A question answer session with respected Dr Krishnakumar, forcing me to dig my mind !

Dear Rajaramji,

I have great appreciation for your achievements and your knowledge. I see in some of your blogs a high degree of religious conviction and messages. One of them is the link between science and religion. I have some questions on that interface between science and religion.

As a statistician I believe in the equation Knowledge+Gaussian Error or IGNORANCE =Truth
Our mission is to explore continuously the unknown (error or ignorance) to improve our knowledge about the truth.
Florence Nightingale thus said rightly that the statistical work is the work of God or discovering God, or discovering truth through improved knowledge and reduced ignorance. Florence Nightingale was one of the founding members of the American Statistical Association and her statistical analysis of health surveys of epidemics in India were donated to the American Statistical Association and are kept in their headquarters in Washington DC.

Excellence in any field from cleaning a toilet to cleaning persons heart of jealousy and greed, is divine... matters of study and in any field devoted and sincere effort to reach excellence makes one see the God. Beyond the frontiers of knowledge and beyond the infinity is the face of God. SO Florence is absolutely right. A meat seller had more knowledge to advise a man spending all his time in forests doing dhyana as demonstrated in one of our ancient stories.

Given the above conviction of mine as a scientist I have a few questions regarding science and religion. If you have any suggestions or comments to enlighten me I will appreciate.

1. As David Hawkins says in his book "The God Delusion" people are born into families with a given faith and grow with it and hence religious bias is built into almost every man who believes in a religion. If this is true then religion and science cannot go together, in the true sense that science is objective. But, I can of course argue that science is not as objective as it is projected to be. Scientists may in fact be influenced by religion to choose one approach than another in investigating the unknown-using Nightingale's version.

Yes each one of us do get our cognitive and further framework and bench marks for our "rational" thinking based on the environment in which growth took place. With normalising educational process further molding our thinking and behaviour soon we learn to place blinkers and see things only the way we are expected to see and think and believe in only the processes and logical deduction as taught and accepted by the majority. Deviations are frowned upon and generally get left out of the main stream. This is true whether it is "religion" or "science" as we normally made to understand and quite often made to believe they are mutually exclusive.

Singular points, axioms science accepts.Science accepts the ignorance bounding their known knowledge, but define it in terms of multiple hypotheses, or say further research needed, but frontiers while exciting still stare at face and challenge the scientific approach to arrive at such unified solution or answer to establish cause and effect.

But any one honestly trying to cross this challenging frontier knocking on the door to know what is beyond, is truly no different from the seeker who is not a "scientist" as we define, but keeps on conducting numerous thought experiments trying to analyse the good and bad in society, the anguish in humans, the need to reconcile his lack of happiness and constant need to seek a means to quieten his questioning mind and demanding desires driving him crazy, depressions caused by failures and sadness in failed love, or death of loved ones, why so called "accident" should choose to visit him, why he cannot have eternal desire -free satisfied life etc etc.

Here also one reaches the frontier bounded by ignorance, just like the honest scientist, he too knocks on the door to find his unified single solution to all his questions.

In my view each path is honourable and I find no difference and attempts to condemn one by another is puerile and only indicates that in his own chosen area of specialisation, he has still a long,long way to go. For me the approaches of gaining knowledge, or journey to reach the "truth" can be many ...many paths under science and as many paths under religion , and finally all are coexistent and any attempt to isolate and condemn one path is futile. Where honesty and sincerity is lacking, it is the human who makes a path filled with "superstitions" or too may "singular points" or"axioms".

In my view words said to have been used by Hawkins like"God delusion" is more a marketing gimmick by the sales driving commercial groups but considering the great man's writings, I feel he is not arrogant enough to jump to absolute statements of truth. Because he also is yet to arrive at the truth. If thinks gravity is God, it is OK but if means that gravity itself is God then it is a mistake.Gravity does not have the attributes of jnana wisdom or creative powers nor destructive powers. Neti neti neti...न इति .... what you see, feel or think is not God but God is there in each one of them, is my understanding of this world.

2. You had mentioned that there are so many lacs of species, some not yet discovered, and about the re-incarnatione-that soul moves from one species to another, and that the penultimate (or ultimate depending on whether Godhood is a species or not) species is manhood. Can that soul be observed, measured, traced from one species to another? Or is it a closure axiom, like Zermeleo's axiom in mathematics to complete the logic of Hindu philosophy? This is one of the links between science and Hindu religion that I have not come across.

I do listen to respected Sanskrit Scholars who while giving lectures on Bhagavatha mention this number and some do add "it is said" but do a definite figure of 84 lac species. More than one scholar quoted fron Bhagavatha. I do not know Sanskrit. Then I checked Wikipedia and found that our research has till now established about 2 million or so species but we are still not sure of large tracts of deep sea water where we have not reached fully.Extending my rational thinking, I feel probability of discovering further 2 to 3 million species must be quite high if you consider ocean depths, bacteria, insects and the millions of living bacteria we carry in our own body...not sure how many we classified.

But what is impressive is the number. A number is mentioned. It is true of time scales, the cycle times between creation and destruction... all defined numbers are available in ancient knowledge, I find it hard to call that as religion. rather I consider it as ancient scientific observations and records archived and preserved through transfer from one generation to another through "vaakku" Minds absorbed, stored and transmitted over thousands, or millions of years? Looks plausible to me because the complex models cannot be dismissed as fiction.Too advanced science looks like magic or superstition or magic to uninitiated.

Since we lost our educational links with language of ancient "science" embedded in "Vedas", we either misinterpret or condemn quite arrogantly what we did not study.While I do not believe you should blank your mind and intelligence and accept unquestioningly what ancient scriptures said to have stated, I do trust we should follow the process prescribed as path to understand and become aware of the deeper meanings they tried to convey. Questioning is very fundamental right encouraged by our ancient scriptures.

Soul or Jeeva ... we have problems in correctly translating Sanskrit in to English because Sanskrit is etymologically many orders richer than English...closer to barbarian era depth as compared to Sanskrit too advanced thousands of years earlier. So it is like seeing glorious infinite canvass through a peephole.

If life energy is understood as jeeva, and even this energy being given by the original creator or it is part of that energy only, then it has to remain indestructible and whenever the physical attributes of body get destroyed in attrition of time, gets released, either to get another set of new physical attributes, or remain standalone, or join back the original source energy.... Our ancient scriptures dealt with these alternatives and deep thinkers on the basis of consistent and logical interpretation of the original Vedas and Upanishads as well as other ancient texts offered monistic and dualistic interpretations.

Beauty is arguments are allowed and we have rules of Tarka & Mimasa and debating to logcially prove or disprove each other's points of view and interpretation. This process qualifies our spiritual leaders to be called as no different from scientists.

Just as wearing a cloak and cap to receive a Doctoral degree, is not science, wearing a cloth of saffron colour or some distinguishing marks on the face is not the "religion" nor spiritual knowledge.

3. Thus the one of the main tenets of Hindu religion, the existence of a transcending soul from life to life and species to species, is it a blind faith or is there any scientific evidence for the existence of a soul and its transport from one physical body to another?

Partly I think the previous answer covers this issue. For a very advanced scholar of statistics, Euler and Lagrange as well as mere thought experiments without physical evidence is proof enough to declare a particular result. It is not absolute certainty of the result which guides but relative higher frequency of occurrence which satisfies the scholar that his thinking is fine. Next scholar gets a relatively better correlation and feels he has improved further. But fact remains significant number of deviations do occur though rare.

Proof for souls and migrations in my opinion is extraneous. Blind faith also is not needed. The process of understanding the universe and the structure and the various attributes described by our scriptures one should go through before attempting the thought experiment for prooving. That is the scientific approach. Can one do experiments of the high order without first gaining knowledge of existing work done?

If it takes a decade even to complete the minimum course to enter a graduation course, what to talk of research in spiritual matters with hearsay untutored knowledge base?

Best is to join the class taken by Lord Sri Krishna and he has given the tutorial Bhagavad Gita. Treating it as a guide understand, analyse, question, seek answers within the text, then sit down for dhyana as prescribed and seek with deep introspection the truth. The attributes of Satvic life described by Lord Krishna cannot be contested.

Full freedom exists to surround yourself with dark ajnana ( ignorance) by condemning outright what ever Krishna says. Duryodhana did it. Krishna did not take any action against him. But Duryodhana's Karma took the action.

Without devoting time one cannot learn statistics nor mathematics nor biology. Same with spiritual field.of science. The more you question and examine, the more you become aware of first yourself and seek who you are. Like neti neti neti, you are not the body, you are not the mind, you are not the thinking, then what are you? Forget about God, first we do know who we are.Choice to remain in ignorance arrogantly and glorify the same or humbly seek enlightenment to discover an entirely new world of different dimensions colours and purport , is with each one of us.

Best teaching book available is Bhagavad Gita for this purpose. Ultimately each has to seek his own fulfillment. I cannot become you, you cannot become someone else, nor you can become the God. But each one of us can become fully evolved and poorna, befitting our own swabhava. Blind unquestioned faith is not the way, as told by my Gurus.

Love and faith rising from the fountainhead of true understanding through knowledge the ultimate truth , is what the aparoksha jnani reaches and stays in that state of immaculate ananda which cannot be described in human communication at sensory level but has to be experienced only by a seeker.

If at any moment of my thinking to write what I wrote above, I did out of arrogance to show off my limited understanding, I may kindly be excused. It is a mere introspection arising out of questions raised and am thankful for the questions put. I am acutely aware of my ignorance and I pray that I keep seeking for the truth on the right path with the blessings and guidance of my Guru.