Suppose you are sleeping in your apartment and a thief breaks in, with the intention of murdering you and stealing all your wealth. In such a moment of danger, which of the five senses is most likely to help you? You certainly cannot smell the thief, nor taste him with your tongue, nor feel him with your skin,nor see him with your eyes. But if the thief makes a noise, you might hear it, wake up and be able to save yourself. This is a simple experience that we can easily relate to. but it has much broader implications.
Suppose I hand you a glass of liquid. How would you go about determining what it is0 Most men of science would suggest doing some chemical tests. First of all, we have to recognize that this involves seeing, smelling, tasting and touching, perhaps with the help of instruments. But all these methods fall in the category of sense perception, which is inevitably fault-prone. Furthermore, chemical tests can be misleading. What if the liquid is one for which the testing reagents have not been developed? And even if you do all the tests, perhaps it may be a mixture of two or more liquids. How can you determine which? After all there are practically unlimited possibilities. Where will you begin? And after all your tests, you might discover that the liquid contained a valuable ingredient capable of curing cancer, and that you have just about wasted all of it in mere testing!
Therefore let us step back and consider something altogether different, something radical for modern science. Why not simply ask the person who handed us the liquid, "What did you give me?" That might just solve all our problems. From the above two examples, we understand the potency of hearing as a reliable way of acquiring knowledge. Hearing is, in fact, the basis of all our knowledge. From the cradle to the crematorium, our whole life is based on hearing. Just think of any five common items of knowledge and backtrack how you learned about them in the first place. How did you get into engineering college? How did you learn about GRE and TOEFL exams? How did you learn ABC? How did you come to know the way to the nearby movie theater? How did you come to know about Einstein? Everything we know begins from hearing. Books are also in the category of recorded sound.Thus all knowledge - whether mundane or Vedic - has to be acquired by hearing from a proper authority. Everyone is born in ignorance; otherwise what would be the need of schools or colleges? We go to educational institutions to gain more awareness about the world around us and to improve our life.
But how do we know from whom to hear in order to obtain perfect knowledge? In the modern times, modern science is not the only source of knowledge, which we hear and accept. Everyday we are bombarded with dozens of newspapers, TV commercials, magazines of all description, journals and so forth. We are overflooded with so much useless and questionable information that we have a hard time deciding which one to accept. How can we judge the degree of authenticity of all that we hear?
How do you know who your father is? By imagination or mental speculation nobody can arrive at an answer. Someone may suggest doing genetic finger printing. But just imagine the sheer effort required. Assuming that only ten percent of the world's males would be capable of having fathered you, still you have to do massive amount of testing of around 250 million adults. Assuming a ridiculously low average test time of 100 seconds per individual, it would still take you a minimum of 800 years of non-stop testing. Can you imagine the enormous expense and the mind-boggling record keeping involved? Even if you somehow managed to do it and assuming that you somehow remained alive, still the people who might have fathered you would be dead and gone by that time The actual solution is simple: just ask your mother; she will tell you. Even if 10,000,000 other people were to contradict the words of your mother, still her words have more weight tor you than the words of all the others put together. That is the power of proper authority.
God, the Supreme Father, has created the complicated universe around us as well as the complicated body which we have. We don't understand what the purpose behind this vast creation is and why we are suffering. Vedas, the divine mother, carry all the necessary information about God, the Supreme Father and everything that is needed to revive our lost relationship with Him so that we can attain eternal happiness. All we need to do is to hear from our mother, the Vedas.
Our misfortune, however, is that we have no faith in our divine mother, the Vedas. Instead we choose to have blind unquestioning faith in modern science, which is actually like a treacherous witch. A witch allures a person by various temptations, but ultimately inflicts great pain on all those who fall prey to her false promises. The deceitful nature of a witch is illustrated in an instructive pastime from the life of Lord Krishna.
Once when Lord Krishna was just an infant three months °ld, His envious uncle Kamsa, sent Putana, a hideous witch, to Vrindavana to kill baby Krishna. Putana disguised herself as a beautiful woman and entered Vrindavan holding a lotus in her hands; nobody - not even Rohini or Yashoda - doubted her; everyone thought that she might be the Goddess of Fortune. Apparently with great love, She fed milk to Krishna from her breast, but actually she had smeared her breast with a deadly poison, in order to kill Him; Krishna, however, sucked her life air along with the milk. Just before her death, the real identity of Putana as a ghastly witch was disclosed in front of everyone. Thus Putana was like a sharp sword concealed within an attractive embroidered sheath.
Similarly, the glitz and glamour associated with technological advancement makes it appear very attractive, but its ultimate results are disastrous. Modern cities are full of countless hi-tech gadgets produced by modern science, which make life appear very easy. But they also lead to multifarious problems, far more complicated than what they were originally meant to solve. There is no shortage of examples to illustrate this.
Automobiles and factories have apparently increased the facilities in our life, but the air pollution they have caused has become a deadly health hazard. Surveys have revealed that just breathing the air in a polluted city like New Delhi is equivalent to smoking several cigarettes a day. Such cities are therefore full of chronic asthma and lung cancer patients.
Water now seems to be so easily available at the turn of a tap, but little do we know that it is greatly contaminated due to chemicals and effluents added during its transit from the river to the tap, thus leading to epidemics of water-borne diseases.
Advancement in technology has led to a culture of sedentary occupations, fast foods, cold drinks, high speed and high pressure lifestyles, all of which lead to a variety of debilitating bodily and mental diseases.
Modern medicine appears to provide quick and easy cures to diseases; all that you have to do is put a pill into your mouth But these inevitably have harmful side-effects on the body, which soon leads to a vicious cycle of illness and medicines.
Modern scientific education promises lucrative future careers, but even the best products of this educational system, namely, the doctorate degree holders in various fields of knowledge, are addicted to many abominable habits like smoking, drinking, drugs, woman-hunting, gambling etc.
Lost are the days when the students would hold their teachers in great esteem; most Indians will be shocked to know that it is not uncommon for school students in the Western world to shoot their teachers over the slightest difference of opinions.
These are just a few gross examples of the destructive consequences of an indiscriminate acceptance of scientific knowledge.Despite this, people are completely enamored by the razzle-dazzle of the technological gadgets offered by modern inventions and the apparent comfort and ease that they seem to bring to life. And as their enjoyment is facilitated, they have developed an innocent, unflinching, blind faith in the atheistic scientists, just like a small child has in his mother. People, however, fail to notice the reality that all these facilities have an inbuilt pernicious effect. They cast aside all discrimination and just blindly accept whatever is certified and promoted by modern scientists. Their altitude is, "Scientists have certified this facility. Therefore it must be wonderful. Let us enjoy it."
But such blind use of scientific advancement often wreaks total havoc as can be substantiated by the following examples:
•Recently scientists invented a drug, which, when injected into cows, lead to a considerable increase in their milk yield. The drug injection was widely used by dairy farmers in Gujarat, till it was detected that the milk produced by such injected cows caused a deadly disease in the human beings who consumed it. The government subsequently banned the use of that drug injection, but still its production continues underground in the form of tablets and many greedy dairy farmers continue to use it without caring for its disastrous consequences on the health of the general populace.
¦• A few years ago, in Europe, scientists prepared a new type of cattle-feed, which greatly increased their mass. This appeared to be a very lucrative arrangement for everyone involved in the cow-slaughter trade as these artificially fattened cows were yielding more beef. But the cattle-feed was prepared using the bones, horns and other remnants of cow slaughter in a pulverized form. This unnatural food fed to the naturally vegetarian cows led to a severe disease in them. And when man consumed the beef of such diseased cows, it led to the deadly BSE disease in him, which caused holes in his brain. Thus what started off as just an improved food for the cow ended up in hundreds of people being afflicted by a terrible disease and in millions of diseased cows being slaughtered to prevent further spread of the disease. Although the disease was called 'mad cow disease', it should rightly be known as the 'mad man disease' because it was the mad greed of man that caused the disease; the cow was just a helpless victim.
• In grape farming, cultivators often use artificial fertilizers to increase the fertility of the soil and speed up the yield. However, the grapes produced using such fertilizers are of a poor quality, so the farmers resort to external phosphate bathing of the grapes to enhance their appearance and give them a sugar coating to increase their sweetness. Thus not only do the grapes have no natural sweetness, but also the phosphates used have injurious effects on the human system.
•By using synthetic fertilizers, farmers can produces huge bright red tomatoes or watermelons. These appear to be very impressive, but if We cut them open, they are full of air and have very little nutrition value.
•In modern society, peace is conspicuous by its absence and infatuation caused by the scientific and technological advancement has led to this sorry state of affairs. The dove is traditionally considered to be a symbol of peace, but a picture of a dove carrying a slaughtered calf and an aborted fetus in its two claws graphically portrays the situation of modern society with its misdirected scientific advancement. Science has made man very powerful, but since man, being infatuated by science, is using this power not to serve God, but to promote his own selfish enjoyment, he has become a powerful ferocious beast. When man has become so merciless and ruthless towards other living entities as to slaughter thousands of innocents calves in organized slaughter houses just to satisfy his uncontrolled tongue and to abort millions of innocent infants just to continue unrestrictedly with his irresponsible sexual enjoyment (all using the most sophisticated technology), how can his so-called peace conferences be expected to be of any avail? Thus science only serves to superficially inflate the ego of man, but in actuality it divests his life of all meaning, substance and happiness. Modern scientific advancement, which has arisen from the research and speculation of man. in defiance of the laws of God, is certainly a cure worse than the disease itself.
The Vedas, on the other hand, are meant to gradually guide the suffering soul away from his sinful life in the right direction towards God. It is only due to the deep-rooted Vedic culture that even a simple illiterate Indian villager hesitates to commit any sinful activity, being aware of the law of karma and lives a very peaceful life. In marked contrast, even a highly educated modern man blinded to all concepts of morality due to his belief in the atheistic scientists, is addicted to various sinful habits and lives an utterly miserable life, being torn apart by immeasurable anxieties. Therefore it is high time for us to awaken to the reality that Vedas are our real mother and the secret of true happiness lies in understanding them and following them under the expert guidance of a bona fide spiritual master.
Comments