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Transontology Programs
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Scientific Vedanta My Spiritual Master Srila Prabhupada often spoke of the Vedic wisdom, Vedanta, as 'scientific.' However, I have never read an adequate or detailed explanation of exactly what this statement meant. If Srila Prabhupada said that such a thing existed, for a disciple, that was certainly sufficient reason to look for it. Thus much of my research has been a quest for the scientific basis of Krsna consciousness. This research led to the present series, where recently we exposed the deep philosophical connections between Vedic wisdom and modern science in detail for the first time. This historic observation had to wait until 2004 because no one, including Srila Prabhupada himself, had the technical knowledge and vocabulary to articulate the connection clearly in modern scientific terminology. Nevertheless, it is exactly in the difficult and technical field of powerful semantic conceptual and analytical tools that modern science and Vedic wisdom find their common ground. This is not at all a criticism of Srila Prabhupada. He attended Scottish Rite College in (then) Calcutta under the Raj. His Western science, vocabulary and language education was in the 19th-century British English medium. This language, with its awkward logic, mechanistic belief system and limited moralistic worldview, is completely unsuitable for expressing the contemporary post-Einsteinian, non-Aristotelian, quantum-mechanical picture of the universe. The groundbreaking discoveries of Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr, Bertrand Russel and Alfred Korzybski were yet to be widely published, let alone incorporated into undergraduate courses, when Srila Prabhupada dropped out of college before accepting his degree. At the time, Prabhupada was protesting the occupation of India by the British Raj in cooperation with Gandhi's noncooperation movement; but in any event that was the end of his formal scientific training. Considering Prabhupada's circumstances, his incomplete explanation seems unsurprising. Much more amazing and miraculous is his awareness of the connection at all. Most commentators seem to assume Srila Prabhupada's 'scientific Vedanta' meant that perfoming the process of bhakti-yoga, following the instructions given in the scriptures, resembles following a scientific formula in a laboratory. If one follows the scriptural formula, then the result he observes will correspond precisely to the descriptions in the scriptures. His benefit, in terms of elevation of consciousness, will be a function of how well he is able to apply those instructions. This is certainly the case, but the similarities go much deeper than the use of empirical methodology. The essential commonality between Vedic wisdom and modern science is a deep agreement in language, logic and metaphysics. Languages contain implicit metaphysical assumptions about the structure of reality. Science has discovered that if a problem or subject is analyzed in a particular scientific language or form of representation, the language itself introduces its structural assumptions into the model. If the same subject can be analyzed in several different languages, the qualities that remain invariant over all transformations of frames of reference are the actual qualities of the subject. The connection between Vedic wisdom and modern science is in their conceptual and methodological tools, linguistic structures and logical procedures. Both Vedic wisdom and modern science use languages built on a non-elementalistic, four-dimensional space-time extensional ontology with a non-Aristotelian finitary logic of nonlinear causality. The highest value of Vedic wisdom consists of a special quality of truth called Absolute Truth. Absolute Truths are invariant over all possible frames of reference. Statements like 'God is omnipotent' or 'The Absolute Truth is the source of all emanations' apply to any being or object in any universe, dimension, or spacetime, and in any internal or external state. Such statements are unconditionally true. The Vedic literature is an inexhaustible mine of such axiomatic Absolute Truths. Statements about material objects are always conditional, and therefore only relatively true, because the material world is not eternal. Even statements such as, 'Objects with mass accellerate toward one another at a rate proportional to the sum of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance,' are relative because they assume the existence of a material universe with certain laws of gravitation. Such truths also implicitly assume a domain of application; for example, the laws of mechanistic physics, such as the law of gravitation quoted above, do not hold true at the nanoscale, at the scale of galaxy clusters, or within the event horizon of a black hole. All such statements are therefore conditional, relative truths. The Aristotelian absolute logical values of 'true' and 'false' actually do not apply even to relative truths. Relative truths are neither absolutely true nor false, but operate within some limited domain, which is usually unstated or assumed. The Absolute Truth of the Vedas is a third logical value of truthfulness besides 'true' and 'false'. Vedic logic is therefore non-Aristotelian. Vedic language and logic also possess other non-Aristotelian features, such as extensibility and multiordinality of relations, absence of the identity relation, tolerance of ambiguity and non-positional grammar. Vedic language is also non-elementalistic, because at the most fundamental level, only God exists, being the root substance of everything and the Complete Whole. Although we cannot experience this level of reality directly due to our limited consciousness and faculties, we know of its existence through the Vedic literature. Nothing can exist in isolation, therefore the Complete Whole has relations with other similar structures. The Vedic theory of emanation teaches that God has many energies, classified into broad categories of internal, marginal and external. The internal energies comprise God's confidential spiritual potencies, the marginal energies emanate the individual living entities, and the external energies create the material universes. All the emanations from the Complete Whole are also complete wholes, formed according to a similar structure. Just as each species creates offspring only of the same species, the emanations of the Absolute Truth display characteristics very similar to the Complete Whole. Thus the normal form of emanations is personal and conscious, while the impersonal emanations, such as the material elements and the Brahman effulgence, are atypical. All such emanations are dependent upon and relative to the Complete Whole. Within the broad classes of internal and marginal energies of the Complete Whole, each emanation is a unique individual. Although the emanations fall into general classes such as Personalities of Godhead, shaktis, incarnations, demigods, humans, animals, etc., internally they are all individual expressions of personal, conscious spiritual energy. We cannot divide such complete, personal beings into parts such as 'body,' 'mind,' 'soul,' 'intelligence' etc. and treat these as separate classes, without introducing artificial linguistic structural assumptions into our thinking. We experience human beings as whole, indivisible entities. The whole is far more than the sum of its parts, and each whole is a unique individual. We cannot assume that what is true for one is true of all. People may resemble one another superficially, but each individual's internal mental, emotional and spiritual structure differs from all others. This kind of thinking is non-elementalist, holistic and congruent with the observed structure and order of reality. Just as we cannot separate 'body' from 'soul,' within the material context at least, neither can experimental science separate 'space' from 'time.' The metaphysical structural implications of our language do not necessarily describe reality. In science, the artificial elementalistic structural division of spacetime into 'space' and 'time' delayed the discovery of the theory of relativity for centuries. However, it is not so much the discoveries of modern science that intrigue us, as the powerful semantic methods of analysis and investigation that made these discoveries possible. Though developments in theories of semantics and psycho-linguistics rarely inspire front-page news stories, their eventual results in the form of new technologies profoundly affect everyone's lives. Conceptual advances, such as non-Aristotelian logic and non-elementalistic terminology, enable theoretical advances such as relativity and quantum mechanics. The new theories suggest new experiments, which enable technical advances such as microelectronics. Similarly, advances in spiritual conceptions enable new synergies among faith, spiritual experience and the exegetical Vedic tradition. There is no end to improving our understanding of spiritual life and consciousness. The conceptual tools of modern science reveal truths that the Medieval metaphysics of conventional language miss or obscure. This principle applies whether the object of our analysis is the physical universe, the world of ideas and symbols, or the spiritual world. The more sophisticated the analytical tools we can bring to bear on the spiritual subject matter, the more profound will be our understanding and realization of the Absolute Truth. |
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