva, became his disciple, and so forth. So the knowledge is coming down to us through the disciplic succession, and Madhvācārya is in that succession. But he went to meet Vyāsadeva. Now one immediately thinks then, “Well, is it possible for an ordinary person to meet Vyāsadeva?”

The answer is, “Well, no, it's not possible. You have to go to Uttara Badarikāśrama. As a matter of fact, there's a place in the Himalayas called Badarikāśrama which is visited by pilgrims every year. And you can go there. Any one of us could go.

But Uttara Badarikāśrama is a little bit more difficult to reach. In fact, when Madvacharya left for Badarikāśrama to Uttara Badarikāśrama, he told his disciples, don't try to follow me, you won't be able to do it. And one of his disciples did want to follow him and followed after him. But at a certain point, Madhvācārya began taking gigantic steps over mountain peaks and just went zyoop, totally out of the… well, let's say he left that disciple behind and after that he left.

When we say knowledge is coming from the spiritual world, we ultimately are inevitably saying this knowledge is coming from a stratum of reality which is totally inaccessible to an ordinary human being with ordinary senses. After all, the real spiritual world of Vaikuṇṭha is totally inaccessible to an ordinary conditioned soul. Within this universe, there are higher levels of material existence occupied by demigods, beings like Nārada Muni, and so on and so forth. And they are accessible to conditioned living beings, but they're not accessible to an ordinary human being. There are even places on this earth which are not accessible to ordinary human beings.

In fact, Uttara Badarikāśrama is an example of such a place. You can only go there by mystical power. Madhvācārya was able to travel in a mystical way and reach this place. We say mystical. What does mystical mean? Well, the word mystery means something you don't understand. Madhvācārya can understand it well enough. It wasn't a mystery to him, but it is a mystery to most of us, except for whichever great yogis may be here in the room. Basically, it's a mystery. So the idea then is that we only perceive a small part of the total reality.

There's a higher reality that we're a part of, even within the domain of the material energy. And beyond that, there's the spiritual reality and there's the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who's the root cause of both the spiritual and material realities. So this means that we're talking about receiving knowledge that is ultimately coming from a source where we can’t track it down. Now, if you look at modern science, the idea is that all the knowledge that is there is something that you can track down and experiment with and bring under your control. That's the concept that is generally presented in science.

Now, what I was saying in the first part of the lecture, basically what I was doing was debunking that to a large extent. Because the fact is that most knowledge that you find within science really isn't like that, because you can't do all the experiments, you can't track it all down. You just have to accept it based on authority. So it comes down to two different sources of authority: knowledge coming down from a spiritual source and knowledge being generated within this world by people doing science. In the earlier days, it was speculative philosophy and so on and so forth. So then the question is, well, how do you. How do you decide? And that's a whole topic.
 
[37:20] 

But since I was introduced in this lecture with the statement that I would kick on the scientists in the face with a boot, I complied with my introduction. But I have only begun to scratch the surface in the matter of raising pertinent questions here. 

In any case, Śrīla Prabhupāda presented knowledge coming from the spiritual stratum of existence – that was the whole point of his teachings. And he also explained the status of knowledge obtained through mundane scientific research. And Śrīla Prabhupāda very emphatically said that this kind of modern scientific knowledge, although we don't totally condemn it as being totally false, but nonetheless, in many ways it is extremely misleading to people. It is actually blocking the path to spiritual knowledge in two ways, actually.

One way by giving people completely false ideas which they have to unlearn in order to be able to follow the path with real spiritual knowledge. That's one way. And the other way is simply by overloading people's senses with all kinds of things that just take up their time so that they don't have time to pursue real spiritual knowledge. Because the fact is we have limited capacity and our lifespan is very short. So if you load your mind with all kinds of mundane things, you won't be able to even have time for spiritual progress.

So in those two ways, the modern scientific society is really creating a great impediment to the spiritual advancement of mankind. And then the point is, the real purpose of this human form of life is spiritual advancement, because otherwise it's all in vain. One can learn so many things and do so many things, but then one finishes one's few decades of life and it's over. And does it matter whether you did it or not once you're dead? So those are a few observations. I'll stop there. Any questions or comments? Yeah, Murli, or whichever one?

Question:  [unclear]... Śrīla Prabhupāda also explained in the chapter on demoniac nature and godly nature that the scientists are of demonic nature. So they are like… because they are so big personalities… they're guided by some evil energy. Or are they are just like, Śrīla Prabhupāda sometimes said, they are just misguided people, innocent people who follow false theories?

Answer:  Well, what you find is that first of all, science is very much a manifestation of māyā. Now this māyā is specifically the illusory potency of Kṛṣṇa. And it's not false. It's a real thing. And basically it puts the living energy in illusion.

So science, even in as much as it produces true knowledge, is a manifestation of māyā. For example, consider modern technology: computers and jet airplanes and so forth. All these things work, so there's some real knowledge there. But it's all māyā nonetheless, because these are complicated patterns of energy interacting, which basically bewilder the spirit soul. The spirit soul can spend a lifetime chasing after these complicated things. And then in the end, what do you have? So it's a manifestation of māyā. 

Now, concerning the inner motives of people who are involved in all this, the motives vary quite a lot. There are people who are relatively innocent and they're just carried along by the whole thing. There are others who manage to make a very negative contribution to the progress of human thought.

[42:17]

There are scientists who are very explicitly atheistic for mentioning the different personified subdepartments of illusion, falsity and envy and so on and so forth, false speech and so on. So these are there in one sense. One has to say the whole thing is Kṛṣṇa's creation. None of this could happen without Kṛṣṇa creating it. So in one sense He wanted all of this.

But at the same time, there's the goal of the living entity to get out of the illusion. So therefore we're on the side of fighting against the illusion. Kṛṣṇa also has his agents who are creating the illusion. And ultimately the purpose of the whole thing is educational. This is an educational program for the spirit soul. So, anyway. Yeah?

Q:  Comment about your analysis of how the scientists overload a person and also give him false knowledge. It parallels exactly Jīva Gosvāmī's description of how māyā works or how ajñāna ignorance works. First you have to cover a person's real knowledge. Then you've got to give them false knowledge. So you can see very much how they're being used by māyā to accomplish this purpose.

Here's my question. You made a very, very clear point how if you try to repeat an experiment that it's oftentimes you don't come up with the same result. And therefore if your result doesn't follow the accepted body of knowledge, then you're ridiculed if you stick to it or you dismiss the results. Now, when we turn to spiritual knowledge coming from above, like the practice of Kṛṣṇa consciousness, we see that there is a knowledge that can have personal verification by practice. However, we see many people practice and don't come up with the result. And the standard response, “Well, you just haven't practiced properly. Just like the standard scientist response is, well, you may not have done it properly.” So then how can you… it seems like the same thing.

A:  The answer is science is hard. Science is definitely hard. So of course the... We would say there are two parallel errors here. One is to say that if you do the experiment and you get a different result, then, well, how should that be dealt with?

Well, one way to deal with it is to just dismiss the experiment that produced the bad result and say, “Well, that was just wrong.” And then you dismiss the person who performed that wrong experiment. The other is to keep going back and doing the experiment and working on it until you really learn what's going on. So just like in this case of Miller in his reproduction of the Michelson-Morley experiment, as far as I'm aware, he was pretty much roundly dismissed by other scientists and the matter wasn't really pursued, as far as I'm aware.

In other words, he probably got pretty discouraged by his rejection and no one else was checking to see if he was right. Because now you've got two results. There's Michelson-Morley and Miller. So who was right? So then logically, a third person should try it and you know, eventually you might get to the bottom.

Okay, what I mean is up to there is that in spiritual life, it's a fact we're told that certain procedures work. Then we have certain people who say, well, I did it and it didn't work. So the thing to do is, since the issues involved are important, is to keep working at it. And not just that one person should keep working on it, but a lot of people should keep working on it and try and really find out what's the real situation. And we can even see in the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement in practice that although Śrīla Prabhupāda told us so many things about spiritual life and what works and what doesn't, still there were a lot of things we didn't understand.

And so by practical experience we can learn about a lot of these things which will give us greater realization, first of all, of what Śrīla Prabhupāda is actually saying and teach us some of the little details that we didn't pick up from what he was saying. So we have to do that. So the thing is, one should not give up, one should keep working at it. So in one sense, yes, Kṛṣṇa consciousness is also empirical because you're presented with the theory, which is what's in the books, and you're told, “Okay, put it into practice.” And that means experiment.

[47:34]

And so then you have to work at the experiment, especially since this isn't an easy experiment. One advantage of it, though, is that it actually is cheaper than a lot of experiments and less harmful than various ways. You're not in danger of, you know, ionizing radiation from electrical apparatus or dangerous carcinogenic chemicals or quite a number of other quite dangerous things involved with science. You know, when the first scientists were studying radioactive elements, a lot of them came down with terrible cases of cancer. I think the Curies also succumbed to this.

So we have a path of experimentation which involves very important issues. And you can do it with your human form of life. That's the only apparatus we need. We need a human body. We've all that one, except for those who might be listening here who don’t have one. But in any case, one has to work at the experiments. Yeah?

Q:  I think that the only way that we have to understand this thing is just to follow the ācārya, because the ācārya is the one who teaches by example. So somehow or other we can follow Śrīla Prabhupāda, he show us, even till the time that he left the body to go back to Kṛṣṇa, how to practice what he teaches.

A:  Yes, but the ācārya orders us to engage in actual practice ourselves, chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa, following the regulative principles, studying śāstra, and so on and so forth. It's a program for personal development. That's what the ācārya instructs us to do. And we're supposed to actually make advancement by following that program. And so that is a kind of experimental science, you might say. But… so that aspect is there. Yeah?

Q:  Two things. On NPR recently, they stated that the scientists have now found out that the sixth particle actually exists. And I feel that the five particles, where the five elements are equal to the five elements. The sixth particle is now pointing the way to prāṇa. And they claim that this exists now and that it will change everybody's life. They didn't say how it would change people's lives. 

And the second thing I'd like to say is that this source, this, let's say a being, let's say a physical being, even they may be in a material or a spiritual plane, is directing energy on the earth. And there are many religions on the earth, and each religion was founded by an individual who received that energy in a certain way. So that energy is coming from a true source. It's only that the apparatus, the experiment, let's say, receive that information in a certain way.

A:  Yes, you could say things along those lines.

Q:  Prabhupāda, from what I understand, and I know very little of it, in the early days, reading some of his books, he said that, well, “We want to bring people to Kṛṣṇa consciousness. At that time, you didn't want to bring people to ISKCON necessarily; he was interested in many people in Kṛṣṇa consciousness. So Kṛṣṇa consciousness transcends all the religions. In other words, if we come to the realization of Kṛṣṇa consciousness, it doesn't matter if we're a Christian, a Buddhist, a Hebrew or an ISKCON.

[52:20]

A:  Well, yeah, ISKCON and Kṛṣṇa consciousness mean a few different things. ISKCON is a specific organization founded back in 1965, ‘66 or thereabouts for the purpose of spreading Kṛṣṇa consciousness. 

Q:  So… we'll just say Kṛṣṇa consciousness. 

A:  Yeah, so there are many religions and these can be analyzed in many religions because it's a whole complex subject. There are different kinds of revelations people have had coming from higher sources within the universe and from the spiritual world which were intended for their benefit. Very elaborate subject matter which would take hours and hours, well, years to discuss actually. But basically there are many different categories of revelation. The knowledge of Kṛṣṇa consciousness that Śrīla Prabhupāda is presenting is quite universal. This is a claim that I am making, but to verify it and prove it would take a lot of work.

But basically all the different religions in the world fit into the Vedic scheme in different places. You can see how they neatly all together. So the Vedic system is a larger encompassing system. And that is one of the great values of the Vedic system of knowledge. And the knowledge of bhakti-yoga that Srila Prabhupada is giving is in fact the highest knowledge. It represents the pinnacle of spiritual knowledge within the Vedic system, which in turn includes all different aspects of religion. And there are so many things you can say. 

There are just like Christian sects in which they chant names of Jesus and we can relate that to chanting the holy name of Kṛṣṇa. So many different topics, but basically this bhakti-yoga is the highest knowledge of how to link up with God, which is the ultimate purpose of religion. [unclear] means to again link up. And Prabhupāda wants us to go back to Godhead. And yoga means to link up also, like yoke, so few summary statements. Let's see, the feast is probably. What is the schedule?

Comment:  There may be some left if you let everybody out now. 

RLT:  Oh my goodness. Well, all glories to Srila Prabhupada!