Podcast | HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj | Aug 8, 2020
Devotee: Hare Krishna Bhanu Maharaj, Please accept my humble obeisances. Thank you very much for joining the Monks’ Podcast.
I thought today we would discuss on, let’s say, right brain and left brain approaches to understanding scriptural knowledge. I’ve seen your presentation and I’ve heard your talks on this topic. I find this very intriguing. And the context from which we’ll discuss this, and the topic we discuss as there are certain aspects of the Bhagavatam which are difficult for the modern rational mind to accept. So how this approach could help it become more acceptable.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj : Yeah.
Devotee: So firstly, Maharaj, is there any, the idea of right brain and left brain, this is more like a modern neuroscience construct. And it is also more like even it’s sometimes considered obsolete, because the brain is not literally polarized like that. People can have a lobotomy where they don’t have a significant part of one brain and still they can function. So it’s more like there’s a logical brain and there is a more of an intuitive brain. Our brain has a logical side and intuitive side, and it may not necessarily equate with left and right, but that usage has become more conventional now. Is it right ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Yeah. So this was, of course, once a presentation that one doctor has given, and some people also to some degree agree with it. We do have two parts of our brain, obviously, and she had a stroke and her part of her brain, her logical brain went off. And then she just had the right brain. So she was perceiving the world in a completely different way from a intuitive point of view. And she was like merging in Brahman and things like this. And then, periodically she would shift back to her regular brain. So she was able to make a phone call. That was a big struggle to call the ambulance, but she would go back and forth between these two brains. And then she understood that -because of the stroke, she got some sort of realization of different levels of consciousness. Yeah.
And it was related to the two parts of the brain. Of course, we cannot say it’s an absolute division, whatever, but it’s very useful to consider the brain also is involved in consciousness to some degree, even though in the Vedic literature, we don’t have mentioned with the brain at all. We can use that model to some degree to help common people, except higher levels of consciousness, at least that much we can do with this analogy.
Devotee: Maharaj, Is this the same lady who gave the TED talk on ‘My stroke of insight’?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Well, yeah, I think so. Probably.
Devotee: Yeah. Yeah. That’s quite a striking way. So now basically, the interesting point You mentioned that the brain doesn’t find much reference in the Vedic literature. So when you say that biologically, Ayurveda does know that there is an organ called brain, but in the Vedic model of consciousness, the brain doesn’t play much role. Is that what you’re saying?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yes. Well, of course, if we look in the Srimad Bhagavatam, we’ll find that there’s an analysis of the different elements. So we got the subtle elements like Prakriti and Mahat tattva and Ahankara, false ego, and we got mind and we get intelligence and Chitta.
And then we get the gross elements, but even the gross elements are very subtle. So we get ether, fire, air, water, earth. These are also very subtle. We can’t even see those elements. It’s only when they combine together that we get the visible world that we know. So in themselves, even those elements are very subtle. Besides that, we have other elements called senses – the eye, the ear, the nose. These are called elements. They’re also invisible.
Devotee: So the elements are different from the organs ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. This is the eye that we call the eyes completely different from that eye or that nose. Of course, the function is the same, we can say, but that’s a very subtle eye actually goes with your subtle body. When you die, it goes into your next body. So we have the subtle body with subtle senses, subtle mind and all this. That’s one level of consciousness itself, but it helps hold the consciousness of the Atma. And then we got the gross manifestations, the brain and the eye that we know of and the ear, etc, the gross organs. So we’ve got two levels of that.
And the Bhagavatam is not speaking about the gross level. So Ayurveda, to some degree, is dealing with the gross level. And we know that, I think, Sushruta, he was doing operations on the brain and whatever other parts of the body. So he was familiar with that. But as far as the Vedas, they don’t, then Puranas, they don’t really deal with that gross body at all. You’re dealing with a more subtle body with senses and mind.
Devotee: That’s remarkable. I never thought about this so explicitly. So the main difference, main reason why we are differentiating between, say, the sensory organs and the sense is because the sense is set to go from one body to another, whereas the sensory organ is a part of the physical body.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. And we know from Bhagavatam that when Puranajana, died, he took his mind, his senses, his Pranas with him [Laughs]. Obviously, that’s not the gross senses which are left in your body and rot in the grave or get burned in the fire for the funeral or whatever. But it’s another set of senses. So this also explains why you can go out of your body and have other body experiences, because you can use your subtle senses, not your gross sense.
You may be brain dead for a few minutes, but you can go out with that other body. And even if your brain isn’t operating and your senses aren’t operating, you can perceive things and things and remember things because you’re using your subtle mind and your subtle senses.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj. I was going to mention that point itself right now when you mentioned it before, about out of body experiences. So also there is this whole idea of some people say they can project themselves outside their body..
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, astral travel [Laughs]..
Devotee: Yeah, astral travel Yeah, So this travel not necessarily a direct topic, but during dreams. So is it that, in some cases we might be going out of our bodies or is it just going somewhere?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: We could, but normally there are people that do it. In fact, I was hearing at Govardhan one devotee says, Oh, last night I had a dream and I was traveling on my body. I came up with the temple. I was looking inside the temple, but actually there was no deities were there. But I was looking at the temple, but he kind of went out of his body, but his perception of the world was quite different. So with that subtle senses, you may perceive something different from what we have here.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Also, this also relates to other things where people consciously try to go out. Of course we have what we call astral projection. People try to do that. And more scientifically, people like Monroe Institute, they try to use sounds on balancing your left and right ears or something like this, in our brain one sense. And then they get you into a trance sort of state and you go out of your body and you can do different things. So it’s getting a little more common in the modern world and maybe a little more scientific.
But on another level, we have persons like investigation or what we call remote viewing, which was developed by the military. And they used a clairvoyant to do that, one Ingo Swann in America. And one physicist, Hal Puthoff was put in charge of the investigations to see if it was bogus or whether it was actual that you could go out of your body and perceive things thousands of miles away and back to your body again. So after many rigorous experiments with this clairvoyant, he said, yes, it is true.
We don’t know how it operates, but you can do that. You can go beyond space and you can also go beyond time. So in other words, Ingo Swann could not only go to the moon or to Jupiter or anywhere in the universe theoretically, he could also go in different times. He could go 3,000 years back or 200 years in the future, whatever. So that was the conclusion of Ingo Swann, the physicist, who’s still alive, I think. Not Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff, who was the physicist behind it. He said, we don’t know how it works, but it is definitely true that the human mind can go out of the body and go beyond space and time. So you could have a different perception completely from what we see in this world.
Devotee: Maharaj, can you just repeat the name of the scientist and maybe some reference for this? .
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Hal Puthoff. He was American and he did his research, I think, at Stanford University, California, sponsored by the CIA. And Ingo Swann, who also wrote a whole detailed summary of what he did there, the experiments they did with him, and he’s written a whole book on that. In that book, he also refers to Sadhaputra’s books, because there’s the whole idea of going out of your body, like the Puranjana story, he says, this could be a model for us.
Because Hal Puthoff, he doesn’t know how it operates either. Ingo Swann, who is the clairvoyant, He just goes out of his body, but he doesn’t know how it happens really. So he said this idea of the subtle body, kind of separating or projecting itself away from this gross body and going beyond space and time. He says that this idea of the Bhagavatam could be a nice model for us to explain.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. There is also a Buddhist researcher, Dean Radin, who has done a lot of research in this field. And he has also done meta research, which brings together various studies, and it seems it is becoming increasingly credible. The idea of there being something at least worth researching in the paranormal domain.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Yeah, So there have been other people also experimenting in this field. Some of it is maybe discredited or controversial. Nevertheless, they did work. I think John was one person in America also. Professor John, he did experiments to see if you could move things with your mind, etc. So there have been various people doing this.
So anyway, many of these people who do the research, they understand that the mind, or what they call the mind, is something quite different from our normal conception of some abstract coming out of the brain. It is very, very powerful, and it’s like it has a force of its own, but it doesn’t operate by the same physical laws as normal objects in this world. But it is real, and therefore it has a force, has an energy, but it doesn’t operate in the same space and time as its normal world we know of. This kind of puts us on another level that even not spiritual perception, even higher material perception, maybe quite gives us a different view of this whole world.
Like I mentioned, that the whole Bhagavatam presentation of the universe looks very different from what we think it is in the modern world, because we’re limited to, you know, our gross senses and what we see from a rocket ship or a telescope or whatever. But there could be other ways of looking at the whole physical world, which may be quite different from what we view.
But you cannot communicate that back, so you have to use images of this world and stick it back into three dimensions, and then it looks ridiculous, because of that. So when we talk about the whole universe with the Mount Meru in the middle and islands and lotuses and stuff, that’s like a fairy tale [Laughs]. But it’s a way of conveying something from someone who’s had the vision, and they try to convey it back, and it looks ridiculous, because it’s not the same dimension, you know, it’s not the same space, it’s not the same time. So it looks a little bit different. And it’s very difficult to describe it.
Devotee: Okay, so let me try to trace the flow of thought. So one was the idea of intuitive and logical ways of looking at the world. That’s one point. And the second was all these paranormal phenomena, for which there is some scientific evidence. And the third is the, say, Bhagavatam’s vision of the universe. So, all the common thread linking all three, is that all these point, that there could be levels of reality, and ways of perceiving those levels, which may not be accessible by our normal scientific method. Is that the common chain of thought ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think modern science also realizes this in a very, maybe disappointing way. They say we, they try to analyze the material world, and then they say, well, yeah, but we know, maybe 3%. The other 97% we call dark matter.
Devotee: Yeah.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: We don’t know what it is. It’s not the matter that we know. So in other words, it could be something like prakrti and mahat tattva, and consciousness, and, you know, material consciousness, so many things that we would be there, even the material elements on the subtle level, which are beyond our definition in the modern world.
So, you know, there’s, we can’t say that modern science is absolute. They got, just the 3%, they know something, and the 97%, they don’t know. So maybe if they go to the next level, they could get a little more into that. It’s not the highest level, but it’s just another level on the subtle level, then they could, you know, discover a little more about the world. And if they do that, then they will get a little bit of ordering on spiritual, we could say at that point, because when they get to the higher level still, then they would get the spiritual level.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj, this is a very, we could say, very intelligible way of presenting the Bhagavatam cosmology. Otherwise, it can seem very absurd. And we can see as if we are, we are ridiculous people for even concept believing something like this.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Yeah.
Devotee: So basically, first step would be that we get rational people to accept that science doesn’t have a monopoly on knowing reality. That science is one way of looking at it, or modern science, we could say. And there could be other ways of looking at the world. And science is also pointing, even modern scientific methods are pointing toward that.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yes, Of course, quantum physics itself points toward that. Because quantum physics kind of upset this whole idea of everything is stuck in a certain place and time, and that, you know, everything’s 3D world and in a flow of time. And then we get quantum physics that it goes beyond that. And material itself kind of dissolves. And location in time and space also dissolves into probability. And then end up with a lot of problems that they haven’t solved in the last hundred and so odd years since they discovered quantum physics.
So they haven’t solved that problem because they haven’t got that next level. They’re still trying to figure this out within the normal science, and it doesn’t work. And they no matter what they do, they can’t solve the problem. So therefore, they are forced to go to a higher level beyond their, you know, limitations of time and space and whatever at the moment that they have.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. I had done a podcast with Akhanda Deep Prabhu a couple of months or so ago. And he said a very interesting thing that he said, science begins with a matter-based approach to reality. Whereas if we start with consciousness and then try to come to a matter, it will be a very different way of looking at things.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So yes, well, this is what quantum physics does. It’s added because when you observe a small thing like an electron or a photon, it acts like a particle or a wave depending on how you want to test it.
Devotee: Yeah.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So in other words, your consciousness decides the reality of a small particle or a wave. So that’s kind of weird, how consciousness and matter are related. So that’s what they cannot solve in quantum physics, because they’re still, they can’t accept the consciousness as a real thing. And what is it? It goes beyond their definition. So, you know, it’s difficult to solve and it’s difficult to test it also.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. That’s true. So now just take this forward that I would say that most scientifically serious people won’t really object to the point that science doesn’t know reality exhaustively.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Most serious scientist will accept that.
Devotee: So somehow some of the most popular spokespersons of science in today’s world happen to be aggressive atheists. So in a sense, we could say science is one body of knowledge and atheism is a ideology, but atheism is misappropriating science to propagate its own ideology in some ways.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. And of course it’ll fail because it’s limited. When we go into this purely materialistic atheistic mode and we say that nothing else exists, consciousness doesn’t exist, then you limit yourself and then you cannot explain even quantum physics. So you get stuck that way. But then quantum physics is forcing us to go beyond the modern or the Newtonian model and go beyond that and include consciousness.
Whatever that is, the science will try to find that at least it puts us a step above the normal thing. And from when the consciousness and we can get up to spirit, soul or God, but that’s a big step. But at least we get the idea of something beyond matter. That’s a big step to make.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj, that’s true. So now, so if I understand right, when we say the Bhagavatam’s model is offering a particular vision of the cosmos to, we are not saying that scientific vision of the cosmos is wrong. This is one way of looking at the universe and that is another way of looking at the universe.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, that’s my idea [Laughs], how I interpret the Bhagavatam to solve the problem [Laughs]. Otherwise we’re stuck on the, all the scientists are wrong. When you go up in the spaceship, they’re lying to us and the world isn’t round. It’s flat. They’re, they’re distorting the photographs, they’re photoshopping them or something like that. You can use that argument and say that everything is false. Or, you know, you can go the other way and say that the Bhagavatam is only imaginary or whatever like that. So either way, we have to go to extreme steps.
So this way, if we understand it in terms of perception, then we can correlate the two. For instance, if a yogi or anybody who’s a paranormal person could skillfully go out of their body and perceive the universe, what would they see? They would see something different from what the scientist sees. So this is what we can say, a yogic vision of the universe. It’s not a spiritual vision, it’s a material vision with a higher dimension beyond the normal space and time that we know.
But how they would draw that and how they would convey that to us may be a little, would be difficult to do here. Because we have to come back into our space and time to explain it, and then it looks strange because of how you want to explain it. So there’s a difficulty in communicating a higher level of perception and redefining it in terms of our normal world. That’s maybe a problem in spiritual subject matters itself.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj. So if I may envision what you said as a pendulum, so one extreme of the pendulum is to say that scientific vision of the universe is wrong. The other extreme of the pendulum is to say that the Bhagavatam is imaginary. But we could have that these are two different modes of perception.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yes. Yes. Yes. Why not? Yes. And I think this is just like we can say that normally Newtonian physics that says, oh, it works in this material world as far as normal things are concerned. And the quantum physics view is another view, which is completely opposite in many ways. So it’s also there and it’s also has its use. So it’s another way of looking at the world. And then we go beyond that. We need more extreme views of the world also..
Devotee: Yes Maharaj, that’s actually, this is a good example, even within the world of science itself, that science has different levels. Yeah.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yes there are different levels.
Devotee: Yeah, Different ways of looking at the world. So..
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: But if you try to force it back into our normal world, then we can’t explain anything. So that’s why they got stuck in quantum physics. And even Einstein was puzzled what to do with this discovery he had, didn’t want to, he was uncomfortable with it because they couldn’t get to the next level. They want to try to stick it within our normal experience.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. Maharaj, when you’re using the word – ‘levels’, say I was using the word like different ways of perception. So by ‘levels’, are you saying that one is higher and one is lower or levels is also more or less the same as ways?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, we can say its gross and subtle.
Devotee: Okay. So this is for the scientific way and Bhagavatam’s way. So one is gross ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, even science, can go on the gross level and a subtle level and a subtler level if it advances. And then until we get to the level where they could accept Bhagavatam.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj. So you’re saying the quantum would be a little subtler way of looking at things ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Yeah. If they could solve their problem, then you would have a more subtle science. Of course, I think Rasaraj is also going in that direction of trying to retrain the scientists to think in a different way, which is a more subtle science.
Devotee: Yes. He’s bringing in semantics, information and semantics as a foundation of science. Yes. That’s fascinating.
Devotee: Maharaj, I read it in the philosophy of science, I read a very interesting way of presenting the conflict between say Newtonian physics and quantum physics, so, which I tried to put in our way of looking at things. So we have Pratyaksha, Anuman and Shabda. So Newtonian physics starts with Pratyaksha and comes to Anuman. Okay. Why do objects fall? We have come up with theories about that.
Whereas, quantum physics starts with Anuman and then tries to come to Pratyaksha. By Anuman, quantum physics works in terms of, the theories are very elegant. The math is remarkable and it works. The calculations work. But when we try to take a quantum physics view and try to visualize it, we just can’t visualize it.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: It’s difficult [Laughs]. Yeah.
Devotee: So if everything is just waves, then why do we perceive it as tangible objects?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, yeah.
Devotee: So then, that means, even if you put Shabda aside, within science itself, whether we start with the empirical primary, or we give the theoretical primacy, science has different ways of looking at it.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, both of which are limited [Laughs].
Devotee: Okay, Yes. Both of them are limited and both of them work within their field, and their particular mode of living. Interestingly, you know, even if you don’t go to the spiritual, actually, even both these models of science also, actually don’t describe reality as we experience it. Because we experience qualia, we experience taste and color and fragrance. But none of these are actually, they don’t have any tangible existence within either of the theories. So you know, maybe we could envision…
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Experience is not included in it.
Devotee: Yeah. That is true, Experience. The whole experiencial aspect, Yeah.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah Yeah..
Devotee: Sorry, You’re saying something Maharaj ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Actually, Newtonian physics, I suppose, ever from that point onwards, from when Newton started, then reality meant just objects. Yes, Maharaj. Divorce from consciousness, the divorce from experience.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Because they felt that experience interfered with the reality. In other words, spiritual life and Bible and God interfered and put prejudices on us to perceive the world in a distorted way. So they gave up the whole spiritual aspect completely. And therefore we get this duality between the, let’s say, the left brain and right brain, heavily left brain. Let’s just observe everything in three dimensions and logical things using sense perception and Anuman inference. And it’s true in one sense, but it’s not everything.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. When I studied the history of science, just at the time of Galileo and others, they decided to divide observed reality into two qualities or two properties, primary and secondary. And according to them, the primary properties are those which are measurable. So high density, viscosity, luminosity, all those, and everything else is secondary. So taste, fragrance, beauty, all those are secondary. So what we call as experience, as you rightly put it, that was considered secondary. And their main reason from what I read was, of course, one factor is the contradiction between science and Christianity. But another was they felt that experience is subjective.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah.
Devotee: Maybe just to try to put visually, say one circle is the, if we have a Venn diagram, one circle is a circle of our experienced reality. Within that, partially intersecting it is say the circle of Newtonian physics. Then they could have another circle, quantum physics. So it’s like a Venn diagram. None of these describes even our experience, what to speak of something which is beyond our experience.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah.
Devotee: So now, so within, just like within science, there are different ways of looking at reality. Even within scripture also, there are different ways of looking at the universe. It’s like say within Jyotish Shastras and Puranas, are different ways of looking at reality. And traditionally, the two have not been considered contradictory. Isn’t it Maharaj?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Yes. So we see that many of these scientists in ancient India, the mathematicians and astronomers, they were actually Brahmins. So they were raised with the Vedas, and they never rejected the Vedas. But then they went on with science. And then they, like Newton said, okay, the earth is spherical or whatever, like this, and it rotates, you know, and they explained eclipses in another way, not like Rahu and Ketu, etc. But they didn’t reject the Puranic version in favor of their scientific version, which was not true in the Western world.
There was a war between religion and science, and then science won. But in the ancient India, the two things that were in one mind, one person had both visions in his mind, and it wasn’t a conflict for him. Which means his mind was operating on, let’s say, the practical level of normal Newtonian type physics, and the other on a much higher level.
Of course, we can understand because they had spiritual background, they could accept that there were different versions of reality. Which means that there may be another level of left brain, right brain, they could work both brains and accept both versions of both brains.
Devotee: Oh, okay. This is quite intriguing to consider that I read one of the differences between say, the Western and the Eastern way of looking of things is the Western has always been this or that. But the Eastern is this and that. There’s not so much or as that.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yes.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj, So then if we consider it that way, then say in our movement, we are trying to depict the planetarium. So the three issues that come up first is that, as you said, if it’s a yogic vision, then how much is it possible for us to depict it through physical architecture? That’s one question.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: You cannot. It cannot.
Devotee: Oh, really? Okay.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So then because you could do it in one level, let’s say if you use holograms and make a light show of some sort, you could kind of approach that type of other dimensional reality or higher dimension of reality. But if you’re just going to use models like a ball to represent the sun and a ball to represent the moon, and a ball to represent the earth, and then we’re back to Newtonian, and that’s it. And then it doesn’t look very convincing.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So, you know, unless we have some other type of presentation, it’s not going to convince people that the Bhagavatam is right and science is wrong [Laughs].
Devotee: Yeah, that’s true.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So it’s going to look like a mythology. Maybe the way is we invent a machine to get people to stimulate the right brain [Laughs] and they could understand everything.
Devotee: Oh, okay. That’s amazing [Laughs]. That’s true. There are some experiments where, not exactly you could say mainstream experiments, but where people are exposed to certain calming music or some meditation-inducing kind of stimuli. And they do seem to calm down and see things from a, not necessarily a radically different perspective, but a significantly different perspective.
In the tradition itself, apart from the fact that, say, these two, the Jyotish Shastras in the Puranic cosmology, they have both existed, but is there any reference within, say, the Bhagavatam itself, which indicates that what is being offered is from a yogic vision?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Yeah
Devotee: Because at one level, the Bhagavatam is a linear narrative going on, and it is describing events that happen on the earth or on some other planets. But then, when Parikshit Maharaj is asking the question, is there any indication over there that what is being described is a yogic vision?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, in one sense, this is all spoken by Sukhdev Goswami, who’s not just having a yogic vision [Laughs], he’s on the highest level of spiritual life [Laughs]. So in one sense, everything he describes is, we have to think of it as being also on another level, perhaps.
For instance, we can take all the stories of Krishna’s pastimes. Yes, we can take them on the normal level we do. Okay, Krishna’s walking down the path in the forest, Krishna goes to the Jamuna River, Krishna bathes in the river with his friends or whatever like that. Then we can just take it like we normally see things in this material world. But actually, it is quite different, because it’s a spiritual world. So there’s another level of realizing that same pastime from the spiritual point of view, in which it takes on a different experience. We’re experiencing with our limited type of material senses and brain, but if we get spiritualized enough, then we can enter into the spiritual aspect of it. So in other words, the Bhagavatam looks like material words and material concepts, but actually it is spiritual.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. Now with respect to 10th canto, that’s perfectly it’s Krishna’s pastime directly. But what about other descriptions? Say for example, when we have Kardama and Devahuti talking or Vidura and Maitreya talking or Uddhava talking, there are all these conversations. Then not everything in the Bhagavatam is necessarily describing things at another level of reality.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, in one sense, because they involve devotees like Kapila or Devahuti, they’re all devotees. So yes, it operates and it looks it’s in historical time and place, etc. But it also has another reality, a higher reality to it also that probably we cannot appreciate at this time.
So similarly, the Bhagavatam description, okay, it operates because we’re talking about the world and the universe, etc. But obviously, the description of the universe as Bhagavatam describes, not only Bhagavatam, other things also with the seven upper worlds and the seven lower worlds and the Dvipas and the oceans, etc., is quite foreign to our perceptional level at this point in time. So how do we explain it? So it can only be explained if there is a higher vision of the world, that’s all. Of certain things we can explain with our normal consciousness, other things are maybe a little more difficult to explain.
Devotee: So yes, now just if I may take a slightly a devil’s advocate, that we could say that, because you want to ensure that this is not dismissed as mythology, you are just introducing this concept of higher levels of reality. The Bhagavatam doesn’t itself refer to them. So, because in one sense, there are some skeptics who say quantum physics is being misused by anyone and everyone to introduce everything, everything, which is illogical and crazy, as if it is acceptable by using quantum physics. And I was just seeing a lot of strange ideas. People just use some quantum mumbo-jumbo and they try to make it sound credible. So like now one point you made is that Sukadev Goswami himself is a yogi.
But when Parikshit Maharaj is asking him questions, he is talking about history, isn’t it? Okay, but he’s talking about, say, for example, there are various Manvantaras and what happened in the Manvantaras that’s being described. So, there any reference in the Bhagavatam to indicate that it’s cosmological description is different from what would be normally perceived. Now, I was talking with one devotee, Hari Parshad Prabhu, and he said that, if Parikshit Maharaj wanted a normal description of the cosmos, he could just have observed it with his own eyes. He wanted a higher description, that’s why he asked him the question. So, does that sound reasonable also?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, we see in the Bhagavatam itself that there’s a description of upper planets like Svargaloka and then those Devatas come down to earth sometime.
Devotee: Yes.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: We’re getting that other reality, it going into our reality, it’s not spiritual reality of Krishna’s spiritual world, but it’s upper planets and upper regions or the sages of Maharloka or Tapaloka or Brahmaloka coming down and coming to the earth. So, we get an intersection there of those higher realms on other so-called other dimensions are invisible to modern science and they’re penetrating into our view. So, we do get a little bit of other dimensions coming in and we know that their time is also different. Brahma’s one second is one year here.
Devotee: That’s true.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So, we get some intersection, a little bit of intersection there of higher dimensions, so-called higher dimensions.
Devotee: Yes, and I think, I read in a Ramayana commentary that even when the Devatas come to the earth, unless the Devatas will, the humans cannot see them, even when they are here.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, yeah. You have to have a certain level of consciousness also to appreciate them [Laughs].
Devotee: Yeah, okay.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So, then the point is to see Brahmaloka or you would have to have a certain level of consciousness. To see Svargaloka, you have to have a certain level of consciousness.
Devotee: Okay. Yes, Maharaj. So, then the, now we talked about the left brain being more logical, the right brain being more intuitive. So, now intuition, is that talked about in terms of levels of consciousness within the Vedic epistemology? Because we have two, one is the Vedic epistemology is pratyaksha, anumana and sabhda, and now I don’t know if intuition would fit anywhere in that, but then we also have levels of consciousness.
So, there are modes of acquiring knowledge, and there are levels of consciousness. Maybe we could, I think in the yoga literature, they talk about when the Prana is at a particular level, then things are perceived differently. So, is intuition talked about in our tradition in any way?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, when you mean intuition, would you mean like the future, seeing the future in one sense?
Devotee: No, no, not just in the sense that we talk about..
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Because if you can do that. Yeah. In other words, if you go beyond, if you go beyond our sense of time and space, then you can see the future or see the past. As I said, even Ingo Swann could go beyond time and space. So, he could go to Jupiter or Mars or wherever, or he could go inside a mountain and look inside a mountain, like that. Or he could go in time also and see something in the past. So, I don’t know if you want to call that intuition, it’s just another way of looking at the world, which is beyond our space and time, so we may call it fantastic, like the yogis.
Devotee: Oh, okay. So, no, I was using the word intuition in the sense that the left brain and the right brain, left brain is logical, the right brain is intuitive. So, in that sense.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Okay. So, that would include, but that right brain would include something like beyond space and time as we know it, I would think. And it would mean that we’re beyond the normal idea of past, present, future at that point.
Devotee: Beyond past, present and future. Okay.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. We’re beyond that passage of time. So, we can perceive things in a different way and we come back to this world and say, oh, how do you do that? We’re surprised by that perception because it’s quite different.
Devotee: Hmm. Yes. So Maharaj, this is fascinating. So, I said that I have three questions. One was that whether we couldn’t depict the Bhagavatam’s cosmology in our domain. So, you said that it’s very difficult unless we use holograms or something like that.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Or alter people’s consciousness, maybe. Yeah.
Devotee: Yes, or We stimulate people’s consciousness to rise higher. So, but it seems in traditional architecture, like whether we look at that big temple in the middle, in the far East, or we have the Meru Parvat and others, they have been commonly depicted, but was it always understood that this is not necessarily like a literal description. It’s a description from a higher level ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: It’s hard to say. It’s there in Buddhism and Jainism, also the same model. And we know even Angkor Wat is a model. And then the Dvipas around us, it’s accepted like that, that it’s a model of the universe. So, that was their way of doing it. So, they put it onto a gross level, so to speak. Then it becomes a little bit higher because it’s a temple. It’s spiritualized to some degree.
Devotee: Yeah, When I read about the Puranic cosmology, it seems most of the Puranas agree on the basic structure of the cosmos. It just that depending on say, which particular deity is being worshipped, they put that deities aboard at the topmost level.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: oh Okay.
Devotee : So, the structure of the universe, the hierarchy remains the same, but maybe Vaishnavas will consider Vaikuntha to be the highest. Shaivites will consider Shiva’s abode to be the highest. Buddhists will consider Nirvana to be above that. So, it seems that, we could say a cross-cultural or a cross-theological, pan-Indian vision of the universe at that time.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, ofcourse i think it goes beyond that also, because the Norse in Norway also, had a similar structure of the universe with a big tree in the middle.
Devotee: oh
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: And other cultures also have a similar idea. They also have a snake somewhere in the whole cosmology as well. So, there’s a common theme. So, of course, it doesn’t look rational in the modern world to say, okay, somewhere in the universe is a snake, you know, crawling around or whatever, or there’s a big tree, a huge monstrous tree or a huge mountain. It doesn’t look, you know, I would think that it’s more like they’re images.
As I say, when you get into the right brain, you don’t think in terms of logic. You record things in terms of images. So, it’s like a lotus. It’s like a tree. It’s like this. And then we convey that back and it looks a little strange. And when we come back to our dimension of how can there be a big lotus or how can there be a big tree? But they describe these things like that. So, it could be, you know, an analogy for something else also possible.
But that’s why in my presentation, I said that even the whole, it can operate in different levels as Sadhaputra also said. It can be like, you know, India with the Himalayas and then china on one side and India on the other side and, you know, whatever like this, you know. Or it can be a vision of the world with Mount Meru being North Pole and then flatten out all the continents and make that like the Bhu Mandala. Or it can be the solar system.
Devotee: Yes.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: With all the planets revolving like that with islands of Dvipas with the radius of their, or the dimensions of their orbit like that. Or we can go beyond that. We go to the galaxy and that the galaxy is the Bhu Mandala.
Devotee: Yes.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Or we can go beyond that, take all the universes together. And then we have this toroidal shape thing with this Mount Meru shape in the middle of it. So, if you go beyond time and space, you could have all of these visions simultaneously, but how do you express it? So, they may express it as, you know, a Mount Meru with the Dvipas and things like this in oceans.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. Sadhaputra’s presentation was very sophisticated. And one thing I observed is that generally when talking with people, if we give them various explanations, it could be like this, it could be like this, it could be like this.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Frustrated.
Devotee: No, not necessarily. They find something that makes sense to them. I find it a little more, they find it, okay, this doesn’t make sense, but this makes sense to me. But if we just directly say, this is like this, and that is wrong, then that appears a little more difficult for them to accept.
So, of course, some people might be like that, that you are just giving so many explanations. But yeah, Sadhaputra’s presentation, I found to be one of the most sophisticated and the way you explained it, that this could be a vision or an image, which cannot really be described in our, which cannot really precisely put in our time and space. So, somehow we seem to have a little paranoia to using the word non-literal.
Sadhaputra used the word non-literal and he was quite surprised by some people for that. So, are there any alternative terminologies that we could use for this, like use the word, it could be metaphorical, but sometimes some people talk by that also, but what terms can we use for describing this? You have any?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe in theology, they have some term for that where they don’t want to use that it’s real speculative or interpretive, but it could have different levels of meaning. There may be a word for that in philosophy or in theology or something. I don’t know. I don’t know myself, but it could be something there like that.
I think some people deal with myths and stuff like that. They talk about myths and appreciate the mythologies of the world, etc. Like Carl Jung, he was appreciating that there was some archetypal things behind, psychological things behind that, whatever. So, that’s of course on a psychological level, but we can say that, that also becomes a reality, that there are levels of reality, that it’s not just a mental thing in your mind, but they’re actually real as well. So, it’s not just symbol. Symbol is reality on one level, but it’s difficult for us on our gross consciousness to accept that a symbol is a symbol, but symbol can be reality also on a higher level.
In the spiritual world, of course, everything becomes real. Whatever you think of becomes real. So, the representation or the metaphor or the symbol, normally we think that we can’t do that because we have to take the direct meaning of the words or whatever like that, but we also know that scripture itself has many levels of meaning.
So, we got in the first verse of Bhagavatam, Vishwanath and Jiva describe in five or six different ways, totally different meanings of the same words. So, we can’t say, oh, you’re interpreting. It’s just the nature of spiritual literature itself that has levels of meaning to it. So, we can say the whole concept of the universe could have different levels of meaning as it’s presented in the Bhagavatam also.
Devotee: That’s amazing. It’s quite fairly except the point that one words can have different meanings. So, if one words can have different meanings, then one universe can also be described in different ways. And then so we could say, you know, that levels is a very acceptable way of looking at the different levels of reality and different levels of perceiving those realities. So, something could be metaphorical and simultaneously, it could also be physical. So, metaphorical just means it’s symbolic, but it’s not metaphysical, it’s describing a reality beyond the physical.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Vishwanath Chakrawarthi in discussing the Chatur sloki of the Bhagavatam, also the last verse, he gives a Jnana level meaning for Jnanis. He gives another, just a literal, very literal meaning. And then he gives a Rasa meaning for the devotees involving Prema and Bhakti.
So, we’ve got three different, you know, versions to the same verse and it means quite different things. But we can’t accuse him of interpreting, you know, or going beyond the direct meaning of words because he also says that Bhagavatam, in some senses, is ‘Parokshavad’. It speaks indirectly. It does not always give the direct meaning of things. It hides the meaning sometimes. So, we have to be careful also that we can’t always take literal meanings.
So, that’s why we have to rely on the Acharyas. But unfortunately, they don’t speak about this universe too much and describe why it’s like that.
Devotee: Yeah, Yes Maharaj, I remember another verse, I think 11th Canto [not clear], where the same verses used to describe Ram, Krishna and Lord Caitanya by Viswanath Chakrawarthy Thakur. So, then we could say that the first question was that is this depictable? Well, in some ways, but we have to have some caveats that this is not, when we depict it physically, it’s not exactly the same as what it is actually. So, that is the first point.
A second point is, you know, when we depict the universe, now, what do you understand is the purpose for doing that? Is that the 5th Canto description of the universe, it’s not exactly spiritual. It’s like at a different material level. So, you know, why do you feel is it so important for us to actually depict it, say, in our international headquarters? Means what is the objective? If it cannot be accurately depicted. Yeah, please go ahead..
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Well, from the point of view of Sukadev Goswami, he presents the universe and description in order to show the skill of the Lord in operating in the material world. And of course, the idea is that he makes places for all types of living entities from the highest Brahma Loka down to the lowest Patala Loka. And he gives all varieties of places and experiences and bodies for living entities. So, that’s the genius of the Lord. So, that’s what it’s supposed to show.
But it may be for people of higher consciousness, because we in the modern world we can’t accept that there’s higher planets like Brahamaloka, because we don’t see them. And, you know, there’s a Mount Meru in the middle and all of this. We can’t accept that. We should not accept it. That was true in this age, which is a few hundred years ago. They were accepting it. They didn’t question it at all. But it’s difficult for us to accept in the modern world. So, in other words, they had different vision of reality, in material reality even. So, now we’re in a different stage of, you know, what is real world.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Of course, like Rasaraj says that, you look at a table and you see the table. And we have a common definition of the table. And everybody looks at the same table, they more or less get the same description. It’ll give you the same description, but it’s not actually the table. We’re seeing that table and commonly we’re seeing that same table, but actually the table was something quite different from that. We don’t see the reality.
Devotee : Yeah, in a sense, actually, we don’t really.. in the objective world is, it’s filled with so many details that we can’t take it all. So we usually have more like a purpose centered vision of the world. This is the object for me to place things. That is a place where I can.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: And I think of people, modern people are trained up from childhood to see things in a certain way. If they don’t see like that, then they consider backwards. So that’s why primitive peoples who are introduced to modern civilization, they can’t make sense of it. They can’t understand why you’re doing this, why you’re living in a house, why you have AC in your house, why, why everybody has to work so hard.
So they sit back in there, you call them lazy, because they’re looking at you and wondering what are these people doing running around like this? Because they’re, they’re seeing the world differently. They’re in a different mode. So similarly, the people in India, ancient India were seeing in a different way and they didn’t question what was in the scripture at all. They could see the world through the eyes of scripture. But nowadays we’re, we’re all trained up in the scientific mode and we have to question everything.
Devotee : Yeah. You know, this, you talk about primitive people. I just remembered, Bhakti Siddhanata Saraswathi Thakur, in one of his Bengali essays, Bengali samajita. He says that the Eastern mode of living focused more on the Jnanendriyas observing the universe, whereas the Western mode of living is more on the Karmendriyas, doing something with the universe.
And he says that for those who are focused on the Karmendriyas, life centered on the Jnanendriyas will seem very lazy. Why are you not doing anything? On the other hand, people who are centered on the Jnanendriyas for them, life with the Karmendriyas will seem unnecessarily busy. Why are you running around? What are you going to achieve by all this? And so something similar to what you said,
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Different worldview.
Devotee: Yes, Different worldview. So this brings me to a third question now that, that then say a person, a new devotee comes up or new person becomes a devotee or even a devotee who’s studying the scriptures. Yeah. They find if that devotee finds it difficult to say, understand or accept the fifth kind of cosmology.
So how central is that in terms of faith? So if there are some things which we can tell, okay, if you don’t understand, you can just leave it as a state of suspended judgment, you could say, like put in the bracket, don’t accept it, don’t reject it, just put it aside and continue studying the Bhagavatam. So is it a, is it a central faith issue that somebody has to accept the fifth kind of cosmology before they can actually develop love for Krishna or it’s not that central.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Well, it’s like I said, the whole purpose was to show the skill of the Lord in making this universe, so that the living entities could live in different levels. So at least that much they can appreciate. So we get all these different places for living entities in higher and lower planets and different Dvipas and different Varshas, etc. So if they can appreciate that, that there are different places for living entities to live, many of which are invisible to us, that’s fine.
And then you don’t have to worry about the details of where the Lokas are, where the Dvipas are, where Mount Meru is, and just leave it at that. You know, and later on they can say that just as we cannot really understand everything about Krishna, so we cannot understand everything about the description of the universe also, which is material we don’t know. So leave it at that.
Devotee: Okay.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: The one thing we do appreciate that the whole thing is very symmetrical.
They work out in detail, the number of Yojanas this way and that way, and it all works out very nicely. The width of the universe, the height of the universe, the height of Mount Meru, the base of Mount Meru, the Dvipas and how each one is double, the diameter of the last Dvipa, etc. Those all work out in very symmetrical proportions.
Just like when they draw the Mandala, which is basically a diagram of the universe. It’s a nice circle and a square, another circle and a lotus in the middle. So the whole universe is very symmetrical. In other words, there is an intellect behind this is making the whole universe very beautiful [Laughs]. But that’s how we appreciate Supreme Lord.
Devotee: That’s beautiful. There’s a, from aesthetic perspective, the symmetry. And in fact, at least early scientists, when they drew, they conceived the planetary orbits and all that, they also appreciate the artistry behind the vision of the universe.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Yeah.
Devotee: So if the purpose is to say further, some appreciation of God and God consciousness, and for some people in today’s.. who grew up in today’s scientific education, even the modern scientific cosmology can also actually evoke a sense of awe and appreciation, not for everyone, but for some purpose might be served even through that this universe is so vast and it’s so magnificent. There has to be some brain behind it.
There’s some organizing principle behind it.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Well, even, even Einstein admitted, we can’t say there’s nothing there. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but it looks like there was something there. You won’t say definitely what it is, but he appreciates that there is, you know, some harmony within the whole physical laws of the universe, etc. So, you know, more, elevated scientists, advanced scientists, they appreciate that there is some, you know, some order within all of the laws of physics.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj. So in fact, Einstein, from what I read, he was not against the concept of God per se, because there are statements which seem to be and some statements of his, which seem to be atheistic. So it seems that he was more against the concept of God that he would go, he got from the Judeo Christian tradition, but from science, he felt there has to be some order that ordering principle.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. .
Devotee: Yes Maharaj, So then, just to, so if it’s a generic appreciation of, God’s greatness that can come from either cosmology and what about some specific, contradictions, we sometimes come up, how much should they be made into faith issues? Say, for example, the distance, which is closer, the moon is closer, the sun is closer, or for example, how big is the universe? Or for example, did, we humans go to the moon or not? So there are some issues which can become quite volatile and can be a big challenge for the faith for some people. How critical are these issues and how can they be addressed?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, Well, for instance, the moon issue, of course Srila Prabhupad said, they didn’t go to the moon or whatever, even if they went, they actually didn’t enjoy on the moon, which is true. They have to wear space suits. They can’t enjoy.
So if you really want to enjoy the moon, then you have to do punyas and then in your next body, you get a body suitable for enjoying. So it’s a different place in other words, a different level of consciousness. So you can go on a physical level, but you’re not going to the moon in the true sense of the, you know, enjoyment, on the enjoyment consciousness level, you’re not going there. So we can say like that.
Devotee: Yeah.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: So, so you can go or not go physically, but there’s plenty of ways we could cheat. And nowadays look like you’re going to the moon, but you didn’t go, or you go to America, You didn’t go to America, whatever you have, you know, you, we could always say that they’re cheating like that. It doesn’t really matter though, because whatever they do, they can’t get the enjoyment that is described in the Vedas by going to the moon. So that is just one way of explaining that particular example.
Devotee: That’s very good Maharaj. So then we don’t, in one sense, have to place science and scripture in competition that you have to choose this or you have to choose that, both can be, can have that validity in their place.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, we should not think that science is absolute. Some neophyte devotees may think this is the science of this. It’s true. This is true. This is wrong. So we have to get out of that mode. So a person who has proper faith, then faith means that he intuitively, so to speak, he will accept the version of scripture, even if he can’t understand it. So that’s what faith is.
A person doesn’t have faith and has to start questioning immediately. We do require faith in order to progress in. But that means that we do appreciate the inexplicable nature of the Supreme Lord and how spiritual actually is quite different from material. We appreciate that as a matter of faith also.
Devotee : Yes. So we could put it this way that, faith means we should be open to the fact that there can be some realities beyond what our senses or our rationality can perceive.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, definitely.
Devotee: But that doesn’t necessarily mean that what our senses or reasoning perceives, we have to reject that. There is more to this, but that doesn’t mean this is wrong.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, That’s stated very nicely also by even Rupa Goswami in the Nectar of Devotion. He says, if you want to appreciate Nectar of Devotion with all the Raasa and everything about Krishna, you need Ruchi. You need a spiritual taste. But then, and then he says, Tarka, this logic doesn’t work there. But then he says, we don’t reject logic also. We also use logic, but it follows after the verdict of the scripture. So we accept what is there in the scripture, and then we can use logic to try to correlate it with our normal life and whatever. But we don’t give up. And of course, we use logic to get the meaning of scripture also. So we don’t reject logic, but it has its place. And in terms of spiritual things, particularly, then we have to take those conclusions and work backwards, accept the conclusions, and then use our logic after that, to try to speculate our own with logic becomes a spiritual conclusion. That’s useful.
Devotee: Oh, yes. So similarly for the other things also, we could come up with explanations. Say, for example, the dimension of the universe, or the size of the, which is higher and lower, moon or sun. There is an explanation that there’s a vertical dimension to the universe.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: That’s clear, actually, all they do is they mentioned the different heights of orbit of the different planets. It doesn’t say what the orbit is, but it’s the height of the Mount Meru. That’s all. So, but the orbit of the sun is way out on Manasikara mountain range. Very, very far away, even though it’s lower than above Bhumandala, than the moon is. The moon is at a higher elevation of Bhumandala. This orbit is closer to Bhartavarsha and it’s circular orbit is much smaller than the sun’s orbit. The sun has got the greatest, the hugest orbit, way out on Manasikara mountain range, which is, you know, a lot of yojanas away. So it’s further away from us, but it’s elevation above the Bhumandala is less than the moon’s elevation.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. So in modern terms, one way I try to explain this is that say somebody’s in the ground level of a building and there’s a skyscraper, which is a hundred level next to it. And somebody’s at a hundredth level in that. And then somebody is maybe at a far distance away, horizontally, but they’re in this third level or fourth level. So then which will be geographically closer diagonally, that may be different from the height. So what you’re saying, isn’t it? Yes, Maharaj.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yes.
Devotee: And now see in the Western intellectual history, there was a conflict between science and religion because there was a time when some Christians claimed, or at least that was the idea at that time that, that scripture gives all knowledge, material and spiritual. And science, it contradicts scripture, then science will be rejected as heretical. But subsequently, now many scientists, many Christian scientists also say that that was actually a misunderstanding.
Like for example, the idea that a geocentric model of the universe that doesn’t come from the Bible that came from Greco from Ptolemy and other Greek thinkers. So now in how Christianity tries to resolve that science religion conflict by compartmentalization that so, in fact, Galileo had put it that, the Bible tells us how to go to the heavens and scripture, science tells us how the heavens go. So how to go to the heaven, how the heavens go. So now is there is some kind of, in our tradition, has there been a similar compartmentalization, say of empirical or scientific knowledge and spiritual knowledge or scriptural knowledge? So are there any reasons why a science, religion conflict or science, scripture conflict is less probable or more probable in our tradition?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Hard to say, I haven’t thought about it, but as I said, it looks like the ancients adjusted it. So the astronomers, they were Brahmanas and they also accepted the Vedas, but they also did their empirical studies and they didn’t find a contradiction there in how they adjusted it. I don’t know, but as I suggested, maybe it’s left brain, right brain, they had cultivated both sides, which means that they had some spiritual realization as well as material intelligence. So then they could adjust the world and look at it both ways without seeing a contradiction.
If we get too dualistic and emphasize the left brain too much, then we’ll have a conflict, because we’ll try to see everything in terms of the left brain and logic and then everything, the other thing doesn’t make sense. So we’ll get a conflict there. But if the person has got, you know, a flexibility where he can operate on both perspectives, then there’d be no contradiction. I would assume that that’s what happened in ancient India, that they could, they were intelligent and they could use their senses and empirically develop science. At the same time, they could progress spiritually and they didn’t see it as contradictory at all.
If we lose let’s say, realization aspect of religion, then it becomes simply doctrine. Then we fall into problem, because we’ll take the doctrine and we’ll interpret everything literally [Laughs] and then it won’t make sense to science or to the, you know, the intelligent person in the world. And then we get this conflict. So when we can say the religion is divorced from realization, then the religion looks fanatical and it’ll look untrue and therefore the conflict. If the person has realization, then he’ll see no conflict between the two worlds.
Devotee: That’s profound Maharaj. Religion without realization is fanatical. Yeah. And in one sense, our tradition has various parts of yoga, by which we can get realizations. Whereas Christianity doesn’t have really the idea of realization so much. It’s more of you accept the doctrines and then you are saved. So not to say that Christians, there might not be elevated Christian Saints, but that’s not a mainstream part of their process that one will get realization or one’s consciousness elevated. So that would mean that a devotee say who is working in cosmology in a field of cosmology and the devotee deals with the normal world as is perceived by scientific cosmology and then the devotee studies the Bhagavatam. That devotee doesn’t have to necessarily think that, okay, I’m in this profession. Therefore, like I just engaging in this profession means that I’m selling my soul or I am, I am something like that.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Yeah. So that what they can do is correlate the two things based on the spiritual realization that can give a new concept to modern scientific cosmology, introduce another viewpoint into it. You know, they can contribute to it, having an advance, but taking another viewpoint.
One other point is that Bhaktivinod Thakur talks about the Saragrahi and the Bharavahi. So in terms of religion, so he says the Saragrahi takes the essence of the religion, which ultimately means the realization of Prema within the religion. That’s essence ultimately. And around that we get traditions, customs, signs, like tilak or dress and so many things, the words you use, the scriptures you accept, your doctrines of your philosophy. So they’re all useful in one sense, but they’re also you can say external. So if we just concentrate on the externals and we don’t get that essence and we lose everything. So you have to be a Saragrahi.
If you get attached to the externals, then you become a fanatic or a prejudiced person or a sectarianism, a sectarian person, you know, and then you have, you fight with other groups because of that. Your group is different from my group. Your doctrine is different from my doctrine. Your dress is different, etc. So we concentrate on these externals. Then we end up with, we lose the essence completely. And you know, that’s the end of the religion or the faith because the realization is gone. So we have to go for that Sar, the essence of all times. Otherwise we, you know, the Bharavahi for carrying loads of, you know, attachments with us.
Devotee: Yes Maharaj. I’ve heard this Saragrahi and Bharavahi repeatedly. Now you put this differentiation, you put even the doctrines of the philosophy that could also be the externals you’re saying.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah. Well, if you get attached to the doctrine for the doctrine sake and we just fight over doctrine, you know, and we don’t see a commonality behind it. For instance, if we were in one religion, then we’ll say, you know, Allah is God, not Jehovah or Allah is God, not Krishna like this. We take a broader view. Then we say, okay, yeah, there, we have different names for God concept. It’s the same as a high Supreme person. So that’s understanding the essential part of the doctrine, not the external aspect of the doctrine.
Devotee: So you would say that the literal, somebody say some spiritual teacher expecting that the fifth canto be accepted literally and demanding that as, the sign of faith from followers that would fall in exactly in the Saragrahi ?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Bharavahi. Yeah, If you don’t accept this, you’re excommunicated from our group [Laughs].
Devotee: Yes Maharaj. Do you have few more minutes Maharaj, i will finish.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah, ok.
Devotee: So actually within our tradition, regarding the compartmentalization of say science and religion to different levels, there’s one side, which is our tradition is can be very comfortable with that because we already have different levels of reality is gross material subtle material, spiritual.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Yeah.
Devotee: And it is said that higher levels are inconceivable. So in that sense, we can actually compartmentalize and use space for everyone. But from another perspective, our tradition also seems to say that scripture is the final authority, not just for spiritual knowledge, but also for material knowledge. So now that could lead to problems, because then if say there are some areas when the scriptural view and the scientific view do not agree, then, is it our traditions position, First of all ? that scripture is the final authority on material knowledge also, or is it more that scripture is authority on spiritual knowledge?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, I don’t think that’s being covered too much in our Gaudiya philosophy and maybe in karma mimsa they deal with that. I’m not sure. But I think probably even there, they may, if it’s simply a technical material detail, they may give preference to observation in that case. I’m not sure, but they may, they may do that in karma mimamsa.
Devotee: So it’s not like a defining tenet of our epistemology that scripture is the authority to the source of material knowledge also. I thought that’s what the Sandarbhas say.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, in the broad sense, obviously, because we define matter, you know, in terms of elements, etc. So we have to accept that we can’t challenge that and say, okay, you’re talking about the material world and I don’t accept Ahankara, I don’t accept earth, water, air, fire, I accept 108 elements. No, obviously, we do have to accept that aspect of it.
When it comes to a detail, maybe there’s a little problem like, you know, when so-and-so in which year he, you know, went around the earth and conquered the earth or whatever like that, you know, it may be a small detail, historical detail. There may be some, you know, contradiction somewhere. But that again, we can say is not so significant, because the history is always repeating itself every day of Brahma and a slightly different all the time. So therefore historical details, even those are adjustable in one sense. So certain aspects of material observation in the scriptures is it’s very flexible, because we have, you know, every day of Brahma and so many thousand yuga cycles in one day of Brahma, etc. So the experience could be repeated many times and be slightly different.
Devotee: It’s amazing. I wish that, when I was introduced to Krishna consciousness, the first few years, I had this understanding because initially I went through a lot of conflict. I thought I had to choose between science and scripture, but actually there is a way in which we preserve our rationality, at the same time, we can preserve our consciousness.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: oh, yeah.
Devotee: Can I just quickly summarize what we discussed Maharaj? If you want to speak some concluding words.
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: hmm
Devotee: So we tried to discuss, you know, say left brain, right brain approaches to scripture. And then you started by how this brain researcher, she had a different way of looking after a stroke. So that’s one scientific way of saying that, the science way of looking at reality is not the only way. Then another layer of evidences are through all paranormal research, whether it is various kinds of research done in Stanford and other places. And then, so we could say that our Bhagavatam cosmology is also another way of looking at reality.
And within science itself, there are different ways. There is quantum physics, which sees reality very differently from modern, from Newtonian physics. So if within science itself, there are different ways of looking at reality. Then there could be some ways which are outside science also. And scripture offers us that view. And Sukadev Goswami is himself a Yogi. So he’s giving a vision of the universe that is meant to increase appreciation for the Lord, that how the Lord accommodates various living beings at various levels. And from that purpose, if we see, then that universe is that is the way the fifth kind of cosmology is described.
And even in our tradition, that they have been comfortable with different ways of looking at the universe. Like the scientists, like Bhaskaracharya, they had both the Brahmins. So they accepted the Puranas, but they also accepted Jyotish Yastras.
And then, so it is that, then the question was, how, how is much is this depictable? So it’s very difficult to depict because it’s more in terms of visions or images. So some depictions can be done, but we don’t have to literally insist that this is the way it is. And certainly we don’t have that the scientific way is wrong.
So the Bhagavatam’s description can be both symbolic and real or metaphorical and metaphysical – both. And then you talk about the pendulum, say one way is that to say that science is wrong. The other is to say scripture is imaginary, but the balance way would be to science has one way of looking scripture, another way of looking. And then with respect to it’s a, it’s a traditional, it’s, it needn’t be made into a major faith issue that if you can’t accept this, then you are a heretic, but rather accept the principles, And then you can, you can put aside the other details if you can’t accept them.
And there are ways in which the details conflict can be resolved. And you talked about that is that religion without realization becomes fanatical. So the Saragrahi and Baravahi. So Saragrahi means to focus on gaining the realization and to encourage people to take up the process by which they can get the realization and not put in unnecessary obstacles.
So we can have a compartmentalization that science has a jurisdiction for empirical knowledge and scripture talks about transcendental matters. When scripture gives us a view of the material universe, that is a different model. We accept that model, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to reject science. And that way we can both go together.
Yes, Maharaj. Any concluding words you want to say, Maharaj? Anything I left out?
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj: Well, one thing is that ultimately our aim is to show that if you get a spiritual insight, then you can actually solve your scientific problems in a more absolute way. In other words, science is always going to change in the future, depending on our Pratakshaya and Anuman, which keep changing.
But if we understand behind that, there is the spiritual essence and spiritual realization, and we introduce that into science, we can have a more accurate science. So in other words, spirituality can contribute to science by giving a higher vision to it. So we get more perfect science in the material world by recognizing spirituality.
Devotee: Yes, Maharaj. That would be a profound contribution. I think that will also require a lot of dedicated study of both science and scripture to be actually able to do that. But that would be a contribution.
Thank you very much for your time. It’s been illuminating in discussing with you. Humble obeisances, Maharaj. Hare Krsna !
HH Bhanu Swami Maharaj : ok, Hare Krsna !