“Mind-Matter Research” (SB 3.26.34)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 26, Text 34. “Mind-Matter Research.” Alachua – 1997 / (037)

[Text 34]:

The activities and characteristics of the ethereal element can be observed as the accommodation of room for the external and internal existences of all living entities, namely the field of activities of the vital air, the senses and the mind. 

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda: 

The mind, the senses and the vital force, or living entity, have forms, although they are not visible to the naked eye. Form rests in subtle existence in the sky, and internally it is perceived as the veins within the body and the circulation of the vital air. Externally there are invisible forms of sense objects. The production of the invisible sense objects is the external activity of the ethereal element, and the circulation of vital air and blood is its internal activity. That subtle forms exist in the ether has been proven by modern science by transmission of television, by which forms or photographs of one place are transmitted to another place by the action of the ethereal element. That is very nicely explained here. This verse is the potential basis of great scientific research work, for it explains how subtle forms are generated from the ethereal element, what their characteristics and actions are, and how the tangible elements, namely air, fire, water and earth, are manifested from the subtle form. Mental activities, or psychological actions of thinking, feeling and willing, are also activities on the platform of ethereal existence. The statement in Bhagavad-gītā that the mental situation at the time of death is the basis of the next birth is also corroborated in this verse. Mental existence transforms into tangible form as soon as there is an opportunity due to contamination or development of the gross elements from subtle form. 

So, well, Śrīla Prabhupāda says this verse is the potential basis of great scientific research work. I will maybe outline what might be involved in that. To begin with, if you look at mainstream science of the modern day, you'll find that it probably could not accommodate the kind of research work required to elucidate this verse. Science as it exists today is based on physical reductionism; and basically the idea is that everything occurs according to the laws of physics, the existing laws of physics. Now of course, the laws of physics change as time passes – the laws of physics today are different from what they were in the 19th century. And one might expect that the laws of physics will continue to change in the future, just by extrapolation of what happened in the past. However, the prevailing viewpoint generally tends to be that whatever laws of physics we have now must be the ultimate laws. So toward the end of the 19th century, there were scientists who were saying that: well, physics is a closed subject. There's really nothing more to discover that is fundamental. Somebody is reputed to have said that the future of physics will consist of calculating the different constants to more and more decimal places, but that's the only thing that can really be done now. Actually, it was Michelson who apparently said that, of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment.

But of course, in the 20th century there were revolutions in physics. You had quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity being introduced, which were fundamentally different from the physics that went before. But now at the present time, there are many prominent physicists who are talking about the end of physics. They're saying that the really fundamental discoveries have been made, and this is a very frustrating period for physics, because there's nothing more to discover other than just minor refinements of what we already know. In fact, a book recently came out entitled The End of Science by a fellow named John Horgan. He's a writer for the Scientific American magazine and he argues in that book that really there's nothing much left to discover. We basically have it all figured out. So according to that viewpoint, the statements made in this verse could not really be pursued or investigated. Now if you look at the laws of physics as they exist, you'll find that they do not allow for an interaction between mind and physical elements. In fact, they do not allow for the existence of mind as an entity separate from the physical elements. 

[5:54] 

The prevailing theory of the mind is that the mind is simply a byproduct of the action of neurons in the brain. Now, it's curious: recently Francis Crick, the famous Nobel prize winner and discoverer of the DNA structure, wrote a book in which he called this the “astonishing hypothesis,” and a lot of people were astonished by the title of the book, because it didn't seem so astonishing for a scientist to claim that your mind is nothing but the action of neurons, because that's what everyone has been saying for many years. But actually, if you look at it, it is a rather astonishing hypothesis. A neuron is basically a little bow of the cell with a long tube extending from one point to another. And it can transmit a kind of electrochemical impulse along this tube. So if it's stimulated at one end, you can send the impulse to the other end, where it may connect to other nerve cells and stimulate them, so they send impulses and so forth. So this is what goes on in the brain, and the prevailing view of the mind is the mind is just the sum total of a lot of electrical and chemical impulses being transmitted down these different tubes within the brain. And that's it. So that has to account for thinking feeling and willing or conscious perception and so on. 

In fact, it doesn't account for any of those things and this is even admitted by some scientists today. You even find in Scientific American articles saying that, “Well, we really can't understand consciousness in terms of the physical structures of the brain and the action... activities that go on within the brain.” Nonetheless, the prevailing view is that if we do explain it, this is how we have to explain it. The conclusion then being that: well maybe we'll never explain consciousness. So, science that exists today is very much committed to this idea, that the mind can be reduced to the brain. The action of neurons, in turn, is compared with the behavior of a computer program. The idea is that just as a computer program carries out a series of steps by logical rules, so these neurons acting together also carry out a series of logical steps. So according to this conception, in principle, you could build a computer which would duplicate the action of your brain, and that would then duplicate your mind. So you could have a computer which would, by its computations, recreate the essence of your mind and your consciousness and so forth.

So, this is a very prominent viewpoint. And it's remarkable that in the... at the present time, there are quite a number of scientists who literally believe that if we could build a sufficiently powerful computer, you could scan your brain somehow, record all the neural interconnections, and download that into the computer. And when you ran the computer program, thus programmed according to all the neural connections in your brain, that would be you. So according to this concept, you could attain immortality by being downloaded into a series of computers. Now, I know of one philosopher who then accused these scientists of being... he said they're closet Buddhists – because they believe in transmigration, but they don't believe in the existence of the soul. And that's actually what you find in Buddhism. They say that the essence of you is just some software, some programming, and if we can download that into a computer, then we reproduce you. And that's very similar to the idea of transmigration in Buddhism, in which you have no soul and no substance, and yet the pattern that represents the personality somehow goes from one body to the next.

[10:35] 

So this still doesn't explain consciousness. And it's perfectly plausible, in principle at least, that you could have a computer that would duplicate human behavior. But that that computer would have awareness while it was doing it is another thing – would the computer be conscious of what it was doing? And you can still raise the question: would the computer duplicate human behavior? If you could program all the different features of the human mind, you might still find that it fell short of duplicating human behavioral patterns. Now this verse is giving an indication of what is really going on, which is quite different from this prevailing scientific theory. According to the verse, first of all there is something called the “mind,” which is distinct from the kind of matter that is studied by physics.

There are, Kṛṣṇa says in the Bhagavad-gītā, eight separated elements: earth, air, fire, water, and ether, and mind, intelligence, and false ego. Now the first five of these – earth, air, fire, water, and ether – pretty much come under the heading of physics as we have it today. I say pretty much, because it's... this isn't exactly true but it's roughly true. Beyond that however, mind, intelligence, and false ego are material elements; that's why they're said to be separated elements in the Bhagavad-gītā, . These are material elements, but they are distinct from the gross physical elements that you're familiar with and which are studied in modern science. Now it turns out that the ether is a key element in this sequence, because the ether is basically the intermediary link between mind, intelligence, and false ego, which are subtle material elements, and earth, air, fire, water, which are the gross material elements that we're all familiar with. So ether is the connecting link. Now of course in addition to these material elements there's the soul, which is completely transcendental to matter. So the full conscious entity would be the soul accompanied by the subtle elements of mind, intelligence, and false ego, which is called basically... these together are called the subtle body. So the soul plus subtle body are interacting with a gross physical body through this element of the ether, which is the intermediary link. 

So, this verse is telling about, basically, what the ether does. And it's quite interesting. First of all, Śrīla Prabhupāda says that there are subtle forms in the ether. He says form rests as subtle existence in the sky. Śrīla Prabhupāda uses the word sky as synonymous with ether. And that is nabhas or ākāśa or khe: these are different Sanskrit words for it. Basically, the idea here is that space is an actual substance. One concept of space is that space is just the absence of substance. You take away everything from a given area of space and you're just left with space, which is a vacuum or the absence of anything. But space has characteristics; even in modern science that's considered to be the case. Geometry is the... you might say the science for describing space. And it used to be that old-fashioned, three-dimensional geometry was considered sufficient for this purpose. But nowadays four-dimensional geometry is used in which space curves. And this is utilized in Einstein’s general theory of relativity to explain gravitation. So, the idea is that gravitation is curvature of space, or more exactly curvature of space and time, which are welded together in one continuum.

[15:31]  

So certainly if space and time can be curved, that means that they must be something. You certainly can't curve the absence of anything. So even modern science is accepting space as a continuum that is actually there; it’s something real and you can even bend it. So that's somewhat analogous to the concept of the ether, but the Vedic concept of the ether is still a bit different from the idea of curved space-time in modern physics. It's a fact that if you look at Einstein’s theory of relativity you'll see that space-time can be bent, and it's a bit springy and flexible. Now, if you take a long spring and you bend it at one end, then you see a wave go propagating down the length of the spring; or if you take a rope and you wave one end back and forth, a wave will go down the length of the rope due to its springiness. Well, space also does the same thing according to the theory of relativity, and so you can have gravitational waves. But the result of having gravitational waves is that if you bend space in a given region, quickly that bent region propagates outward and goes away from you at the speed of light. So, you can't bend it and have the bend remain in a given place. But apparently, according to this description and other references in the Vedic literature, ether can contain forms, which are localized. And they stay in one place or if they move, they don't necessarily move very quickly. Then again, they may also move at a very high speed. 

So ether can accommodate all forms or shapes or patterns. And the mind, basically, uses ether as a slate for writing things down in transmitting information to the gross material elements. So, what you can think of then is that ether is able to sustain forms or shapes or patterns; and this mind element, which is a subtle material element – which has the capacity of thinking, feeling, and willing – can impose these shapes or patterns on the ether. Now, the gross elements are embedded within ether, so when shapes and patterns are imposed on the ether, that in turn affects the gross elements. So you then have the gross elements taking on different patterns and forms. So the result then is, that if you conceive of an idea in the mind, that can produce a pattern in the ether, which in turn can affect gross matter. Now that would be the explanation, for example, of what I’m doing right now, according to the Vedic understanding, as I’m sitting here and talking. Now if Francis Crick was in the room, he would be convinced that everything I’m saying is due to neurons in the brain. So nerve impulses are going back and forth and bringing out information and doing computations and eventually these impulses go down to the vocal cords and the diaphragm and so forth; and the result is these words are produced, which you're listening to. And it's all just done by neurons and chemistry and electricity and so forth. 

[19:26] 

According to the Vedic understanding, what really is happening is this: I have an idea within my mind. That idea is used to generate patterns in the ether. Those patterns in the ether then stimulate different neurons to do different things within the brain, and finally the vocal cords are vibrated and the diaphragm contracts, and so on and so forth, to produce the words. So that would be the Vedic explanation of what is happening. So this is something that one might in principle actually investigate. One common argument that is made to refute this kind of idea is, it will be said: well, you're saying that the non-physical mind is making the brain do things. This must require some exchange of energy and that would violate conservation of energy, because there's this law that says that the sum total of physical energy always remains the same. So, if my mind, by manipulating the ether, can make neurons do something, it must be violating this law that the total energy remains constant. Of course, the answer to that is very simple: why should one say that mind cannot exert energy? If you look at the law of conservation of energy, you'll see that the physicists themselves continually violate it by redefining it. An example would be: the weak interaction and neutrinos. If you go back to, say, 1920, scientists didn't know about neutrinos. So their energy equations didn't have neutrinos in them. Later they discovered neutrinos, now neutrinos can carry energy. So now the equations for energy have to include neutrinos. So which equations are right? Well, they'll say, the equations with the neutrinos in them are right. That means the old equations must have been wrong. Which means that the old statement of conservation of energy was in fact incorrect. So, likewise, it's perfectly possible that mind also has energy and when mind interacts with ether and the elements of the body and so forth, it can produce changes in the energy balance. But this still doesn't violate conservation of energy, because mind also contains a kind of energy. 

So, what you have in this verse then is a basic explanation of how the mind interacts with the gross physical body. This goes the other way also, because the action of the physical senses will also produce patterns in the ether. And the mind picks up those patterns. And in this way you see and hear and so forth through the gross physical senses. Now the statement that Śrīla Prabhupāda is making, in the purport, even goes beyond what I’ve said thus far. He is saying that these patterns produced in the ether by the mind can even result in the creation of material elements, gross material elements. Now, it's one thing to stimulate the gross material elements to move in a certain way. And it's another thing to actually generate matter. But what Śrīla Prabhupāda is saying here is that that's actually what happens. In fact, this entire chapter of the Bhāgavatam explains how the elements of earth, water, fire, and air are produced from the elements of ether. And this involves the subtle sense elements, which are called tan-mātras.

So, the description is given that from the ether you have the generation of touch, and in connection with touch then the element of air is generated. Then the next step is the generation of form, which is connected with the sense of vision. Touch of course is connected with the sense of touch. And in connection with form, the element fire is generated – or radiance in general. And then you have the element of taste and the sense of taste and the water element is generated in connection with that, and then finally the sense of smell and the sense object for odor and the element earth. So this description is given. So the basic pattern is transformation from subtle elements to gross manifestations. So one might ask if there is any evidence that... of the actual creation of elements within the bodies of living organisms in connection with the action of the mind. This is something that could also be investigated. 

[25:22]

One interesting point that I might make in that connection, well, I’ll make two, is that apparently nuclear reactions can occur at room temperature in the bodies of living organisms. This is something that's been documented; and recently one of the children of the devotees here who's going to a high school did a science project on that. So the investigation involved growing plants and monitoring the amount of calcium in the plants. Basically you start with some seeds and you take a large batch of seeds divided into two parts. Measure the amount of calcium in one batch chemically. Then you assume the other batch has pretty much the same amount of calcium. Then you grow those seeds and you monitor how much calcium is going in. You use distilled water, which wouldn't have any calcium, and so on. So you monitor calcium intake and let the seeds sprout and grow for a while until you have a plant there. And then you analyze them chemically to find out how much calcium there is. And you'll find out that there's more than you can account for by what went in, and what was there in the original seeds. 

So, this... this has been reported in various papers, which are not taken too seriously by mainstream science. But the reports are there, so this student was Tosan Krishna’s son. The student was doing the science project, so I gave him some of some papers describing these experiments. He did them. He had a chemist at the University of Florida do the chemical analysis, without telling him what it was all about. So, the fellow didn't know what he was measuring. He just said, “Okay, I measure the amount of calcium in these plants,” and so forth. And he got the results that agreed with what [unclear] had reported, the scientist who originally did these experiments. So it's an interesting confirmation. Of course, it's considered to be a little bit unusual to say that elements can be created within the bodies of living organisms, but one could investigate and see if this really happens. It looks as though there's some evidence indicating that it might happen. Also, I could make another comment concerning this whole question of mental existence giving rise to tangible form. There is a great deal of practical evidence for reincarnation, in which you have young children who remember previous lives. There's a psychiatrist named Ian Stevenson, who's investigated many cases of this type. In many cases it is possible to take the story told by the child and investigate and actually find that the previous person that the child says that he or she was in the previous life actually did exist, and to confirm various details in the life of that person. 

An interesting additional feature of this is that many of the people who... of the children who report past lives, report that they died violently in the previous life. This seems to be connected with remembering your previous life, for some reason. In any case, in quite a number of cases it was possible to determine the injury that caused death in the previous life, even to the point of finding medical records indicating what this injury was. And it turned out that the child frequently has a birthmark corresponding to the injury. For example, let's say the injury was a bullet wound to the head – this was one case in particular. The... in the previous life, medical records indicate that the bullet went in one temple making a small hole and it came out the other temple making a large hole – this is what bullets will do. So, the child had a small compact birthmark in this location and a large diffuse one on the other side. 

[30:29]

Stevenson was able to find about 40 different cases of this in which he was able to confirm the effect. So it would appear that you have a case in which the mind recorded the trauma of the injury causing death, and when the embryo was developing this was imposed on it as a mental pattern, which gave rise to a physical birthmark. So that's an interesting example showing some empirical data that might be related to what's described in this verse. So, there's potential for great scientific research work here. So anyway, I’ll stop there. Are there any questions or comments? Yeah? 

Question:  [unclear]

Answer: Yes. 

Q:  [unclear]

Answer:  Well, as I understand it, I mean I don't know the details of how that's done, but this... these weapons are of a subtle nature. So, the understanding as far as I’m aware would be that toward the end of Dvāpara-yuga, there were military applications of techniques for generating gross matter from subtle elements. So, it was possible actually to create gross physical forms using the subtle mind.

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Yeah, well we're talking about creating gross matter. So in principle, you could visualize the physical object and manifest it. Now we read about yogis doing things like that. So the indication then would be that our minds are very much conditioned to act in a certain very stereotyped way, but we're not using our full capacity. But in principle, many things could be done that we're not able to do. Yeah? 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Yeah.

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, I have an answer for that one. You are sitting in front of a computer even at this moment. What would happen if your hard disk crashed?

Q:  [unclear]  

A:  Well, you can see... one could say the physical brain certainly carries out a lot of functions involving the body. So if that is damaged, your ability to operate is impaired. Likewise, you can become dependent on using a computer. And if the computer then becomes impaired, then that can interfere with your ability to do things. It seems to me to be an analogous phenomenon. Now that gives rise to the question: would it be possible... just as a person may renounce computers and say, “Okay, I’m not going to become dependent on computers. I'll just use my mind for everything. After all, that's the old-fashioned way to do things.” You could say, “Well, could the mind... could a person somehow become independent of his brain?” And in that case brain damage presumably wouldn't affect him. That's an interesting question. In principle it seems to me that that should be possible.

[35:16]

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Pardon me?

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, yeah, I mean just consider. Well, another example: you don't have to go so far as to become an actual permanent ghost. But they're these out-of-body experiences, this is quite well corroborated. The evidence there would be, let’s say, a person has a heart attack – their heart has stopped beating for a couple of minutes. According to medical science, the brain deprived of oxygen cannot perform its functions, the neurons are not able to fire normally, and so forth. So therefore the person's mind should be completely shut down at this point. But you have people at that very point saying that they experience floating out of their body, looking at things in the room, and seeing what's going on – maybe even going through the wall into another room and seeing what's going on there. Then when they recover from the heart attack, they may report what they saw, and it turns out they were right. Now how could they do that if their mind was shut down during that time period? So…

Q:  [unclear]

Well, that's another interesting case. There's a pediatrician named John Lorber connected at least at one time with Sheffield University in England, who is studying hydrocephaly – hydrocephaly, called water on the brain. You have cerebrospinal fluid building up pressure due to a defect in the system there, which damages the brain. And in very advanced cases, the cerebral tissue is reduced to a thin film around the inside of the skull. So, the person in effect has no brain, or at least the higher brain, which is supposed to do the thinking, is grossly defective. And Lorber said that he had cases of students, who were, you know, bright college students, who had this defect. So, what were they thinking with?