WEBVTT
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[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My name is David Lorimer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the Program Director, Chair of Gallaudet Commission with Marjorie Willocott, who's here with me and Global Ambassador of the Scientific and Medical Network, and it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Ravi Ravindra and Marjorie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who are going to be having a dialogue in our series of conversations about wise scientists.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What really is a wise scientist?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is the relationship between science and wisdom?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So Ravi initiated this project by writing a short paper on why scientists and the need for scientists to become whyser human beings.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we've had a couple of interviews so far, and this is the third with Marjorie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ravi's path is one of...
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[SPEAKER_00]: a spiritual pilgrim, spiritual seeker, physicist, professor of comparative religion, someone who's worked with some of the key texts of Indian scriptures such as the Bhagavad-gita and the Patangali Yogasutras.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Marjorie is a neuroscientist by background and has done a great deal of medical research, also research and meditation, and both our speakers today are long-term meditators.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And she is author of Infinite Awareness, which is an author by a graphical account of life and spiritual journey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, Ravi, I'm going to pass over to you to ask the first question
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, well, I'm happy to begin.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let me first of all make a few general remarks, which are relevant both to martyrs and myself, and to any other human being, actually.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Personally, I can hardly believe that a person does not periodically wonder
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because I am obviously like everybody else, not going to be on this planet for more than a few decades.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So one would naturally wonder why have I been created and what energies and forces create me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My impression is that that is at the very root of whatever gets called spiritual search.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, it is also true that spirituality has been associated just linguistically with religion and religions have done more harm to spiritual search than anything else.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at it just in the 1617, essentially, all the major scientists were excluded or killed or somehow by the religious side, not from the scientific side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So to some extent I often wonder how can any scientist, or really any human being, not occasionally ask these kind of questions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But then of course the answers are not easy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: because the constant reminder by all the stages is that for me to connect with something real, one has to connect with something subtler than the mind.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mind cannot figure it out, so already then people don't know what else to connect with and how to be free of my attachment to just mental negotiations.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But obviously, some of us manage somehow to get free of it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I want to ask Marcerina what was her own journey, what took her from the scientific side, to at least being more and more interested in the spiritual side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So please.
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[SPEAKER_02]: sure and what I want to say is that when I was in undergraduate and graduate school in neuroscience, I was trained in that materialist paradigm that consciousness is solely produced by the brain.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember coming from that place that you might be talking about where I knew what happened to us when we died, which was basically that when the brain is dead, everybody's dead.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That was my absolute belief that was given to me by all my professors at the university, undergraduate and graduate.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember the sense of superiority I felt toward others who had a religious or a spiritual view thinking they were weak minded.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and that they couldn't accept the truth that our awareness dies with our bodily death.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember being at this family reunion once in my early college years, and my uncle who had been trained at Caltech and Pasadena in engineering and physics, and I sat in one corner talking about science.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Superior the ignoring the others and the family who were spiritually oriented with their own conversation.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So,
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[SPEAKER_02]: With that worldview that I embraced came also a sense of competition with others in academia to show that I was a high quality researcher.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I entered the arena of competing for research grants, for academic promotions, for increased salaries, and the number of papers I published.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And though I loved working with and teaching my graduate students, I also felt this strong sense of competition with other faculty members.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And in addition, I started my original PhD research doing work on the nervous system of animals.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And at that time, I was working on gastropod.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Mollos, these pretty creatures that swim at a sea and have very large nerve cells, like about a millimeter and diameter bright gold.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I also did research on the nervous system of locus or grasshoppers, and I never thought of whether my dissections might cause them pain, as I thought of them as really incendiant creatures.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So like many people, I would just squash an insect if it was in my way in my regular life as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it wasn't until I had my spiritual awakening that I began to feel my interconnection with other animals and plants and see these other beings in the world, even if they're simple beings, as sentient at some level, as not robots, but having pain and pleasure like human beings and being able to communicate with me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it took me a while to incorporate that understanding into my actions as a researcher.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I studied that nervous system of animals to understand how their brain works, and that meant that I had to dissect those animals and record from their nerve cells.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I stopped doing that research a few years after my spiritual awakening, as I couldn't justify for myself taking an animal's life for my own research data.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Now saying that, I understand that there are nuances in all of these issues and I was asked my own meditation teacher about that and he said that we have to be very careful about taking an animal's life and to consider whether the medical benefits for all human and animal kind outweighs the loss of that life.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm also a vegetarian, and that I don't judge others who aren't.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I have the understanding that everyone needs to make their own decision in that area, and that's fine.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that those are the beginnings of changes that happen to be once I had that spiritual awakening.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I began questioning all of those materialist principles that had been the basis of the way I behaved and the way I did my research.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, Robbie, I guess I, before we, you go on with any other questions, I also imagine that you had something like that, though you were a physicist and you were at a neuroscientist killing animals, you must have had some similar sorts of questions about the ethics of being a scientist and how we incorporate that properly into our world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I would have to say that my journey was a little different from this because in India especially immediately after India became independent, if anybody graduated from the school, the call was to go to a technological college and a new institution called the Indian Institute of Technology was set up in 1952 based more or less model after MIT.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and then I graduated from the school in 1954, just heard it to his later.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And even though I personally was earlier really wondering why I'm alive, the kind of question that later on became more stronger and stronger in me,
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[SPEAKER_01]: one might call them spiritually-oriented questions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were very strong in me fairly early on, but such strong social pressure that I needed to go into technological.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, at that time, even now, at least in India, maybe it is true even in USA, if you go study philosophy or history or literature that meant you were a bad student,
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you are a good student, you would first of all go into technological institute, secondly, to medical institutes, then humanities, that was very strong emphasis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So nobody was especially pressuring me, but that whole attitude, then I ended up going to the institute of Indian Institute of Technology, at that time there was only one institute.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, the Prime Minister at that time, Jawal Nero even said,
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[SPEAKER_01]: will be the temples of New India.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There was such strong emphasis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, so I ended up doing a BSEN and Master of Technology there, especially in oil exploration.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I kept wondering, this is really peculiar, first of all, in technological work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: they don't really take very much of the contemporary or modern physics, like general relativity or quantum mechanics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So partly because of my interest in that, I decided to do an MSC.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I actually, I guess.
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[SPEAKER_01]: maybe I shouldn't be saying that, but I seem to have been a good student, I guess in everybody's point of view.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I got as fellowship from MIT, fellowship from Caltech and as scholarship from Commonwealth scholarship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I accepted the Commonwealth scholarship because they paid for my travel also, but as the others didn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I ended up in Toronto University doing a PhD in physics, wishing to learn really modern physics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So having done MSC and PSD there, but I was now getting more and more dissatisfied, because physics was not really leading to any understanding why I am alive.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What forces have created the meme, and alive only really for a few decades that is obvious in everybody's case.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then I actually ended up even writing to a very well-known religious person from the Indian tradition, but he was in California, sort of president of the Ramakrishna Mission there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I did not know anything about him, but I had heard of his name.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I wrote him a letter saying that I'm...
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[SPEAKER_01]: thinking of just quitting doing physics PhD because it's not really touching what I wish to go.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He wrote to me, says, it's not a good idea to give it up because it'll help you to do so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I finished my PhD, but immediately when I was later on hired at the University on the side, I decided to do an MA in philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: thinking that will help me learn some.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But soon I'd also discovered that philosophers are just basically arguing with each other.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're not searching for any truth at all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it is worse than what goes on in the scientific world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the scientific world, at least we rely on some data, some measurement.
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[SPEAKER_01]: although those are external measurements, they are not really reflecting what is going on inside human being.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But still we at least lie on some things that we have actually tested.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the humanities it's just terrible, just one argument after another.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And unless, because unless you argue, you can't get a promotion because you can't publish a paper.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it really gradually I was even
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[SPEAKER_01]: But Wilford can't will Smith, who was actually the founding director of the institute for a religious study that Harvard was a Canadian origin and was getting a little tired of USA.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So he came to our university when the department of religion was started there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we would occasionally meet each other in the faculty club at lunchtime.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And on one occasion, little bit to my surprise, he said, you know, I'm teaching a course on the Bhagavad Gita, but you seem to know more about it than I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you come into our department?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I have never taken a single course in religious studies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Amazingly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but he's inviting me to be on the faculty in the religion department, but because of his teacher, nobody could argue with him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he started the institute at Harvard for religious studies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so, meanwhile, I was getting a little fed up with philosophy argument, so I shifted to religion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, in the process, I discovered that very few professors of religion are actually trying to be religious.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the same thing goes on there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not only in the philosophy department or in scientific department, the whole academic world, as far as I can see, is identified with just me, me, me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How can I get more promotion?
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[SPEAKER_01]: How can my papers or books be published?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And very much admired, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, gradually I began to feel that what I needed was to really work with some people who I would regard as sages.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, what does it mean, sages, really is partly to do with their behavior?
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[SPEAKER_01]: they behave with compassion, with love, even accepting somebody who is just arguing with them for a few time, they would accept that also.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And also they always have a sense of oneness with the others, a sense of unity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: None of the stages doesn't matter whether they come from the Christian background or Buddhists or any background, regardless the other tradition or other teachings to be stupid or wrong.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm absolutely convinced if the Buddha and Christ were to meet each other, they will embrace each other with love.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But Christians and Buddhists won't do it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I became really a little bit disillusioned with the religious part of it, but more and more interested in the spiritual practitioners.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And especially those like Krishna Murthy or Rhan the Sousman whom I have met and some two very well-known Zen masters, Roshikabhuri is highly regarded.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was head of Rinsai Zen for two decades in Japan.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So gradually, I began to feel that what is really required to assist my understanding or my own wish was not this academic study or that academic study.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because all academics, almost, is requirement how to get ahead, which is not what I needed to do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had enough, no matter what difference would it make for me to publish another five books?
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't feel that I need to be against the academic world they do what they do which is fine
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that doesn't satisfy me personally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I, in fact, I retired a couple of years before, I was required.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, at least in Canada at that time, we were supposed to retire at the age of 65.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I was only 63.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I retired partly because I was speaking to many people here there was being invited, traveling very often.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that has been my background.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So.
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[SPEAKER_01]: then I partly because the great spiritual text, like the remarks of Christ in the Gospels, or of Krishna in the Bhagavad-gita, or Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra, or the Buddha's remarks in the Buddha.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they have struck me, but for I don't regard myself as a writer or anything like this, but if I am studying something,
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[SPEAKER_01]: deeply and I mention it to my friends.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They can't believe that it is in the gospels or it is in the Bhagavad Gita.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they ask me to you better publish it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So actually all of my books more than it doesn't now have been published not because I feel that I'm a writer or anything like this, but I'm seriously interested in studying what Krishna is teaching in the Bhagavad Gita or what the Buddha is teaching or Christ is teaching.
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[SPEAKER_01]: not what the Churches say they are teaching, because the Churches don't even accept.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Christ, for example, very simple remark of Christ, unless you leave yourself behind, you cannot be a follower of mine.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Complete freedom from me, me, me, that's the fundamental requirement in any teaching.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But there are three billion Christians, how many of them are practicing like this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, Hindu, it's not that the problem is with the Christians only, it's the problem is across the board.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just keep quoting Krishna or the Buddha or Christ and not actually following any practice.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's my sadness.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and you're reminding me that what of my next questions that I was wanting to talk about too?
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[SPEAKER_02]: What were your challenges along the way?
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think you've just listed a number of the challenges right now on your own path.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I obviously had different challenges as well because I stayed within my neuroscience system.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so maybe I'll just mention a few of those.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One thing that I noticed is when I decided to start doing research on meditation, I soon found out that research in such areas like meditation or Tai Chi or yoga or end-of-life experiences like NDE's, near-death experiences, was not considered credible by my granting agencies or the academic journals that I published in.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so it was almost impossible to get expanded in my new research areas, as well as to get those papers published by reputable journals.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And because of that, I continued to do my work in rehabilitation and medicine in the area of stroke and Parkinson's disease, et cetera, until I retired from the university, because it gave me great credibility as a neuroscientist.
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[SPEAKER_02]: However, then what I did is I added on meditation and tai chi and yoga research on the side near death experiences with my graduate students and did that without funding because I realized that I basically wanted to publish that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That was a real
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I could do that in parallel with my regular university background.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I found that that was a key point for me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, what I've noticed is that when I talk to students about how they can go forward in areas like UNI or talking about, about bringing wisdom to science in one way or another, I say that it always helps for me in academia, if I'm going to stay in academia, to have two parallel lines of research.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And one that's immediately affordable,
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[SPEAKER_02]: And my current scientific environment, for example, for me, it would be in the health care or the medical system, as I did with my research on stroke and balance control and older adults.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But then to add in my secondary research that might be related to post materialist questions like the fundamental nature of consciousness.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I also feel, for me, it was very important to have a support network of like-minded individuals.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So what that meant is that when, in fact, I discovered people like David Lormer in the scientific and medical network in the Galileo Commission, yourself and others in, for example,
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[SPEAKER_02]: the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaid Federal Materialist Sciences, they gave me support and moving forward in these areas.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So to me, it's critical to have something more than, as you were saying, they religious studies department or the neuroscience, the Institute or whatever, because those people are not interested in wisdom per se as we are.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They're interested in the information.
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[SPEAKER_02]: in the field, which is okay, but it's not what I'm interested in primarily.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I would tell graduate students the same thing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I'd say, look for mentors that are active in these organizations that are wise mentors, and they will help you navigate through academia successfully because they're adding that extra component to your academic,
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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm setting and to your moving forward in your career and I've been trying to do that myself with students by actually giving them mentorship whenever I can being on a graduate student committee for a PhD or something of that sort.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But you know another thing which really struck me very much.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was in 1968 a long time ago because of wishing to connect with philosophy, I had applied for a post-doctoral fellowship in philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Although I don't have a PhD in philosophy, but PhD in physics, people think you are a smarty one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I had only a master's in philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But at Princeton, because of the physics background, I would also auditing a course in physics, given by John Wheeler at that time, based on one of his new books.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What surprised me that in the physics department there at that time, students of one professor would not negotiate or talk with students of another professor, because they're competing with each other for the Nobel Prize in physics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And also later on, this was a few years later, I had persuaded somebody to provide enough funding that if anybody wished, we offered this for six months, they can get a scholarship and if they're willing to go and stay in a Zen monastery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I thought this will be helpful for them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then come back to do science.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they already have to be graduate students, so they are doing science and then spend six months or so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this person in Japan was willing to give a fair amount of money to assist all of this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But absolutely nobody in the whole physics department at Princeton was even willing to accept that scholarship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because they're just competing to get a Nobel Prize in physics.
22:20.784 --> 22:24.385
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not speaking with fellow students of other professors.
22:26.285 --> 22:38.594
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and you're reminding me, as you say that, Robbie, that I had somewhat similar interactions at one point where as a neuroscientist, I was working on the development of balance and walking and things like that in young children.
22:38.634 --> 22:43.698
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was talking to a very well-known professor from Sweden, who was also a neuroscientist.
22:43.878 --> 22:46.620
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was telling me that he was doing something similar.
22:46.640 --> 22:47.781
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, well, tell me about it.
22:47.801 --> 22:50.923
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it, oh no, no, I can't tell you about it because I'm about to publish the paper.
22:51.163 --> 22:53.045
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm afraid you would steal my data.
22:53.725 --> 23:14.267
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think really, I mean, really, and so it was that shocking thing about competition that I hadn't been aware of versus the other way that so often I think people feel in the wise side as feel is that the more I can share, the more you might actually help me understand more about my paper that I'm about to publish.
23:14.607 --> 23:20.513
[SPEAKER_02]: So it would be a stronger paper because of our interaction and our interconnection working together on something.
23:20.593 --> 23:23.836
[SPEAKER_02]: And we would welcome someone to read it and give us advice.
23:23.896 --> 23:29.461
[SPEAKER_02]: So I find that fascinating for me in that old world of view of competition.
23:29.541 --> 23:32.904
[SPEAKER_02]: And I should say that I had a great moment of joy when
23:33.865 --> 23:49.299
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote my book Infinite Awareness that David mentioned, and I gave a copy of it of just the manuscript before it was finished to Ed Kelly at the University of Virginia and the Department of Perceptual Studies, and they're doing research on end-of-life experiences in cases suggestive of reincarnation.
23:49.819 --> 23:58.687
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just wrote to them and I said, I'm trying to write the last chapter of my book pulling everything together on what it means to be conscious and be a sentient being.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, it wouldn't be possible to perhaps talk with you about what you guys are doing there.
24:03.709 --> 24:10.033
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was so gracious, compared to my competitive colleagues, he said, Of course, come to the university.
24:10.353 --> 24:13.995
[SPEAKER_02]: Spend three days with us here, what we have to say, and we'll hear what you have to say.
24:14.135 --> 24:18.317
[SPEAKER_02]: And I had the most wonderful time at the University of Virginia with those people.
24:18.637 --> 24:21.779
[SPEAKER_02]: And that contributed to a whole extra chapter in my book.
24:22.299 --> 24:27.100
[SPEAKER_02]: as we were collaborating together on our own understanding of the nature of consciousness.
24:27.160 --> 24:50.567
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that there is that beautiful example about what we're talking about becoming wise scientists is becoming scientists that see the interconnection with not only other scientists, that would be great, but also everything else in the universe, and that changes the joy in doing our research from guarding ourselves very carefully, hoping that we might, as you say, get the Nobel Prize, versus sharing because we want
24:50.967 --> 24:58.232
[SPEAKER_02]: the fields move forward in this way that is helpful and nourishing for all beings on this planet.
24:59.473 --> 25:18.827
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but you see, even there, my impression is that actually a need for some connection with reality, if you like with divine reality, is actually in everybody, but competition interferes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: doesn't give them enough time.
25:22.083 --> 25:35.710
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, if you look at some of the scientists, only after they got, for example, Einstein is a good example of this, after they got very famous, then they become more interested in spiritual matters.
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[SPEAKER_01]: because now they are obviously actually people listen to them.
25:41.842 --> 25:48.309
[SPEAKER_01]: Earlier, there is a competition, so nobody would listen to them about religion, et cetera.
25:49.009 --> 25:59.500
[SPEAKER_01]: And also another thing I have noticed, that science has now become more or less as if extras and their nulla veritas.
25:59.780 --> 26:01.442
[SPEAKER_01]: Outside this, there is no truth.
26:02.787 --> 26:12.329
[SPEAKER_01]: but this is usually not the case for actually working scientists because if you're actually doing research, you're aware of the limitations of what you're doing.
26:13.449 --> 26:20.931
[SPEAKER_01]: It's mostly the people who are struck by science or scientific achievements, usually connect with technology.
26:22.312 --> 26:26.893
[SPEAKER_01]: And even the fact that you and I can now speak on Zoom is all resulting from that.
26:27.853 --> 26:27.973
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
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[SPEAKER_01]: The technological advancement has really mesmerized various people about this.
26:36.649 --> 26:44.215
[SPEAKER_01]: And but usually those who are not actually practicing science are much more convinced that science is the only avenue to truth.
26:44.995 --> 26:52.321
[SPEAKER_01]: Although it is probably also true for some usual low level scientist, but if you look at any of the great scientists
26:59.321 --> 27:03.743
[SPEAKER_01]: they would all agree that science is not the only avenue to truth.
27:04.084 --> 27:13.889
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, capillary, I was reading it the other day, made this remark, I am a priest of God in the temple of nature.
27:15.630 --> 27:16.110
[SPEAKER_02]: Beautiful.
27:16.550 --> 27:17.511
[SPEAKER_01]: Kepler's remark.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Can I just come in?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, with a remark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What you've been talking about reminds me of a sentence that Charlie Tart said at a mystics and scientist conference, Charlie Tart and Psychologist Parapsychologist has just passed over very recently.
27:36.277 --> 27:39.499
[SPEAKER_00]: and born in 1937 and he died this year, 2025.
27:39.539 --> 27:52.745
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember him saying the conflict between science and spirituality is not one that applies to first-rate scientists, but only to second-rate scientists.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I thought that was rather a good remark to bring in at this point.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think you're right.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I want to add to that what Robbie was saying and you're really saying too, I've seen in other scientists as well and I'll give you one example that I'm also still struggling with because even people who I would say consider themselves first great scientists are what's the word I want to say they are afraid of losing their credibility and so they don't broach certain subjects in public in a certain sense.
28:23.557 --> 28:24.577
[SPEAKER_02]: And here's an example so.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that I have been very intrigued by as both of you are is, how do we really understand the nature of consciousness?
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[SPEAKER_02]: And if it's fundamental, how do we really look at that in terms of how that affects our daily life, all those sorts of things?
28:38.767 --> 28:39.787
[SPEAKER_02]: And what would a...
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[SPEAKER_02]: reality picture of the universe coming from this fundamental all-pervasive consciousness reading, look like in terms of the creation of everything around us and us.
28:50.074 --> 28:52.175
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
28:52.275 --> 29:03.683
[SPEAKER_02]: And what I found is that people like Federico Fagin, Bernardo Castro, other scientists, have come up with very interesting philosophical perspectives that are idealist meeting that consciousness is fundamental.
29:04.563 --> 29:14.027
[SPEAKER_02]: But what they don't talk about is what I would call information from what we might call spiritual sources, which would be like revealed texts.
29:14.467 --> 29:30.113
[SPEAKER_02]: So in most of the religious traditions that I know about especially in India and other Eastern countries, it's understood that the universe may actually give information through you that is accurate, that flows from a higher source, from infinite consciousness through you and you write it down, and
29:30.433 --> 29:34.776
[SPEAKER_02]: people are very happy to acknowledge that they received insights in this way.
29:35.136 --> 29:41.521
[SPEAKER_02]: And I imagine that Einstein received a lot of his insights in that way, and so did a lot of other scientists and dreams and things.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But when it comes to a person saying that, for example, I had a medium-ship relationship, or information was channeled from someone else, the scientists say I will never say that, because somehow in science,
29:55.651 --> 30:07.275
[SPEAKER_02]: It's for both in to say that consciousness survives a physical body, and someone could actually then communicate something through you from the other side, and I find that slightly duplicitous in scientists.
30:08.035 --> 30:22.801
[SPEAKER_02]: Like if somebody, I'm thinking about the course in miracles, which was said to be Jesus, and it's a beautiful course, I may have heard much of it, and it has lots of wisdom, but for some people to just throw it out because how could anything be channeled through
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[SPEAKER_02]: I feel is that's where we aren't willing to be curious about whether the information is wise and helpful for all humanity and make the decision on that point.
30:34.288 --> 30:46.256
[SPEAKER_02]: And that reminds me of what in fact William James said in his variety of religious experience just related to a person's conversion to a wider understanding of consciousness.
30:46.296 --> 30:49.258
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, you judge them by the fruits of their actions.
30:49.718 --> 31:16.702
[SPEAKER_02]: If their life is becoming stronger and their wiser and they're happier, well then you can say that's really the work of some wonderful power versus as the Christians might have said in the past will maybe know that's only the devil if now they have this awakening so I think always if we see that people have been transformed by information coming in again channel through someone and it's very, very wise and helpful it's interesting to be curious about that at least.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I know, but you see part of that transformation, whoever is transformed by that, always insists that the mind cannot completely understand or control higher reality.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But scientific enterprise is obviously mind-based.
31:43.965 --> 31:56.412
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what is actually then being said by these stages that there is no need to be against science, but science cannot comprehend reality, but which scientists is willing to accept that?
31:57.793 --> 32:10.401
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of the conviction that, okay, we haven't yet got it, I often remind my friends here, almost everything that we now speak about in physics was unknown, 135 years ago.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So surely in the next 135 years, scientists would find something, or maybe 1350 years, they'll find something.
32:20.460 --> 32:24.462
[SPEAKER_01]: Because unless you find something new, you can't get a PhD in any case.
32:24.562 --> 32:27.203
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the academic system.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So therefore not to imagine that now we know everything.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, this is the remarkable Saint Augustine made my goodness nearly 2,000 years ago.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What we know of nature is not all there is to nature.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But there is nevertheless a strong suggestion from the spiritual side that the mind needs to be quietened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But if I'm insisting on grasping reality with the mind,
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[SPEAKER_01]: which is the scientific enterprise, then there is obviously a sort of a sense of conflict maybe, or sense of disobeyed disagreement, however, one puts it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But as I just said earlier too, certainly if you look at four or five greatest scientists in the history of physics at least, they would all actually agree with me, what I just said,
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[SPEAKER_02]: I agree, Robbie, and in fact, one of the people that I just mentioned Bernardo Castro wrote a very interesting book that maybe David has read as well called more than allegory that I just read in the last few months, which is really stating exactly that, Robbie.
33:47.565 --> 33:55.809
[SPEAKER_02]: What he's saying is that he now understands that the very, many philosophical religious traditions of the world, the mystical traditions,
33:56.549 --> 34:00.092
[SPEAKER_02]: would create what we might call myths to point to a higher truth.
34:00.173 --> 34:20.252
[SPEAKER_02]: And they were like, this is an allegory that will help you understand the nature of reality because we can't ourselves really explain reality or grasp it fully, but through our metaphors through our allegories, through these belief systems that we can point to it and they will give us a sense of then experiencing it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that's what I'm understanding.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Scientists never have thought that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They think we're really going to grasp all of reality.
34:27.317 --> 34:33.202
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're grasping crumbs because they don't understand what's really beyond all their scientific experiences.
34:33.322 --> 34:36.385
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm hoping that that's one thing that we can
34:36.765 --> 34:50.175
[SPEAKER_02]: understand more these days is that all of these spiritual traditions throughout history for the last 2,000 or more years are pointing us to the truth even though their stories don't necessarily coincide with the materialism of today.
34:50.515 --> 34:56.960
[SPEAKER_02]: They were still pointed exactly the same truth and perhaps getting closer to that truth than many of the scientists today.
34:57.100 --> 35:00.202
[SPEAKER_02]: So I highly encourage people to read more than allegory.
35:00.222 --> 35:01.483
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's a wonderful book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But also, I think people just become against mythology, et cetera.
35:07.233 --> 35:12.737
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me remind you, a remark of hardly a negative or negligible philosopher.
35:12.857 --> 35:14.538
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Aristotle's remark.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When philosophy is unable to connect with reality, one takes recourse to mythology.
35:24.327 --> 35:25.308
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not my room.
35:25.348 --> 35:26.149
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a restaurant.
35:26.790 --> 35:27.671
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can totally get it.
35:27.871 --> 35:31.355
[SPEAKER_02]: Once you try to put something into words, it seems like it becomes mythology.
35:31.395 --> 35:33.638
[SPEAKER_02]: The connecting with reality is experience.
35:33.678 --> 35:35.560
[SPEAKER_02]: It has nothing to do with our conceptuality.
35:35.721 --> 35:39.485
[SPEAKER_02]: So I agree with Aristotle, but I think that we nevertheless try to write things down.
35:39.525 --> 35:40.046
[SPEAKER_02]: What can I say?
35:42.710 --> 35:53.122
[SPEAKER_01]: But, therefore, not to be against mythology, it is true that something mythological then gets interpreted in varieties of ways by various people.
35:54.364 --> 35:56.326
[SPEAKER_01]: Then conflicts can begin to occur.
35:56.386 --> 36:02.213
[SPEAKER_01]: Then one say, oh, there's just mythological as if this is just fictional, we can disregard it.
36:04.925 --> 36:06.485
[SPEAKER_01]: but one doesn't need to.
36:06.726 --> 36:12.787
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, he's just simply pointing out the limitations of reason by pointing out this.
36:14.807 --> 36:25.089
[SPEAKER_01]: The very first substantial sutra or remark in the yoga sutras is yoga consists in stopping all the movements of the mind.
36:25.909 --> 36:27.269
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there you are.
36:27.709 --> 36:30.830
[SPEAKER_01]: So, if you are interested in anything spiritual,
36:32.437 --> 36:37.603
[SPEAKER_01]: call is to connect with something subtler than the mind.
36:37.623 --> 36:38.644
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, but there is no reason to be against anything dealing with mind deals with, that has this place.
36:51.762 --> 37:02.513
[SPEAKER_02]: And I believe that allegories actually can point us to the truth, I mean, as sort of like a Beethoven symphony points me to the truth of that experience of the Beethoven symphony, which is a much higher reality.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I think of them all as perhaps avenues toward opening us up to the experience that is ineffable.
37:10.632 --> 37:14.936
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could also say that, I mean, Jesus spoke in parables, didn't he?
37:16.277 --> 37:20.100
[SPEAKER_00]: I did speak in parables because those with eyes to see could see.
37:20.600 --> 37:23.903
[SPEAKER_00]: And those with ears to ear, yes, but here.
37:25.144 --> 37:28.186
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were in other words there was a deeper meaning to the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Which is not going to be grasped by the empirical mind that we've been referring to.
37:37.598 --> 37:41.480
[SPEAKER_01]: But also you see really right from the beginning of modern science.
37:42.280 --> 37:47.242
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole idea was that everything comes from matter without any consciousness.
37:48.023 --> 37:52.404
[SPEAKER_01]: So to come to reality, I needed to say, mass length and time.
37:53.005 --> 37:54.565
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the aspects of matter.
37:55.366 --> 37:58.367
[SPEAKER_01]: To be sure, in the 19th century, charge was added to that.
37:58.887 --> 38:01.188
[SPEAKER_01]: In the 20th century, spin was added to that.
38:01.809 --> 38:05.590
[SPEAKER_01]: But what about all these artists and musicians that they can just go to hell?
38:09.425 --> 38:16.628
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this very notion absolutely completely obscures any relationship with any of the arts.
38:18.568 --> 38:37.937
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you only spoke about mythology, that is one part of it, but you look at music as an example or painting or sculpture, because they are not telling you mass length and time and charge or spin, so therefore they are not real from the perspective of modern science.
38:39.090 --> 38:41.892
[SPEAKER_02]: and Ravi actually saying that what I love is just hearing you talk.
38:42.313 --> 38:57.025
[SPEAKER_02]: I imagine the experience I have when I am listening to Beethoven or looking at a beautiful impressionist painting or whatever versus thinking about mass length and time of a particular object and what is in the intellect is dry and awful and the other is making one sore.
38:57.366 --> 38:58.667
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's the contrast.
38:58.727 --> 38:58.927
[SPEAKER_02]: I think
38:59.267 --> 39:09.471
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe as perhaps getting close to running out of time, I might just add for myself that what I'm really asking of science, which is what you've said already today, Robbie, is having a balance.
39:09.912 --> 39:12.273
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what really brings wisdom to everything we do.
39:12.653 --> 39:17.975
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like accepting that yes, the materialist point of view has given us much in the way of technology and comfort in our world.
39:18.455 --> 39:23.280
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you only have that, we would be stuck in the intellect in a dry place of the world.
39:23.440 --> 39:33.570
[SPEAKER_02]: And we need to incorporate the other half of being human, which is coming from the heart and really feeling the wisdom of our interconnection with everything around us.
39:34.370 --> 39:42.878
[SPEAKER_01]: But that is really what will be the nature of whatever we mean by a wise scientist, not against science, but realizing its limitations.
39:43.643 --> 39:49.647
[SPEAKER_01]: actually a good scientific work, but also realizing that there is something subtler than that.
39:50.547 --> 39:56.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Now again, but at any given time there is a strong tendency that now we have figured it all out.
39:56.991 --> 40:06.096
[SPEAKER_01]: I often give this example at the end of the 19th century, the president of the British scientific society, hardly a negligible
40:11.647 --> 40:17.309
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, he on his retirement address, this is 1896 or 97.
40:18.989 --> 40:25.392
[SPEAKER_01]: He made this remark, first of all, praising all the wonderful things we had discovered in the 19th century, which is actually true.
40:26.152 --> 40:33.054
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, that's the time and light as an electromagnetic field, et cetera, or Maxwell's equations were discovered.
40:33.114 --> 40:39.436
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but then he said, I have only one regret left, that the future scientists have nothing left to discover.
40:39.936 --> 40:40.657
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you believe this?
40:42.858 --> 40:46.181
[SPEAKER_01]: almost everything now we know in physics is since then.
40:47.322 --> 40:47.842
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
40:47.922 --> 40:49.824
[SPEAKER_00]: You might have lived to regret that remark.
40:51.485 --> 40:54.768
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think we're also talking about the different ways of knowing.
40:55.268 --> 40:59.832
[SPEAKER_00]: That you have to be open to more direct experiential ways of knowing.
41:00.633 --> 41:04.116
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just measurement and analysis.
41:05.337 --> 41:08.780
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there any question that you've wanted to raise either of you?
41:09.308 --> 41:22.713
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to say that as you were saying there are multiple ways of knowing, the greatest scientists also found that was the truth and there ways of knowing included more than their intellectual manipulation of facts and their observations.
41:22.773 --> 41:24.333
[SPEAKER_02]: They also understood that.
41:24.413 --> 41:34.717
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that to me that's the bottom line is that to really understand that we need to embrace all the ways of knowing and that will really make us vice-rescientists.
41:35.712 --> 41:38.975
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually, if you don't mind one other remarkable that I like to make.
41:39.996 --> 41:46.881
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, from the spiritual perspective, the wish is to have actually objective knowledge.
41:48.062 --> 41:52.606
[SPEAKER_01]: I know this has now become an attitude as if something coming from human side is subjective.
41:52.986 --> 41:54.488
[SPEAKER_01]: Science has objective knowledge.
41:55.108 --> 42:01.914
[SPEAKER_01]: Science is not even a man will can't point it this out more than 100 years ago in his book, Critique of your reason,
42:03.926 --> 42:07.723
[SPEAKER_01]: Something comes from the object, but our mind is introducing something in it.
42:08.661 --> 42:12.744
[SPEAKER_01]: The great quality of science is that it is inter-subjective.
42:13.305 --> 42:17.328
[SPEAKER_01]: If I discover something in one university, somebody else can test it, etc.
42:18.069 --> 42:34.883
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the spiritual practice, the call is to be completely objective, potentially in the yoga sutra explicitly says this, that the mind has to be cleansed to be so clear that it doesn't introduce his own color on what it sees, just reveal whatever the object is.
42:36.063 --> 42:53.033
[SPEAKER_01]: So really the, in fact, when we say freedom from myself, this remark of Christ that I just mentioned earlier, unless you leave yourself behind, that simply means that now you can actually have an objective perception, not something being introduced by my mind.
42:53.762 --> 42:58.669
[SPEAKER_00]: The mirror needs to be clear in order to reflect the true light.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you both very much for this wonderfully stimulating and interesting and important conversation in our series, Wise Scientists.
00:01.039 --> 00:01.420
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
00:16.733 --> 00:18.334
[SPEAKER_00]: My name is David Lorimer.
00:18.555 --> 00:32.787
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the Program Director, Chair of Gallaudet Commission with Marjorie Willocott, who's here with me and Global Ambassador of the Scientific and Medical Network, and it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Ravi Ravindra and Marjorie.
00:33.307 --> 00:39.531
[SPEAKER_00]: who are going to be having a dialogue in our series of conversations about wise scientists.
00:40.091 --> 00:42.452
[SPEAKER_00]: What really is a wise scientist?
00:42.552 --> 00:46.675
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the relationship between science and wisdom?
00:47.861 --> 00:58.389
[SPEAKER_00]: So Ravi initiated this project by writing a short paper on why scientists and the need for scientists to become whyser human beings.
00:59.170 --> 01:04.394
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've had a couple of interviews so far, and this is the third with Marjorie.
01:04.835 --> 01:06.636
[SPEAKER_00]: Ravi's path is one of...
01:08.077 --> 01:26.088
[SPEAKER_00]: a spiritual pilgrim, spiritual seeker, physicist, professor of comparative religion, someone who's worked with some of the key texts of Indian scriptures such as the Bhagavad-gita and the Patangali Yogasutras.
01:26.888 --> 01:38.412
[SPEAKER_00]: Marjorie is a neuroscientist by background and has done a great deal of medical research, also research and meditation, and both our speakers today are long-term meditators.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And she is author of Infinite Awareness, which is an author by a graphical account of life and spiritual journey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, Ravi, I'm going to pass over to you to ask the first question
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, well, I'm happy to begin.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let me first of all make a few general remarks, which are relevant both to martyrs and myself, and to any other human being, actually.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Personally, I can hardly believe that a person does not periodically wonder
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because I am obviously like everybody else, not going to be on this planet for more than a few decades.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So one would naturally wonder why have I been created and what energies and forces create me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My impression is that that is at the very root of whatever gets called spiritual search.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, it is also true that spirituality has been associated just linguistically with religion and religions have done more harm to spiritual search than anything else.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at it just in the 1617, essentially, all the major scientists were excluded or killed or somehow by the religious side, not from the scientific side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So to some extent I often wonder how can any scientist, or really any human being, not occasionally ask these kind of questions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But then of course the answers are not easy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: because the constant reminder by all the stages is that for me to connect with something real, one has to connect with something subtler than the mind.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mind cannot figure it out, so already then people don't know what else to connect with and how to be free of my attachment to just mental negotiations.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But obviously, some of us manage somehow to get free of it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I want to ask Marcerina what was her own journey, what took her from the scientific side, to at least being more and more interested in the spiritual side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So please.
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[SPEAKER_02]: sure and what I want to say is that when I was in undergraduate and graduate school in neuroscience, I was trained in that materialist paradigm that consciousness is solely produced by the brain.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember coming from that place that you might be talking about where I knew what happened to us when we died, which was basically that when the brain is dead, everybody's dead.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That was my absolute belief that was given to me by all my professors at the university, undergraduate and graduate.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember the sense of superiority I felt toward others who had a religious or a spiritual view thinking they were weak minded.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and that they couldn't accept the truth that our awareness dies with our bodily death.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember being at this family reunion once in my early college years, and my uncle who had been trained at Caltech and Pasadena in engineering and physics, and I sat in one corner talking about science.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Superior the ignoring the others and the family who were spiritually oriented with their own conversation.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So,
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[SPEAKER_02]: With that worldview that I embraced came also a sense of competition with others in academia to show that I was a high quality researcher.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I entered the arena of competing for research grants, for academic promotions, for increased salaries, and the number of papers I published.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And though I loved working with and teaching my graduate students, I also felt this strong sense of competition with other faculty members.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And in addition, I started my original PhD research doing work on the nervous system of animals.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And at that time, I was working on gastropod.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Mollos, these pretty creatures that swim at a sea and have very large nerve cells, like about a millimeter and diameter bright gold.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I also did research on the nervous system of locus or grasshoppers, and I never thought of whether my dissections might cause them pain, as I thought of them as really incendiant creatures.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So like many people, I would just squash an insect if it was in my way in my regular life as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it wasn't until I had my spiritual awakening that I began to feel my interconnection with other animals and plants and see these other beings in the world, even if they're simple beings, as sentient at some level, as not robots, but having pain and pleasure like human beings and being able to communicate with me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it took me a while to incorporate that understanding into my actions as a researcher.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I studied that nervous system of animals to understand how their brain works, and that meant that I had to dissect those animals and record from their nerve cells.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I stopped doing that research a few years after my spiritual awakening, as I couldn't justify for myself taking an animal's life for my own research data.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Now saying that, I understand that there are nuances in all of these issues and I was asked my own meditation teacher about that and he said that we have to be very careful about taking an animal's life and to consider whether the medical benefits for all human and animal kind outweighs the loss of that life.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm also a vegetarian, and that I don't judge others who aren't.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I have the understanding that everyone needs to make their own decision in that area, and that's fine.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that those are the beginnings of changes that happen to be once I had that spiritual awakening.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I began questioning all of those materialist principles that had been the basis of the way I behaved and the way I did my research.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, Robbie, I guess I, before we, you go on with any other questions, I also imagine that you had something like that, though you were a physicist and you were at a neuroscientist killing animals, you must have had some similar sorts of questions about the ethics of being a scientist and how we incorporate that properly into our world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I would have to say that my journey was a little different from this because in India especially immediately after India became independent, if anybody graduated from the school, the call was to go to a technological college and a new institution called the Indian Institute of Technology was set up in 1952 based more or less model after MIT.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and then I graduated from the school in 1954, just heard it to his later.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And even though I personally was earlier really wondering why I'm alive, the kind of question that later on became more stronger and stronger in me,
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[SPEAKER_01]: one might call them spiritually-oriented questions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were very strong in me fairly early on, but such strong social pressure that I needed to go into technological.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, at that time, even now, at least in India, maybe it is true even in USA, if you go study philosophy or history or literature that meant you were a bad student,
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you are a good student, you would first of all go into technological institute, secondly, to medical institutes, then humanities, that was very strong emphasis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So nobody was especially pressuring me, but that whole attitude, then I ended up going to the institute of Indian Institute of Technology, at that time there was only one institute.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, the Prime Minister at that time, Jawal Nero even said,
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[SPEAKER_01]: will be the temples of New India.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There was such strong emphasis.
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[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, so I ended up doing a BSEN and Master of Technology there, especially in oil exploration.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I kept wondering, this is really peculiar, first of all, in technological work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: they don't really take very much of the contemporary or modern physics, like general relativity or quantum mechanics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So partly because of my interest in that, I decided to do an MSC.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I actually, I guess.
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[SPEAKER_01]: maybe I shouldn't be saying that, but I seem to have been a good student, I guess in everybody's point of view.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I got as fellowship from MIT, fellowship from Caltech and as scholarship from Commonwealth scholarship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I accepted the Commonwealth scholarship because they paid for my travel also, but as the others didn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I ended up in Toronto University doing a PhD in physics, wishing to learn really modern physics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So having done MSC and PSD there, but I was now getting more and more dissatisfied, because physics was not really leading to any understanding why I am alive.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What forces have created the meme, and alive only really for a few decades that is obvious in everybody's case.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then I actually ended up even writing to a very well-known religious person from the Indian tradition, but he was in California, sort of president of the Ramakrishna Mission there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I did not know anything about him, but I had heard of his name.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I wrote him a letter saying that I'm...
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[SPEAKER_01]: thinking of just quitting doing physics PhD because it's not really touching what I wish to go.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He wrote to me, says, it's not a good idea to give it up because it'll help you to do so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I finished my PhD, but immediately when I was later on hired at the University on the side, I decided to do an MA in philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: thinking that will help me learn some.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But soon I'd also discovered that philosophers are just basically arguing with each other.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're not searching for any truth at all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it is worse than what goes on in the scientific world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the scientific world, at least we rely on some data, some measurement.
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[SPEAKER_01]: although those are external measurements, they are not really reflecting what is going on inside human being.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But still we at least lie on some things that we have actually tested.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the humanities it's just terrible, just one argument after another.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And unless, because unless you argue, you can't get a promotion because you can't publish a paper.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it really gradually I was even
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[SPEAKER_01]: But Wilford can't will Smith, who was actually the founding director of the institute for a religious study that Harvard was a Canadian origin and was getting a little tired of USA.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So he came to our university when the department of religion was started there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we would occasionally meet each other in the faculty club at lunchtime.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And on one occasion, little bit to my surprise, he said, you know, I'm teaching a course on the Bhagavad Gita, but you seem to know more about it than I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you come into our department?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I have never taken a single course in religious studies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Amazingly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: but he's inviting me to be on the faculty in the religion department, but because of his teacher, nobody could argue with him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he started the institute at Harvard for religious studies.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so, meanwhile, I was getting a little fed up with philosophy argument, so I shifted to religion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, in the process, I discovered that very few professors of religion are actually trying to be religious.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the same thing goes on there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not only in the philosophy department or in scientific department, the whole academic world, as far as I can see, is identified with just me, me, me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How can I get more promotion?
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[SPEAKER_01]: How can my papers or books be published?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And very much admired, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, gradually I began to feel that what I needed was to really work with some people who I would regard as sages.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, what does it mean, sages, really is partly to do with their behavior?
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[SPEAKER_01]: they behave with compassion, with love, even accepting somebody who is just arguing with them for a few time, they would accept that also.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And also they always have a sense of oneness with the others, a sense of unity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: None of the stages doesn't matter whether they come from the Christian background or Buddhists or any background, regardless the other tradition or other teachings to be stupid or wrong.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm absolutely convinced if the Buddha and Christ were to meet each other, they will embrace each other with love.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But Christians and Buddhists won't do it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I became really a little bit disillusioned with the religious part of it, but more and more interested in the spiritual practitioners.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And especially those like Krishna Murthy or Rhan the Sousman whom I have met and some two very well-known Zen masters, Roshikabhuri is highly regarded.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was head of Rinsai Zen for two decades in Japan.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So gradually, I began to feel that what is really required to assist my understanding or my own wish was not this academic study or that academic study.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because all academics, almost, is requirement how to get ahead, which is not what I needed to do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had enough, no matter what difference would it make for me to publish another five books?
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't feel that I need to be against the academic world they do what they do which is fine
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that doesn't satisfy me personally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I, in fact, I retired a couple of years before, I was required.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, at least in Canada at that time, we were supposed to retire at the age of 65.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I was only 63.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I retired partly because I was speaking to many people here there was being invited, traveling very often.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that has been my background.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So.
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[SPEAKER_01]: then I partly because the great spiritual text, like the remarks of Christ in the Gospels, or of Krishna in the Bhagavad-gita, or Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra, or the Buddha's remarks in the Buddha.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they have struck me, but for I don't regard myself as a writer or anything like this, but if I am studying something,
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[SPEAKER_01]: deeply and I mention it to my friends.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They can't believe that it is in the gospels or it is in the Bhagavad Gita.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they ask me to you better publish it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So actually all of my books more than it doesn't now have been published not because I feel that I'm a writer or anything like this, but I'm seriously interested in studying what Krishna is teaching in the Bhagavad Gita or what the Buddha is teaching or Christ is teaching.
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[SPEAKER_01]: not what the Churches say they are teaching, because the Churches don't even accept.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Christ, for example, very simple remark of Christ, unless you leave yourself behind, you cannot be a follower of mine.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Complete freedom from me, me, me, that's the fundamental requirement in any teaching.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But there are three billion Christians, how many of them are practicing like this?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, Hindu, it's not that the problem is with the Christians only, it's the problem is across the board.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just keep quoting Krishna or the Buddha or Christ and not actually following any practice.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that's my sadness.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and you're reminding me that what of my next questions that I was wanting to talk about too?
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[SPEAKER_02]: What were your challenges along the way?
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think you've just listed a number of the challenges right now on your own path.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I obviously had different challenges as well because I stayed within my neuroscience system.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so maybe I'll just mention a few of those.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One thing that I noticed is when I decided to start doing research on meditation, I soon found out that research in such areas like meditation or Tai Chi or yoga or end-of-life experiences like NDE's, near-death experiences, was not considered credible by my granting agencies or the academic journals that I published in.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so it was almost impossible to get expanded in my new research areas, as well as to get those papers published by reputable journals.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And because of that, I continued to do my work in rehabilitation and medicine in the area of stroke and Parkinson's disease, et cetera, until I retired from the university, because it gave me great credibility as a neuroscientist.
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[SPEAKER_02]: However, then what I did is I added on meditation and tai chi and yoga research on the side near death experiences with my graduate students and did that without funding because I realized that I basically wanted to publish that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That was a real
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I could do that in parallel with my regular university background.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I found that that was a key point for me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, what I've noticed is that when I talk to students about how they can go forward in areas like UNI or talking about, about bringing wisdom to science in one way or another, I say that it always helps for me in academia, if I'm going to stay in academia, to have two parallel lines of research.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And one that's immediately affordable,
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[SPEAKER_02]: And my current scientific environment, for example, for me, it would be in the health care or the medical system, as I did with my research on stroke and balance control and older adults.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But then to add in my secondary research that might be related to post materialist questions like the fundamental nature of consciousness.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I also feel, for me, it was very important to have a support network of like-minded individuals.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So what that meant is that when, in fact, I discovered people like David Lormer in the scientific and medical network in the Galileo Commission, yourself and others in, for example,
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[SPEAKER_02]: the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaid Federal Materialist Sciences, they gave me support and moving forward in these areas.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So to me, it's critical to have something more than, as you were saying, they religious studies department or the neuroscience, the Institute or whatever, because those people are not interested in wisdom per se as we are.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They're interested in the information.
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[SPEAKER_02]: in the field, which is okay, but it's not what I'm interested in primarily.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I would tell graduate students the same thing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I'd say, look for mentors that are active in these organizations that are wise mentors, and they will help you navigate through academia successfully because they're adding that extra component to your academic,
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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm setting and to your moving forward in your career and I've been trying to do that myself with students by actually giving them mentorship whenever I can being on a graduate student committee for a PhD or something of that sort.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But you know another thing which really struck me very much.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was in 1968 a long time ago because of wishing to connect with philosophy, I had applied for a post-doctoral fellowship in philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Although I don't have a PhD in philosophy, but PhD in physics, people think you are a smarty one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I had only a master's in philosophy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But at Princeton, because of the physics background, I would also auditing a course in physics, given by John Wheeler at that time, based on one of his new books.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What surprised me that in the physics department there at that time, students of one professor would not negotiate or talk with students of another professor, because they're competing with each other for the Nobel Prize in physics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And also later on, this was a few years later, I had persuaded somebody to provide enough funding that if anybody wished, we offered this for six months, they can get a scholarship and if they're willing to go and stay in a Zen monastery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I thought this will be helpful for them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Then come back to do science.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So they already have to be graduate students, so they are doing science and then spend six months or so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this person in Japan was willing to give a fair amount of money to assist all of this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But absolutely nobody in the whole physics department at Princeton was even willing to accept that scholarship.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because they're just competing to get a Nobel Prize in physics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're not speaking with fellow students of other professors.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and you're reminding me, as you say that, Robbie, that I had somewhat similar interactions at one point where as a neuroscientist, I was working on the development of balance and walking and things like that in young children.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I was talking to a very well-known professor from Sweden, who was also a neuroscientist.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And he was telling me that he was doing something similar.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, well, tell me about it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Is it, oh no, no, I can't tell you about it because I'm about to publish the paper.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm afraid you would steal my data.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think really, I mean, really, and so it was that shocking thing about competition that I hadn't been aware of versus the other way that so often I think people feel in the wise side as feel is that the more I can share, the more you might actually help me understand more about my paper that I'm about to publish.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So it would be a stronger paper because of our interaction and our interconnection working together on something.
23:20.593 --> 23:23.836
[SPEAKER_02]: And we would welcome someone to read it and give us advice.
23:23.896 --> 23:29.461
[SPEAKER_02]: So I find that fascinating for me in that old world of view of competition.
23:29.541 --> 23:32.904
[SPEAKER_02]: And I should say that I had a great moment of joy when
23:33.865 --> 23:49.299
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote my book Infinite Awareness that David mentioned, and I gave a copy of it of just the manuscript before it was finished to Ed Kelly at the University of Virginia and the Department of Perceptual Studies, and they're doing research on end-of-life experiences in cases suggestive of reincarnation.
23:49.819 --> 23:58.687
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just wrote to them and I said, I'm trying to write the last chapter of my book pulling everything together on what it means to be conscious and be a sentient being.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, it wouldn't be possible to perhaps talk with you about what you guys are doing there.
24:03.709 --> 24:10.033
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was so gracious, compared to my competitive colleagues, he said, Of course, come to the university.
24:10.353 --> 24:13.995
[SPEAKER_02]: Spend three days with us here, what we have to say, and we'll hear what you have to say.
24:14.135 --> 24:18.317
[SPEAKER_02]: And I had the most wonderful time at the University of Virginia with those people.
24:18.637 --> 24:21.779
[SPEAKER_02]: And that contributed to a whole extra chapter in my book.
24:22.299 --> 24:27.100
[SPEAKER_02]: as we were collaborating together on our own understanding of the nature of consciousness.
24:27.160 --> 24:50.567
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that there is that beautiful example about what we're talking about becoming wise scientists is becoming scientists that see the interconnection with not only other scientists, that would be great, but also everything else in the universe, and that changes the joy in doing our research from guarding ourselves very carefully, hoping that we might, as you say, get the Nobel Prize, versus sharing because we want
24:50.967 --> 24:58.232
[SPEAKER_02]: the fields move forward in this way that is helpful and nourishing for all beings on this planet.
24:59.473 --> 25:18.827
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but you see, even there, my impression is that actually a need for some connection with reality, if you like with divine reality, is actually in everybody, but competition interferes.
25:20.022 --> 25:21.483
[SPEAKER_01]: doesn't give them enough time.
25:22.083 --> 25:35.710
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, if you look at some of the scientists, only after they got, for example, Einstein is a good example of this, after they got very famous, then they become more interested in spiritual matters.
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[SPEAKER_01]: because now they are obviously actually people listen to them.
25:41.842 --> 25:48.309
[SPEAKER_01]: Earlier, there is a competition, so nobody would listen to them about religion, et cetera.
25:49.009 --> 25:59.500
[SPEAKER_01]: And also another thing I have noticed, that science has now become more or less as if extras and their nulla veritas.
25:59.780 --> 26:01.442
[SPEAKER_01]: Outside this, there is no truth.
26:02.787 --> 26:12.329
[SPEAKER_01]: but this is usually not the case for actually working scientists because if you're actually doing research, you're aware of the limitations of what you're doing.
26:13.449 --> 26:20.931
[SPEAKER_01]: It's mostly the people who are struck by science or scientific achievements, usually connect with technology.
26:22.312 --> 26:26.893
[SPEAKER_01]: And even the fact that you and I can now speak on Zoom is all resulting from that.
26:27.853 --> 26:27.973
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
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[SPEAKER_01]: The technological advancement has really mesmerized various people about this.
26:36.649 --> 26:44.215
[SPEAKER_01]: And but usually those who are not actually practicing science are much more convinced that science is the only avenue to truth.
26:44.995 --> 26:52.321
[SPEAKER_01]: Although it is probably also true for some usual low level scientist, but if you look at any of the great scientists
26:59.321 --> 27:03.743
[SPEAKER_01]: they would all agree that science is not the only avenue to truth.
27:04.084 --> 27:13.889
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, capillary, I was reading it the other day, made this remark, I am a priest of God in the temple of nature.
27:15.630 --> 27:16.110
[SPEAKER_02]: Beautiful.
27:16.550 --> 27:17.511
[SPEAKER_01]: Kepler's remark.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Can I just come in?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, with a remark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What you've been talking about reminds me of a sentence that Charlie Tart said at a mystics and scientist conference, Charlie Tart and Psychologist Parapsychologist has just passed over very recently.
27:36.277 --> 27:39.499
[SPEAKER_00]: and born in 1937 and he died this year, 2025.
27:39.539 --> 27:52.745
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember him saying the conflict between science and spirituality is not one that applies to first-rate scientists, but only to second-rate scientists.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I thought that was rather a good remark to bring in at this point.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think you're right.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I want to add to that what Robbie was saying and you're really saying too, I've seen in other scientists as well and I'll give you one example that I'm also still struggling with because even people who I would say consider themselves first great scientists are what's the word I want to say they are afraid of losing their credibility and so they don't broach certain subjects in public in a certain sense.
28:23.557 --> 28:24.577
[SPEAKER_02]: And here's an example so.
28:25.738 --> 28:31.822
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that I have been very intrigued by as both of you are is, how do we really understand the nature of consciousness?
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[SPEAKER_02]: And if it's fundamental, how do we really look at that in terms of how that affects our daily life, all those sorts of things?
28:38.767 --> 28:39.787
[SPEAKER_02]: And what would a...
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[SPEAKER_02]: reality picture of the universe coming from this fundamental all-pervasive consciousness reading, look like in terms of the creation of everything around us and us.
28:50.074 --> 28:52.175
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
28:52.275 --> 29:03.683
[SPEAKER_02]: And what I found is that people like Federico Fagin, Bernardo Castro, other scientists, have come up with very interesting philosophical perspectives that are idealist meeting that consciousness is fundamental.
29:04.563 --> 29:14.027
[SPEAKER_02]: But what they don't talk about is what I would call information from what we might call spiritual sources, which would be like revealed texts.
29:14.467 --> 29:30.113
[SPEAKER_02]: So in most of the religious traditions that I know about especially in India and other Eastern countries, it's understood that the universe may actually give information through you that is accurate, that flows from a higher source, from infinite consciousness through you and you write it down, and
29:30.433 --> 29:34.776
[SPEAKER_02]: people are very happy to acknowledge that they received insights in this way.
29:35.136 --> 29:41.521
[SPEAKER_02]: And I imagine that Einstein received a lot of his insights in that way, and so did a lot of other scientists and dreams and things.
29:41.961 --> 29:55.211
[SPEAKER_02]: But when it comes to a person saying that, for example, I had a medium-ship relationship, or information was channeled from someone else, the scientists say I will never say that, because somehow in science,
29:55.651 --> 30:07.275
[SPEAKER_02]: It's for both in to say that consciousness survives a physical body, and someone could actually then communicate something through you from the other side, and I find that slightly duplicitous in scientists.
30:08.035 --> 30:22.801
[SPEAKER_02]: Like if somebody, I'm thinking about the course in miracles, which was said to be Jesus, and it's a beautiful course, I may have heard much of it, and it has lots of wisdom, but for some people to just throw it out because how could anything be channeled through
30:24.261 --> 30:33.748
[SPEAKER_02]: I feel is that's where we aren't willing to be curious about whether the information is wise and helpful for all humanity and make the decision on that point.
30:34.288 --> 30:46.256
[SPEAKER_02]: And that reminds me of what in fact William James said in his variety of religious experience just related to a person's conversion to a wider understanding of consciousness.
30:46.296 --> 30:49.258
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, you judge them by the fruits of their actions.
30:49.718 --> 31:16.702
[SPEAKER_02]: If their life is becoming stronger and their wiser and they're happier, well then you can say that's really the work of some wonderful power versus as the Christians might have said in the past will maybe know that's only the devil if now they have this awakening so I think always if we see that people have been transformed by information coming in again channel through someone and it's very, very wise and helpful it's interesting to be curious about that at least.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I know, but you see part of that transformation, whoever is transformed by that, always insists that the mind cannot completely understand or control higher reality.
31:37.483 --> 31:42.225
[SPEAKER_01]: But scientific enterprise is obviously mind-based.
31:43.965 --> 31:56.412
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what is actually then being said by these stages that there is no need to be against science, but science cannot comprehend reality, but which scientists is willing to accept that?
31:57.793 --> 32:10.401
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of the conviction that, okay, we haven't yet got it, I often remind my friends here, almost everything that we now speak about in physics was unknown, 135 years ago.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So surely in the next 135 years, scientists would find something, or maybe 1350 years, they'll find something.
32:20.460 --> 32:24.462
[SPEAKER_01]: Because unless you find something new, you can't get a PhD in any case.
32:24.562 --> 32:27.203
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the academic system.
32:27.943 --> 32:32.225
[SPEAKER_01]: So therefore not to imagine that now we know everything.
32:35.083 --> 32:39.406
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, this is the remarkable Saint Augustine made my goodness nearly 2,000 years ago.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What we know of nature is not all there is to nature.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But there is nevertheless a strong suggestion from the spiritual side that the mind needs to be quietened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But if I'm insisting on grasping reality with the mind,
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[SPEAKER_01]: which is the scientific enterprise, then there is obviously a sort of a sense of conflict maybe, or sense of disobeyed disagreement, however, one puts it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But as I just said earlier too, certainly if you look at four or five greatest scientists in the history of physics at least, they would all actually agree with me, what I just said,
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[SPEAKER_02]: I agree, Robbie, and in fact, one of the people that I just mentioned Bernardo Castro wrote a very interesting book that maybe David has read as well called more than allegory that I just read in the last few months, which is really stating exactly that, Robbie.
33:47.565 --> 33:55.809
[SPEAKER_02]: What he's saying is that he now understands that the very, many philosophical religious traditions of the world, the mystical traditions,
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[SPEAKER_02]: would create what we might call myths to point to a higher truth.
34:00.173 --> 34:20.252
[SPEAKER_02]: And they were like, this is an allegory that will help you understand the nature of reality because we can't ourselves really explain reality or grasp it fully, but through our metaphors through our allegories, through these belief systems that we can point to it and they will give us a sense of then experiencing it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that's what I'm understanding.
34:23.034 --> 34:24.996
[SPEAKER_02]: Scientists never have thought that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They think we're really going to grasp all of reality.
34:27.317 --> 34:33.202
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're grasping crumbs because they don't understand what's really beyond all their scientific experiences.
34:33.322 --> 34:36.385
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm hoping that that's one thing that we can
34:36.765 --> 34:50.175
[SPEAKER_02]: understand more these days is that all of these spiritual traditions throughout history for the last 2,000 or more years are pointing us to the truth even though their stories don't necessarily coincide with the materialism of today.
34:50.515 --> 34:56.960
[SPEAKER_02]: They were still pointed exactly the same truth and perhaps getting closer to that truth than many of the scientists today.
34:57.100 --> 35:00.202
[SPEAKER_02]: So I highly encourage people to read more than allegory.
35:00.222 --> 35:01.483
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's a wonderful book.
35:02.410 --> 35:06.973
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, I think people just become against mythology, et cetera.
35:07.233 --> 35:12.737
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me remind you, a remark of hardly a negative or negligible philosopher.
35:12.857 --> 35:14.538
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Aristotle's remark.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When philosophy is unable to connect with reality, one takes recourse to mythology.
35:24.327 --> 35:25.308
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not my room.
35:25.348 --> 35:26.149
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a restaurant.
35:26.790 --> 35:27.671
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can totally get it.
35:27.871 --> 35:31.355
[SPEAKER_02]: Once you try to put something into words, it seems like it becomes mythology.
35:31.395 --> 35:33.638
[SPEAKER_02]: The connecting with reality is experience.
35:33.678 --> 35:35.560
[SPEAKER_02]: It has nothing to do with our conceptuality.
35:35.721 --> 35:39.485
[SPEAKER_02]: So I agree with Aristotle, but I think that we nevertheless try to write things down.
35:39.525 --> 35:40.046
[SPEAKER_02]: What can I say?
35:42.710 --> 35:53.122
[SPEAKER_01]: But, therefore, not to be against mythology, it is true that something mythological then gets interpreted in varieties of ways by various people.
35:54.364 --> 35:56.326
[SPEAKER_01]: Then conflicts can begin to occur.
35:56.386 --> 36:02.213
[SPEAKER_01]: Then one say, oh, there's just mythological as if this is just fictional, we can disregard it.
36:04.925 --> 36:06.485
[SPEAKER_01]: but one doesn't need to.
36:06.726 --> 36:12.787
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, he's just simply pointing out the limitations of reason by pointing out this.
36:14.807 --> 36:25.089
[SPEAKER_01]: The very first substantial sutra or remark in the yoga sutras is yoga consists in stopping all the movements of the mind.
36:25.909 --> 36:27.269
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there you are.
36:27.709 --> 36:30.830
[SPEAKER_01]: So, if you are interested in anything spiritual,
36:32.437 --> 36:37.603
[SPEAKER_01]: call is to connect with something subtler than the mind.
36:37.623 --> 36:38.644
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, but there is no reason to be against anything dealing with mind deals with, that has this place.
36:51.762 --> 37:02.513
[SPEAKER_02]: And I believe that allegories actually can point us to the truth, I mean, as sort of like a Beethoven symphony points me to the truth of that experience of the Beethoven symphony, which is a much higher reality.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I think of them all as perhaps avenues toward opening us up to the experience that is ineffable.
37:10.632 --> 37:14.936
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could also say that, I mean, Jesus spoke in parables, didn't he?
37:16.277 --> 37:20.100
[SPEAKER_00]: I did speak in parables because those with eyes to see could see.
37:20.600 --> 37:23.903
[SPEAKER_00]: And those with ears to ear, yes, but here.
37:25.144 --> 37:28.186
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were in other words there was a deeper meaning to the story.
37:29.768 --> 37:36.093
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is not going to be grasped by the empirical mind that we've been referring to.
37:37.598 --> 37:41.480
[SPEAKER_01]: But also you see really right from the beginning of modern science.
37:42.280 --> 37:47.242
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole idea was that everything comes from matter without any consciousness.
37:48.023 --> 37:52.404
[SPEAKER_01]: So to come to reality, I needed to say, mass length and time.
37:53.005 --> 37:54.565
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the aspects of matter.
37:55.366 --> 37:58.367
[SPEAKER_01]: To be sure, in the 19th century, charge was added to that.
37:58.887 --> 38:01.188
[SPEAKER_01]: In the 20th century, spin was added to that.
38:01.809 --> 38:05.590
[SPEAKER_01]: But what about all these artists and musicians that they can just go to hell?
38:09.425 --> 38:16.628
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this very notion absolutely completely obscures any relationship with any of the arts.
38:18.568 --> 38:37.937
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you only spoke about mythology, that is one part of it, but you look at music as an example or painting or sculpture, because they are not telling you mass length and time and charge or spin, so therefore they are not real from the perspective of modern science.
38:39.090 --> 38:41.892
[SPEAKER_02]: and Ravi actually saying that what I love is just hearing you talk.
38:42.313 --> 38:57.025
[SPEAKER_02]: I imagine the experience I have when I am listening to Beethoven or looking at a beautiful impressionist painting or whatever versus thinking about mass length and time of a particular object and what is in the intellect is dry and awful and the other is making one sore.
38:57.366 --> 38:58.667
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's the contrast.
38:58.727 --> 38:58.927
[SPEAKER_02]: I think
38:59.267 --> 39:09.471
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe as perhaps getting close to running out of time, I might just add for myself that what I'm really asking of science, which is what you've said already today, Robbie, is having a balance.
39:09.912 --> 39:12.273
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what really brings wisdom to everything we do.
39:12.653 --> 39:17.975
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like accepting that yes, the materialist point of view has given us much in the way of technology and comfort in our world.
39:18.455 --> 39:23.280
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you only have that, we would be stuck in the intellect in a dry place of the world.
39:23.440 --> 39:33.570
[SPEAKER_02]: And we need to incorporate the other half of being human, which is coming from the heart and really feeling the wisdom of our interconnection with everything around us.
39:34.370 --> 39:42.878
[SPEAKER_01]: But that is really what will be the nature of whatever we mean by a wise scientist, not against science, but realizing its limitations.
39:43.643 --> 39:49.647
[SPEAKER_01]: actually a good scientific work, but also realizing that there is something subtler than that.
39:50.547 --> 39:56.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Now again, but at any given time there is a strong tendency that now we have figured it all out.
39:56.991 --> 40:06.096
[SPEAKER_01]: I often give this example at the end of the 19th century, the president of the British scientific society, hardly a negligible
40:11.647 --> 40:17.309
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, he on his retirement address, this is 1896 or 97.
40:18.989 --> 40:25.392
[SPEAKER_01]: He made this remark, first of all, praising all the wonderful things we had discovered in the 19th century, which is actually true.
40:26.152 --> 40:33.054
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, that's the time and light as an electromagnetic field, et cetera, or Maxwell's equations were discovered.
40:33.114 --> 40:39.436
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but then he said, I have only one regret left, that the future scientists have nothing left to discover.
40:39.936 --> 40:40.657
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you believe this?
40:42.858 --> 40:46.181
[SPEAKER_01]: almost everything now we know in physics is since then.
40:47.322 --> 40:47.842
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
40:47.922 --> 40:49.824
[SPEAKER_00]: You might have lived to regret that remark.
40:51.485 --> 40:54.768
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think we're also talking about the different ways of knowing.
40:55.268 --> 40:59.832
[SPEAKER_00]: That you have to be open to more direct experiential ways of knowing.
41:00.633 --> 41:04.116
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just measurement and analysis.
41:05.337 --> 41:08.780
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there any question that you've wanted to raise either of you?
41:09.308 --> 41:22.713
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to say that as you were saying there are multiple ways of knowing, the greatest scientists also found that was the truth and there ways of knowing included more than their intellectual manipulation of facts and their observations.
41:22.773 --> 41:24.333
[SPEAKER_02]: They also understood that.
41:24.413 --> 41:34.717
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that to me that's the bottom line is that to really understand that we need to embrace all the ways of knowing and that will really make us vice-rescientists.
41:35.712 --> 41:38.975
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually, if you don't mind one other remarkable that I like to make.
41:39.996 --> 41:46.881
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, from the spiritual perspective, the wish is to have actually objective knowledge.
41:48.062 --> 41:52.606
[SPEAKER_01]: I know this has now become an attitude as if something coming from human side is subjective.
41:52.986 --> 41:54.488
[SPEAKER_01]: Science has objective knowledge.
41:55.108 --> 42:01.914
[SPEAKER_01]: Science is not even a man will can't point it this out more than 100 years ago in his book, Critique of your reason,
42:03.926 --> 42:07.723
[SPEAKER_01]: Something comes from the object, but our mind is introducing something in it.
42:08.661 --> 42:12.744
[SPEAKER_01]: The great quality of science is that it is inter-subjective.
42:13.305 --> 42:17.328
[SPEAKER_01]: If I discover something in one university, somebody else can test it, etc.
42:18.069 --> 42:34.883
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the spiritual practice, the call is to be completely objective, potentially in the yoga sutra explicitly says this, that the mind has to be cleansed to be so clear that it doesn't introduce his own color on what it sees, just reveal whatever the object is.
42:36.063 --> 42:53.033
[SPEAKER_01]: So really the, in fact, when we say freedom from myself, this remark of Christ that I just mentioned earlier, unless you leave yourself behind, that simply means that now you can actually have an objective perception, not something being introduced by my mind.
42:53.762 --> 42:58.669
[SPEAKER_00]: The mirror needs to be clear in order to reflect the true light.
43:00.211 --> 43:08.642
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you both very much for this wonderfully stimulating and interesting and important conversation in our series, Wise Scientists.
