by Yogeśvara dāsa

by Yogesvara dasa

Yogesvara dasa is a 24-year-old American now living at the ISKCON center in Paris, France. He has studied at the University of Wisconsin and the Sorbonne. He and his wife play important roles in preparing Krsna conscious books and magazines for publication in French and other European languages.

Before accepting the renounced order of life in 1959, our spiritual master, Srila Prabhupada, was chief supervisor in the laboratory of Dr. Jagadish Chandra Bose, renowned Indian botanist and chemist, whose most memorable experiments were in the field of consciousness-perception in plants and other nonmoving entities. Dr. Bose was an innovator in the true sense of the term. He attempted successfully to show contemporary men of science the need for a spiritual perspective in their work-an open-mindedness that would allow them to examine more objectively the conclusions of the Vedic scriptures-and simultaneously he resolved the ambivalent attitude toward Western science held by many of his Hindu associates. Dr. Bose summarized his most recurrent experimental theme in these concluding remarks of his lecture-demonstration at the Royal Institute in 1901:

"I have shown you this evening the autographic records of the stress and strain in both the living and the nonliving. How similar are the two sets of writing, so similar indeed that you cannot tell them the one from the other! They show you the waxing and waning pulsations of life-and the climax due to stimulants, the gradual decline in fatigue, the rapid setting in of death rigor from the toxic effect of poison. It was when I came on this mute witness of life and saw an all-pervading unity that binds together all things-it was then that for the first time I understood that message proclaimed on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago: 'Those who behold the One in all the changing manifoldness of the universe, unto them belongs the eternal truth, unto none else, unto none else.' "

This must have been hard to swallow for some of Bose's Western listeners, steeped in an Aristotelian scientific culture. The intellects of modern science prefer on the whole to see such conclusions relegated to convenient departments of parapsychology and religious studies, thus freeing themselves from the responsibility of conscientiously seeking to resolve the dichotomy between science and religion. This situation has arisen not because all scientists are necessarily anti-religion, but rather because religion for so long has not shown her scientific side-the substantive, researchable quality that would make her more attractive to the rationalist.

A quality of honest men is that they admit ignorance of things beyond their knowledge, and further that they accept an idea when convinced of it by proper reason and argument. The Vedic conception of the forthright man of science is one of an individual bent on extending the perimeters of empirical knowledge to bring about a fusion with transcendental truth. Real science, according to the Vedic conception, is not unspiritual, but, rather, unrestricted, truly experimental-even to the extent of experimenting with the chanting of ancient mantras, for example, or attempting the various yoga systems as means for self-purification. And real religion, say the Vedas, rests not on blind following or mere sentiment, but rather on a scientific analysis of matter, spirit and the control of both.

This is not a new viewpoint. The greatest scientific thinkers in history have all been spiritual men who have tried to unify the apparent divergences between science and religion. All have pointed to the same ultimate truth in science and religion, but only from different points of vision.

"Subjects of philosophy and theology are like the peaks of large and towering and inaccessible mountains standing in the midst of our planet inviting attention and investigation. Thinkers and men of deep speculation take their observations through the instruments of reason and consciousness. But they take different points when they carry on their work. These points are positions chalked out by the circumstances of their social and philosophical world. Plato looked at the peak of the spiritual question from the West, and Vyasa made the observation from the East: so Confucius did it from further East, and Schlegel, Spinoza, Kant and Goethe from further West. These observations were made at different times and by different means; but the conclusion is all the same inasmuch as the object was one and the same."

Krsna consciousness, as a practical program for implementing the conclusions of spiritual science, may offer some valuable insights into primal origins, or the beginnings of the creation, which might not otherwise be available to sincere men of science. This information is drawn from authentic Vedic texts, and, as we shall see, it finds convincing supportive evidence in modern logic and scientific discovery.

Scientific opinions about the origins of creation have been summarized into two very famous theories, called Big Bang and Steady State. The Big Bang theory hypothesizes that originally there existed an enormous manifestation of matter that by its own gravitational force "turned in" on itself, creating a density so great that it ultimately exploded, sending gas, dust and radiation flying millions of miles into space. Little by little, over an unimaginably long time, these substances began synthesizing into solid elements, which in turn became planets and other celestial bodies. The Steady State theory, however, suggests that the process of creation is going on perpetually, from a source in the universe that constantly produces material elements. These elements spread out and form the planets, stars and other celestial manifestations. Thus the process of creation is constantly going on.