WEBVTT
00:00.031 --> 00:00.331
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
00:17.003 --> 00:37.078
[SPEAKER_03]: Hello and welcome to the Why Scientist podcast with Ravi Irvindra and my friend Rupert Shelldrek, in fact of course Ravi is my old friend as well and so his Rupert and so it's a special pleasure to have them talking to each other about wisdom and science and why scientists.
00:54.080 --> 00:59.622
[SPEAKER_03]: So, Ravi, I'm going to hand over to you, and I believe you're going to open the batting or at least ask questions.
01:00.242 --> 01:05.803
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but I think we can all join in, but my question really to Rupert is really an obvious one.
01:05.963 --> 01:14.106
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody uses the word wise or wisdom, and often most people just identify it with knowledge.
01:15.146 --> 01:17.967
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you see the difference between wisdom and knowledge?
01:20.106 --> 01:30.934
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I certainly don't identify with knowledge with Google, the internet, chatGPT and stuff knowledge, at least of a kind of codifiable kind.
01:31.194 --> 01:32.716
[SPEAKER_02]: There's so much of it now, isn't it?
01:32.776 --> 01:33.916
[SPEAKER_02]: We're overwhelmed with it.
01:34.717 --> 01:35.458
[SPEAKER_02]: Information.
01:35.578 --> 01:37.519
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's just vast quantities.
01:38.080 --> 01:45.345
[SPEAKER_02]: So I suppose wisdom is partly a matter of knowing what to do with knowledge and where it's relevant and where it isn't.
01:49.643 --> 02:01.331
[SPEAKER_02]: But if it seems to me that it has to be based on experience, it has to be based on a kind of wide-ranging view of the situation, informed by knowledge, but not just about knowledge.
02:01.872 --> 02:08.116
[SPEAKER_02]: If it was just about knowledge, our civilization would be unbelievably wise, and it's obviously unbelievably unwise.
02:08.917 --> 02:13.480
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a general suggestion made by many stages,
02:14.551 --> 02:27.400
[SPEAKER_00]: that wisdom almost always associates knowledge with love or compassion and also a sense of sort of oneness with the others that we are not separated from everybody else.
02:28.721 --> 02:29.942
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a feeling for that.
02:31.096 --> 02:39.383
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there would be a kind of loving wisdom, but I suppose there's a kind of wisdom that comes from another kind of wisdom, say, military wisdom.
02:39.844 --> 02:50.193
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you could have people who are experienced military strategists who give wise advice about when to attack and when not to attack, which is nothing to do with love.
02:50.713 --> 02:53.175
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think there would be a subspecies of wisdom.
02:53.195 --> 02:58.040
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, loving wisdom may be a divine wisdom.
02:58.600 --> 03:03.263
[SPEAKER_02]: But there are secular forms of wisdom as well that may be more limited.
03:04.024 --> 03:09.888
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we argue for getting wise scientists, what kind of wisdom are we asking for?
03:11.372 --> 03:30.673
[SPEAKER_00]: when to use scientific knowledge or when not to use it like the example you gave from the military wisdom or is it that the scientific knowledge is not going to be helpful unless there is some association with some compassion for all of humanity taking care of the planet, etc.
03:31.565 --> 03:33.948
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm just don't know.
03:33.968 --> 03:39.654
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, my experience of scientists is that most of them don't feel wisdoms their job.
03:40.675 --> 03:44.359
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it may be that grant giving agencies have wisdom as their job.
03:44.879 --> 03:47.022
[SPEAKER_02]: Most scientists just do what they're paid to do.
03:47.702 --> 03:51.366
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suppose they could refuse to do it, if they thought it was too destructive.
03:51.486 --> 03:51.606
[SPEAKER_02]: But,
03:52.327 --> 04:08.075
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think the way science has actually practiced involves much wisdom, and that again there might be a more limited kind of wisdom about what sort of experiments are like it with fruit from which or not, which goes beyond mere knowledge it goes to kind of judgment and experience.
04:09.095 --> 04:20.923
[SPEAKER_02]: But for the very course that science follows, the people who set the course of science are not always scientists themselves, they're grant giving agencies or people who pay for the research.
04:21.683 --> 04:31.550
[SPEAKER_02]: And when we have an interesting situation in the US at the moment with the shutting down of large amounts of NIH and official government grants,
04:32.070 --> 04:44.577
[SPEAKER_02]: and the axing of many breadgrams at Harvard, it's obviously nothing to do with wisdom, but it shows that decisions made by limited number of people can affect the course of science in a dramatic way.
04:45.698 --> 04:56.424
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you, I mean, someone, obviously, who you knew well, Rupert, who I think you could qualify as wise, was being Griffiths, but of course he wasn't a scientist, but
05:01.742 --> 05:07.644
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, he certainly fitted into Ravius idea of someone who's wisdom was informed by love.
05:08.690 --> 05:20.255
[SPEAKER_02]: I think one of the things about it, it was situational, when people visited him, when I lived in Father Beads, Ashram in South India, there was a continuous stream of visitors.
05:21.075 --> 05:28.398
[SPEAKER_02]: And Father Beads used to spend about half an hour with each visitor if he could, if there were too many, then of course the time had to be reduced.
05:29.298 --> 05:32.939
[SPEAKER_02]: And what happened was that people would go and visit him, sit with him, and
05:35.069 --> 05:37.573
[SPEAKER_02]: in some way he brought out the best in people.
05:38.294 --> 05:44.082
[SPEAKER_02]: He asked them, you know, what they wanted to do with their life or what their aspirations were.
05:44.823 --> 05:49.550
[SPEAKER_02]: And people usually, in response to that question, came out with their most
05:51.240 --> 05:56.426
[SPEAKER_02]: they're biggest and most loving and creative aspirations.
05:57.126 --> 06:01.571
[SPEAKER_02]: And he would then kind of reinforce what seemed to him appropriate.
06:02.112 --> 06:03.433
[SPEAKER_02]: But it was very situational.
06:03.473 --> 06:04.614
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't formulaic.
06:04.915 --> 06:09.579
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean I suppose it was a formula in the sense that he let make people do most of the talking.
06:10.220 --> 06:25.011
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what made him different from most gurus in India because the normal format of visiting a guru in India is you ask a simple question and then you get to kind of download and answer and they're not very interested in what you say.
06:25.731 --> 06:28.652
[SPEAKER_02]: because the assumption is that they're the wise ones and you're not.
06:29.192 --> 06:42.735
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas a father-beads form of wisdom, in so far as there was a formula to it, was trying to draw out from people what their own vision was and reinforce what was good about it and what was practical about it.
06:42.795 --> 06:51.777
[SPEAKER_02]: And most people emerged from there to the conversations with the father-beads glowing and inspired and actually in most cases he had a said very much.
06:53.208 --> 06:55.230
[SPEAKER_03]: And did you have that experience yourself?
06:55.390 --> 06:59.153
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, did he help you clarify, nail priorities?
07:00.574 --> 07:01.014
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, yes.
07:01.114 --> 07:04.737
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I wrote my book in your son's life living in his ashram.
07:06.343 --> 07:09.547
[SPEAKER_02]: In part, what happened to a chapter by chapter?
07:09.627 --> 07:14.513
[SPEAKER_02]: I rated in notebooks with a fountain pen and I'm was pre on the thought of it.
07:14.594 --> 07:24.606
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I had a bought ink from the local village shop and exercise books, which they sold for school children in the local shop.
07:25.367 --> 07:34.074
[SPEAKER_02]: and I wrote it in these books and chapter by chapter Father Beard would read through it and and he was actually very helpful.
07:34.634 --> 07:39.358
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, not in the way of sort of telling the things that they did tell me things.
07:39.418 --> 07:42.501
[SPEAKER_02]: For example, when I was writing about form and morphogenesis,
07:43.693 --> 07:49.017
[SPEAKER_02]: He asked me if I'd read some Thomas Aquinas on form, or Aristotle on form, or causes.
07:49.638 --> 08:10.115
[SPEAKER_02]: I knew a bit about Aristotle, but I'd never read Aquinas, so he suggested I read particular passages from Aquinas, which were enormously helpful, and then Saint Bonaventcher and stuff, so he suggested reading to me, which was in the Ashram Library, which I could actually read, a practical suggestions, which gave a whole other
08:13.493 --> 08:30.771
[SPEAKER_02]: But partly again, it was opening things up, for example, when I was talking about fields, he'd just say, well, what is a field, and you know, I then had to try and explain to someone who'd done no science at school, what a field was, yet he was very philosophically informed.
08:31.672 --> 08:34.896
[SPEAKER_02]: So then I talked about magnetism and he'd say, what is magnetism?
08:35.507 --> 08:56.053
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, he wasn't just doing this to be like socrates, only he genuinely was interested to know, and he hadn't ever had the chance of asking a scientist these sort of simple straightforward yet profound questions, and so he made me go much further than I would otherwise have done, because he then asked further questions.
08:57.523 --> 09:09.407
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, I suppose his method there was bringing it to drawing stuff out of me that was already there, rather than apart from these reading suggestions and stuff.
09:09.707 --> 09:13.488
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a method of allowing things to come through.
09:13.508 --> 09:17.729
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a sort of a general question to us.
09:18.529 --> 09:20.630
[SPEAKER_00]: Since I think we all agree,
09:21.944 --> 09:30.351
[SPEAKER_00]: that, in principle, the whole external universes mirrored inside each one of us, like we are a hologram of the whole universe.
09:31.411 --> 09:36.936
[SPEAKER_00]: So also, therefore, naturally, the devil is also there, not only in me, but in everybody.
09:38.257 --> 09:45.623
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way the devil or Mara, or Satan, tested Christ, or the Buddha to be,
09:46.784 --> 09:54.209
[SPEAKER_00]: was by usual factors, such as more acquisitions, more pleasure, more power.
09:55.049 --> 09:57.010
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of us have to face this.
09:57.290 --> 09:57.751
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we...
09:58.529 --> 10:11.098
[SPEAKER_00]: train anybody, including ourselves, to be more and more free of this and to really search for truth, whether it is in the scientific realm or the philosophical realm, we don't need to get attached too much only to the scientists.
10:11.579 --> 10:12.720
[SPEAKER_00]: This is true for everybody.
10:13.580 --> 10:19.525
[SPEAKER_00]: How do I face my devil and to be a little free of the revenge from the devil?
10:20.225 --> 10:23.047
[SPEAKER_02]: Gosh, well, I don't know, Ravi.
10:23.468 --> 10:26.290
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, I don't spend much time thinking about this.
10:26.410 --> 10:27.310
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to confess.
10:29.427 --> 10:37.334
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, again, I deal with it as the situation arises, rather than having a general philosophical view of how it might work.
10:38.095 --> 10:47.564
[SPEAKER_02]: Part of it is we get pushback from other people, and I pay attention to that, you know, I have, you know, I'm married, and I have a wife who's quite critical.
10:48.085 --> 10:53.370
[SPEAKER_02]: So I get often unwelcome critical feedback on a regular basis,
10:54.230 --> 11:10.819
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this is one constraint and I get a feedback from other people I have a lot of scientific enemies, you know, the people who hate me most to the dogmatic militant atheists and the skeptics who there's professional skeptics.
11:11.319 --> 11:19.143
[SPEAKER_02]: So I get a lot of pushback from skeptics and atheists and some of it is simply an expression of their own prejudice.
11:19.844 --> 11:22.425
[SPEAKER_02]: But some of it can be valid and I think that
11:23.798 --> 11:33.063
[SPEAKER_02]: by a scientific work is probably better as the result of the fact that it's subject to continual criticism by people who are highly motivated to criticise it.
11:33.944 --> 11:37.646
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm not sure that one essay has to put in all hard work oneself.
11:37.746 --> 11:46.351
[SPEAKER_02]: I think quite a lot of this comes feedback from the world around one to bring in limits to what one's doing.
11:47.192 --> 11:49.113
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if one becomes arrogant,
11:50.171 --> 12:02.911
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, these things about the desire for knowledge, power, kind of fastion desires for knowledge and power, and also the desire for wealth and so on, they tend to stir up.
12:03.933 --> 12:10.696
[SPEAKER_02]: opposition and that opposition can be helpful if one takes it into account.
12:11.456 --> 12:24.641
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not helpful if it's simply an expression of other people's greed or prejudice or pride, but it is helpful if it is actual genuine criticism of valid criticism of what one's doing.
12:25.261 --> 12:25.942
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think there's
12:27.037 --> 12:44.227
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, almost anyone who, if Jesus had actually yielded temptations to the devil and started wanting to become rich and powerful, he would have started getting a lot of pushback from his disciples and followers who would have said he'd gone over to the wrong side.
12:44.328 --> 12:47.690
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, you see all these gurus today who,
12:48.530 --> 12:53.855
[SPEAKER_02]: get to involved in power and money and also sexual exploitation of their devotees.
12:54.435 --> 12:56.677
[SPEAKER_02]: And soon or later, they get a lot of pushback.
12:57.438 --> 13:05.544
[SPEAKER_02]: I think actually we don't need to worry too much about doing it ourselves, because I think it's going to come to us from outside ourselves.
13:05.624 --> 13:08.547
[SPEAKER_02]: These are the criticisms and corrective forces.
13:10.265 --> 13:30.561
[SPEAKER_00]: But really behind this question, if we actually agree more or less that contemporary scientific knowledge or the use of that knowledge is not connected with wisdom, so question really is, what is interfering and how do we assist?
13:33.148 --> 14:01.302
[SPEAKER_02]: I think what's interfering is the fact that scientific knowledge is coming back to my first point, is paid for by people who commission the research and when a drug company pays for people to do research on cell biology, they're not doing it just out of an interest in cells, they're doing it because they want to find molecular methods of making new drugs or new immunotherapies and making lots of money and that's why their investors put in all
14:02.592 --> 14:15.116
[SPEAKER_02]: And when scientists write grant applications, they don't just say, I'm interested in studying this phenomenon because it's really, really interesting and would give us a deeper insight into the workings of nature.
14:15.476 --> 14:22.759
[SPEAKER_02]: They say, if I get this grant, I'll understand molecular mechanisms that will lead to the caring of cancer or to the
14:23.840 --> 14:35.674
[SPEAKER_02]: alleviation of the climate crisis or to something like that, almost all grant applications promise some benefit to the thunder or to the right of world, and ever utilitarian kind.
14:36.491 --> 14:41.256
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suppose arguably, if one says, well, science should be driven by a pure curiosity.
14:41.276 --> 14:51.987
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's not necessarily a very good thing either, because pure curiosity, without some higher end or goal, might not be very helpful and might even be destructive.
14:52.668 --> 14:58.894
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that the wisdom is not, a lot of it isn't actually down to the scientists.
14:58.934 --> 14:59.155
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean,
15:00.453 --> 15:13.789
[SPEAKER_02]: When you actually watch scientists at work in academic or industrial institutions, so much of it is about what they can get funded, what grant applications they can write, what they can do.
15:14.350 --> 15:18.454
[SPEAKER_02]: I have people all the time saying they'd have to do research on morphic resonance or on
15:19.235 --> 15:29.121
[SPEAKER_02]: to empathy or something like that, but they know they won't get it funded, and they know that they'll lose their job if they do too much of the deviates from the standard orthodoxy.
15:29.681 --> 15:36.305
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, it's not really an individual decision of the scientists, they're part of a much larger economic and social system.
15:37.180 --> 15:54.256
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we think that some change will be helpful, how do we go about it, even though, as you just said, it's part of not only individual scientists, part of a whole social structure, economic structure, how do we go about bringing any change?
15:56.778 --> 16:02.663
[SPEAKER_02]: I think part of the change has to come through this funding system, because, say, for example,
16:03.957 --> 16:10.025
[SPEAKER_02]: the research that shows that spiritual practices are helpful and have measurable beneficial effects.
16:10.426 --> 16:11.848
[SPEAKER_02]: There's now been a lot of research.
16:12.709 --> 16:15.893
[SPEAKER_02]: I summarized some of it in my book Science and Spiritual Practices.
16:16.715 --> 16:19.839
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of that research was paid for by the Templeton Foundation.
16:20.682 --> 16:35.465
[SPEAKER_02]: And Sir John Templeton, when he set up his foundation, had the idea that science could actually do some good in the world, and it could actually help illuminate aspects of spirituality or at least spiritual practice.
16:36.185 --> 16:42.886
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the fact that he had the wisdom to see that, and to set up a funding institution,
16:49.058 --> 16:51.599
[SPEAKER_02]: But again, it was a kind of top-down decision.
16:52.079 --> 17:01.761
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't individual scientists with their grant applications, and with three year grant applications, or people applying for post-docs.
17:02.221 --> 17:11.383
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, young scientists desperately competitive and have to apply for post-docs in other people's labs where they're in their cog in the machine.
17:12.128 --> 17:16.510
[SPEAKER_02]: And they have very little say over what they actually do in the modern world.
17:16.550 --> 17:18.150
[SPEAKER_02]: They mean that's the reality of it.
17:18.170 --> 17:27.034
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean if the world were full of independent scientists like it was in the 19th century who had their own funding, it would be a completely different question.
17:27.454 --> 17:32.876
[SPEAKER_02]: But the number of independent scientists in the world at the moment is you can count them on the fingers of one hand.
17:33.476 --> 17:36.257
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, you're one and I'm another and there's probably three or three others.
17:39.633 --> 17:45.017
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was a judge in the temple done foundation for their prizes for several years.
17:45.998 --> 17:50.781
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I also very much appreciated the initiative from temple done.
17:52.022 --> 18:06.512
[SPEAKER_00]: So, is this what we really required to do is to find some more or less wealthy people who can undertake this sort of project of assisting that kind of movements or assisting those scientists who are likely to bring more wisdom.
18:06.592 --> 18:07.613
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we go about it?
18:08.215 --> 18:10.817
[SPEAKER_02]: But I don't know, you've thought about it more than me, Ravi.
18:10.857 --> 18:12.538
[SPEAKER_02]: Why don't you tell me what you think?
18:13.739 --> 18:18.963
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you've actually been involved with the Templeton Foundation and various initiatives.
18:19.043 --> 18:22.465
[SPEAKER_02]: So what's your conclusion after years of experience?
18:23.566 --> 18:29.911
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but there you see the initiative actually came from Templeton who offered fair amount of money.
18:31.475 --> 18:36.097
[SPEAKER_00]: to have people undertake something to do with science and religion.
18:36.177 --> 18:41.599
[SPEAKER_00]: That was his interest, initially, not necessarily using words like wisdom, etc.
18:42.439 --> 18:49.302
[SPEAKER_00]: But trying to bring some sort of a coordination between science and religion rather than just assuming they are opposed to each other.
18:50.283 --> 18:53.344
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is really coming initiated from him.
19:01.562 --> 19:03.623
[SPEAKER_00]: either in the council or the judges.
19:05.004 --> 19:08.567
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, even Prince Charles at that time, he was knocking Charles.
19:08.707 --> 19:10.348
[SPEAKER_00]: Prince Charles was one of the judges.
19:11.188 --> 19:16.592
[SPEAKER_00]: So was the person in charge of the whole Eastern religions, Eastern Christianity.
19:17.837 --> 19:27.422
[SPEAKER_00]: So they try to invite people who from their perspective were going to bring a slightly wider perspective.
19:28.142 --> 19:30.904
[SPEAKER_00]: But initially, it really was from Templeton.
19:31.024 --> 19:33.886
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, of course, he has friends.
19:34.006 --> 19:40.149
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody has some friends who assist people, just like you have friends or have friends and with they talk to us.
19:41.069 --> 19:44.011
[SPEAKER_00]: So we get influenced by their attitudes and their help.
19:45.748 --> 19:52.202
[SPEAKER_00]: But should we go around trying to find some wealthy people to make some contributions for this kind of thing?
19:52.242 --> 19:53.285
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we go about that?
19:55.040 --> 19:56.181
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I don't know.
19:57.462 --> 20:11.931
[SPEAKER_02]: In my experience, I mean, my work has been funded independently for 40 years, because it can't be funded through regular foundations or government grants, because to heretical, even for the temples and foundation.
20:12.532 --> 20:18.036
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they're back off whenever I've approached them, because they're very concerned with respectability.
20:18.936 --> 20:24.558
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I have, I myself have been able to do what I do because a few wealthy people have supported me.
20:24.638 --> 20:27.319
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I'm very appreciative of the fact that that's happened.
20:27.999 --> 20:33.361
[SPEAKER_02]: But what's happened in my case is not that I've approached them, but that they've approached me.
20:33.381 --> 20:38.983
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, I mean, for one reason or another, they've thought that time was doing work.
20:39.023 --> 20:41.524
[SPEAKER_02]: They wanted to support and they've offered to support it too.
20:42.890 --> 20:50.277
[SPEAKER_02]: In that case, one could say, what I did was just do what I do, and then, providentially, people came forward to support it.
20:50.297 --> 21:07.333
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think one thing we can do and should do is pray for guidance in what we do and pray for God's guidance on those who fund science and who make key decisions about what kind of science is funded.
21:08.341 --> 21:16.709
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that we're not just working according to our own ideas, but we're part of a much wider historical process.
21:17.750 --> 21:20.933
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not immediately clear how that works.
21:21.053 --> 21:33.804
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if we think that human life is under providential guidance, there's an influence of the spiritual realm on history and on what happens in history, which I do believe, then it's not always clear
21:34.845 --> 21:40.680
[SPEAKER_02]: how God works, how God works in mysterious ways we're often told, and it could be that
21:41.775 --> 21:43.856
[SPEAKER_02]: the destruction of a lot of the U.S.
21:43.936 --> 21:54.660
[SPEAKER_02]: science base that's going on at the moment, perhaps will lead to a positive change in the end in a way that businesses usual would not have done.
21:55.501 --> 22:04.904
[SPEAKER_02]: And the motives of those who are destroying it are mixed and maybe completely wrong, but the effects may or may not be beneficial.
22:04.964 --> 22:05.725
[SPEAKER_02]: We just don't know.
22:07.219 --> 22:18.346
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that in my own case, I'm a Christian, I pray every day the Lord's prayer, and part of that is that I came to become, that I will be done.
22:19.246 --> 22:33.275
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, the coming of the kingdom of God and how it affects science and science policy again, does no immediate blueprint that sort of falls out in front of one, or is there in the book of common prayer,
22:36.937 --> 22:46.332
[SPEAKER_02]: But if one thinks that the divine will is involved in the process of history and in people's decisions, then it seems to me that's a very important part of it.
22:46.953 --> 22:51.840
[SPEAKER_02]: But one can't actually have prayers in science labs because
22:52.740 --> 23:06.537
[SPEAKER_02]: First of all, there's no agreed religious approach, and secondly, at least in Britain a lot of scientists are atheists and would strongly object to their being any prayers or any spiritual dimension in the practice of science.
23:07.138 --> 23:08.620
[SPEAKER_02]: So it has to be done privately.
23:09.777 --> 23:18.224
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think I just want to come in on the John Templeton because I think this is a very good point that and he's funded the work on forgiveness.
23:18.464 --> 23:22.307
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean the main work has been done on forgiveness as far as, no, no.
23:22.628 --> 23:27.271
[SPEAKER_03]: Some spirituality in health, he's funded, he's funded unlimited love.
23:28.052 --> 23:50.657
[SPEAKER_03]: And I love the story from Stephen Post, who he worked with on this, and they used to have telegrams sent from Nassau where Sir John was living, and they were talking about what kind of love they wanted to support research in.
23:50.797 --> 23:52.577
[SPEAKER_03]: And Sir John said, it has to be unlimited.
23:53.759 --> 24:00.490
[SPEAKER_03]: and say it was him who came up with this idea of the science of unlimited love and I think that's quite remarkable.
24:00.510 --> 24:07.542
[SPEAKER_02]: I know Richard loves a big challenge and I'm not sure how much one can have a a science of it.
24:07.622 --> 24:07.862
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean
24:08.772 --> 24:24.055
[SPEAKER_02]: Satish Kumar is a great devotee of the principle of unlimited love and I've seen him shock people terribly when he says you know we should have love for Putin and we should have love for Netanyahu and people who are causing so much distraction in the world.
24:24.735 --> 24:33.177
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean I'm sure he's right but that's not something that either comes naturally to most people or where you could do
24:35.982 --> 24:38.523
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, that's my ethical spiritual conviction.
24:39.243 --> 24:39.523
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
24:40.404 --> 24:44.225
[SPEAKER_02]: The scientific and medical networks been going for a long time now, 50 years.
24:45.005 --> 24:54.488
[SPEAKER_02]: And its aims have been to promote what we're talking about, I would have thought, a more spiritual dimension of science and spirituality.
24:54.548 --> 24:59.490
[SPEAKER_02]: So perhaps I could ask you David, I'm into what degree do you think it's been successful?
25:00.785 --> 25:19.633
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that what the phrase I was just going to call to mind at moment is one, no originally from George Blaker, when he said that part of our purpose is to maintain a sort of uphold the human spiritual essence as compatible with enlightened scientific thinking.
25:20.932 --> 25:26.015
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thought that's, I mean, George was a great drafter of memos and agreements and everything.
25:26.796 --> 25:37.102
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's an aim, which I think is more relevant now than ever, but because of the advent of lands and schemes of transhumanism,
25:38.073 --> 25:42.958
[SPEAKER_03]: which I think threatened the very idea of what we understand spiritually to be a human being.
25:44.399 --> 25:56.730
[SPEAKER_03]: So we have undoubtedly, you know, done a lot of, I suppose you know, our mystics and scientists conference, and there which has been going since 1978, which you both spoke with the spoken.
25:57.290 --> 26:01.514
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a kind of undertow of wisdom in that series, wouldn't you say?
26:02.277 --> 26:16.083
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, but I think one of the things that the scientific and medical network has done is is sort of normalized the possibility of a spiritual dimension in the lives of scientists and medical research.
26:17.204 --> 26:28.109
[SPEAKER_02]: I think another thing is done is in the sense of the negative side of it is necessary negative side of it, is showing the extreme limitations of mechanistic materialism.
26:29.024 --> 26:50.782
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, every issue of the paradigm explorer that I read has about 30 books pointing out these limitations and you must be probably the person who knows most about them because you review so many of these books yourself and you must read about a thousand books now that point out the limits of mechanistic materialism.
26:51.667 --> 26:58.934
[SPEAKER_02]: They seem to be having some effect because there aren't that many people who are prepared to defend mechanistic materials as many more.
26:59.674 --> 27:14.067
[SPEAKER_02]: Bernardo Castro told me that when people set up debates where to challenge his philosophy of idealism, when they try to find a materialist to oppose him, they find it very hard to get anyone to volunteer to do that nowadays.
27:15.082 --> 27:25.645
[SPEAKER_02]: So the mainly the influence of mechanistic materialism is not because it has hundreds of brilliant defenders who were incredibly persuasive arguments.
27:26.765 --> 27:40.349
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead, it's more like the inertia of an established system, you know, like an ocean liner, it takes an awful long time for it to change direction, because there's such an enormous inertia built into the system.
27:40.950 --> 27:45.904
[SPEAKER_02]: and that inertia is probably strongest within the educational system because
27:46.764 --> 27:52.589
[SPEAKER_02]: and we've been talking for years and the scientific and medical network about the need to get beyond the materialist world view.
27:53.130 --> 28:13.808
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, look at the GCSE or the A level syllabus and there's not the slightest hint of a change there or in most undergraduate science degrees we're still educating new generations of children in an old world view that we don't believe in anymore and even some of their teachers don't believe in anymore,
28:15.154 --> 28:28.462
[SPEAKER_02]: to change that system is enormously important that the scientific medical networks had various initiatives over the years to try and reform science teaching, but so far the results have been close to zero.
28:29.303 --> 28:29.903
[SPEAKER_03]: That's true.
28:29.923 --> 28:34.286
[SPEAKER_03]: I just wanted to make one observation about the mystics and scientists series.
28:35.146 --> 28:37.748
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the beginning of the series.
28:38.768 --> 28:44.170
[SPEAKER_03]: The scientists were not necessarily mystical, but some of them weren't mystical at all.
28:45.011 --> 28:57.616
[SPEAKER_03]: But what I've observed over the decades that I've been involved in creating the conference is that there are more mystical scientists who actually marry both the science and the mysticism.
28:57.696 --> 29:03.478
[SPEAKER_03]: Then you both you are Rupert and Ravi are examples of that sort of
29:04.058 --> 29:11.905
[SPEAKER_03]: Janus, as it were, so that it's coming together more in the lives and being of the speakers.
29:13.630 --> 29:17.993
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think so, and I think that's one of the positive effects normalizing this.
29:18.713 --> 29:35.283
[SPEAKER_02]: When I lived in India, you know, I lived there for seven years and I worked as a scientist in India, almost none of my Indian colleagues were materialists, or atheists, or my sort of them had a spiritual view of life, whether it was Hindu or Muslim or Jain or Sikh or whatever.
29:35.763 --> 29:44.708
[SPEAKER_02]: but almost all of them had a spiritual view of life, but it had no effect on their science that was noticeable because they lived in separate compartments.
29:44.768 --> 29:53.553
[SPEAKER_02]: They, you know, when they were at work, they were conventional scientists doing conventional science because they wanted to be published in conventional journals because that would help their career.
29:54.298 --> 30:01.264
[SPEAKER_02]: As soon as they got home in the evening, they became fairly conventional Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or jains or whatever.
30:01.984 --> 30:08.410
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's perfectly possible for the respiratory and scientific in separate compartments.
30:09.250 --> 30:13.233
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suppose one of the challenges is not to persuade
30:14.362 --> 30:32.838
[SPEAKER_02]: Atheos and materialists as a spiritual dimension to the universe, a lot of them know that already, but it's more of a matter of trying to find a way of crossing these compartmental divisions that separate professional scientific life from personal religious practice or spiritual practice.
30:34.359 --> 30:37.622
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to make it slightly more general remark here.
30:38.737 --> 30:45.719
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole scientific enterprise or philosophical enterprise is clearly driven by our mind.
30:47.320 --> 30:57.803
[SPEAKER_00]: And the repeated recommendation or suggestion by all spiritual teachers is that there are many levels of reality, subtler than the mind.
30:58.684 --> 31:07.327
[SPEAKER_00]: And that what they are recommending is direct perception rather than more and more fancy conception.
31:09.011 --> 31:20.089
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, to imagine that science itself can teach us spirituality or bring spirituality is really already a mistake and enterprise.
31:21.572 --> 31:21.892
[SPEAKER_00]: We can
31:22.885 --> 31:38.935
[SPEAKER_00]: What we can do is, at best, is that the scientists can have a slightly more human understanding and they use their science or do the kind of science that can be more helpful to humanity.
31:39.595 --> 31:46.039
[SPEAKER_00]: That is quite different from saying that spirituality and science are doing the same thing.
31:46.320 --> 31:51.423
[SPEAKER_00]: One is a completely different enterprise that I keep reminding people of this, to me seems rather obvious.
31:52.477 --> 31:56.078
[SPEAKER_00]: One is a call to a direct perception of reality.
31:56.859 --> 32:03.301
[SPEAKER_00]: The other one is thinking about reality and putting it in some technical terminology or intellectual terminology.
32:04.242 --> 32:12.505
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's a very good and important point, Ravi, but I think that there's also it and dimension of spirituality, which
32:13.942 --> 32:15.844
[SPEAKER_02]: at least in some spiritual traditions.
32:15.904 --> 32:21.969
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean in the Christian tradition it's not just about one's perception it's about how one works with other people.
32:22.590 --> 32:31.918
[SPEAKER_02]: The kingdom of heaven is brought about collectively and not individually and just rather paradoxically one of the things I came to see when I was living in India is that
32:32.498 --> 32:54.538
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a tendency in some Hindu and teravada buddhist thinking that, you know, here we definitely have a terrible world of endless suffering, we're in Kali Yoga, things getting worse and worse, and the best thing we can do is undergo an individual kind of vertical take-off spiritually by escaping from Samsara and all these things.
32:55.358 --> 33:04.461
[SPEAKER_02]: but it doesn't really help other people very much, I mean it can help other people to undergo vertical takeoff perhaps, but it doesn't help the collective.
33:05.021 --> 33:13.664
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think in the Christian and the Islamic and the Jewish traditions there's more of an emphasis on doing it together and a collective action.
33:14.345 --> 33:19.086
[SPEAKER_02]: So there then we do enter the world of sort of funding and politics and
33:25.297 --> 33:26.818
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I agree with this.
33:26.878 --> 33:40.182
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, one other thing that I often comment on because in a global culture we need to see how what can learn from the other side and what you have just said is exactly my criticism of much of the Indian tradition.
33:40.422 --> 33:43.003
[SPEAKER_00]: So much very famous remark of Shankara.
33:44.649 --> 33:50.815
[SPEAKER_00]: Brahma-sattya Jagatmitya, meaning Brahma is true and the whole manifested universe is just illusion.
33:51.996 --> 33:55.679
[SPEAKER_00]: In my judgment, this has done more harm to Indian culture than anything else.
33:56.119 --> 34:03.585
[SPEAKER_00]: So I actually point this out, and that in the Abrahamic tradition, very much emphasis on taking care of this world.
34:03.785 --> 34:06.307
[SPEAKER_00]: But you see, this is where the problem also comes.
34:07.448 --> 34:19.922
[SPEAKER_00]: Every stick has two ends, taking care of this world has meant combining religious and spiritual or political powers together, look at the planet history for the last 4,500 years.
34:20.563 --> 34:23.627
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is controlled by people coming from the Christian background.
34:24.147 --> 34:24.347
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
34:25.577 --> 34:38.583
[SPEAKER_00]: So wisdom is a good idea, spiritual practice is a good idea, but how does it one actually free one from all worldly desires, which are occupying one's whole energy?
34:41.064 --> 34:45.046
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, this is a general spiritual question, isn't it?
34:45.126 --> 34:49.228
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, you're right, the destruction of the planets and the environment.
34:50.150 --> 34:57.553
[SPEAKER_02]: has come largely from people from the Christian and Jewish background because they've played a very important part in the growth of science.
34:58.453 --> 35:03.555
[SPEAKER_02]: And many of these things that have had such a destructive effect have actually been done with good intention.
35:04.396 --> 35:11.979
[SPEAKER_02]: You know people say we've got care diseases, reduce infant mortality, etc., and the result is a population
35:13.319 --> 35:15.780
[SPEAKER_02]: or we've got to grow more crops to feed more people.
35:16.200 --> 35:25.342
[SPEAKER_02]: The result is the pollution of the soil with nitration, phosphate, fertilizers, and angled algal blooms and depletion of soil fertility etc.
35:25.942 --> 35:37.225
[SPEAKER_02]: So one could argue that a lot of this was done with good intentions and perhaps it would have been better if people hadn't had the good intentions in the first place and just simply taking them more selfish for you.
35:37.925 --> 35:43.129
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean it's very hard to have counterfactual histories of what would have happened if people had thought differently.
35:43.669 --> 35:50.955
[SPEAKER_02]: But yes, it's a very good point that a lot of it has come from people with Jewish and Christian backgrounds, the transformation of the planet.
35:51.735 --> 35:53.997
[SPEAKER_02]: But other people have adopted it very willingly.
35:54.057 --> 36:07.287
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the Chinese, for example, are not being forced to build AI or computers or rockets, only they want to for all sorts of natives, but nobody's compelling them to do all that.
36:08.725 --> 36:20.468
[SPEAKER_00]: But really, in a way, for their own survival in the planet rather than just being controlled by Mr. Trump, they also have to find out how they can protect themselves.
36:20.948 --> 36:21.188
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
36:22.168 --> 36:28.550
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it's not only a question of just because this is what they want to do, but this is what they have to do to survive.
36:29.730 --> 36:29.930
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
36:38.732 --> 36:47.816
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's also developed with an context of competitive capitalism, so there's a competitive motion, a nation all the time.
36:48.317 --> 36:55.480
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not as if we reach a stable state, there's always the next innovation wanting to get ahead of someone else.
36:56.241 --> 37:00.963
[SPEAKER_02]: And science has got sucked into that and is, in fact, one of the principal drivers,
37:01.483 --> 37:21.273
[SPEAKER_02]: of this process, which is where coming back to the funding question, individual scientists becoming wiser or more contemplative or seeing reality more deeply may not have much effect on the this breakneck speed of scientific research and technological innovation.
37:22.654 --> 37:26.816
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I think we should probably be bringing the conversation to a close.
37:26.896 --> 37:27.636
[SPEAKER_03]: I just wanted whether
37:31.682 --> 37:48.708
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm only in favor of wisdom, and I'm only in favor of more wise science, but I don't see any simple way of doing this, and we can have wise scientists, but if we have even if we had more wise scientists, we may not have more wise science at least as it's pursued.
37:49.488 --> 37:53.372
[SPEAKER_02]: in China, India, the United States, all over the world.
37:53.852 --> 38:02.160
[SPEAKER_02]: We might not have a wider scientific educational system because that's all geared towards producing people to create the business's usual science.
38:03.160 --> 38:30.197
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we have to hope and pray that science and technology will be used more wisely and that the processes that unfold in the political and economic world will somehow result in the coming of the kingdom of heaven or but it's not obvious and it's not under our control but we can open ourselves to it and that's where I think that prayers as well as perception
38:33.889 --> 38:34.750
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much.
38:35.311 --> 38:41.380
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's a really interesting conversation, so thanks so much for coming together.
38:41.960 --> 38:47.048
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that, I'm sure that the listeners will very much enjoy it and the food for thought.
00:00.031 --> 00:00.331
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
00:17.003 --> 00:37.078
[SPEAKER_03]: Hello and welcome to the Why Scientist podcast with Ravi Irvindra and my friend Rupert Shelldrek, in fact of course Ravi is my old friend as well and so his Rupert and so it's a special pleasure to have them talking to each other about wisdom and science and why scientists.
00:54.080 --> 00:59.622
[SPEAKER_03]: So, Ravi, I'm going to hand over to you, and I believe you're going to open the batting or at least ask questions.
01:00.242 --> 01:05.803
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but I think we can all join in, but my question really to Rupert is really an obvious one.
01:05.963 --> 01:14.106
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody uses the word wise or wisdom, and often most people just identify it with knowledge.
01:15.146 --> 01:17.967
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you see the difference between wisdom and knowledge?
01:20.106 --> 01:30.934
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I certainly don't identify with knowledge with Google, the internet, chatGPT and stuff knowledge, at least of a kind of codifiable kind.
01:31.194 --> 01:32.716
[SPEAKER_02]: There's so much of it now, isn't it?
01:32.776 --> 01:33.916
[SPEAKER_02]: We're overwhelmed with it.
01:34.717 --> 01:35.458
[SPEAKER_02]: Information.
01:35.578 --> 01:37.519
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's just vast quantities.
01:38.080 --> 01:45.345
[SPEAKER_02]: So I suppose wisdom is partly a matter of knowing what to do with knowledge and where it's relevant and where it isn't.
01:49.643 --> 02:01.331
[SPEAKER_02]: But if it seems to me that it has to be based on experience, it has to be based on a kind of wide-ranging view of the situation, informed by knowledge, but not just about knowledge.
02:01.872 --> 02:08.116
[SPEAKER_02]: If it was just about knowledge, our civilization would be unbelievably wise, and it's obviously unbelievably unwise.
02:08.917 --> 02:13.480
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a general suggestion made by many stages,
02:14.551 --> 02:27.400
[SPEAKER_00]: that wisdom almost always associates knowledge with love or compassion and also a sense of sort of oneness with the others that we are not separated from everybody else.
02:28.721 --> 02:29.942
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a feeling for that.
02:31.096 --> 02:39.383
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there would be a kind of loving wisdom, but I suppose there's a kind of wisdom that comes from another kind of wisdom, say, military wisdom.
02:39.844 --> 02:50.193
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you could have people who are experienced military strategists who give wise advice about when to attack and when not to attack, which is nothing to do with love.
02:50.713 --> 02:53.175
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think there would be a subspecies of wisdom.
02:53.195 --> 02:58.040
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, loving wisdom may be a divine wisdom.
02:58.600 --> 03:03.263
[SPEAKER_02]: But there are secular forms of wisdom as well that may be more limited.
03:04.024 --> 03:09.888
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we argue for getting wise scientists, what kind of wisdom are we asking for?
03:11.372 --> 03:30.673
[SPEAKER_00]: when to use scientific knowledge or when not to use it like the example you gave from the military wisdom or is it that the scientific knowledge is not going to be helpful unless there is some association with some compassion for all of humanity taking care of the planet, etc.
03:31.565 --> 03:33.948
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm just don't know.
03:33.968 --> 03:39.654
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, my experience of scientists is that most of them don't feel wisdoms their job.
03:40.675 --> 03:44.359
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it may be that grant giving agencies have wisdom as their job.
03:44.879 --> 03:47.022
[SPEAKER_02]: Most scientists just do what they're paid to do.
03:47.702 --> 03:51.366
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suppose they could refuse to do it, if they thought it was too destructive.
03:51.486 --> 03:51.606
[SPEAKER_02]: But,
03:52.327 --> 04:08.075
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think the way science has actually practiced involves much wisdom, and that again there might be a more limited kind of wisdom about what sort of experiments are like it with fruit from which or not, which goes beyond mere knowledge it goes to kind of judgment and experience.
04:09.095 --> 04:20.923
[SPEAKER_02]: But for the very course that science follows, the people who set the course of science are not always scientists themselves, they're grant giving agencies or people who pay for the research.
04:21.683 --> 04:31.550
[SPEAKER_02]: And when we have an interesting situation in the US at the moment with the shutting down of large amounts of NIH and official government grants,
04:32.070 --> 04:44.577
[SPEAKER_02]: and the axing of many breadgrams at Harvard, it's obviously nothing to do with wisdom, but it shows that decisions made by limited number of people can affect the course of science in a dramatic way.
04:45.698 --> 04:56.424
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you, I mean, someone, obviously, who you knew well, Rupert, who I think you could qualify as wise, was being Griffiths, but of course he wasn't a scientist, but
05:01.742 --> 05:07.644
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, he certainly fitted into Ravius idea of someone who's wisdom was informed by love.
05:08.690 --> 05:20.255
[SPEAKER_02]: I think one of the things about it, it was situational, when people visited him, when I lived in Father Beads, Ashram in South India, there was a continuous stream of visitors.
05:21.075 --> 05:28.398
[SPEAKER_02]: And Father Beads used to spend about half an hour with each visitor if he could, if there were too many, then of course the time had to be reduced.
05:29.298 --> 05:32.939
[SPEAKER_02]: And what happened was that people would go and visit him, sit with him, and
05:35.069 --> 05:37.573
[SPEAKER_02]: in some way he brought out the best in people.
05:38.294 --> 05:44.082
[SPEAKER_02]: He asked them, you know, what they wanted to do with their life or what their aspirations were.
05:44.823 --> 05:49.550
[SPEAKER_02]: And people usually, in response to that question, came out with their most
05:51.240 --> 05:56.426
[SPEAKER_02]: they're biggest and most loving and creative aspirations.
05:57.126 --> 06:01.571
[SPEAKER_02]: And he would then kind of reinforce what seemed to him appropriate.
06:02.112 --> 06:03.433
[SPEAKER_02]: But it was very situational.
06:03.473 --> 06:04.614
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't formulaic.
06:04.915 --> 06:09.579
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean I suppose it was a formula in the sense that he let make people do most of the talking.
06:10.220 --> 06:25.011
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what made him different from most gurus in India because the normal format of visiting a guru in India is you ask a simple question and then you get to kind of download and answer and they're not very interested in what you say.
06:25.731 --> 06:28.652
[SPEAKER_02]: because the assumption is that they're the wise ones and you're not.
06:29.192 --> 06:42.735
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas a father-beads form of wisdom, in so far as there was a formula to it, was trying to draw out from people what their own vision was and reinforce what was good about it and what was practical about it.
06:42.795 --> 06:51.777
[SPEAKER_02]: And most people emerged from there to the conversations with the father-beads glowing and inspired and actually in most cases he had a said very much.
06:53.208 --> 06:55.230
[SPEAKER_03]: And did you have that experience yourself?
06:55.390 --> 06:59.153
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, did he help you clarify, nail priorities?
07:00.574 --> 07:01.014
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, yes.
07:01.114 --> 07:04.737
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I wrote my book in your son's life living in his ashram.
07:06.343 --> 07:09.547
[SPEAKER_02]: In part, what happened to a chapter by chapter?
07:09.627 --> 07:14.513
[SPEAKER_02]: I rated in notebooks with a fountain pen and I'm was pre on the thought of it.
07:14.594 --> 07:24.606
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I had a bought ink from the local village shop and exercise books, which they sold for school children in the local shop.
07:25.367 --> 07:34.074
[SPEAKER_02]: and I wrote it in these books and chapter by chapter Father Beard would read through it and and he was actually very helpful.
07:34.634 --> 07:39.358
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, not in the way of sort of telling the things that they did tell me things.
07:39.418 --> 07:42.501
[SPEAKER_02]: For example, when I was writing about form and morphogenesis,
07:43.693 --> 07:49.017
[SPEAKER_02]: He asked me if I'd read some Thomas Aquinas on form, or Aristotle on form, or causes.
07:49.638 --> 08:10.115
[SPEAKER_02]: I knew a bit about Aristotle, but I'd never read Aquinas, so he suggested I read particular passages from Aquinas, which were enormously helpful, and then Saint Bonaventcher and stuff, so he suggested reading to me, which was in the Ashram Library, which I could actually read, a practical suggestions, which gave a whole other
08:13.493 --> 08:30.771
[SPEAKER_02]: But partly again, it was opening things up, for example, when I was talking about fields, he'd just say, well, what is a field, and you know, I then had to try and explain to someone who'd done no science at school, what a field was, yet he was very philosophically informed.
08:31.672 --> 08:34.896
[SPEAKER_02]: So then I talked about magnetism and he'd say, what is magnetism?
08:35.507 --> 08:56.053
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, he wasn't just doing this to be like socrates, only he genuinely was interested to know, and he hadn't ever had the chance of asking a scientist these sort of simple straightforward yet profound questions, and so he made me go much further than I would otherwise have done, because he then asked further questions.
08:57.523 --> 09:09.407
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, I suppose his method there was bringing it to drawing stuff out of me that was already there, rather than apart from these reading suggestions and stuff.
09:09.707 --> 09:13.488
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a method of allowing things to come through.
09:13.508 --> 09:17.729
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a sort of a general question to us.
09:18.529 --> 09:20.630
[SPEAKER_00]: Since I think we all agree,
09:21.944 --> 09:30.351
[SPEAKER_00]: that, in principle, the whole external universes mirrored inside each one of us, like we are a hologram of the whole universe.
09:31.411 --> 09:36.936
[SPEAKER_00]: So also, therefore, naturally, the devil is also there, not only in me, but in everybody.
09:38.257 --> 09:45.623
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way the devil or Mara, or Satan, tested Christ, or the Buddha to be,
09:46.784 --> 09:54.209
[SPEAKER_00]: was by usual factors, such as more acquisitions, more pleasure, more power.
09:55.049 --> 09:57.010
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of us have to face this.
09:57.290 --> 09:57.751
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we...
09:58.529 --> 10:11.098
[SPEAKER_00]: train anybody, including ourselves, to be more and more free of this and to really search for truth, whether it is in the scientific realm or the philosophical realm, we don't need to get attached too much only to the scientists.
10:11.579 --> 10:12.720
[SPEAKER_00]: This is true for everybody.
10:13.580 --> 10:19.525
[SPEAKER_00]: How do I face my devil and to be a little free of the revenge from the devil?
10:20.225 --> 10:23.047
[SPEAKER_02]: Gosh, well, I don't know, Ravi.
10:23.468 --> 10:26.290
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, I don't spend much time thinking about this.
10:26.410 --> 10:27.310
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to confess.
10:29.427 --> 10:37.334
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, again, I deal with it as the situation arises, rather than having a general philosophical view of how it might work.
10:38.095 --> 10:47.564
[SPEAKER_02]: Part of it is we get pushback from other people, and I pay attention to that, you know, I have, you know, I'm married, and I have a wife who's quite critical.
10:48.085 --> 10:53.370
[SPEAKER_02]: So I get often unwelcome critical feedback on a regular basis,
10:54.230 --> 11:10.819
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this is one constraint and I get a feedback from other people I have a lot of scientific enemies, you know, the people who hate me most to the dogmatic militant atheists and the skeptics who there's professional skeptics.
11:11.319 --> 11:19.143
[SPEAKER_02]: So I get a lot of pushback from skeptics and atheists and some of it is simply an expression of their own prejudice.
11:19.844 --> 11:22.425
[SPEAKER_02]: But some of it can be valid and I think that
11:23.798 --> 11:33.063
[SPEAKER_02]: by a scientific work is probably better as the result of the fact that it's subject to continual criticism by people who are highly motivated to criticise it.
11:33.944 --> 11:37.646
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm not sure that one essay has to put in all hard work oneself.
11:37.746 --> 11:46.351
[SPEAKER_02]: I think quite a lot of this comes feedback from the world around one to bring in limits to what one's doing.
11:47.192 --> 11:49.113
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if one becomes arrogant,
11:50.171 --> 12:02.911
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, these things about the desire for knowledge, power, kind of fastion desires for knowledge and power, and also the desire for wealth and so on, they tend to stir up.
12:03.933 --> 12:10.696
[SPEAKER_02]: opposition and that opposition can be helpful if one takes it into account.
12:11.456 --> 12:24.641
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not helpful if it's simply an expression of other people's greed or prejudice or pride, but it is helpful if it is actual genuine criticism of valid criticism of what one's doing.
12:25.261 --> 12:25.942
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think there's
12:27.037 --> 12:44.227
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, almost anyone who, if Jesus had actually yielded temptations to the devil and started wanting to become rich and powerful, he would have started getting a lot of pushback from his disciples and followers who would have said he'd gone over to the wrong side.
12:44.328 --> 12:47.690
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, you see all these gurus today who,
12:48.530 --> 12:53.855
[SPEAKER_02]: get to involved in power and money and also sexual exploitation of their devotees.
12:54.435 --> 12:56.677
[SPEAKER_02]: And soon or later, they get a lot of pushback.
12:57.438 --> 13:05.544
[SPEAKER_02]: I think actually we don't need to worry too much about doing it ourselves, because I think it's going to come to us from outside ourselves.
13:05.624 --> 13:08.547
[SPEAKER_02]: These are the criticisms and corrective forces.
13:10.265 --> 13:30.561
[SPEAKER_00]: But really behind this question, if we actually agree more or less that contemporary scientific knowledge or the use of that knowledge is not connected with wisdom, so question really is, what is interfering and how do we assist?
13:33.148 --> 14:01.302
[SPEAKER_02]: I think what's interfering is the fact that scientific knowledge is coming back to my first point, is paid for by people who commission the research and when a drug company pays for people to do research on cell biology, they're not doing it just out of an interest in cells, they're doing it because they want to find molecular methods of making new drugs or new immunotherapies and making lots of money and that's why their investors put in all
14:02.592 --> 14:15.116
[SPEAKER_02]: And when scientists write grant applications, they don't just say, I'm interested in studying this phenomenon because it's really, really interesting and would give us a deeper insight into the workings of nature.
14:15.476 --> 14:22.759
[SPEAKER_02]: They say, if I get this grant, I'll understand molecular mechanisms that will lead to the caring of cancer or to the
14:23.840 --> 14:35.674
[SPEAKER_02]: alleviation of the climate crisis or to something like that, almost all grant applications promise some benefit to the thunder or to the right of world, and ever utilitarian kind.
14:36.491 --> 14:41.256
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suppose arguably, if one says, well, science should be driven by a pure curiosity.
14:41.276 --> 14:51.987
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's not necessarily a very good thing either, because pure curiosity, without some higher end or goal, might not be very helpful and might even be destructive.
14:52.668 --> 14:58.894
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that the wisdom is not, a lot of it isn't actually down to the scientists.
14:58.934 --> 14:59.155
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean,
15:00.453 --> 15:13.789
[SPEAKER_02]: When you actually watch scientists at work in academic or industrial institutions, so much of it is about what they can get funded, what grant applications they can write, what they can do.
15:14.350 --> 15:18.454
[SPEAKER_02]: I have people all the time saying they'd have to do research on morphic resonance or on
15:19.235 --> 15:29.121
[SPEAKER_02]: to empathy or something like that, but they know they won't get it funded, and they know that they'll lose their job if they do too much of the deviates from the standard orthodoxy.
15:29.681 --> 15:36.305
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, it's not really an individual decision of the scientists, they're part of a much larger economic and social system.
15:37.180 --> 15:54.256
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we think that some change will be helpful, how do we go about it, even though, as you just said, it's part of not only individual scientists, part of a whole social structure, economic structure, how do we go about bringing any change?
15:56.778 --> 16:02.663
[SPEAKER_02]: I think part of the change has to come through this funding system, because, say, for example,
16:03.957 --> 16:10.025
[SPEAKER_02]: the research that shows that spiritual practices are helpful and have measurable beneficial effects.
16:10.426 --> 16:11.848
[SPEAKER_02]: There's now been a lot of research.
16:12.709 --> 16:15.893
[SPEAKER_02]: I summarized some of it in my book Science and Spiritual Practices.
16:16.715 --> 16:19.839
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of that research was paid for by the Templeton Foundation.
16:20.682 --> 16:35.465
[SPEAKER_02]: And Sir John Templeton, when he set up his foundation, had the idea that science could actually do some good in the world, and it could actually help illuminate aspects of spirituality or at least spiritual practice.
16:36.185 --> 16:42.886
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the fact that he had the wisdom to see that, and to set up a funding institution,
16:49.058 --> 16:51.599
[SPEAKER_02]: But again, it was a kind of top-down decision.
16:52.079 --> 17:01.761
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't individual scientists with their grant applications, and with three year grant applications, or people applying for post-docs.
17:02.221 --> 17:11.383
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, young scientists desperately competitive and have to apply for post-docs in other people's labs where they're in their cog in the machine.
17:12.128 --> 17:16.510
[SPEAKER_02]: And they have very little say over what they actually do in the modern world.
17:16.550 --> 17:18.150
[SPEAKER_02]: They mean that's the reality of it.
17:18.170 --> 17:27.034
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean if the world were full of independent scientists like it was in the 19th century who had their own funding, it would be a completely different question.
17:27.454 --> 17:32.876
[SPEAKER_02]: But the number of independent scientists in the world at the moment is you can count them on the fingers of one hand.
17:33.476 --> 17:36.257
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, you're one and I'm another and there's probably three or three others.
17:39.633 --> 17:45.017
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was a judge in the temple done foundation for their prizes for several years.
17:45.998 --> 17:50.781
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I also very much appreciated the initiative from temple done.
17:52.022 --> 18:06.512
[SPEAKER_00]: So, is this what we really required to do is to find some more or less wealthy people who can undertake this sort of project of assisting that kind of movements or assisting those scientists who are likely to bring more wisdom.
18:06.592 --> 18:07.613
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we go about it?
18:08.215 --> 18:10.817
[SPEAKER_02]: But I don't know, you've thought about it more than me, Ravi.
18:10.857 --> 18:12.538
[SPEAKER_02]: Why don't you tell me what you think?
18:13.739 --> 18:18.963
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you've actually been involved with the Templeton Foundation and various initiatives.
18:19.043 --> 18:22.465
[SPEAKER_02]: So what's your conclusion after years of experience?
18:23.566 --> 18:29.911
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but there you see the initiative actually came from Templeton who offered fair amount of money.
18:31.475 --> 18:36.097
[SPEAKER_00]: to have people undertake something to do with science and religion.
18:36.177 --> 18:41.599
[SPEAKER_00]: That was his interest, initially, not necessarily using words like wisdom, etc.
18:42.439 --> 18:49.302
[SPEAKER_00]: But trying to bring some sort of a coordination between science and religion rather than just assuming they are opposed to each other.
18:50.283 --> 18:53.344
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is really coming initiated from him.
19:01.562 --> 19:03.623
[SPEAKER_00]: either in the council or the judges.
19:05.004 --> 19:08.567
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, even Prince Charles at that time, he was knocking Charles.
19:08.707 --> 19:10.348
[SPEAKER_00]: Prince Charles was one of the judges.
19:11.188 --> 19:16.592
[SPEAKER_00]: So was the person in charge of the whole Eastern religions, Eastern Christianity.
19:17.837 --> 19:27.422
[SPEAKER_00]: So they try to invite people who from their perspective were going to bring a slightly wider perspective.
19:28.142 --> 19:30.904
[SPEAKER_00]: But initially, it really was from Templeton.
19:31.024 --> 19:33.886
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, of course, he has friends.
19:34.006 --> 19:40.149
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody has some friends who assist people, just like you have friends or have friends and with they talk to us.
19:41.069 --> 19:44.011
[SPEAKER_00]: So we get influenced by their attitudes and their help.
19:45.748 --> 19:52.202
[SPEAKER_00]: But should we go around trying to find some wealthy people to make some contributions for this kind of thing?
19:52.242 --> 19:53.285
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we go about that?
19:55.040 --> 19:56.181
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I don't know.
19:57.462 --> 20:11.931
[SPEAKER_02]: In my experience, I mean, my work has been funded independently for 40 years, because it can't be funded through regular foundations or government grants, because to heretical, even for the temples and foundation.
20:12.532 --> 20:18.036
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they're back off whenever I've approached them, because they're very concerned with respectability.
20:18.936 --> 20:24.558
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I have, I myself have been able to do what I do because a few wealthy people have supported me.
20:24.638 --> 20:27.319
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I'm very appreciative of the fact that that's happened.
20:27.999 --> 20:33.361
[SPEAKER_02]: But what's happened in my case is not that I've approached them, but that they've approached me.
20:33.381 --> 20:38.983
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, I mean, for one reason or another, they've thought that time was doing work.
20:39.023 --> 20:41.524
[SPEAKER_02]: They wanted to support and they've offered to support it too.
20:42.890 --> 20:50.277
[SPEAKER_02]: In that case, one could say, what I did was just do what I do, and then, providentially, people came forward to support it.
20:50.297 --> 21:07.333
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think one thing we can do and should do is pray for guidance in what we do and pray for God's guidance on those who fund science and who make key decisions about what kind of science is funded.
21:08.341 --> 21:16.709
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that we're not just working according to our own ideas, but we're part of a much wider historical process.
21:17.750 --> 21:20.933
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not immediately clear how that works.
21:21.053 --> 21:33.804
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if we think that human life is under providential guidance, there's an influence of the spiritual realm on history and on what happens in history, which I do believe, then it's not always clear
21:34.845 --> 21:40.680
[SPEAKER_02]: how God works, how God works in mysterious ways we're often told, and it could be that
21:41.775 --> 21:43.856
[SPEAKER_02]: the destruction of a lot of the U.S.
21:43.936 --> 21:54.660
[SPEAKER_02]: science base that's going on at the moment, perhaps will lead to a positive change in the end in a way that businesses usual would not have done.
21:55.501 --> 22:04.904
[SPEAKER_02]: And the motives of those who are destroying it are mixed and maybe completely wrong, but the effects may or may not be beneficial.
22:04.964 --> 22:05.725
[SPEAKER_02]: We just don't know.
22:07.219 --> 22:18.346
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that in my own case, I'm a Christian, I pray every day the Lord's prayer, and part of that is that I came to become, that I will be done.
22:19.246 --> 22:33.275
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, the coming of the kingdom of God and how it affects science and science policy again, does no immediate blueprint that sort of falls out in front of one, or is there in the book of common prayer,
22:36.937 --> 22:46.332
[SPEAKER_02]: But if one thinks that the divine will is involved in the process of history and in people's decisions, then it seems to me that's a very important part of it.
22:46.953 --> 22:51.840
[SPEAKER_02]: But one can't actually have prayers in science labs because
22:52.740 --> 23:06.537
[SPEAKER_02]: First of all, there's no agreed religious approach, and secondly, at least in Britain a lot of scientists are atheists and would strongly object to their being any prayers or any spiritual dimension in the practice of science.
23:07.138 --> 23:08.620
[SPEAKER_02]: So it has to be done privately.
23:09.777 --> 23:18.224
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think I just want to come in on the John Templeton because I think this is a very good point that and he's funded the work on forgiveness.
23:18.464 --> 23:22.307
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean the main work has been done on forgiveness as far as, no, no.
23:22.628 --> 23:27.271
[SPEAKER_03]: Some spirituality in health, he's funded, he's funded unlimited love.
23:28.052 --> 23:50.657
[SPEAKER_03]: And I love the story from Stephen Post, who he worked with on this, and they used to have telegrams sent from Nassau where Sir John was living, and they were talking about what kind of love they wanted to support research in.
23:50.797 --> 23:52.577
[SPEAKER_03]: And Sir John said, it has to be unlimited.
23:53.759 --> 24:00.490
[SPEAKER_03]: and say it was him who came up with this idea of the science of unlimited love and I think that's quite remarkable.
24:00.510 --> 24:07.542
[SPEAKER_02]: I know Richard loves a big challenge and I'm not sure how much one can have a a science of it.
24:07.622 --> 24:07.862
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean
24:08.772 --> 24:24.055
[SPEAKER_02]: Satish Kumar is a great devotee of the principle of unlimited love and I've seen him shock people terribly when he says you know we should have love for Putin and we should have love for Netanyahu and people who are causing so much distraction in the world.
24:24.735 --> 24:33.177
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean I'm sure he's right but that's not something that either comes naturally to most people or where you could do
24:35.982 --> 24:38.523
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, that's my ethical spiritual conviction.
24:39.243 --> 24:39.523
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
24:40.404 --> 24:44.225
[SPEAKER_02]: The scientific and medical networks been going for a long time now, 50 years.
24:45.005 --> 24:54.488
[SPEAKER_02]: And its aims have been to promote what we're talking about, I would have thought, a more spiritual dimension of science and spirituality.
24:54.548 --> 24:59.490
[SPEAKER_02]: So perhaps I could ask you David, I'm into what degree do you think it's been successful?
25:00.785 --> 25:19.633
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that what the phrase I was just going to call to mind at moment is one, no originally from George Blaker, when he said that part of our purpose is to maintain a sort of uphold the human spiritual essence as compatible with enlightened scientific thinking.
25:20.932 --> 25:26.015
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thought that's, I mean, George was a great drafter of memos and agreements and everything.
25:26.796 --> 25:37.102
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's an aim, which I think is more relevant now than ever, but because of the advent of lands and schemes of transhumanism,
25:38.073 --> 25:42.958
[SPEAKER_03]: which I think threatened the very idea of what we understand spiritually to be a human being.
25:44.399 --> 25:56.730
[SPEAKER_03]: So we have undoubtedly, you know, done a lot of, I suppose you know, our mystics and scientists conference, and there which has been going since 1978, which you both spoke with the spoken.
25:57.290 --> 26:01.514
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a kind of undertow of wisdom in that series, wouldn't you say?
26:02.277 --> 26:16.083
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, but I think one of the things that the scientific and medical network has done is is sort of normalized the possibility of a spiritual dimension in the lives of scientists and medical research.
26:17.204 --> 26:28.109
[SPEAKER_02]: I think another thing is done is in the sense of the negative side of it is necessary negative side of it, is showing the extreme limitations of mechanistic materialism.
26:29.024 --> 26:50.782
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, every issue of the paradigm explorer that I read has about 30 books pointing out these limitations and you must be probably the person who knows most about them because you review so many of these books yourself and you must read about a thousand books now that point out the limits of mechanistic materialism.
26:51.667 --> 26:58.934
[SPEAKER_02]: They seem to be having some effect because there aren't that many people who are prepared to defend mechanistic materials as many more.
26:59.674 --> 27:14.067
[SPEAKER_02]: Bernardo Castro told me that when people set up debates where to challenge his philosophy of idealism, when they try to find a materialist to oppose him, they find it very hard to get anyone to volunteer to do that nowadays.
27:15.082 --> 27:25.645
[SPEAKER_02]: So the mainly the influence of mechanistic materialism is not because it has hundreds of brilliant defenders who were incredibly persuasive arguments.
27:26.765 --> 27:40.349
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead, it's more like the inertia of an established system, you know, like an ocean liner, it takes an awful long time for it to change direction, because there's such an enormous inertia built into the system.
27:40.950 --> 27:45.904
[SPEAKER_02]: and that inertia is probably strongest within the educational system because
27:46.764 --> 27:52.589
[SPEAKER_02]: and we've been talking for years and the scientific and medical network about the need to get beyond the materialist world view.
27:53.130 --> 28:13.808
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, look at the GCSE or the A level syllabus and there's not the slightest hint of a change there or in most undergraduate science degrees we're still educating new generations of children in an old world view that we don't believe in anymore and even some of their teachers don't believe in anymore,
28:15.154 --> 28:28.462
[SPEAKER_02]: to change that system is enormously important that the scientific medical networks had various initiatives over the years to try and reform science teaching, but so far the results have been close to zero.
28:29.303 --> 28:29.903
[SPEAKER_03]: That's true.
28:29.923 --> 28:34.286
[SPEAKER_03]: I just wanted to make one observation about the mystics and scientists series.
28:35.146 --> 28:37.748
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the beginning of the series.
28:38.768 --> 28:44.170
[SPEAKER_03]: The scientists were not necessarily mystical, but some of them weren't mystical at all.
28:45.011 --> 28:57.616
[SPEAKER_03]: But what I've observed over the decades that I've been involved in creating the conference is that there are more mystical scientists who actually marry both the science and the mysticism.
28:57.696 --> 29:03.478
[SPEAKER_03]: Then you both you are Rupert and Ravi are examples of that sort of
29:04.058 --> 29:11.905
[SPEAKER_03]: Janus, as it were, so that it's coming together more in the lives and being of the speakers.
29:13.630 --> 29:17.993
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think so, and I think that's one of the positive effects normalizing this.
29:18.713 --> 29:35.283
[SPEAKER_02]: When I lived in India, you know, I lived there for seven years and I worked as a scientist in India, almost none of my Indian colleagues were materialists, or atheists, or my sort of them had a spiritual view of life, whether it was Hindu or Muslim or Jain or Sikh or whatever.
29:35.763 --> 29:44.708
[SPEAKER_02]: but almost all of them had a spiritual view of life, but it had no effect on their science that was noticeable because they lived in separate compartments.
29:44.768 --> 29:53.553
[SPEAKER_02]: They, you know, when they were at work, they were conventional scientists doing conventional science because they wanted to be published in conventional journals because that would help their career.
29:54.298 --> 30:01.264
[SPEAKER_02]: As soon as they got home in the evening, they became fairly conventional Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or jains or whatever.
30:01.984 --> 30:08.410
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's perfectly possible for the respiratory and scientific in separate compartments.
30:09.250 --> 30:13.233
[SPEAKER_02]: And I suppose one of the challenges is not to persuade
30:14.362 --> 30:32.838
[SPEAKER_02]: Atheos and materialists as a spiritual dimension to the universe, a lot of them know that already, but it's more of a matter of trying to find a way of crossing these compartmental divisions that separate professional scientific life from personal religious practice or spiritual practice.
30:34.359 --> 30:37.622
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to make it slightly more general remark here.
30:38.737 --> 30:45.719
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole scientific enterprise or philosophical enterprise is clearly driven by our mind.
30:47.320 --> 30:57.803
[SPEAKER_00]: And the repeated recommendation or suggestion by all spiritual teachers is that there are many levels of reality, subtler than the mind.
30:58.684 --> 31:07.327
[SPEAKER_00]: And that what they are recommending is direct perception rather than more and more fancy conception.
31:09.011 --> 31:20.089
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, to imagine that science itself can teach us spirituality or bring spirituality is really already a mistake and enterprise.
31:21.572 --> 31:21.892
[SPEAKER_00]: We can
31:22.885 --> 31:38.935
[SPEAKER_00]: What we can do is, at best, is that the scientists can have a slightly more human understanding and they use their science or do the kind of science that can be more helpful to humanity.
31:39.595 --> 31:46.039
[SPEAKER_00]: That is quite different from saying that spirituality and science are doing the same thing.
31:46.320 --> 31:51.423
[SPEAKER_00]: One is a completely different enterprise that I keep reminding people of this, to me seems rather obvious.
31:52.477 --> 31:56.078
[SPEAKER_00]: One is a call to a direct perception of reality.
31:56.859 --> 32:03.301
[SPEAKER_00]: The other one is thinking about reality and putting it in some technical terminology or intellectual terminology.
32:04.242 --> 32:12.505
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's a very good and important point, Ravi, but I think that there's also it and dimension of spirituality, which
32:13.942 --> 32:15.844
[SPEAKER_02]: at least in some spiritual traditions.
32:15.904 --> 32:21.969
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean in the Christian tradition it's not just about one's perception it's about how one works with other people.
32:22.590 --> 32:31.918
[SPEAKER_02]: The kingdom of heaven is brought about collectively and not individually and just rather paradoxically one of the things I came to see when I was living in India is that
32:32.498 --> 32:54.538
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a tendency in some Hindu and teravada buddhist thinking that, you know, here we definitely have a terrible world of endless suffering, we're in Kali Yoga, things getting worse and worse, and the best thing we can do is undergo an individual kind of vertical take-off spiritually by escaping from Samsara and all these things.
32:55.358 --> 33:04.461
[SPEAKER_02]: but it doesn't really help other people very much, I mean it can help other people to undergo vertical takeoff perhaps, but it doesn't help the collective.
33:05.021 --> 33:13.664
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think in the Christian and the Islamic and the Jewish traditions there's more of an emphasis on doing it together and a collective action.
33:14.345 --> 33:19.086
[SPEAKER_02]: So there then we do enter the world of sort of funding and politics and
33:25.297 --> 33:26.818
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I agree with this.
33:26.878 --> 33:40.182
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, one other thing that I often comment on because in a global culture we need to see how what can learn from the other side and what you have just said is exactly my criticism of much of the Indian tradition.
33:40.422 --> 33:43.003
[SPEAKER_00]: So much very famous remark of Shankara.
33:44.649 --> 33:50.815
[SPEAKER_00]: Brahma-sattya Jagatmitya, meaning Brahma is true and the whole manifested universe is just illusion.
33:51.996 --> 33:55.679
[SPEAKER_00]: In my judgment, this has done more harm to Indian culture than anything else.
33:56.119 --> 34:03.585
[SPEAKER_00]: So I actually point this out, and that in the Abrahamic tradition, very much emphasis on taking care of this world.
34:03.785 --> 34:06.307
[SPEAKER_00]: But you see, this is where the problem also comes.
34:07.448 --> 34:19.922
[SPEAKER_00]: Every stick has two ends, taking care of this world has meant combining religious and spiritual or political powers together, look at the planet history for the last 4,500 years.
34:20.563 --> 34:23.627
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is controlled by people coming from the Christian background.
34:24.147 --> 34:24.347
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
34:25.577 --> 34:38.583
[SPEAKER_00]: So wisdom is a good idea, spiritual practice is a good idea, but how does it one actually free one from all worldly desires, which are occupying one's whole energy?
34:41.064 --> 34:45.046
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, this is a general spiritual question, isn't it?
34:45.126 --> 34:49.228
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, you're right, the destruction of the planets and the environment.
34:50.150 --> 34:57.553
[SPEAKER_02]: has come largely from people from the Christian and Jewish background because they've played a very important part in the growth of science.
34:58.453 --> 35:03.555
[SPEAKER_02]: And many of these things that have had such a destructive effect have actually been done with good intention.
35:04.396 --> 35:11.979
[SPEAKER_02]: You know people say we've got care diseases, reduce infant mortality, etc., and the result is a population
35:13.319 --> 35:15.780
[SPEAKER_02]: or we've got to grow more crops to feed more people.
35:16.200 --> 35:25.342
[SPEAKER_02]: The result is the pollution of the soil with nitration, phosphate, fertilizers, and angled algal blooms and depletion of soil fertility etc.
35:25.942 --> 35:37.225
[SPEAKER_02]: So one could argue that a lot of this was done with good intentions and perhaps it would have been better if people hadn't had the good intentions in the first place and just simply taking them more selfish for you.
35:37.925 --> 35:43.129
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean it's very hard to have counterfactual histories of what would have happened if people had thought differently.
35:43.669 --> 35:50.955
[SPEAKER_02]: But yes, it's a very good point that a lot of it has come from people with Jewish and Christian backgrounds, the transformation of the planet.
35:51.735 --> 35:53.997
[SPEAKER_02]: But other people have adopted it very willingly.
35:54.057 --> 36:07.287
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the Chinese, for example, are not being forced to build AI or computers or rockets, only they want to for all sorts of natives, but nobody's compelling them to do all that.
36:08.725 --> 36:20.468
[SPEAKER_00]: But really, in a way, for their own survival in the planet rather than just being controlled by Mr. Trump, they also have to find out how they can protect themselves.
36:20.948 --> 36:21.188
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
36:22.168 --> 36:28.550
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it's not only a question of just because this is what they want to do, but this is what they have to do to survive.
36:29.730 --> 36:29.930
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
36:38.732 --> 36:47.816
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's also developed with an context of competitive capitalism, so there's a competitive motion, a nation all the time.
36:48.317 --> 36:55.480
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not as if we reach a stable state, there's always the next innovation wanting to get ahead of someone else.
36:56.241 --> 37:00.963
[SPEAKER_02]: And science has got sucked into that and is, in fact, one of the principal drivers,
37:01.483 --> 37:21.273
[SPEAKER_02]: of this process, which is where coming back to the funding question, individual scientists becoming wiser or more contemplative or seeing reality more deeply may not have much effect on the this breakneck speed of scientific research and technological innovation.
37:22.654 --> 37:26.816
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I think we should probably be bringing the conversation to a close.
37:26.896 --> 37:27.636
[SPEAKER_03]: I just wanted whether
37:31.682 --> 37:48.708
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm only in favor of wisdom, and I'm only in favor of more wise science, but I don't see any simple way of doing this, and we can have wise scientists, but if we have even if we had more wise scientists, we may not have more wise science at least as it's pursued.
37:49.488 --> 37:53.372
[SPEAKER_02]: in China, India, the United States, all over the world.
37:53.852 --> 38:02.160
[SPEAKER_02]: We might not have a wider scientific educational system because that's all geared towards producing people to create the business's usual science.
38:03.160 --> 38:30.197
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we have to hope and pray that science and technology will be used more wisely and that the processes that unfold in the political and economic world will somehow result in the coming of the kingdom of heaven or but it's not obvious and it's not under our control but we can open ourselves to it and that's where I think that prayers as well as perception
38:33.889 --> 38:34.750
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much.
38:35.311 --> 38:41.380
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's a really interesting conversation, so thanks so much for coming together.
38:41.960 --> 38:47.048
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that, I'm sure that the listeners will very much enjoy it and the food for thought.
