“Universe is Both Personal and Mechanical” (SB 3.17.4)
The principle of locality integral to Einstein’s theory of relativity, states that cause and effect take place in a localized region and follow simple rules. However, persistent challenges from the field of theoretical physics suggest this picture is far from complete. Thompson examines several apparently contradictory concerns, including mind-body matters as well as free will versus determinism. He suggests that attempts to resolve such constructs could well make better sense in an expanded model, where non-localized causes produce irreducibly complex effects.
TRANSCRIPT: Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 17, Text 4. “Universe is Both Personal and Mechanical.” Alachua - July 11, 1996 / (080)
[Text 4]:
[There were earthquakes along the mountains] on the earth and it appeared that there was fire everywhere. Many inauspicious planets like Saturn appeared, along with comets, meteors and thunderbolts.
Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:
When natural disturbances occur on a planet, one should understand that a demon must have taken birth there. In the present age the number of demoniac people is increasing; therefore, natural disturbances are also increasing. There is no doubt about this, as we can understand from the statements of the Bhāgavatam.
om ajñāna-timirāndhasya
jñānāñjana-śalākayā
cakṣur unmīlitaṁ yena
tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ
śrī-caitanya-mano-'bhīṣṭaṁ sthāpitaṁ yena bhū-tale
svayaṁ rūpaḥ kadā mahyaṁ dadāti sva-padāntikam
Translation:
There were earthquakes along the mountains on the earth and it appeared that there was fire everywhere. Many inauspicious planets like Saturn appeared along with comets, meteors and thunderbolts.
So, this is the section describing the birth of Hiraṇyākṣa and Hiraṇyakaśipu, and it's described in this verse that various natural phenomena occurred indicating that demonic persons were being born. This is another example in which you see that phenomena of nature are tied in some way with personality. So it's mentioned here that comets, meteors, and thunderbolts were appearing when the two demons took birth. Then further verses give a long list of different inauspicious natural phenomena.
In general, actually in human society, comets and meteors have been considered inauspicious. According to modern science, though, these are objects orbiting in outer space that just by chance happen to come into the area where they would be visible from the earth. The scientists say that there is a belt of comets surrounding the solar system out beyond the orbit of Pluto. And they maintain that periodically, due to gravitational disturbances caused by the outer planets such as Jupiter, a comet will be dislodged from this belt and it will move in towards the sun. And as it approaches the sun, it will heat up and admit gas, which spreads out in space and is glowing in the light of the sun. So, that's what you see as a comet. That's the general explanation.
And then meteors are said to be rocks that are out there in space, orbiting along certain orbits. So, when the earth gets in the way of the orbit of such a rock, it will come down into the atmosphere and burn up due to the heat created as it hits the air. And so you see a flash of light, which is called a meteor. So, supposedly these phenomena have nothing to do with what is going on, on the earth. In particular, they should have nothing to do with whether or not demonic humans are being born. These would be two categories of phenomena that have no relation to one another according to the scientific point of view. But it is maintained in the Bhāgavatam that when demonic persons are born you have these inauspicious phenomena. At the same time, for example, when saintly persons are born, you would have other phenomena that would be considered to be auspicious.
[4:47]
So, what you see is a correlation between a phenomena of nature and the different personalities taking birth on the earth. So this requires some kind of higher order within the universe beyond the laws of nature as the scientists understand them. Basically, the scientific concept of the laws of nature has a number of key features. One of these is what they call locality, namely, the cause and effect will take place only within a very small region of space. So the sum total of the events that occur in nature according to the laws of physics would simply be due to the sum total of little chains of cause and effect that occur within localized regions of space.
The idea, for example, is if you have two atoms that are close to each other, one atom will influence the atom right next to it, but it won't have an influence directly on something at a great distance. The influence is just localized. So, another feature would be that these localized influences basically follow very simple rules. For example, you can consider one thing pushing against another; that's a very simple operation. So, the sum total of what happens then in the universe is simply due to all these little simple local operations adding up. That would be the scientific picture. And that would be the reason that the scientists would deny that you could have these correlations, for example, the ones described here.
In order to have these kinds of correlations between different phenomena in the universe, you would need actions that are first of all on a very large scale. For example, they would involve something happening on the earth and something happening in outer space. So, it would be on a large scale. And instead of simple interactions, you require some kind of intelligence. But this goes against the standard conception that is pursued by the scientists.
So in one sense, if you compare the worldviews of modern science and the Vedic literature, the basic difference is essentially this: that on the one hand, everything occurs according to simple, impersonal rules; and on the other hand, you have phenomena guided by higher intelligence on a broad scale. So, you have two different pictures of the universe. So, let's see. Well, I could go on a bit more on that topic. Yeah, you had something?
Question: [unclear]
Answer: Yeah. The idea of some higher intelligence guiding phenomena is very widespread in human society. In fact, you could say that most human societies throughout history have had this viewpoint in one form or another. And the modern society based on scientific ideas is basically an exception to that. So, science has basically obtained its successes by assuming that you can find these very simple laws within nature. Such laws are there, but they don't give you the entire picture of what is going on.
[9.59]
Even if you look in Vedic literature, you'll find a class of Sanskrit texts called Jyotiṣa Śāstras which enable you to calculate when astronomical phenomena will take place. So these phenomena are very much predictable and you can calculate in advance when they will occur based on certain formulas. So, the idea of phenomena that are predictable mathematically using formulas and calculations is also there in the Vedic literature; but at the same time, you have the concept of a higher personal control of the phenomena of nature.
These two ideas in one sense seem to be incompatible. And so if you try and put them together, you get into various controversial areas. Just to list a few of them, consider, well, at the smallest scale, there's the question of the relation between the mind and the body. So, if you look at the body, you can see that in many ways it's like a machine. For example, you'll see that there are different kinds of levers in the arms and legs and so forth. So, the body acts like a machine.
And in fact, in Vedic literature, you find the body described as a machine: yantrārūḍhāni māyayā. So, that aspect is there. At the same time, you have the idea of free will. The spirit soul can act according to its desire. And that's accompanied then by the concept of responsibility. If there was no question of free will then what would be the meaning of assigning responsibility to individuals. There's no point in saying do this or don't do that if in fact what is going to be done is just the automatic outcome of a series of causes and effects which are determined by some simple, natural laws.
So, you have then a dichotomy between the personal element, which can act according to free will, and the machinery which is acting by cause and effect according to some simple rules. So, that's on the level of ordinary individual life. If you look at the level of the universe, you have the whole question of astrology, for example. Actually, these inauspicious symptoms and so forth are in a way related to the patterns of cause and effect described in astrology, where movements of heavenly bodies have some meaning that applies to life on the earth.
But, the key feature of astrology is that it is based on the movements of the planets, which are predictable. And yet it says something about what is going to happen, to personal experience on the earth. Also, another factor is that in astrology the influences of the planets are attributed to demigods and yet the motions of the planets are predictable. So, you have the same dichotomy. The demigod is exerting some influence, but you can calculate what influences will be exerted on the basis of some formula.
Actually, you can even generalize that further. Even if you look at Kṛṣṇa's pastimes, you'll see that they repeat according to cycles. So, it would appear, then, that of course Kṛṣṇa is supremely free in what He is doing, but He does the same thing repeatedly in a cyclical fashion within different universes. So there again, you see the same pattern. So, you can say then: What is the relation between the things that occur according to regular laws and things that occur according to the direction of personality? And basically what ultimately would be the answer of the relation between these two things is that the patterns shown by the laws are not final or complete. So, they can always be modified by personality. So that, of course, leads to controversial issues as far as science is concerned, because the scientists will try and say that these things are complete. So…
[15:37]
Q: [unclear]
A: Well, the historical change really occurred, let's say, in the 17th century. In the beginning of the 17th century, you would find scientists adopting the viewpoint that geometry or mathematics is the language of God. These scientists were all theistic. They believed in God. Mostly they were Christians, of course. But they were thinking that God's thoughts are expressed in terms of mathematics and geometry.
At the same time in Europe, perhaps for other reasons, machinery was becoming very popular. Clocks became very popular. And it was interesting, early clocks were made as models of the world. This is still shown by the old fashioned cuckoo clocks in which on the hour, a little bird comes out and chirps or something like that, or two little men come out and go around in a circle and so on. But that's more than just a toy because it implies an underlying idea that the whole world is just clockwork. And, this idea became very popular. Now in other parts of the world, people also made clockwork and automata.
In fact, I have some Sanskrit texts from India from the Middle Ages that describe all kinds of robots. Apparently these were used in the palaces of kings. For example, they'd have a robot door opener. As you walk towards the door, you see a guard standing by the door, and as you approached the door, the guard reaches over and opens the door for you. But the guard is a robot. And the way it worked is, as you walk towards the door, your weight pushes down a stone slab and opens a valve. And they have a tank of water up on the roof. So, the valve opens, the water comes down through this figure that is standing there, and powers different levers and mechanisms, which causes the thing to reach over and open the door. So, they actually had things like this.
The article that I read about this, though, was kind of interesting. A fellow named Raghavan was writing the article. And he lamented that in India, the only result of these developments was that these automata were taken as illustrations of the relation between the soul and the body. In other words, your body is compared to an automaton, which is different from the soul. So he lamented: “Well, that's the only thing that came of this in India. But in other parts of the world, you have the entire industrial revolution,” and so forth. So “alas, if only they could have done that in India.” Well, they're catching up now.
But, in any case, in Europe, you had the combination of these two ideas, the machines and clocks were becoming popular. The idea was there that God is a mathematician. So, then you come to Newton. So Newton developed a very successful set of mathematical laws to describe natural phenomena. These work very well, but Newton himself was still a theist. In fact, Newton is something of an embarrassment to scientists because not only was he theistic, he wrote many different books on theology, which apparently are still in his handwritten manuscript form. Nobody ever printed them. But they still exist from what I understand.
[20:24]
He also spent about 30 years doing alchemy. And if you study alchemy, you'll see it's a very strange system of thought. On the one hand, it's chemistry, but on the other hand, it's full of all these ideas about personality and so forth. So it more or less reflects the same dichotomy that you've got personality and you've got physical processes. But in any case, Newton's system was taken over as an absolute mathematical system that will describe what is going to happen in nature. Newton himself thought that God would have to intervene from time to time to change things that were moving according to the equations that he had given. In other words, he didn't think that these equations were absolute. In particular, he thought that the planetary orbits would get out of alignment if they just moved according to these equations. And so God would have to intervene to adjust things.
But other people, notably Leibniz, the Dutch philosopher, argued that God would never intervene, that God simply set up the rules and everything was simply running according to those rules. So this idea became very popular. And after some period of time, people realized that: Well, it actually makes God unnecessary altogether. And so, God became more and more remote and was finally dropped out of the picture.
The final step, of course, was Darwin's theory. Because Darwin's theory provided an explanation of how, simply by natural mechanisms, you could have the origin of living species. Before that people were thinking that some kind of creator was necessary. But once Darwin eliminated the need for the creator, the idea of a totally mechanical world became very prominent. Yeah.
Q: [unclear]
A: Yeah. One would think. Some studies have been made, but to my knowledge, the results are ambiguous because in some cases you'll find claims that astrology was verified by different studies. In other cases, you'll find the claim is made that it was not in fact verified. And in other cases, it will be said that they found some kind of correlation that was like astrology, but it was different from anything you find in the astrology books. So, it's still a rather murky situation then. It's hard to say just what the real story is there. Of course, then you have two systems of astrology also with different assignments of the signs of the Zodiac, namely the Western and the Indian system. So that leads to a question that would have to be resolved. Yeah.
Q: [unclear]
[25:05]
A: You know, I'm not aware of anything in Vedic literature corresponding to the kind of apocalyptic prophecies that are very popular at the present time. Of course everyone has heard about all these prophecies of disaster and so forth. But I'm not aware of anything in Vedic literature indicating that. Let's see.
Of course, Śrīla Prabhupāda made some predictions of war and predictions that everyone is going to be living underground at a certain point, which you can find in folio. As far as predictions of enormous earthquakes that will cause California to sink in the ocean and things like that, as far as I'm aware, he didn't support those kinds of ideas. But of course a nice nuclear holocaust would be disaster enough – we have something like that. But that's as much as I know about that. Yeah.
Q: [unclear]
A: What you're referring to there was, I think, the dating of Tiahuanaco based on the alignments with the different positions of the sun at the equinoxes. The idea is there's something called procession of the equinox. So there's... and also what is called the obliquity of the ecliptic. It's the angle between the earth's orbit and the equator that shifts with time. Now these calculations are done on the basis of Newtonian mathematics. They use something called perturbation theory. So on this basis, calculations are made as to how the planets and so on would have been moving thousands of years ago.
So, what this guy was saying was: Well, the buildings line up nicely with planetary and solar positions that would correspond to a period of time about 15,000 years ago. So he argued: Well, therefore the buildings must've been built about 15,000 years ago. That's the argument. This kind of thing has been argued in many other cases also. Yeah.
Q: [unclear]
A: Yeah. The topic here is this. I'll say briefly what procession of the equinoxes is. The modern point of view, you have the earth spinning like a top. So you know, if you spin a top, the axis of spin will shift around like this. Well, supposedly that's happening with the axis of the earth also. So, as the spin axis of the earth shifts around that changes what you see in the sky in various ways. So that's procession. Now, according to the scientific picture, this change is continuous. It moves at a steady rate of one degree in about 72 years, and it takes about 25,000 something years for it to go all the way around.
[30:21]
Now, the Sūrya-siddhānta also describes this, but it doesn't say that it goes around in a complete circle, at a steady pace. According to the Sūrya-siddhānta, you have the shifting of the equinoxes up to a certain point, then it stops and goes backwards and it goes the other way up to a certain point. Then again, it stops and goes back. So this is called trepidation of the equinox.
Now, the thing is that if you look at the entire span of recorded history that we know, it lies within one of those periods of steady motion. So, within recorded history, we don't have an example of a time period in which the sudden change is supposed to occur. Now, normally in astronomy, things move in a steady and smooth way. But what the Sūrya-siddhānta says is when the equinox reverses its motion, it's sudden. It just goes z-zo-op, which is a bit unusual astronomically. Now the question is, is this going to happen? But you say 24 degrees according to Parashara?
Q: [unclear]
A: Well, there's a problem with the pole star anyway because even if you consider the last 5,000 years, during most of that time, according to the idea of procession of the equinoxes there hasn't been a pole star. For example, the spin axis is now pointing very close to the star called Polaris. And if you go back to about 2,500 BC or thereabouts, then the spin axis would be pointing at the star called Alpha Draconis. But in between, there's a huge gap sometime, a couple of centuries before the birth of Christ, the spin axis would be between two stars. So, you could say that you had pole stars at that time. Yeah. On the other side, there's nothing until you get to Vega, which would be around 13,000 years from now or something like that. So, that's the mystery of the pole star.
Q: [unclear]
A: Oh, shifting... Yes. The shifting of the magnetic field. That's another question. Well, it would be interesting to see what happens as far as the procession goes.
Q: [unclear]
A: Excuse me.
Q: [unclear]
A: Well, the trepidation of the equinoxes makes no sense at all from the Newtonian point of view. In other words, as far as Newton goes, that won't happen. And it just makes no sense in Newtonian terms. It's like saying you have a big truck, it's barreling down the road at 60 miles an hour going west and within a second it's going 60 miles an hour in reverse. So...
Q: [unclear]
A: Pardon me. Well, yes. Yes, that's been reported. So if that happens, it will mark a considerable revolution in astronomical thought. The pole star, though, is a mysterious thing. Of course the Bhāgavatam refers to the Pole star as Dhruva, which means fixed, but then Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura spoke of the polar star being displaced. So, I've never found a further indication though of what he meant by that. But he has a reference in a brief pamphlet that he put out in which he's describing the temporary nature of material things. And he referred to the ocean being dried up. Of course, we know about that from the Bhāgavatam. But also the polar star being displaced and the cords that bind the planets being broken. So, interesting to know more about what that referred to. So, all glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.