Transcendental Nectar of Sadhu-Sanga

by

Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D.

Several of our subscribers requested further clarification on the concept of Maya .

 

PROCRUSTIAN MENTALITY

 

One subscriber to this list proposed that scientists are not obliged to respect the dictionary difference between reality and appearance, as if these words were of no consequence to anyone of scientific bent. And besides that, the words God and soul could also be eliminated from the dictionary by the scientific section, because they had no way to deal with them empirically.

 

In Greek Mythology, Procrustes used to invite travelers to stay overnight at his house and let them sleep on an iron bed. He would stretch his visitors or amputate them accordingly so that they would fit the bed. Unfortunately, it is this kind of Procrustean attitude toward science that is likewise as shallow as it is barbaric.

 

GOD CAN BE SEEN WITH THESE VERY EYES

 

We cannot expect an atheist, impersonalist, exploitive sense enjoyer (bhukti), or liberationist (mukti) to tell us much about God or whether He can be seen or not.  The only qualified source of information on God must come from a devotee (bhakti) who is imbued with prema.  In Sri Brahma Samhita we find premanjana churita bhakti vilocanena, santah sadaiva hrdayesu vilokayanti, yam syamasundaram achintya guna swarupam. Not only can a devotee who is imbued with prema see God, he can also tell us His name, color, qualities, figure, paraphernalia, associates, and pastimes. Only the unqualified can claim that God cannot be seen with these very eyes.  The proper process is to approach an authentic devotee and learn about what can and cannot be done in relation to God.

 

SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING

 

Every educated man/woman should know that science does not work in the past, present and future. Thus Newton's laws were accepted as absolute in the past, but not after relativity. Space is not absolute as Newton assumed. Or is it? Dark energy and matter now pose a dilemma for relativistic astronomy. Einstein's relativity is being replaced by strings, membranes, etc.  Electrons are now replaced by probability clouds. And so on  ad infinitum.

 

TECHNOLOGY IS NOT SCIENCE

 

A mouse trap works, not because it makes use of the knowledge of modern physics - it was developed long before such physics was known. Thus it works despite the lack of such knowledge.  Technology is different from scientific knowledge. Technology is the knowledge and utilization of tools and crafts. A machine is manufactured to produce a certain effect. Certainly it is designed to work. But science is not a machine. It is supposed to tell us something fundamental about reality.  The simple fact remains that empirical science has never given us eternal verities. Whoever fails to understand this, has failed to understand what science is.

 

You may try to define gravity as the force of attraction between bodies, but Einstein would object and say, no, it is the curvature of Riemannian space. What you assume you know through science changes over time. This is a fact of empirical science, and any educated person should know this.

 

Future messages containing this type of misunderstanding will not be posted to this list. Please don't burden the moderators with deleting this kind of empty verbiage.

 

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

 

Appearance means what something is for another, or being-for-another. What something is in-itself may be different from what it is for another. Sugar is sweet to human taste, unless that human has jaundice. The sugar doesn't change in itself, what changes is its being for another. Science does not claim to be anthropomorphic, i.e. valid for humans only. It claims to be objective truth. Yet if appearance and reality are not distinguished, then it will be impossible to establish any objective universal truth.

 

NAIVE REALISM, SCIENTIFIC REALISM

 

The problems of naive realism, which takes direct sense perceptions as capable of grasping reality, are well known.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism

 

It is called naive because it fails to distinguish what any thoughtful person would differentiate. In order to understand science in a way that is rationally coherent, this problem must be faced. We have already defined science as the empirical study of the world. But this does not mean that science has to ignore what is also there in addition to such empirical study.

 

Chemistry is a science. Does it mean that chemists ignore physics or biology? It has a limited range of applicability, and works within that range. But there does not arise any justification for saying that the different sciences cannot work together harmoniously.

 

A book can be analyzed typographically, without denying the fact that it is also a piece of literature. There is no necessity of demanding that one field cannot exist harmoniously with the other, even though they may be non-overlapping magisteria, as Gould would have it.

 

Scientific realism has even more serious problems. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism

 

Here, reality is described in terms of atomic theory, so that all perceptions are conceived as stimuli in the brain, and no direct perception of reality is possible at all.

 

CONCLUSION

 

There are undoubtedly many scientists who hold irrational and dogmatic conceptions of reality. They have always been the main obstacle to progress in science, as Thomas Khun pointed out in his landmark book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." So we are appealing to those who have a more objective and thoughtful disposition, who are willing to critique modern science, find its weaknesses and come up with a more modest or honest appraisal of its capabilities and limitations. And to recognize that in a properly adjusted view, science and religion are completely compatible.

 

We will demonstrate this again and again in our presentation, as we have already pointed out a number of such scientific insights in our previous posts.