The problem of dualism
Dear Maharaja,
pamho agtsp
Now I will try to ask a thoughtful question so we all here can benefit from your wisdom and Krishna Consciousness.
In Bhagavad Gita Krishna says that the individual soul is not the doer alone. In fact the atman has very little input, he is basically only the seer, and most of what he experiences is material nature working like a machine (BG 3.27, 13.30, 14.19). This fits in well with philosophy and findings of modern science and also Buddhism with their “no self” and “no free will” favouritism.
Fortunately for us Krishna further explains that the atman is the doer in that he desires and can change his situation in doing so. “Man proposes and God disposes”. Prabhupada in purport to BG 18.14 explains how the atman is also the doer and gives reference to Prasana Upanishad 4.9 and Vedanta sutra 2.3.33 (when I looked up this verse I found it was 2.3.31). So our philosophy is that the Supersoul facilitates desires of the living entities by giving intelligence, which is “the form-direction of the Paramātmā plenary portion of the Personality of Godhead”(SB 2.2.35) to engage with material energy, which is also under His control ultimately. Atma desires, Supersoul gives intelligence and also facilitates actual movements of matter, remembering that the Supersoul exists at every point the universe. Interestingly this idea of God moving matter comes up in the philosophy of Occasionalism.
Now in order for the trick of maya to be believable the material machine-body-and-mind must appear to be functioning without God because if we can see Him it becomes more difficult to avoid surrender. If we can see God doing the workings of the universe how can we deny He exists. I’ll give the example like this. If you want to trap a bird (with ropes of ahankara maybe, tie its wings) and make it believe that it needs an aeroplane (a machine of matter) to fly when it can actually fly on its own, the machine has to actually work. So the machine - body, mind and world - must all function as if on its own or without any input from the bird. The whole goal of modern science is to show this is possible. The atheistic scientists in the fields of neuroscience and consciousness studies love this. They feel that they are so close to explaining everything in terms of materialism with all the progress made in neural-networking, but they must always hide the most accurate phenomenon of consciousness, “The Hard Problem” under the carpet for their belief to stand. No matter how sophisticated the machine there’s no good explanation for its subjective experience, there’s no good explanation as to why there is something that it’s like to be that machine. They have to trivialize or downplay consciousness as simply an evolutionary byproduct of a biological machine.
ASA - What we see is that that explanation of the machine is also really deficient. Like trying to explain how your Momma and Kitty are being produced by the electronics of the cell phone.
Anyway, the bird is in the plane and we get to this classic mind-body problem of cartesian dualism. In western philosophy it’s “how does the mind interact with matter if they are two fundamentally different things?” It’s a self-defeating theory because the two substances cannot touch. Dascartes himself struggle to resolve this issue and it is still debated today. In the eastern traditions it is not a problem of how does mind touch matter because mind is also matter. It is “how does the atman interface with subtle and physical matter?” The same issues arise. How is it that spirit affects matter if they cannot touch due to their fundamental difference? How is it that the soul, with the assistance of the Supersoul, sets matter into motion? Or you could say how does the bird touch the controls to fly the plane? If it is all just the Supersoul making a show for us as the seers according to our desires and karma, then again we have the problem of how the does Supersoul touch matter? Also we have the problem of what is the need for the jiva at all if God is doing it all and the jiva only sees?
ASA - Many discusssions of this in the Bhagavatam to our memory. One interesting is SB 2.8 and then the answers by Suka deva Goswami.
I cannot get around this problem without concluding that matter must ultimately be spiritual. I am so confident that this has to be the case but Prabhupada says “Like oil and water, matter and spirit do not mix!”So my question is how does spirit drive matter? We see activity in the brain but how is spirit driving it? How does spirit move the electrons, the quarks?
We could try use your smart phone example also. The atma’s consciousness is transmitted into the cell phone from a higher dimensional reality but how does it drive the phone? My mother appearing on the screen has been artificially built from a signal passing through the sky as radio waves. Maybe that is the question. What are the waves coming from the atma or the super soul that set matter into motion? HG Sadaputa prabhu made a video of this, trying to show how the atma or mind (I forget ) could move matter we overlapping wave patterns. But still, If the waves are spiritual, how do they touch matter? If the waves are material, how do they come out of the atma?
Ultimately matter has to be spiritual also isn’t it? “Simultaneous oneness and difference” or one in quality but with distinctions. The only thing that makes matter non-spiritual is our own perception. If we see through the false ego we see matter or a substance separate from God. False ego also allows us to see ourselves separate from God, somehow separate from our "inner most Self" or the Self in our etherial heart (BG 10.20). But without false ego then there is no matter because there is no separation from God. Is this correct? The whole material world puppet show is ultimately a spiritual illusion to provide a false sense of separateness from God?
The best explanation materialists have for the formation of life and consciousness is panpsychism. Panpsychism is the theory or explanation that ultimately all matter is intrinsically conscious and has its own will to exist. They basically surrender themsleves to the impersonal aspect of God just i psite of the personal aspect of God. This explanation is a close speculation of our understanding of the brahman aspect of God. So their best explanation for matter is that it is the impersonal aspect of God, although they don’t like to admit that because eventually it leads to a Person. When we look at it this way we can see that they are saying the same thing as us. We are not the doers, we are the observers and God is somehow moving matter.
We see the material body, brain and mind so complex. Why the need for such complexity if we are ultimately spiritual beings? Why not just souls riding in bodies full of water? Maybe we can look at the smart phone again to answer that? Very sophisticated technology is needed to bring us our mother and her cat on our very thin screens. What do brains look like in the spiritual realm? Liquid bliss? Full of tears of love? I also think the sophistication of the material machines is a must in order to allow people to think we don’t need God. “Nature herSELF can do it all”. It protects free will in this way because it can appear so obvious that God is behind everything to some and so unlikely to others. Like I said with the bird trapped in a plane, the plane’s ability to fly as a souless machine must be believable in order to accpet it as the highest possble experince for the living entity.
Please Maharaja share with us your wisdom on this topic. We are very eager to learn.
Thank you
Your student,
Dhruvananda Das.
HpS - ASA - My God! This is heavy! A Navajo indian after hearing this would say those are very good questions but I have just one more, when is lunch?
I see that the Bhagavata is addressing these questions again and again.
If Krsna is a cowherd boy then how does he interact with cowherd girls?
Gopis, Siva, Maharloka, Patalaloka, these are all just energies of Krsna. He can relate to them all in different way.
Long section of this discussion in the instructions to Sanatana Goswami CC 2.20-23(?).
"Daddy, how do you make the car turn?"
Well there is his mind, hands, steering wheel, hydraulic stuff, tires....
Krsna, Balarama, Siva, Durga, Mahat tattva, Buddhi, Manas, Vayu, Agni. At every level there is interaction with the superior and inferior levels.
Those who have opted to get on the roller coaster have no free will about where it is going. For them it is "prakreteh kriyamanani". For those who are off it they have free will. "Daddy, I don't want to go on the vomiting machine. I want to ride a pony".
We are like kids on our fathers lap driving the car. The Supersoul "smells" the desires of the Jiva floating on the life airs and then manipulates the machine.
Lord Siva is the functional material body of Krsna. Want to play with kitty, we don't touch him, we use a piece of string, but we are not DIFFERENT from the string.
The Virata rupa is the material incarnation of Krsna, but of course it is kind of imaginary because Krsna never really incarnates as matter.
Without manas the neuro physiology can't create it all. If the original chunk is impersonal where do tables come from? It has no enemies so why does it change?
When I chant Hari nama Japa from my heart I see my head starts to line up with it.
Mathematics (look for a definition of this word!!) based upon Euclidean Geometry starts with 'neti neti', 'not this, not this'. That is the point. From that we get lines. So trying to describe the interaction of Spirit with Matter based upon this limited philosophy won't work.
Vin Deloria, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_Deloria_Jr, was an American Indian advocate, law professor at university of Arizona. We heard him say that if a Navajo Shaman heard a white man, professor, give his explanation of the origin of the world, matter and spirit, Calculus - He might listen to the whole thing and then say, "Well, Brother, you know it just migh work if tossed in one fox and one crow".
Our conclusion is that BG 7.4 basically explains the whole thing. To our mind you have it sorted out really well. Seems maybe a little more bathing in the SB and develop your own model. There are so many philosophers so you can't relate to them all.
O.K.
When is lunch?
