"Vedic Creative Process" (SB 10.2.41)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad Bhagavatam, Canto 10, Chapter 2, Text 41. “Vedic Creative Process.” San Diego – March  2, 1986 / (114)

[Text 41]:

O mother Devakī, by your good fortune and ours, the Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself with all His plenary portions, such as Baladeva, is now within your womb. Therefore you need not fear Kaṁsa, who has decided to be killed by the Lord. Your eternal son, Kṛṣṇa, will be the protector of the entire Yadu dynasty. 

O mother Devakī…

Audience:   O mother Devakī… 

…by your good fortune and ours… 

Audience:  by your good fortune and ours… 

…the Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself… 

Audience:  the Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself… 

…with all his plenary portions, such as Baladeva...

Audience: with all his plenary portions, such as Baladeva… 

…is now within your womb.

Audience:  is now within your womb.

Therefore you need not fear Kaṁsa.. 

Audience:  Therefore you need not fear Kaṁsa…

 …who has decided to be killed by the Lord. 

Audience:  who has decided to be killed by the Lord. 

Your eternal son, Kṛṣṇa…

Audience:  Your eternal son, Kṛṣṇa…

...will be the protector of the entire Yadu dynasty. 

Audience:  will be the protector of the entire Yadu dynasty. 

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda: 

The words paraḥ pumān aṁśena signify that Kṛṣṇa is the original Supreme Personality of Godhead. This is the verdict of the śāstra (kṛṣṇas tu bhagavān svayam). Thus the demigods assured Devaki, "Your son is the Supreme Personality of Godhead and He is appearing with Baladeva, His plenary portion. He will give you all protection and kill Kaṁsa, who has decided to continue his enmity toward the Lord and thus, be killed by Him." 

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: 

O mother Devakī, by your good fortune and ours, the Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself with all His plenary portions, such as Baladeva, is now within your womb. Therefore you need not fear Kaṁsa, who has decided to be killed by the Lord. Your eternal son, Kṛṣṇa, will be the protector of the entire Yadu dynasty.

Actually, this is the last verse in the series of prayers which are offered by the demigods to Lord Kṛṣṇa who was in the womb of Devakī. So, these prayers are being offered by the demigods such as Lord Brahmā and Lord Śiva. They appeared in the prison chamber along with Devakī and Vasudeva to offer these prayers. And similarly, demigods appeared at the time of the advent of Lord Caitanya and offered various prayers which were heard by Jagannātha Miśra and his wife Śacī-mātā. 

So, I was talking to a fellow about that just the other day and also the question came up of the role of the brahmajyoti in the process of creation. So, actually, it's described in the Brahma-saṁhitā, that the brahmajyoti or Brahman is actually the source of creation. So, Śrīla Prabhupāda also points out in the purport in the Second Canto that this is the case, and he explains it in an interesting way. He makes the point that the brahmajyoti, which is the effulgence of Kṛṣṇa, is the vehicle by which Kṛṣṇa transmits seedling forms of all kinds of different creative manifestations. So, he actually makes the point there that one shouldn't expect Kṛṣṇa to have to create using a hammer and other instruments the way a blacksmith does it. Actually, you can consider the way that human beings create, and this is ultimately using their hands. And the process can become quite complicated, especially when you want to create very small things. So, Kṛṣṇa doesn't have to use such methods, and the basic idea of how the creation is carried out is that... Well, we framed this idea of the brahmajyoti. This brahmajyoti is described as the effulgence emanating from the transcendental body of Kṛṣṇa, and typically it is described as being undifferentiated. 

[5:40]

So, the well-known Māyāvādīs like to take advantage of this idea that the brahmajyoti is undifferentiated, and they take undifferentiated in the strictest sense possible, meaning brahmajyoti does not have any qualities of difference between one part and another, in any respect. So according to this conception, this brahmajyoti is the ultimate oneness, the idea that it’s free of duality. Of course, duality means two. So the idea is there that in the brahmajyoti there cannot be two things that can be distinguished from one another. So that's one conception of what it means for something to be undifferentiated.

However, there is a much less extreme conception of what that would mean. Namely, you have something that's more or less uniform and homogeneous in nature. For example, if you look at a large amount of water, as in the ocean, you can say, reasonably, that that is undifferentiated because everywhere you look the water's the same. And water by nature is quite uniform, so that an integral part of it in any place that you put your sampling, it's the same nature. Or likewise, if you consider a region of outer space with sunlight pouring through it, it is said that the field of sunlight is undifferentiated in the sense that the sunlight is the same everywhere within that region. 

However, at the same time there's differentiation there, strictly speaking. Because, for example, the sunlight is going in one direction and it's going from the sun outwards and it's not going in all the other possible directions. So that means you have a differentiation there. It's coming off from the sun, not going into the sun. And likewise, even in the ocean, what we say is: Well, if you look closely enough you can see that there are molecules of water. So, they're differentiated from one another. 

So, the same idea actually applies with the brahmajyoti as described in the Vedic literature. First of all, the brahmajyoti is the effulgence of Kṛṣṇa and is emanating from the body of Kṛṣṇa; then that's a differentiation right there because it's not coming from infinity and going into the body of Kṛṣṇa. No, that's not the way it’s described. Nor is it emanating from something else. And another alternative to this is that it could be just emanating from nothing at all – it could be just there. But since it's described as emanating from the body of Kṛṣṇa, that means there is differentiation in the brahmajyoti. And furthermore, we understand that there are innumerable spirit souls situated within this brahmajyoti. So that's comparable to the molecules in the water: just as the water has innumerable molecules in it and they're all distinct, so likewise the brahmajyoti is occupied by innumerable spirit souls. So that's also differentiation. 

And in fact, it’s a greater degree of differentiation than exists in the water, at least, as far as the scientific understanding of water is concerned. Because according to the scientific conception, any two H2O molecules, assuming their atomic nuclei are all of the same isotope, and so hydrogen-oxygen, are exactly identical. That is, there is literally no difference between, say, between one proton and another proton – they're identical in every possible respect; this is the concept of quantum physics. But in the actual brahmajyoti, all of the different spirit souls are individual by nature. They all have different desires, they’re in different states of consciousness, and they will all have different future histories. Also, they have different past histories. So that means that then the brahmajyoti has even greater differentiation than the mass of water, you could say.

[10:33]

So Śrīla Prabhupāda points out in explaining this verse in the Brahma-saṁhitā, that verse describes that through this brahmajyoti, which is unlimited and absolute and is the effulgence of Kṛṣṇa, innumerable planetary systems are generated with all their various variegated features. So Śrīla Prabhupāda points out that what happens there is that seedling forms of all the different manifestations are present within this brahmajyoti, or they're transmitted through it, and then these forms under appropriate circumstances grow and develop into complete manifestations. And this is superintended by living entities such as Brahmā, who act as gardeners. So the analogy here is that if you have some seeds, and we have a suitable garden, and also a gardener, that you can plant the seeds in the garden and they will grow different kinds of plants. So this is quite a remarkable process.

Now here, we're talking about not the spirit souls exactly, we're talking about the material forms. Kṛṣṇa says, bījo 'haṁ sarva-bhūtānām and bhūtānām there refers to the different manifestations. In the Bhagavad-gītā that's translated as, “I am the original seed of all existences,” but essentially, it refers to the material embodiment of living entities. So the idea then is that on a very subtle level, there are seeds. So we use the word seed here as an analogy because the seeds we know of are gross material entities. And it's actually quite a remarkable thing that a single seed, when put in the appropriate situation, can manifest a complete organism. The example is often given in the Vedic literature of the seed of a Banyan tree. Apparently it's very small, very tiny seeds [unclear], but the Banyan trees become extremely large. And likewise, from a single fertilized egg it can produce a whole human being within the womb in appropriate circumstances. 

So this is Kṛṣṇa's arrangement and actually in modern science people are trying to figure out how it works simply on the material level. For many years the biochemists and so on have been studying the process whereby, say, a fertilized germ cell manifests a complete living organism; and they have many theories about it, of course, but no one really knows how that happens. 

For example, when the fertilized egg first begins to develop, it splits into two, four, eight, 16, 32 and so on, cells. So soon you have a lump of cells, and here you have the problem that they seem to be undifferentiated. Come back to this question of things being undifferentiated again, because it seems that all the cells are the same. For example, they all have exactly the same DNA and the only difference between one cell and another is that one cell might be near the center of the lump and another one might be near the outside. So how is it that these cells then manage to develop different destinations, so the one cell will become part of the liver in the future, that is, it will be the ancestor of all liver cells, let's say; and another cell will become the ancestor of all the brain cells, and so on? So you run into this problem at every stage in the development of the embryo, actually.

[15:00]

For example, let's say one cell somehow has decided that it's going to become the ancestor of the brain cells, and the other cells have made their respective decisions. So after that cell is divided a bit, you then have another lump of cells that are all the same. So they then have to decide what part of the brain they are going to make. That is, certain cells are going to form the cerebellum and others will decide to form the medulla oblongata. So, how do they decide that? And then to make it worse, according to the modern conception, the brain is like a computer in which the nerves are compared to wires and transistors and so forth. So that means the nerve cells have to connect together to form circuits or networks with a very specific pattern. 

For example, sometimes you may see magnified pictures of these silicon chips that are used to build computers. You see a very intricate arrangement of wires crisscrossing in various ways: Well, that has to be very carefully designed – you can't just connect them any old way, helter-skelter or you'll never get something that works. They have to be connected together in a very precise plan. So how is it that the nerve cells and neurons in the brain know how to connect up with one another? Imagine if a given neuron, which is just growing… it starts out as a spherical cell, but then it grows these long thin processes called axons and dendrites and so on. So one nerve cell has to grow, say an axon and connect with another appropriate neuron somewhere in the brain and that may be several inches long. Actually, some neurons have axons that grow for several feet; they go right down the spinal cord and down into your leg or something like that. So this is a cell doing that. So it has to grow and then make the right connection. So how does it know where to go, which direction to grow in and what to connect with? 

And it's estimated now that there are about 10 billion cells in the brain, and somebody said that out of those 10 billion cells, at least 100 million are located in a certain ganglion within the brain. So you're faced with a really formidable problem. Even if somebody says: Well, they don't have to line up exactly – there's room for freedom and choice. Still, it seems to be a formidable task to connect all those neurons. So how does it happen?

Well, somehow or other, all the potential for doing that is stored in this original fertilized egg; even the scientists will agree that that must be true. So, they don't really understand how it works, this really incredible structure. Actually, there's a kind of nematode worm. It's a very tiny little worm, which has only about a hundred cells. It's one of the smallest multicellular organisms that exist. So scientists have thought: Well, this is a fairly simple organism, so we'll try and figure out just how it grows from the egg. So they spent years studying what each cell does as this thing develops. And they still haven't figured out how this worm develops, even though I'm sure a lot of doctoral dissertations have been written on it by now. Of course, this kind of thing is great for graduate students, who work on this to get their PhD. Then they can become professors and have students who will work on similar things and get their PhDs, and go on like that and eventually, they die. That's one way to live if you want to waste your life completely. 

So anyway, similarly, Kṛṣṇa, since time immemorial, has on a spiritual level generated seeds for all the different manifestations within the universe and evidently, it's described that He transmits these through the brahmajyoti. Even that isn't so hard to understand if you think of the idea of radio transmission going through outer space. In that example, if you have a radio in a certain place, the radio transmission comes through and then you can hear the program, so that becomes manifest.

[20:00]

So similarly, if you have a Brahmā in a certain location, and he can pick up the transmission coming through the brahmajyoti, and he can manifest the whole universe. So, it's really not such a difficult conception, but it involves the idea that the brahmajyoti is by no means strictly undifferentiated. It's undifferentiated in the same way that the space with the radio transmission was coming through is undifferentiated. Of course, that's not really undifferentiated but if you look closely, you'll see that this part of radio transmission is here, and the other part is back there, and another part is still further back; so it's not really strictly undifferentiated. 

So the Bhāgavatam and the Vedic literature in general, Brahma-saṁhitā and so on, presents actually a reasonable idea of how creation comes about. In terms of basic principles, it's not an unreasonable thing. The idea is that you have an original information source, which is Kṛṣṇa, and He transmits information in a very subtle form into these spiritual seeds, and they begin to create manifestations on the subtle platform, by the arrangement of Kṛṣṇa. Because Brahmā, of course, is entirely on the subtle platform – it’s said that his body is made of intelligence (one of the separated energies of Kṛṣṇa is intelligence imaging). Then, there are successive stages of manifestation going from subtle to gross.

So, it's described that Brahmā generates from his mind various living beings called Prajāpatis. These are also very powerful demigods, not as powerful as Brahmā but nearly as powerful. And the Prajāpatis, in turn, generate different demigods. Of course, Brahmā also directly generates various demigods. For example, it’s described that once Brahmā was looking into the water, just sort of contemplating his reflection and from his mind there manifested a whole category of demigods who are dedicated to glorifying Brahmā. So, Brahmā has a pretty powerful mind. You can imagine the trouble we'd get into if we had minds like that. It's bad enough that you just start looking in the mirror and thinking, "Wow, that's me." But imagine if as soon as you thought that a whole host of beings would manifest and begin singing your glories. It could create a difficult situation. 

So anyway, the Prajāpatis are manifested; they then create different demigods. At a certain point the mode of manifestation goes from mental creation to sexual reproduction. But at each stage what's happening is these seeds are being transmitted from one form to another. So at one stage in the creation, it is described that the daughters of Dakṣa were giving birth to all kinds of different living beings. Of course… and that seems like a somewhat strange story when you first hear it, as you hear that a certain daughter of Dakṣa gave birth to predatory birds and another one gave birth to serpents (and that was Kadrū, actually), and another one gave birth to cloven-hoofed beasts and so on.

This seems a bit strange according to our normal experience. But actually, the principle behind that is easy enough to understand, because, if from Dakṣa these daughters obtain different subtle seedling forms for different kinds of organisms, then naturally they can manifest the different body types. And actually what you have in this process of successive creations is a successive specialization. That is, Brahmā receives seeds which you can use to create anything in the universe. Prajāpatis receive a more limited selection. I don't know the details on this, but at a certain point, once a rhinoceros has been created, that rhinoceros can only reproduce more rhinoceroses – it's limited in that way. However, if you look at what happens when the fertilized egg for the rhinoceros develops, you'll see a further process of successive specialization occur. This has been noted by scientists. 

[25:08] 

What happens is that an initial cell in what's called the blastula form for the rhinoceros has the potential power to become any part of the rhinoceros. In fact, you can show that – well, they don't do it with rhinoceroses since they are a bit bulky – but they use frogs and sea urchins, especially sea urchins, these are their favorite. 

But, if you take one cell out of the blastula, put it by itself, it'll grow into a complete organism. And you can do that in a surprisingly late stage; and up to a certain point, you can pick out one cell and it becomes a complete organism. But then what happens is the cells somehow become specialized. They narrow down their abilities so that at a certain point if you pick out a liver cell it can form a complete liver, assuming you can keep it growing so that it can do that, but it can't form anything else. And so the cells eventually become so specialized that a certain cell in the eye, let's say, can produce, say, corneal tissue and it can't produce anything else. So, this process of successive specialization of original, general information takes place even when the embryo is developed. So, a similar thing takes place in the creation. 

So, actually, this conception of the creation in Vedic literature is quite sensible and it's a reasonable alternative to the scientific idea, which is that matter just gets it together by itself. Somehow atoms just bouncing together form more and more complicated shapes until eventually you get human beings, which is a little bit [unclear] for discussion. I won't go into it today but it's a theory that has its drawbacks, to say the least. So someone could say: Yes, but really to say that God did it is, first of all, just a cop-out, and that's fantastic anyway, and superstition went out with the Dark Ages. This is the basic kind of reaction that people are trained these days to give. 

But actually, the process of creation is described in Vedic literature. If you look at it in terms of general principles, it's a sensible process. Not only that, it allows for the possibility of scientific investigation because one charge that scientists will make is that: These ideas from religion are sterile. They don't result in any kind of development to further knowledge. You either accept them or you don't; you either have blind faith in the dogmas put forth in these scriptures or else you don't have blind faith, that's it. You can't go any further.

But actually, if you wanted to scientifically study this process of creation described in the Vedic literature, at least at the lower stages of the process as you come closer to the gross manifestation, there are a lot of things you immediately think of studying. For example, in one purport in the Third Canto where it's describing the nature of the etheric element, Śrīla Prabhupāda points out that the element ether is, so to speak, the connecting link between the three subtle separated energies of Kṛṣṇa and the five gross energies. It's actually one of the five gross energies. 

So, ether connects the mind element and the other gross elements. So the mind element, which is a subtle energy, imposes forms within the ether; and then the ether, in turn, affects the gross manifestations of air, fire, water, and earth and vice-versa. The air, fire, water, and earth, obviously, will have an effect on the ether in that turn affects the mind. So it's like a communicating link. So that means there are forms in the ether. And it's also described that within the body the pattern of the veins and so forth corresponds to the forms generated within the ether, and maybe this is a clue telling how the whole bodily arrangement takes place. As I was saying, it's quite mysterious. But anyway, Śrīla Prabhupāda said that this is a subject for great scientific research work. And actually, if you think about it, one could try to investigate the ether, and show that there is such a thing and that complex forms could be manifested. And then this leads to another subject. What time is it? [unclear].

[30:06]  

For example, if the cells were described by Śrīla Prabhupāda as essentially independent living entities, he would say that yeah, they have souls, they're living entities. But, on the other hand, Ravindra Svarupa once described cells as sort of bricks in the wall. For example, if you look at the epithelial tissue, we'll see that's the essential structure and all the cells are like little [unclear] bricks arranged in a sheet. And so then Śrīla Prabhupāda responded by giving the analogy of the apartment saying the body is comparable to an apartment and the soul is like the tenant in that apartment. So the tenant is the actual living entity – you don't say that the apartment is alive. So that shows that there are different ways of looking at it. 

Now, it is conceivable that in something like epithelial tissue, all the cells could just be units that had been reproduced on a structure without souls in them. On the other hand, there are the white blood corpuscles that are just like living independent entities that move around by themselves. And, of course, all of these cells can live independently. You can even take a skin cell and put it in a culture medium with sufficient nutrients and it will just grow into a lump; and it will keep growing as long as you provide food for it. In fact, there are people who died many, many years ago whose cells are still living in culture media. So exactly... I wonder if they're still attached to themselves. In fact, people's cancers still are living long after the people were killed by them. They keep growing, and culture media is used to study the process of cancer formation. So, it's not completely clear. 

Now, it is clear that when a cell divides, say it is a separate living entity like an amoeba, another soul either comes in or is promoted from a semi-conscious state to become the soul of that cell. Likewise, you can take a plant. Now, the plant has a soul, but it's well known that you can take part of the plant, and plant it separately; if you do that it'll grow into a whole new plant. Also there are certain worms, if you cut them in half, the tail will grow a new head and the head will grow a tail and now you have two worms. So in those cases, the soul either is brought in from outside or a soul with a lower state of consciousness within the organism is promoted and becomes the soul of that organism. So these kinds of things are going on. Anything else?

Question:  [unclear]

Answer: Well, the Supersoul is there all right. In fact, the Supersoul is present in every atom and between the atoms also. But this process of development of the organism, as I was describing, Kṛṣṇa has a system for doing that. So I was describing the system. Apparently, the system is not that He just creates it from scratch right then and there each time. Kṛṣṇa can do that too if He wants, but that's not the way He does it. Instead, He devises a system with the arrangement of seeds which can grow and so on, so forth. That's the system He uses.