HH KKS: ...Modern science is also not all powerful and as we have made progress ,yes we have made progress and nowadays if we compare our knowledge to the knowledge of the cave man then this knowledge was just a tiny little area that our knowledge is advanced .
Just on the plane there was a man sitting next to me with a book..something about everything and it was all about science and it was describing how there are bacteria , when they are being bombarded by radioactivity disintegrate because the radioactivity will destroy the coherence of the atom and the protons and neutrons go all over the place and then there is bacteria , these protons and neutrons you just reassemble…whushhh, back so it is bacteria now….so science tells us some many little details, they know so many things about so many things. So it seems at modern times the knowledge that modern man has is so much more than that we had before and just now we are on the peak of civilisation, that there is no level beyond where we are now ..mankind has come on the peak of his natural understanding of reality. …Sometimes we think like that and our area of knowledge is as now become not the small little island but it has become a vast continent ……………..Now what I would like to present to you …it is a continent fair enough , it is a continent but it is a drifting continent, a drifting continent in the sense that whatever progress we are making in terms of knowledge simultaneously we are forgetting tradition …Our great grandfather knew how to take certain herbs from the forests and he could cure disease with that…don’t ask Me, right …I always thought potatoes grow in plastic bags until I was twenty, right, on the shelves in the supermarket because I was born in a city, little did I know , the first time I saw a cow and saw that the milk came out of that!.... I gave up milk for one week, it was like Oh God ……..and I saw the stooly backside so close to the place where my milk came from (crowd laughs)..it was like Oh No …Oh God…. what can I do …. …When you come from an urban area and you grow up like that later I stayed in Australia in the outback in the ….. so I seen something of the countryside also and I appreciate the countryside …now I know what a potato plant looks like ……….But still…we have lost something.
In the traditional times people had so much knowledge which we don’t have today …so have we really made progress? This is one question that I am making or are we simply shifting our knowledge from one thing to another and as we are finding out so many new things, learning so many new things we are forgetting so many things at the same time and daily so much knowledge and tradition is getting lost .
America is exporting one thing and it’s culture or lack of culture and Mickey mouse goes everywhere, right?... nowadays ……..And in India also they also have Mickey mouse and Mickey mouse came by plane flew into India and was welcomed there in a traditional way by offering of incense and garlands just as they worship in the temple and I am sure it won’t be long before there will be Mickey mouse temples ….in India…So the point being all over the world the original culture is dying out and we are getting that one same homogenous culture all over the world.I’m not passing judgement, right, just as I asked you in the beginning not to pass any judgement about the situation with the dead man in the street and whether the western approach to sending the red cross to save him or the eastern approach to try and save his soul…what’s the best…no judgement …just see the differences in culture and in the same way I am also not going to pass judgment which culture is better ,…east or west…but I just wanted to point out that if we think that now mankind is at the height of it’s progress then we might be mistaken because this drifting continent phenomena that we are finding out new things and very rapidly forgetting so much ……..So therefore it is very interesting to dvelve deep into ancient cultures. So we are seeing that the ancient cultures before the industrial revolution were more spiritually orientated than the culture of today …we see that practically all over the world at that time the orientation was religious …predominantly so and we find that in modern times that is much less so, at least traditional religions have less attention then ever, right, in the western world
….but then we see so many alternative things are coming up …so many alternative things are coming up …people are now into crystals , into birth lines , into chakras, all kinds of things..pyramids …so a many other things that are considered to be spiritual so looking at all these varieties of culture which I have sketched with some question marks about the progress and the superiority of our modern day culture over other traditions…. it is interesting to look a little further then our own known culture …So if we look in traditional cultures there we see that pure rationalism has a source of knowledge as the source of finding out reality is inadequate …they say this is unnatural this is artificial to try and establish an objective truth, right, is considered to be false and artificial because the point is being made that objectivity doesn’t exist ..we are always subjective beings …we can never switch off intuition and feelings ….
It’s like certain signals are coming in , just as we go around the curve of an unknown street, immediately there are certain feelings about this street, I don’t know what it is, about his street but something awkward, there are vultures sitting on that branch there, I don’t know what it exactly is but it does something up my spine ……….. So there are so many signs that we read and so many signs that we have beyond pure rationalism that gives us an indication of what is going on and therefore to just base our knowledge on rationalism only ……..is considered to be very narrow.
In psychology certainly it is said that intution and belief and all these factors are also considered essential elements in consciousness ….so the Bhagavad Gita, however, is quite a scientific book, it is a very scientific book because it does not ask anyone to believe anything although there it is making statements that there is a soul it is said we are never born we never die, there is a God who is in control of everything it does not ask anyone to believe but simply asks for suspension for this belief….we can not approach the book and say it is not true because then you are like the atheist …(Maharaja sings.. ‘I’m a believer, I‘m a believer!’) no, ………so it is not for believers …..it is objective…for those who want to try approach the matter objectively by saying oh I don’t know , maybe it is true and maybe it is not .
Now the Bhagavad Gita besides making statements about the soul being eternal, about God being in control and statements like that , the Bhagavad Gita beyond that is offering a process for getting a direct experience of this reality and that process is called yoga …so yoga is not as what we know..and bend your back and bend and stretch and touch your toes, right, and so on and sitting in this asana, this asana and that asana …and this is good for digestion and this helps the respiritory organs and so on …No, it I not merely for that. Yoga originally interesting enough has roots in Sanskrit and the roots are …it means to connect so if we look at the world religion …it is interesting because it comes from the Latin ….which is the same to reconnect …so that’s interesting: Yoga and Religion have the same translation ….anyway, so the purpose of yoga was to reconnect , reconnect to the spiritual position …so it has a spiritual context: Yoga………anyway Bhagavad Gita introduces yoga and explains various types of yoga as a process by which one can realise the philosophy of the eternity of the soul and the existence of the Supreme Lord …and it says if you follow that system of yoga then in due course of time there will be a change of consciousness ,a change of perception and then one will able to directly perceive God face to face ….not as a philosophical idea …but directly, directly experience ……(More to come in part5)
