“Soul-Brain” (SB 3.31.45)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 31, Text 45-46. “Soul-Brain.” Alachua – 1998 / (041)

[Text 45-46]

When the eyes lose their power to see color or form due to morbid affliction of the optic nerve, the sense of sight becomes deadened. The living entity, who is the seer of both the eyes and the sight, loses his power of vision. In the same way, when the physical body, the place where perception of objects occurs, is rendered incapable of perceiving, that is known as death. When one begins to view the physical body as one’s very self, that is called birth.

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda: 

When one says, “I see,” this means that he sees with his eyes or with his spectacles; he sees with the instrument of sight. If the instrument of sight is broken or becomes diseased or incapable of acting, then he, as the seer, also ceases to act. Similarly, in this material body, at the present moment the living soul is acting, and when the material body, due to its incapability to function, ceases, he also ceases to perform his reactionary activities. When one’s instrument of action is broken and cannot function, that is called death. Again, when one gets a new instrument for action, that is called birth. This process of birth and death is going on at every moment, by constant bodily change. The final change is called death, and acceptance of a new body is called birth. That is the solution to the question of birth and death. Actually, the living entity has neither birth nor death, but is eternal. As confirmed in Bhagavad-gītā, na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre: the living entity never dies, even after the death or annihilation of this material body.

So this verse presents the definition of birth and death in reference to the soul, who is perceiving the body. So we have a fundamental mystery here. Śrīla Prabhupāda makes the comment that when one says “I see” this means that he sees with his eyes or with his spectacles. So the spectacles play a role. Clearly... let us say if you need glasses in order to see, which is beginning to happen in this case; and let's say the glasses are broken or misplaced, then because that apparatus is out of order you can't see, or you can't see as well. But clearly the spectacles are an intermediate agency involved with sight. For example, the spectacles take light that is coming in towards the person and refracts the light so that it will form a sharper image on the retina. So likewise the eye has its own lens which is focusing the image. Then there's the retina itself. What you have here is a series of stages in the transmission of information which results in visual perception. So Śrīla Prabhupāda refers to deadening of the optic nerve. So once you go past the retina the information concerning sight is transmitted along the optic nerve and from there it goes into the brain. 

But that's not the end of the process. In the brain this data goes through different stages, and I say data because at each stage the information involved with sight is taking on a different form. For example, initially it's in the form of light – waves of light – being refracted. Then in the retina, it's in the form of some kind of chemical state. There are different chemicals, such as rhodopsin and so on, which undergo reactions when light strikes them in the retina. Then in the optic nerve you have electrical impulses, or electrochemical. So an electrical impulse travels down the length of the optic nerve. So you work your way back into the brain. Now at any stage if you interfere with the way the apparatus works you break the chain, and so that interferes with vision. But the question is: what lies at the end of the chain? This is the really mysterious point, because if you trace this process back into the brain, you go through different parts of the brain. Scientists have traced this out to some degree, but that's it. So how does perception come about, and what is it about the brain that enables perception to occur? 

[5:12]

Now the standard viewpoint that the scientists take is that the story ends with the brain. Perception is entirely a function of the brain according to them, but this is a little bit hard to make sense of because how do you go from this data that we're talking about, this information, to conscious perception? The philosophers have a name for this problem. They call it “the problem of qualia.” What gives the quality, for example, of red light? Let's say you look at a sunset and you see red. Well, what is it that gives you that perception of red?  When light was coming into the eye, that was light of a certain wavelength. But that's not what's involved because you're definitely not responding to light of a certain wavelength inside the brain – there you've got nerve impulses. So what is it about nerve impulse that gives rise to the perception red? you could ask. Why should that happen? Why shouldn't a nerve impulse just be an impulse and that's it? Why should perception of redness come into the picture? 

And then you can see there's a further problem if you take sound. Let's say you're listening to some sound: so there sound waves impinge upon the ear and they cause vibration in a series of different mechanical devices – there's the tympanic membrane, and the three little bones that are connected together, and then a whole series of things. There's the basilar membrane; all these things are vibrating due to the sound, and then finally there are nerve endings that are stimulated, and nerve impulses going to the brain due to the stimulus provided by the sound. So in this case, you have nerve impulses once again. They're basically the same sort of nerve impulses that are involved with vision. But when these nerve impulses go to the brain you hear sound. Why is it that you hear sound instead of seeing something? For example, you can imagine a case where if you produce a sound the person will perceive redness. Let's see... or maybe when you look at the sunset with your eyes you hear b-flat. Why couldn't it be like that? So there's a mystery there of how qualities of perception come into being, and the scientists really have no answer for that. They'll just say: well somehow it happens in the brain. But they have no basis for explaining how it happens. 

So here in the Bhāgavatam, this verse is referring – of course indirectly, it doesn't directly mention the soul here, but it's referring – to the soul, and the idea is that consciousness occurs in the soul, when the information somehow reaches the soul. Of course this gives rise to another question: well, where does the information make the jump from the brain to the soul? For example, it doesn't do that in the retina of the eye because if that were so, then you could get rid of the optic nerve and the person should still be able to see. If the jump from the body to the soul occurs in the retina then the soul should be able to pick up the information from the retina and then you should be able to see simply based on the healthy functioning of the retina, even without the optic nerve. But it doesn't work that way. If you cut the optic nerve, even though the eye itself is still in perfectly good shape, you'll be blind. So likewise, even if the optic nerve also is in good shape, if you damage the back of the head, in what's called “the occipital region of the brain,” then again you become blind. So apparently something going on in the occipital part of the brain is necessary for the jump to take place from the brain to the soul. But nobody really knows how that works. You just know that somehow the soul links up with the brain in a particular way. 

[9:41] 

Of course this is an interesting point, also, because there are cases where the soul seems to link up with the brain in an unusual way. For example, some years ago there was a curious article in the journal called Science. The title of the article was “Is Your Brain Necessary?” and the subject had to do with a disease called hydrocephaly; this is called ‘’water on the brain.’’ What happens apparently is that in a young child, the mechanism adjusting the pressure of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain is damaged in some way, and so pressure builds up inside the head. And this damages the brain and typically this causes mental retardation, as you might expect. But there are cases where apparently it doesn't cause mental retardation. And apparently if retardation is there people, of course, will ask why; and maybe they'll discover that it's because of hydrocephaly, as the case may be. But if the person is perfectly normal, people may not notice that the person actually has hydrocephaly. 

Well, this Doctor Lorber at Sheffield University in England had occasion to do brain scans on some normal students at the University and he found that some of them had severe hydrocephaly. There was one student who was studying economics, he was in an honors program. He was a very bright student. He had an IQ, I guess, of about 126, but he had practically no brain. The cerebrum, which is supposedly the part of the brain that you think with, was just a thin film plastered against the inside of his skull. It was totally abnormal, but he was a bright student. So first of all, what was he thinking with, if thought requires the brain? And how was his visual perception system working, because all the normal apparatus was defective? Of course you can say he still had something there as a brain, but certainly it wasn't working the way a normal brain does because it was, first of all, greatly reduced in volume. So there's a great mystery as to how the transition occurs from perception, from physical phenomena – the dravya that are mentioned in the text here – to conscious perception. 

So of course, another aspect then of this is the whole question of identification. The spirit soul is identifying with the material body and accepting the material body as the self. This means that the soul is put in a state of ignorance because the soul actually is different from the material body. So by linking up with this physical apparatus, the soul is thinking, I am something which in fact is not the case. There's an interesting topic in relation to this, namely the multiple personality syndrome. There are cases where a person will exhibit different personalities, and this is considered generally to be a state of mental illness. In some cases, a person may exhibit maybe even 10 or 20 different personalities. The curious thing that happens is that when the person is manifesting one personality they won't consciously know necessarily about another personality. Actually, the way it works is that sometimes one personality knows about another personality, but that other personality may not know about the first personality. 

And so the question is: what is happening here and how does this work? Because first of all, one might ask: are different souls involved or is one soul involved here? But it could be one soul because in fact we know that a specific soul – every specific soul – is a victim of the multiple personality syndrome, at least if you go from one body to the next. Because when you die and then later you awaken to consciousness in a different body then you develop a whole new personality and a whole new set of identifications and you think that you're that body and you completely forget about the other one, at least in many cases. Of course there are also cases of people who remember previous lives, that's another whole topic. So one could ask in the case of the multiple personality syndrome, do you simply have a manifestation of identification with several different personalities in one body? 

[15:35] 

A curious phenomenon involved with this is that a particular personality will be associated with a particular brainwave pattern for the entire brain, because you might say: well, could it be that one personality is being executed, so to speak, by one part of the brain; and a different personality is being executed by a different part of the brain; and each personality has its own turf so to speak in the brain? That's one idea. But it appears that the entire brain changes its brainwave pattern when a different personality manifests. So perhaps the personality is being imposed on the entire brain from somewhere else and from that somewhere else different personalities are being switched on or switched off. So that's another aspect of the mystery of bodily identification – the multiple personality syndrome. 

So in this connection, I was just reading the other day about the story of Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das, who became Śyāmānanda and I know that is… of course, in the story, Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das finds this ankle ornament of Rādhārāṇī in Vṛindāvana... later Lalita Sundari, in the form of an old lady, comes to ask him to return it. And in the course of the events, he acquires a new name and tilak mark and his guru becomes angry at him because he thinks that this is some kind of improper behavior. So Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das, or Śyāmānanda, at a certain point goes into a state of meditation and enters into the spiritual world in order to ask the inhabitants there to help him out and explain things to his guru in a way that can be accepted. Well, the interesting thing there is that in the spiritual world it turns out that Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das was one of the gopis. And as a gopi in the spiritual world, he knew that in the material world he was living in life as this person Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das. But as Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das he didn't, at least in his normal state of consciousness, know that he was a gopi. So it seems you have a multiple-personality case there. So of course, that's a very special case. So anyway: the mystery of the identification of the soul with the body. 

So let's see, then of course there's the question of time. Śrīla Prabhupāda made an interesting point in the previous purport concerning the time period that the soul has been transmigrating through different bodies. Of course, as soon as you speak of the consciousness being due to something other than the brain, then the question is: Can the consciousness exist separately from the brain? And the idea is that the conscious self, the soul, transmigrates from one body to another and takes on different temporary identifications. So then the question is: How long has this been going on? So I noticed that in the previous purport, Śrīla Prabhupāda makes an interesting point; he says,

This process is going on perpetually, from a time which is impossible to trace out. Vaiṣṇava poets therefore say, anādi karama-phale, which means that these actions and reactions of one’s activity cannot be traced, for they may even continue from the last millennium of Brahmā’s birth to the next millennium. 

[20:04]

So he is taking the word anādi there to mean for a very long time. So that's one way to interpret a word such as ‘perpetually.’ Literally it means without any beginning, but Śrīla Prabhupāda is taking it to mean ‘for a long period of time.’ So this enables one to escape from one dilemma and it puts one in a different one. So if one says that anādi means literally without beginning, then that means the soul has been transmigrating from one material body to a next without any beginning, it's always been doing this, and it's never been doing anything else. And then that leads to the question: What could be the relation between that spirit soul and God if that soul simply has been eternally in a state of ignorance, transmigrating from one body to the next? It creates a philosophical dilemma. It would seem that the soul has to change its nature at the point when it becomes God conscious, because it's been eternally not God conscious. Now at a certain point it's supposed to become God conscious, so that would seem to involve a total change in character. But if anādi simply means for a very long time, you avoid that problem, because then the idea could be that the spirit soul was in the spiritual state of existence previously, and then for a very long time it has been transmigrating in various material bodies in the state of material consciousness. So in that case, it becomes reasonable to think that the spirit soul could switch back into the spiritual state of consciousness. Of course, that leads to the question of why the soul would go from the spiritual state to the material condition, which is a whole question that one can go into. But those questions come up in connection with the idea of time. 

Of course, another point to bring out is that eternality can also refer to a state which is beyond time. For example, the Brahma-saṁhitā has pointed out that in the spiritual world there is no time as we know it, with events that pass away and are lost – everything is eternally present. So there, in one sense, you have a timeless state but at the same time you have pastimes. So how could you have passing of time in a state which is timeless? Of course that's partly a play on the English word 'pastime' since the Sanskrit word is līlā, which is a different word. But the question there would come: How does it come about that one can enter from a timeless state, or a time in which things do not pass away, into a state in which time is passing? And if you do enter into it, at what time do you enter into that state, because you're going from timelessness to time at some particular time? For example, is the soul coming into the material world at exactly 4:30 Eastern Standard Time on March 10th of a certain year and so forth? So there are many questions. Ultimately there are many mysteries connected with the question of the relation between the conscious self and the material body. So anyway, I'll stop there. There’re some questions?

Question:  [unclear] 

Answer:  Yeah, the question is regarding that same book by Satyaraja, where the Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das story occurs. Another one of the ācāryas, now it may have been Narottama dāsa Ṭhākura, I'm not sure – maybe someone can remember. Anyway, he was meditating on preparing milk for Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in Vṛindāvana and very vividly visualizing this. And at a certain point the milk spilled and he wound up burning his finger in the meditation. And when he came out of the meditation, he found that his finger was actually burned. 

[25:06]

Of course there's a similar story about a brāhmaṇa who was very poor and was meditating on preparing sweet rice for Lord Viṣṇu, and he also burned his finger, I guess, testing the sweet rice. And then he came out of his meditation and the finger was burned. So what is happening there? Actually, in one sense this is not so surprising because the mind can have a direct effect on the body. This actually comes up, curiously enough, in the research on memories of previous lives done by this Ian Stevenson, because he has cases where a person died violently in the previous life. In fact, it turns out that a very large proportion of the people who remember a previous life died violently in that life. So the mode of death has something to do with remembering the previous life, it would appear. In any case, he has collected quite a large number of cases in which the person dies from a particular wound – let's say a gunshot wound to a certain part of the body – then in the next life there is a birthmark corresponding to that wound. 

So for example, there was one fellow who remembered a past life; this was a young child. He remembered a past life as a dacoit in New Delhi. So he was a regular mafiosi type of person. And as is traditional, he died by being shot. This is traditional for mafiosi types. So the bullet entered the side of the head at one side and escaped from the other side. So the entry wound was very small, and the exit wound was quite large, as tends to happen. So the young boy had a very small well-defined birthmark here and a large sort of irregular one on this side. Now it's demonstrated that hypnosis can do this in the course of one's ordinary life. It is possible to hypnotize a person and suggest to them that they've been burned in a certain part of their body. For example, you may touch them with your finger and say, “I'm touching you with a red-hot metal block, you'll be burned.” Then a burn forms in that part of the body even though there was actually no hot object at all. So mind over... you have the effect of mind over matter.

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, where is it? The question is – well I said nobody – the comment I made was that nobody knows how the transition occurs from the physical body and the brain to the conscious self. And how that actually works, I haven't seen any description in the Bhāgavatam; we're merely told that it does. There are a lot of things that are not explained, after all. And there's probably a limitation to our ability to comprehend the explanations. In any case, I'll just note that it is said that in the higher planets, the Bhāgavatam has many more verses. Huge numbers of verses are cited for the Bhāgavatam in the heavenly planets, so perhaps it's explained in the larger version. We have an abridged edition.

[30:06]

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Yeah. Well in that one, that was in the verse describing the functions of ether. And Śrīla Prabhupāda described that forms are generated in the ether by the mind. And then he compared that to transmission of forms through the ether by a television transmission, and he said there's a possibility here for great scientific research work. Well there again, although the statement is made that the mind generates forms in the ether, we don’t really know how that works... There's unlimited knowledge to be learned as far as that goes. Yeah?

Q:  [unclear]

A:  You’re asking if the jiva can occupy many bodies at once? 

Q:  “Yeah.” 

A:  Well let's see. In the Gaura-gaṇoddeśa-dīpikā a number of things like that are described. So I do believe you have some cases there where one soul was occupying different bodies, so apparently such things are possible. And if it is possible for one soul to exhibit different personalities in one body, then why couldn't one soul occupy different bodies? The question is what is the ultimate carrying capacity of the soul? It's just like if you have a TV set and you can get several different channels. How much can a soul handle? Of course, that example of Dukhi Kṛṣṇa das that I just mentioned also illustrates this. If he was in the spiritual world as a gopi and in this world as a human being at the same time, there you have one soul doing different things at one time. So it would appear that such things are possible. 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  No, I didn’t say that.

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, you see the thing is, if you take a camera, take a photograph – nobody sees anything there until somebody looks at the photograph. So if the brain is acting like a camera and producing some kind of image, that still doesn't explain who sees the image. Somebody has to look at it. The scientists are aware of this point. And those who dislike this idea, they speak contemptuously of the “little man in the brain'' because the idea is you have to postulate a “little man in the brain” just to see what the brain is projecting, and that begs the question. In fact, you do have to have a little man in the brain, except of course, it's not a little man, obviously. So the scientists cannot explain how perception occurs, nor do we understand how the soul links up with the brain. But we understand that the soul is there and by the soul's action, conscious perception occurs of the different events produced within the brain.