Technology of spirituality: A flawed and desperate attempt to sell myth as science
With the ever growing popularity of pseudo-science and false faith in the superiority of a civilization’s ancient past, the Indian public is no exception. So much to say is probably the most caught up in the illusion. With the rise of the so called Hindutva campaign and the coming to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party the matter has become worse since a long time. With pseudo-science creeping into institutions like the IITs and the FTII, the new social media has become the playing ground for this infestation to spread. One such video that I came across was the tired attempt by a spiritual guru Khurshed Batliwala’s lecture in the Ruia College, Mumbai. While I have had my own spiritual upbringing and exposure, attending larger than life lectures by gurus and swamis, it has been quite a while since I have been fascinated by charming talks by men/women in earthly colored robes. Real science has been my driving force in life, amazing me in its patience in understanding the truth and its continued effort to push us into new frontiers.
Science and scientific temperament to anything has been a roller coaster ride. My life has changed from looking up at the ceiling of our 2 bedroom urban apartment, praying for a miracle to get me what I wanted the most, to looking inside me, realizing my strength and weaknesses and leveraging them to my advantage. The struggle is ongoing but is more satisfying than the disappointment of the miracles being only in my dreams.
As the great Carl Sagan puts it
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Alright, let’s get on with the real intention of this article. While I am not an expert on many subjects what I really like about science is that anybody can learn, appreciate and even challenge. So here is a small argument of how the Batliwala video is teeming with nonsense.
Batliwala starts with the opening statement of his lecture talking about his education at the very same premises that he is currently lecturing and also mentions his second attempt at the gold medal. While there is no reason to believe that a person who “flunks” would not go on to get the gold medal on the second attempt, this clearly is a marketing strategy to sell him to both the bright and the not so bright. Both the parties would start relating themselves to him. This is only proven when we hear cheers from the audience when he talks about this.
Statement: “After my MS in Mathematics from IIT Bombay I decided to teach meditation to people and make them happy instead to teach them mathematics and make them miserable.”
Mathematics is difficult, spirituality is easy. This is what I get from this statement, so is the use of drugs and alcohol abuse, then why is spirituality any greater than these. As far as I can see, Mathematics>Spirituality since Batliwala has clearly given up. Yay! Teaching science is probably the most divine deed that one can do according to me. Aren’t we all here because of those Science and Mathematics teachers?
At the beginning of his lecture he mentions that he has decided to go into ancient history. Well while we know what ancient history means, it certainly does not include our mythology and puranas. The most ancient recorded history that we have discovered yet so far are the Sumerians and the most ancient in India is no older than 3300 BCE. Remember this statement of his since this would be wrongly conveyed later in his lecture.
Statement: “Have all of you heard about the Varaha avatar? If not which country are you in?”
Wow! I can’t believe he just said that. While on one hand I do agree to the question which country am I in, it is most definitely not because I had missed out on the lesson of the avatars of Vishnu by my grandma but because I see us regressing to where we most definitely did not want to be.
More appropriate statements would be…
“I see a more advanced secular civilization where scientific literacy is the foremost principle, which country am I in?
“I see a united democratic nation which leads the world towards peace and prosperity, which country am I in?”
“While we were ruled by British for more than 200 years we have risen above and embraced our mixed culture, which country am I in?”
OK moving on…
Statement: “Lord Vishnu takes the form of a boar and for some reason the Earth is drowning in water and we don’t know why and how but the boar lifts the Earth up and brings it out of the water.”
This statement is accompanied by him showing a modern picture of the boar lifting a brown earth.
He then continues, “Check out the shape of the Earth, what is it? Huh! It’s round, which means that more than 10,000 years ago we knew that the Earth was round which Europe only accepted when they saw Apollo pictures from space.”
Alright, first of all if I have a master’s degree in mathematics I would most definitely look at a 2D picture of any planetary body and would not call it “round” but a sphere. I would most definitely treat my audience intelligent enough to grasp that. This somewhat tells us that he is going to take the science behind this a little lightly.
That picture of the boar lifting Earth was not drawn when the ancients wrote it. It is a modern imagination of what could most easily have been a fantastical idea at that time. In what authority does he claim that this all happened 10,000 years ago? As I had mentioned before the Vedic civilization is much newer and only dated to about 1500 BCE-500 BCE. That would put it around 2500 to 4000 years ago. This is to clearly misguide the students into believing that what he is talking about is something that we should be amazed. I am amazed at how our minds are so easily carried away by something that is large.
Alright, then we have the statement about Europe accepting that the Earth was “round”, still not a sphere, only after they saw the pictures of Earth from the Apollo mission. The concept of a spherical Earth has been around for centuries now in the western world. Beginning from the 6th century BC when Plato described a spherical Earth as a philosophical concept to a later scientific theory of a spherical earth by mid-15th century. Practical evidence to this was obtained when Magellan circumnavigated the Earth.
Even if we accept the fact that the ancient Indian civilization knew about the Earth as being spherical, so did the Egyptians and the Sumerians, much older than us. This I see as a collective triumph of human civilization rather than a single nation or people achieving something extra-ordinary. Our ancient Indian scientists made use of this knowledge and devised theorems and equations. Where they went wrong is when because of our self-contained life limiting us on innovation, this knowledge was put to use in so called astrology. Astrology rose when the scientists had to predict the King’s rise to power, time of death, possible betrayal etc. etc.
Batliwala goes on to describe the use of Zinc in India, the ability to separate Zinc from its ore and the story of how the process was “stolen” from us and sent across the world. Alright, what is the big deal again? We had technology to separate zinc, the Chinese invented the technology of print, and the American’s the technology of everything that Batliwala has used to make this video. Isn’t this what science is supposed to do? Make people’s life simpler?
There is a bit about the star Antares and the twin systems of stars. At that point of his talk this doesn’t seem harmful. He is but giving information about ancient Indians identifying the twin star system. Let’s hold on to this for some time till he decides to ruin the whole awesomeness of astronomy.
Batliwala then has a story about Vasco Da Gama and his discovery of India with the help of a Gujarati. While history is a debatable subject, depending on the writings of the past I don’t see the point of this in a lecture of Technology or Spirituality. Explorations were driven by commerce; hence we have the Europeans and Guajarati, the two probable communities that were involved in trade working together at that point of time.
The whole issue here is the fact that Vasco Da Gama discovered India is wrong and has to be removed. Batliwala subtly suggests renaming the city of Vasco Da Gama as Kanha, the Gujarati who helped Da Gama reach India. Well, who are we trying to prove this point to? Nobody in the west bothers anymore. If to the Indians then the right history lesson should take care of it.
While I don’t celebrate the idea of the Europeans finding their way to India, trading with the west has been going on centuries before this happened. In fact the Europeans had so many civilizations that flourished and fell, they seem to be doing the same thing all over again and again. And I would say that the whole trade imperialism of the mid 15th century and the later warfare of the Zamorin of Calicut with the Portuguese resulted because of the politics of the kingdoms of Calicut and its neighbors. The outcome of the war was decided by the superiority of Portuguese forces in technology and due to the foreign policy adopted by the kings. While it is easy to laugh at the stupidity of the Europeans who went scrambling to find land almost believing that they would fall off a flat earth, we should also see how the trading and policies of the royals ensured the establishment of the Portuguese as the ruling power very soon. Where were the wise patriotic advisers to these kings all these times?
Towards the middle of the lecture he decides to stop giving examples of our ancient knowledge and this is where my observation too would stop. The rest of the lecture is about meditation and pranayama which I have no issue with unless they claim extra-ordinary and that is exactly what Batliwala does.
Statement: “Our ancient scientists were saints, all of them did pranayama, all of them did yoga, all of them meditated. When you have trained your mind, when you have meditated, when you know how to do this and you have done it for appreciable number of years then you are no longer limited by physical instruments. If you want to go into outer space, and then close your eyes and dum, you can go. If you want to get into the depth of the atoms then close your eyes and you get there. And you are seeing it right? So it has to be accurate.”
I am again reminded of a quote by Carl Sagan.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
When someone is claiming that meditation and pranayama would allow a human bounded by the laws of the physical nature to travel to the Antares twin star system and also into the atoms then I would stand up, hold my hand out and ask for evidence. Not evidence of stories from puranas or from the Vedas but a physical demonstration of the same by someone at present. I do believe a lot of the gurus and swamis practice pranayama; many of them have years of experience in yoga. Can they point out a scientific observation in space or in the atom that our telescopes and microscopes can confirm? If yes then why are we waiting for a cure for cancer? Why are we waiting for ways to mine an asteroid? Why is there so much suffering in this world if these swamis can reassure us that the best or worst is yet to come?
Where Batliwala fails to even slightly impress me is the assumptions that he has about various things. What if the Vedas, the fountainhead of knowledge is only a small chapter in the vast knowledge available to be discovered? What if this so called knowledge was handed down by Sumerians who could have been the original inventors?
The Vedas were considered to be “apaurusheya” meaning not of human origin. Could ancient aliens have given us all this knowledge? Were these ancient aliens Sumerians? All these are equally possible and probable theories as that of our scientists being saints. While we can spend our energies defending these so called myths or we can do actual science devoid of bias and assumptions.
We live in a country where the chief of the space agency looks for Rahu kaala before sending the rocket into space and surgeons leave their last hope to the idol sitting in the corner of the hospital. While these things do not hamper our progress they do make us lazy in our urgency to achieve higher.
As a science fiction writer there is a thick line between what I see as scientific fact and what I see as source for my stories whereas that doesn’t seem to be the case with most of these gurus and swamis. And these are the people who reach the young far sooner than the rational teachers.
Here is a link to the lecture and a suggestion.
Do not accept anything with just words. Question everything. Compare results from various sources and be prepared for your beliefs to be shattered and upgraded.
