In2-MeC

Prague, Czech Republic
25 June 2004

The bad habit of mental speculation

Srila Prabhupada explains another phrase from Brahma's famous verse thusly:

Brahma is the topmost living creature within this universe. He said, "A person must give up this nonsense habit of speculation": jnane prayasam udapasya. One must become submissive. One should not pose that he knows something, that he can speculate, that he can invent. The so-called scientists are simply speculating and wasting labor. Nothing can be done by you. Everything is already arranged. You cannot change the law. You can simply see how it is working.

The agitated mind urges us to change our situation--in the universe, in society or at least within ourselves. Scripture compares the mind to the restless wind or to an impetuous, uncontrolled horse. Though the mind calls for change, change doesn't satisfy the mind. Change is taking place anyway-- life after life we change our cosmic, social and mental situations, sometimes getting the form of a Brahma, sometimes that of an ant. But throughout it all, the mind remains unsatisfied. Srila Prabhupada called this utopianism--a never-ending search for noplace, or Utopia (from Greek ou, "not" and topos, "a place"). Dissatisfaction of mind simply drives us onward in the cycle of birth and death.

It is the human habit to resort to speculation to relieve ourselves of utopian anxiety. Speculation generates "new discoveries," and new discoveries inflate pride in human progress. But pride stands behind the mind's utopian anxiety: "this situation I'm in now isn't good enough for me. " Thus new discoveries breed new anxieties. For example, Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 sparked a revolution in medical and dental diagnostics. Now we are told that every year an alarming number of people contract cancer from medical and dental X-rays.

Speculative knowledge is called jnana. This is a different jnana from that Lord Krsna taught to his disciples Arjuna and Uddhava. The Lord's system of jnana-yoga is not aimed at changing one's position. It teaches how the mind and senses are to be purified under the direction of the spiritual master. But as the Personified Vedas say (Bhag. 10. 87. 33), for one who abandons the lotus feet of his spiritual master, the attempt to pacify the mind is full of distress. He encounters many obstacles and is never successful. The attempt to pacify the mind by means other than the mercy of guru and Krsna is precisely the kind of jnana that Brahma orders us to stop. From the above words of Srila Prabhupada, this kind of jnana can be identified by five symptoms: 1) unsubmissiveness due to thinking one already has knowledge; 2) the habit to speculate; 3) the habit to invent something new; 4) the habit to change the law (dharma); 5) laborious wasting of time.

<< Back