'The Original Source" (SB 10.2.27)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad Bhagavatam, Canto 10, Chapter 2, Text 27. “The Original Source.” San Diego – February 5, 1986 / (114)

[0:00 – 2:34: repeating word-for-word]

Translation: 

The body [the total body and the individual body are of the same composition] may figuratively be called “the original tree.” From this tree, which fully depends on the ground of material nature, comes two kinds of fruit – the enjoyment of happiness and the suffering of distress. The cause of the tree, forming its three roots, is association with the three modes of material nature – goodness, passion and ignorance. The fruits of bodily happiness have four tastes – religiosity, economic development, sense gratification and liberation – which are experienced through five senses for acquiring knowledge in the midst of six circumstances: lamentation, illusion, old age, death, hunger and thirst. The seven layers of bark covering the tree are skin, blood, muscle, fat, bone, marrow and semen, and the eight branches of the tree are the five gross and three subtle elements – earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego. The tree of the body has nine hollows – the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth, the rectum and the genitals, and ten leaves – the ten airs passing through the body. In this tree of the body there are two birds: one is the individual soul and the other is the Supersoul. 

Well, I will go back and pick up where we left off. That was the top of 158?

Audience:  First paragraph on page 158.

[4:23]

The first paragraph beginning on 158. Okay, let's just see what this says. 

Lord Brahmā and Lord Śiva, accompanied by great sages like Nārada and followed by many other demigods, had now invisibly appeared in the house of Kaṁsa. They began to pray for the Supreme Personality of Godhead in select prayers which are very pleasing to the devotees and which award fulfillment of devotional desires. The first words they spoke acclaimed that the Lord is true to His vow. As stated in the Bhagavad-gītā, Kṛṣṇa descends upon this material world just to protect the pious and destroy the impious. That is His vow. The demigods could understand that the Lord had taken His residence within the womb of Devakī to fulfill this vow. They were very glad that the Lord was appearing to fulfill His mission, and they addressed Him as satyaṁ param, or the Supreme Absolute Truth.

Everyone is searching after the truth. That is the philosophical way of life. The demigods give information that the Supreme Absolute Truth is Kṛṣṇa. One who becomes fully Kṛṣṇa conscious can attain the Absolute Truth. Kṛṣṇa is the Absolute Truth. Relative truth is not truth in all the three phases of eternal time. Time is divided into past, present and future. Kṛṣṇa is Truth always, past, present and future. In the material world, everything is being controlled by supreme time, in the course of past, present and future. But before the creation, Kṛṣṇa was existing, and when there is creation, everything is resting in Kṛṣṇa, and when this creation is finished, Kṛṣṇa will remain. Therefore, He is Absolute Truth in all circumstances. If there is any truth within this material world, it emanates from the Supreme Truth, Kṛṣṇa. If there is any opulence within this material world, the cause of the opulence is Kṛṣṇa. If there is any reputation within this material world, the cause of the reputation is Kṛṣṇa. If there is any strength within this material world, the cause of such strength is Kṛṣṇa. If there is any wisdom and education within this material world, the cause of such wisdom and education is Kṛṣṇa. Therefore Kṛṣṇa is the source of all relative truths.

Devotees, therefore, following in the footsteps of Lord Brahmā, pray, govindam ādi-puruṣaṁ tam ahaṁ bhajāmi, worshiping the ādi-puruṣa, the supreme truth, Govinda. Everything, everywhere, is performed in terms of three principles, jñāna-bala-kriyā — knowledge, strength and activity. In every field, if there is not full knowledge, full strength and full activity, an endeavor is never successful. Therefore, if one wants success in everything, one must be backed by these three principles. In the Vedas (Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 6.8) there is this statement about the Supreme Personality of Godhead:

na tasya kāryaṁ karaṇaṁ ca vidyate

na tat samaś cābhyadhikaś ca dṛśyate

parāsya śaktir vividhaiva śrūyate

svābhāvikī jñāna-bala-kriyā ca

The Supreme Personality of Godhead does not need to do anything personally, for He has such potencies that anything He wants done will be done perfectly well through the control of material nature (svābhāvikī jñāna-bala-kriyā ca). Similarly, those who are engaged in the service of the Lord are not meant to struggle for existence. The devotees who are fully engaged in spreading the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement, more than ten thousand men and women all over the world, have no steady or permanent occupation, yet we actually see that they are maintained very opulently. The Lord says in Bhagavad-gītā (9.22): 

ananyāś cintayanto māṁ

ye janāḥ paryupāsate

teṣāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ

yoga-kṣemaṁ vahāmy aham

“For those who worship Me with devotion, meditating on My transcendental form, I carry to them what they lack and preserve what they have.” The devotees have no anxiety over what will happen next, where they will stay or what they will eat, for everything is maintained and supplied by the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who has promised, kaunteya pratijānīhi na me bhaktaḥ praṇaśyati: “O son of Kuntī, declare it boldly that My devotee never perishes.” (Bg. 9.31) From all angles of vision, therefore, in all circumstances, if one fully surrenders unto the Supreme Personality of Godhead, there is no question of one’s struggling for existence. In this connection, the commentary by Śrīpāda Madhvācārya, who quotes from the Tantra-bhāgavata, is very meaningful:

sac-chadba uttamaṁ brūyād

ānandantīti vai vadet

yetijñānaṁ samuddiṣṭaṁ

pūrṇānanda-dṛśis tataḥ

attṛtvāc ca tadā dānāt

satyāttya cocyate vibhuḥ

Explaining the words satyasya yonim, Śrīla Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura says that Kṛṣṇa is the avatārī, the origin of all incarnations. All incarnations are the Absolute Truth, yet the Supreme Personality of Godhead Kṛṣṇa is the origin of all incarnations. Dīpārcir eva hi daśāntaram abhyupetya dīpāyate (Brahma-saṁhitā 5.46). There may be many lamps, all equal in power, yet there is a first lamp, a second lamp, a third lamp and so on. Similarly, there are many incarnations, who are compared to lamps, but the first lamp, the original Personality of Godhead, is Kṛṣṇa. Govindam ādi-puruṣaṁ tam ahaṁ bhajāmi.

The demigods must offer worship in obedience to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, but one might argue that since the Supreme Godhead was within the womb of Devakī, He was also coming in a material body. Why then should He be worshiped? Why should one make a distinction between an ordinary living entity and the Supreme Personality of Godhead? These questions are answered in the following verses.

[11:25] 

Well, there's quite a bit of material here. We haven't yet gotten to the rather long purport of today’s verse. So, I’ll make a few comments here. Śrīla Prabhupāda begins by describing how Kṛṣṇa is the source of everything. And of course, nowadays the argument is often being made that matter is the source of everything.

In fact, I just happened to glance at Carl Sagan's book, Cosmos. In that book, he was saying that some people will argue that the various things within this world are produced by God. So, according to that argument, we have matter manifesting different things but the cause behind that is God. So he said: Well, why not save a step and just say that the cause of all these things is simply matter? Wouldn't that make things simpler? So, in fact, he wanted to argue that if you ask people where this God comes from, they'll say that God is eternal. But why not save a step and just posit that matter is eternal? Doesn't that make it simpler? And so on. So he's arguing like that. 

So, indeed, why should one not try to save a step in that way? Well, one point that can be made is that we see that matter does not have the property of maintaining various forms and manifestations eternally by its own power. So one can look at the nature of matter and see what it's like. Essentially matter… well, you can use clay, which of course is a kind of matter, to illustrate what matter is like. If you take a lump of clay, you can mold that to form a statue. And that statue may have various aesthetic qualities once you've created the statue. It may have certain proportions. Certainly, one can apply aesthetic standards to statues. One statue may be very excellently made, such as Michelangelo's David or something like that. Another may be a very crude stick figure and so on. So once the clay has been molded into the statue, suddenly one can begin talking about aesthetic characteristics and so on. 

But the clay by itself does not have any qualities or properties of this kind. It's merely a sort of shapeless substance as far as its own nature is concerned. So the clay by itself would not tend to form a statue. If you left it to itself it would just sit there in the form of a shapeless lump. And in the course of time some changes might occur, but you'd never find something highly organized like a statue just emerging from the clay. And then, of course, another feature of the clay is that if you do form it into a statue and then leave it, then in due course of time the statue will be seen to disintegrate. If you just let it sit around, after some period of time it will gradually lose its form. First, it will become a little bit more rough and crude than it was at its highest point and then gradually it will disintegrate, and you'll just have a shapeless lump of clay again. So this is the nature of matter.

[15:57] 

So if one simply had matter moving according to the particular laws that govern it, then one would not expect to find anything but shapeless lumps existing in reality. So the scientists tend to put great emphasis on the laws of nature. So in the case of this clay, we can see what the laws of nature correspond to, because certainly clay has certain properties. It has a certain consistency. It resists being squeezed and extruded and so on to a certain degree, and you can define all these principles in very exact terms. So those are the laws of the clay, you might say. So given that the clay obeys certain laws, it's possible to mold it into statues and so forth, but it won't tend to form statues by itself.

So you can generalize that to the material energy as a whole. So, there are certain laws governing matter, but these laws will not by their own nature or their own potency tend to produce anything highly organized. So of course, this could be a subject of controversy. The whole idea of the theory of evolution is that these laws will produce something organized, and one can discuss that. But the basic principle should be fairly clear that the laws governing matter that you can readily perceive do not tend to produce high organization. In fact, they don't tend to produce any kind of organization at all other than something quite simple.

For example, if you have a big lump of clay and you just sit it on the earth, then gradually it will flatten out as a result of gravity. So, something will happen but it won't be really remarkable, just a gradual flattening out. And if you take liquids such as water… well, the liquid will tend to flow down into a low area and form a horizontal surface. And if there's air blowing across it that will tend to form waves of a certain shape, and you can see these waves. They always seem to have the same shape, and this is due to the basic laws governing water. But you'll never see this water and clay and other substances come together and form a fish for example, or at least normally we don't expect to see that, or in fact, any kind of organism. 

So, Śrīla Prabhupāda here is saying now that Kṛṣṇa is the source of all these various opulences within the material world, and Śrīla Prabhupāda lists a number of different sorts of opulences. Of course there's opulence in general then he mentions strength, reputation, knowledge, wisdom, and so on. So these properties are all characteristics of personality, and we see personalities manifested in the material world in the form of bodies of different kinds. And these bodies engage in various complex activities. And once the body is there, and it's engaging in complex behavior, then it becomes reasonable to speak of such things as strength or wisdom or beauty or knowledge and so on. Now these are not words you would normally use in reference to say, clay. You wouldn't… well, you could speak of the strength of the piece of clay, I suppose. At least a certain kind of strength – the loading strength – that is how much weight you could put on it before it gave way or something like that. But as far as reputation or wisdom, you wouldn't attribute that to a lump of clay normally. 

[20:21]

So it seems that somehow this matter gets arranged into these complex forms that we call living bodies, and then there are very complex patterns of behavior exhibited, which can be referred to by words such as wisdom or also beauty and so forth. So how has this come about? So Śrīla Prabhupāda is saying the ultimate source is Kṛṣṇa. From the point of view of just logic, what he's saying is that there's an original entity or reality which has all these opulences by its own nature. And these are specifically opulences of personality. That is, we associate these things with persons.

So, what's being said then is that there's an original entity which has personality. So we claim that the Absolute Truth is an eternally existing person, and to some this may seem to be somewhat arbitrary. Someone could say: Well, why do you say that the Absolute Truth is a person? Isn't this just anthropomorphism? Isn't it that you're just saying that: Well, we're persons, so we're used to the idea of persons – it's sort of a comfortable notion that we’ve become accustomed to. So, being exceedingly naive, we say well the whole universe must be coming from a person. This is the argument of anthropomorphism. And someone could say: Well, you're just generalizing from your immediate experience. You see persons so you say: Well, everything must be due to a person. And so a primitive individual, when he sees something remarkable in nature, he's likely to immediately personify that and think that some person is causing it. And so the savage, when he sees lightning, thinks, "Ah, the lightning god must be producing that." And when he sees a big mountain, he thinks, "Ah, the mountain god must be there" and so forth. Well, this is the argument that is made to deride the idea that there must be a person behind everything. And in fact, this kind of cynicism goes way back. There was a Greek philosopher, I forget his name. 

Audience:  [unclear]

Which one? 

Audience:  Xenophanes.

Xenophanes? Yes, it could have been.

Audience:  [unclear]

But, pardon me. 

Audience:  [unclear]

Well this particular philosopher… Acharyadev’s tape? Oh yeah, well, he would have him down. This particular philosopher said that: Well, if a race of donkeys had, you know, sufficient intelligence to be able to speak and to invent religion, then they would imagine that God was a donkey. And they would speak of the adi-donkey and so forth. And if a race of pelicans invented religion, well they would imagine that God looked like a pelican. So, this is just a very naive generalization from one's immediate experience, they would say. 

Well, in response to that, the point can be made, though, that, as I was saying, matter does not tend to manifest anything like personality. So, where does personality come from anyway? You can't save a step, as Carl Sagan would suggest, and say that it must be eternally existing in matter, because we see that matter would not tend to form persons and personal traits and so on. I won't go into the whole discussion of the evolution theory, but to say that this comes about by mutations and survival of the fittest also is not much of an explanation. It certainly doesn't account for why you have such a thing as personality, why wisdom should develop, and so forth. 

[24:55]

Even if you have living organisms, you could argue on the basis of mutation and natural selection that they should all become very much like turtles, because it's easy to argue that way. You can say that turtles are very low slung and close to the ground, so they're not likely to suffer damage by falling over. And they move very slowly so they don't need to eat very much. They have a very tough shell and so on. So you can argue that this is very good for survival. So organisms should develop as turtles. And in fact, turtles should develop which have sort of suction feet which enable them to hold on to the ground with great strength. And they should tend to live in rocky areas where there's a lot of solid rock to grip onto, and thus if something comes after them they can just hold on to their very tough shell and avoid any kind of injury. And in fact, you can argue that this would be the best form of life actually, according to natural selection and mutation. So, one can give great arguments for that and conclude on this basis that really that's how life would evolve.

Audience:  And not even move, it's just like a giant abalone so to speak, very slowly. 

Well yes, they could move very slowly. You know maybe an inch a day or something like that. Why move quickly? 

Audience:  Why take a risk?

Yeah. I mean, why waste the energy? 

Audience:  [unclear] Are you going to tell us why that's not a fact?

Well I'm going to suggest why. You see--

Audience:  [unclear]

Well, the nature of this natural selection theory is that you can make arguments for all kinds of amazing things. In fact, you can pick any life form you like. Just imagine something and then you can… if you think about it long enough, you can make a pretty good argument for why that should be the basic life form. So I'm arguing for the very slow turtle-like organism with the thick shell. One could argue for other things. I once came up with an interesting argument for the organisms equipped with radio – biological radio would be very useful. You can send signals back and forth, you know, communicate. The males and females could find each other by sending radio messages.

Audience:  [unclear]]

Yeah. You can immediately see how... well, I won't go into the details. But anyway, to go back to the original point… so the question is: What is the origin of all these different opulences of personality, which, it can be argued, are completely unnecessary from a biological point of view? Why should there be musical ability for example? It's completely superfluous from the point of view of survival. Of course, once musical ability is there, some people can make money by being rock musicians and so forth. But if the whole thing just didn't exist then what would be the need for it anyway? One could survive perfectly well without it, and how would musical ability help some primitive nomadic hunters throw spears into bison, or something like that?

In fact, our ability to throw things is not that great if you think about it. I mean we should all be equipped with the ability to take a stone and throw it with incredible accuracy and knock the eye out of a dog at 50 paces or something like that. Why don't we have that ability? It would be great for getting your food by the primitive method. You have a…

Audience:  Our arms should be longer for better leverage too.

Oh yeah. One can think of many improvements from the point of view of basic survival. So, this musical ability, though, seems superfluous. What to speak of the ability to come up with arguments like this, because how does that really relate to survival in nature? You know, if your business is to stop a bison in its tracks and then eat it, then what is the ability to engage in philosophical arguments good for? In fact, even today people will ask the same question. You know, what does this have to do with making money and doing practical things in life? All this philosophizing. So, it's reasonable then to propose that there's some original source of all these things. 

[30:17] 

[break in audio]... that might be a lot more efficient. Especially when you consider all the emotional problems people get tangled up in. If they had some simple feedback system this might be much more adequate for the purpose of getting food into the body and so on. So one can say that there is no basis for, you know, positing the origin of these things just by the interaction of matter. So Śrīla Prabhupāda is asserting here what is, of course, the Vedic conclusion, namely that all of these things are the properties of an original personality and this original personality created temporary pseudo-personalities, you might say. This is where the term false ego comes in. These material manifestations of personality are essentially false. Of course, the innermost self is also a personality, but the idea is that the material body with all the associated apparatus forms a kind of false personality centered around what we call ahaṅkāra or false ego.

So of course, discussing why that is done is a very elaborate subject matter. But the first point is that we are dealing with a situation in which an imitation of personality is manifested using materials which by themselves lack the quality of personality and that's a very remarkable state of affairs if you think about it. And one might ask: Well, just why should that be? So, the first point is that there's an original personality from which it is all coming, and then today's verse begins a discussion of the nature of this false manifestation of personality. In fact, this verse is a kind of, what you might call, a subtle anatomy lesson, for it's describing both the gross and the subtle anatomy of these material bodies. And then the distinction is going to be made between these material forms and the original personality of Kṛṣṇa. So, what time is it now? 

Audience:  [unclear]

Well, I’d better stop. Well, question?

Question:  [unclear] 

Answer:  Well, yeah. The material energy, according to the Bhāgavatam, is eternally existing. Sometimes it's in the form called prādhana, in which nothing is manifest. No forms are created. So, everything is just what you'd expect matter to be like if there was no guiding agency behind it. Namely, there's just like a big blob, completely formless with no distinction between one thing and another. And then at other times, forms are manifested and this is through the agency of Mahā-Viṣṇu. And of course there's the whole elaborate discussion of how that comes about in different stages.

Q:  [unclear] in the sense that matter is eternal but then the question would be, how does matter manifest itself in so many different forms?

A:  Yeah, matter is eternal but material form is not eternal. And that takes you right back to the example of the clay. We may say we have some eternally existing clay. Sometimes it's formed into statues, and you have statues and so on. Other times the statues are destroyed, and it's reduced back just to shapeless clay and just left there as shapeless clay. Then once again statues are formed, and then once again they're destroyed, and you have shapeless clay. So that's the situation according to the Vedic literature. Yeah?

[35:16] 

Q:  I thought from the thing with the Big Bang Theory that the idea was, before the Big Bang there wasn't matter.

A:  Oh yeah. That's the Big Bang Theory.

Q:  So, what is their understanding now? That matter is eternal, or is there some conflict among the scientists?

A:  Well, there are different ideas. Scientists didn't really like the Big Bang Theory very much. They were initially quite solidly committed to the idea that matter is eternally existing, and they would still like to go back to that. In fact, probably the Big Bang Theory will be replaced by some theory in which you have some eternally existing something or other. The question is, what? The scientists these days enjoy playing very freely and loosely with fundamental concepts. So, now they would like to say that space and time itself may have emerged from literally nothing by a quantum vacuum fluctuation. But...

Q:  [unclear] Sounds like a plumbing part. What was it?

A:  Vacuum fluctuation. Well, the idea of a vacuum fluctuation is that you have literally nothing and it fluctuates. 

Q:  Between nothing and almost something. 

A:  Yes, from nothing to almost something, you have a fluctuation taking place. Now you might ask...Well they enjoy this kind of thing. It's very stimulating. Actually, one scientist once... yeah, this was an evolutionist, he said, “Evolutionary speculation is good clean fun.” He made that comment.

But even if you say there was literally nothing and it fluctuated, still your nothing becomes something; and in fact, it takes about three heavy textbooks worth of mathematics to describe that nothing. This is a point we made in the Origins magazine. In fact, you'll see there a diagram showing a little balloon coming out of this complicated machinery. And in case you wonder what that diagram is all about, what it represents... The machinery represents all the mathematics of their theory which explains how something comes out of nothing. And the fact is, to understand their theory you'd have to study mathematics, well, for years. And then the actual mathematics describing the theory itself, which uses a very compact notation… well, to properly describe that takes a big thick book. So if this is nothing, it's a pretty strange kind of nothing. So they're still saying that there's something out of which this fluctuation emerges. But anyway, well, we shouldn't eat up the japa period – too much here. Well, we'll stop there. All glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.