Science. People say the word with weight, as if it were a synonym for authority, rigor, precision, and the highest form of knowledge. But is it? Is science true knowledge?
The Bhagavad Gita says that true knowledge is to know matter, spirit, and the controller of both. To know these three areas is complete knowledge.
The first is matter, the domain of science. The study of what can be touched, what can be measured, what can be observed and analyzed. And for whatever they can’t, they calculate and speculate. It’s the pursuit of knowledge through the senses.
The second is knowledge of the spirit, which is the study of the invisible world, the spiritual world. How to transcend the senses, the mind, the ego, and all the subtleties of the process until you reach the original plane of the soul. It’s the knowledge of everything that lies beyond the reach of the senses.
And the third is to know the controller of both. Who controls matter and spirit? Is it a person? What is that person like? Who is He? What is His personality like? It’s the knowledge that connects both the material and the spiritual and puts it all in perspective.
To know these three areas is 100% of knowledge. To focus on matter is to study only a third, 33.33% of what can be known. And how much of that 33 percent does science actually know? Does it know everything that exists in the universe? Does it know whether the universe has a boundary or not? Does it know whether there’s life in other galaxies? Does it know whether there are other universes? Does it know what’s in them? Does it know whether there are other dimensions? How many there are? How to access them? How the human brain works? What lies beyond atoms? If science can’t answer all of these questions perfectly, then it doesn’t know the whole 33% of matter. But does it at least know half? 16.5%? Does it know half of all material manifestation across all the universes? No. Less? 10%? 5%? I think the generous thing to say is that science today knows about 0.01% of everything that exists in matter.
But science has done a lot of good. Even if it doesn’t know everything, it has given us many benefits: it cured diseases, invented airplanes, medicine, mobile phones, the internet, it took us to space.
For every good thing science gave us, you could list twenty bad ones.
They cured diseases, but they also killed millions with defective drugs. They saved people from traffic accidents, but they killed millions by creating the car in the first place. They saved the habitat of three dolphins, but then killed thousands of animals in laboratories. The benefits of science are dubious once you start doing the math.
A fascinating part of the Bhagavatam is its description of creation. At one point it describes how the universe is created and how matter is formed. Matter is a manifestation, a crystallization of the ego in ignorance. In other words, the study of matter is the study of ignorance. Matter, the senses, everything you can touch or measure can’t give you knowledge because, at its most basic level, it’s pure ignorance. Is there anything further from knowledge than ignorance? Is there anything further from knowledge than studying only matter?
Matter only becomes knowledge when you know it in relation to spirit and its controller. Studied alone, it never rises above the ignorance it’s made of.
Science. The study of 33% of knowledge. Science. The obsession with measuring, cataloging, and analyzing ignorance.
