Origins

Creation and the Problem of Consciousness

When Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond in Concord Massachusetts in 1845 he wanted self-reflection:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Henry David Thoreau

One of the books he found especially useful in his quest was the Bhagavad-gita:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."

At times I'm shocked and dismayed by the constant aggression and hatred I see in the world. At times like this I follow the mature counsel of Thoreau when he said, "Read not the Times. Read the Eternities." When I am alone and without the company of enlightened friends, I  find no solace greater than reading the "Eternities." The greatest of all these wisdom literatures is the Bhagavat.

I have spent some time sharing with you my own personal reading of the Bhagavat, but find myself involved in other projects at the moment. I haven't had the chance to write in this space. 

I've been asked to prepare materials on the nature of consciousness: a kind of reboot of Life comes from Life. We'll see what happens. It's a big project. 

But, since I'm involved in a book project on the nature of consciousness, I'm taking a break from the discussion between Śukadeva Goswāmī and Mahārāja Parīkṣita. 

Their conversation is highly worthy of reflection and meditation. Many readers of the Bhagavat prefer to rush to the 10th Canto and try to savor the intimate pastimes of the Bhagavan Śrī Krishna. But the ontology of the Bhagavat is not to be taken lightly.  The next point that Śukadeva discusses is a conversation between Lord Brahmā and Nārada Muni about the creation of the universe. Some adepts try to take every word of this great treatise literally. And yet the Bhagavat is a metaphysical work and one needs to appreciate carefully the metaphysics of its thesis.

I don't wish to blandly state ideas as facts. I find it offputting. And so, I'm consulting some of the wisdom literature and trying to understand more about the ontology and cosmology of the Bhagavat, which is distinct from the Vedic view. While the Vedic cosmology may take great interest in the movements of the planets, for astrological purposes, the Bhagavat eschews exploitation as a spiritual paradigm. 

The Bhagavat is not interested in a materialistic understanding of the planetary systems. My spiritual mentor, Śrīdhara Mahārāja, for example often referred to "Bhu-loka" as the "world of misconception."

Much of the language of the Bhagavat is secret, occult, and esoteric. The Sanskrit word "Loka" may be translated as "planet" but it also means "world," "country," and even "people." The House of Commons in India is known as the Lok Sabha, the House of the People.
http://loksabha.nic.in

The Bhagavat speaks of different "Worlds" or Lokas. There are hellish worlds and heavenly worlds. But since the Bhagavat concentrates on consciousness and divine love as its main thesis, it may be useful for us to consider these worlds as planes of consciousness.  The Bhagavat after all identifies itself as commentary on the Gayatri mantra which meditates on the planes of consciousness known as bhur, bhuvah, and svah, or sense, mind, and intelligence. 

So when Nārada and Brahmā discuss the creation of worlds, they are not speaking with reference to the materialistic paradigm developed by positivists like Comte in the 19th Century.  The holistic paradigm of Bhagavat ontology always includes consciousness as an axiomatic truth. As commentary on Vedānta, the Bhagavat paradigm incorporates an understanding of Brahman, Paramātma, and Bhāgavan as requisites for a proper interpretation of monism and dualism. This is supported by the exegesis of Chaitanya Mahāprabhu, whose acintya-bheda-bheda-tattva  philosophy is elucided by Jiva Goswāmi in Tattva-sandarbha.

Given all that, I don't want to write superficially on the subject. 

These days there's a very active school of atheists who feel that the battle of "belief" vs. "nonbelief" is really a battle between "reason" and "superstition." This is a superficial view, in my opinion. Any ideas on creation that don't correspond to the currently held views are held up to ridicule as an example of "superstition" or "myth." 

Unfortunately modern atheists are not trained as philosophers or they would know the limits of reason. 

Undisputed facts are difficult to arrive at. History is even more difficult. The history of creation would seem to be utterly impossible.  And yet certain mysteries elude science: The origin of the universe, gravity waves, a cure for cancer, the unified field theory, a theory of everything.  

The problem of consciousness is one such mystery. 

Much has been made of the search for the “original building blocks of life.” The Rosetta project recently sent a space probe to a distant comet in search of the so-called “origins of life.” There is no need for journey to distant planets to find the “origins of life.” The origins of life are found in every egg or seed here on earth. And yet, no scientist can produce an egg.

No biologist would claim that he has created a seed. Monsanto, of course, goes about the business of patenting seeds as if seeds were possible to create. It is a practical matter to remove or insert some genetic material into a seed and change its genetic composition. But the genetic material must come from a living plant. Life comes from life. The origin of life, according to anyone’s observation is other life. One can not create a life form with inert material ingredients. This may be considered as another “law” of material nature: Inorganic matter cannot produce life.



No biologist can take inorganic ingredients and create an egg.    Not an ostrich egg, not a lizard egg, not a chicken egg, not even a hummingbird egg.

The sum total of the finite will never equal the infinite. Organs are not life. Blood is not life. You may harvest all the organs, blood, bone, and nerves you like from dead bodies. You will never produce a living Frankenstein monster by charging a cadaver with electricity.

The world of matter is confirmed by the senses and discussed by the rational faculties of the human brain. And yet, such senses are unable to perceive the higher reality.  Unable to perceive spiritual reality  the senses would convince us that the perceived reality is the only reality. But this is presumptuous.

Our senses are, after all, imperfect. Scientists must constantly revise their calculations. Even our best computer software is constantly being "updated," since the previous version, even the actual version is somehow faulty. There are always "bugs" to be "fixed." We are subject to all kinds of illusions, tricks of material nature. We see a dark figure move in the shadows only to find that it's a chair. We make mistakes. And we have the tendency to fit the facts around our theories. All these work against the science of reason.

And worse. Reason itself is a circular argument. There is no such thing as impartiality according to philosophers from the time of Nietzsche. All reasoning is self-serving. Our preoccupation with the  secrets of the material world is self-serving: we want to control and exploit the world of the senses. Exploitation is almost the exclusive activity of reason.  Reason is useful because it works in tandem with science to produce new discoveries, new technologies. And the very purpose of technology is exploitation. 

The focus on the exploitation of the world of the senses is a paradigm that has served us well for centuries. But now the karmic boomerang is coming to haunt us in the form of contaminated air, polluted oceans, devastated habitats and extinct species. Can this really be the culmination of science?



Our exclusive preoccupation with the exploitation of the sensual world has led to a denial of the suprasensual world, the world of transcendence. And yet the great thinkers in science are satisfied by a faithful repetition of formulas left to us by the Victorian age. This is merely the jealous conservation of dead and dying formulas.

I believe it's possible to seek a deeper metaphor for existence in the pages of the Bhagavat and in the conversations between Nārada and Brahmā. 

It may be that the language used in the Bhagavat to describe the sensual cosmos evades our comprehension. We lack the exegetical tools to penetrate some of the descriptive metaphors.  The hermeneutics of the acharyas are available only to highly realized souls.

And yet the organic metaphor is enlightening. The cosmos with its galaxies is compared to an egg, where barely differentiated consciousness combines with the potentiality of matter in a concentrated form of energy unknown to modern physicists.

Quantum Astronomers cannot decode the energies responsible for the singularity that may have existed in the moments before the Big Bang. Nor can they account for the conceptual form of substance known as consciousness. 

The conversations in the Bhagavat explore the eternal paradox of consciousness and its relationship with the perceived world, how divine and unlimited consciousness represents itself in limited forms and bodies, conditioned minds and senses. And how the Personal Godhead expands through various agencies and potencies, from Bhagavan, through Mahavishnu to Paramātma to the transcendent, indefinable and spaceless Being who makes  time, space and the cosmos possible.