In2-MeC

Prague, Czech Republic
30 June 2004

Devotees sometimes inquire what happened to the previous Jagannatha silas I had been worshiping before my recent Salagram pilgrimage. This photo shows 2 of my former silas, now under the care of Premavanya Prabhu in the Ukraine. They look very happy, huh?

Intellectual rebellion against the Supreme Person

Modern civilization suffers from an unfortunate propensity to idolize the human mind. People tend to believe that famous scientists have some extraordinary power to sculpt a perfect model of the world from a block crystalline logic, this logical world being the pure form of reality. But because intellectuals are in difficulty, their so-called logical worlds are likewise full of difficulties. With a bit more sophistication, intellectuals just do what even lower creatures do: they mentally impose their own subjective values upon what their senses perceive. These values end in the physical affairs of eating, sleeping, mating and defending, which in turn end in death.

No, we do not "really" live within the logical worlds of dead or dying scientist and philosophers. We really live within the Supreme Person. Purusa evedam sarvam--"all this is He. " The true intellectual class, the brahmanas, are meant to instruct us in an exacting understanding of God as the origin and controller of the universe. Knowing Him in truth, we shall know Him as our only means to get free from the grip of death. But when intellectuals are infected with the disease of "I" and "mine", they act as agents of mystification. They concoct models of mind to take the place of the Supreme Person. Then, acting as priests, they conduct the rest of society in worshiping these models as idols.

Take for example the modern idol of space science. Merchants and workers of leading nations make offerings to this idol in the form of taxes collected by the administrators. This wealth is taken by clever rocket scientists who ceremoniously shoot it into the sky. The scientists sometimes defend this wasteful enterprise as being motivated by humility before the vast cosmos. But this humility is deceptive. The actual intent behind the worship of the idol of space science is the conquest of the universe. To conquer the universe, mankind has to somehow find a way to free himself from the authority of the Supreme Person, represented by the laws of material nature. This is impossible. But when an intellectual acts as an agent of mystification, he persuades society to believe the impossible: "Others dream dreams and ask why, I dream dreams and ask why not. "

Vedic histories record the account of one Trisankhu, a sudra who attempted to enter the celestial realm of svarga in his earthly physical body with the help of the brahmana Visvamrta, a master of mystic power. But Trisankhu was not successful; the laws of nature did not permit it. The law is that one can attain heaven in the next life by choosing to live a life of goodness on earth. Urdhvam gacchanti sattva stha, declares the Bhagavad-gita: after giving up the earthly body, a person in goodness goes upward to receive a superhuman body in the celestial world.

The future of bad science

Today's rocket scientists hope to do with machinery what Visvamrita could not do by mystic power. Allen Cromer has this sobering observation:

The idea that spaceships may someday trek from star to star makes great science fiction but bad science. The laws of physics and the properties of matter limit the speed of spaceships, making it impossible to travel between stars in any reasonable time. (Uncommon Sense, 1993, p. 184)

But bad science gets big money. Just as some scientists spend incredible sums of money on machines to conquer space, others spend money on the mechanical conquest of the microcosm, as popularized by films like Robocop, Terminator and Johnny Memnonic. The hope is the development of a human body and mind improved by computerized prostheses: limbs endowed with increased strength and speed; artificial eyes that see far beyond the visible spectrum; neural implants that enable direct mind-linkage with computer networks and instant downloading of data into the brain.

The scientific future of the mesocosm (human society) is technopoly, defined by communications theorist Neil Postman as "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology. " Postman explains:

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. (Technopoly, 1992)

Scenarios of "a new kind of social order" have for many decades been a staple of science fiction. Probably the most celebrated works of this type are Brave New World, 1984, and, written more recently, This Perfect Day (which depicts the world of tomorrow governed by a giant computer). Each book foresees a highly automated society wherein everybody has a job, crime is abolished, social roles are completely stereotyped--and human life has no meaning. As a character in This Perfect Day muses, "Machines are at home in the universe; people are aliens. "

Yes, we are spiritual aliens in a material universe. That is why, after all is said and done, we want out of here. Machines are at home here because the world functions under karma, the impersonal law of action and reaction. People naturally seek freedom from karma. As we learned in the first chapter, they try either to detach themselves from it, change it, or negate it. Western science is a program to change it. It hopes to rebuild the world--first with mental models, then with physical machinery. But that is an act of rebellion against Krsna's plan. It is impossible for humanity to free itself from the laws of material nature by rebellion. This rebellious spirit that is the disease of the soul, and its symptom is mental speculation.

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