Dr. B S Ramachandra’s immersion in Eastern Wisdom especially Indian Yogic traditions, goes back to his engineering days when as a young eighteen year old student, he realised that the physical sciences did not address adequately the most important question he was after, “Who am I?” Though it did address to some extent the other important question, “What is it?” Even the later, was possible only by admitting the framework of complexity theory and systems thinking as the purely particle model based theories were incompletely formulated to encompass the diversity of phenomena at a macroscopic scale, and especially cognate phenomena and human potential. This realisation need him to delve deeply into the meaning of Indian philosophy and its experiential methods in all its fulness. He soon learnt Sanskrit and Pali in order to read and understand the original works of Indian and Buddhist philosophy. He took a middle path that avoided the exaggerations of the popular mind that took anything and everything to be ‘spirituality,’ and also the rigidity of the strictly scientific paradigm that rejected most cognate and occult phenomena as moonshine and superstition. He decided to keep a fine balance between reason and intuition and let experience be the arbiter. It became clear to him that the attitude to take in pursuing subjective phenomena was similar to that required in pursuing objective phenomena in the sense that spirituality demanded an equal measure of rigorous as the scientific disciplines. As in science, in spirituality also, incomplete generalisations and ill-founded concepts were of little use. An earnest, serious approach was indispensable to build up bodies of knowledge that would stand one in good steed as one accumulated experience after experience in the inner domain. Soon enough, his pursuits fused together into a unified framework that he embodied in his work in research, education and performance consultancy. Below, he talks to Karthik Bharadwaj on his insights into Eastern Wisdom.

KB: In talking about your work on “Neuro-Cognitive Eastern Wisdom,” I think it is quite unusual for a person to be writing simultaneously about mathematical reality on one hand and Eastern wisdom on the other hand.  One would think these two are contradictory rather than complementary! What would you say?

Dr. BSR: To me, on the contrary, these two apparently contradictory domains are very complementary as they represent to me, two different windows into reality. And I think that is more so because of the experiential nature of my quest. I never undertook any domain simply for speculative reasons. As I told you about mathematical reality a little earlier, to me, theoretical physics has a mystical appeal. Now, that may seem strange and uncanny. But the question is, to whom? Not to me, for I have pursued mysticism with the same earnestness of purpose as theoretical physics. I have put in the same kind of effort into mastering the complexities and nuances of spiritual experience, in all its rigor, the way I did pure mathematics, for instance, working out all the problems, theorems, lemmas and proofs. 

Obviously, the methodology of spiritual practice is completely different from that of science except for the logical and intuitive elements common to all serious inquiries. No, I am not saying that Eastern wisdom is scientific, far from it. And by this I do not mean Eastern wisdom does not have any logical foundation. It has admirably but not at all the same kind of logical structure that modern scientific thought has. And why should it? Why should anything to be valid be a science? Not everything need be a science, and there are so many disciplines that do not at all fit into the scheme of a science. But that does not in any way, undermine the meaning, power and efficacy of those disciplines. 

Even medicine is a discipline and not a science though the profession labels it medical science. There is no strict causality in medicine. So merely labelling something with the adjective science does not make it so. It is childish to do that. Whatever has anything worthy in it for humanity needs must stand on its own without borrowing respectability from some other discipline. For instance, I wouldn’t use the term “spiritual science” but rather “spiritual practice” and by that do not at all mean that spiritual practice lacks a rational foundation but merely that it differs fundamentally in methodology from that of science.

KB: You are saying that Eastern wisdom is not a science in the sense that its methodology differs from that of science?

Dr. BSR: Undoubtedly. If one goes into Eastern wisdom in the experiential sense, one soon realises why it cannot be fit into the framework of science in the Western sense. Let me qualify this. By Western sense, I mean, the exclusive reliance on sense-perception. Western science is too much attached to sense-data and would like to tie everything down to it. But the very beginnings of Eastern wisdom have to do with a departure from sense-perception. So either one learns to do that logically and intuitively or one remains in the purview of science per se. 

KB: Why does Eastern wisdom depart from sense-perception?

Dr. BSR: Because, it begins to investigate existence proper, and has as its main theme that the self-awareness that a conscious being is endowed with, has in it the means to know itself. This is no mere tautology. Having self-awareness does not necessarily imply that one would know oneself. Because self-awareness in a human being is normally untrained and scattered and has not the means to look into itself. It needs to be gathered up and concentrated. Ordinary attention and concentration is insufficient to know oneself. For that, there are several conditions to be met, the primary one being that there must be the seriousness and earnestness of a quest. Mere intellectual curiosity is not sufficient to take one into the domains of the spirit. 

But this is quite the case even with science. One may be curious to know about curved spacetime but is everyone willing to take up the path of learning General Relativity? Not everyone has that sense of earnestness. The same with spiritual experience. Unfortunately, most people think that anyone can easily do that. Can anyone easily learn General Relativity? In principle, yes, certainly. In practice, only a few. In fact, it is even more difficult in the case of spiritual experience. Because, the kind of preparation of body, life and mind that it requires places much more demands on a seeker than science would. One has to give oneself to the quest in order to begin to experience its meaning. 

KB: So there is necessarily the sense of consecration accompanying the entry into this domain. It reminds me more of people like Kepler and Newton for whom natural philosophy was not just an intellectual pastime but a pathway to what they represented to themselves as the ultimate truth.

Dr. BSR: There is even more than that necessary to embark on spiritual experience, a self-surrender if you will, that alone provides the force for the quest.

KB: Coming back to sense-perception, why does Eastern wisdom depart from it?

Dr. BSR: That’s quite straightforward to understand. Sense-perception, even in the physical world allows for only an infinitesimal window into reality. The spectrum of sense-perception is extremely limited as physics itself demonstrates. Sense-perception is most often aided significantly by a telescoping series of amplifiers. That is how one can know of the vast band of the electromagnetic spectrum even though the sense of sight allows only visible light to be perceived. So also with the other senses. Now what do you do with that vast spectrum teeming behind, that is inaccessible to the senses by direct perception? 

Many would be content to infer and deduce its nature. But a few would not be so content and would want to seek to know the nature of that spectrum directly. Are they right or are they wrong? This is not the right question to ask. It is up to each one to make their choice, for, as Galileo pointed out, like in science, “the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” Only, in the case of spiritual experience you would have to replace “reasoning,” with “experience.” And again, not the experience of the casual individual who is merely curious or has an intellectual seeking but that of the serious, earnest individual who makes the necessary preparations before arriving at the experience. 

KB: Could you clarify a little about the necessary preparations?

Dr. BSR: I think one can best understand this by recalling what Einstein said to Heisenberg. I was always struck by Einstein’s prescient thinking extending beyond physics into the very nature of knowledge, epistemology. When Heisenberg had just formulated the quantum theory and wanted some further inputs into putting it on a solid basis, he went to meet Einstein. After a brief conversation he told Einstein that he would be putting into his theory only those constructions that could be directly tied down to experiment. Einstein disagreed and said that was not the way to do that. Heisenberg asked wasn’t it he who had insisted on doing so in his earlier writings. Einstein agreed he had said so but that it was nevertheless wrong. And then he uttered something that struck Heisenberg powerfully, “it is the theory that tells us what we can observe.” 

Just a minute, let me read it out from my notes, ah, here it is as Heisenberg narrates about what Einstein said,

 “He pointed out to me that the very concept of observation was itself already problematic. Every observation, so he argued, presupposes that there is an unambiguous connection known to us, between the phenomenon to be observed and the sensation which eventually penetrates into our consciousness. But we can only be sure of this connection, if we know the natural laws by which it is determined. If, however, as is obviously the case in modern atomic physics, these laws have to be called into question, then even the concept of "observation" loses its clear meaning. In that case, it is the theory which first determines what can be observed.”

Meaning, that the theoretical framework provides the necessary background as to what to observe. I would say, also, which experiment to design. Without the theory there can be no experiment. This may seem a bit too strong but actually it does deeper into the nature of experience itself. But if you recall Aldous Huxley’s statement, “experience is not what happens to us. It is what we do with what happens to us,” this makes complete sense. A raw experience without the background of the appropriate framework does not contribute to knowledge. It is incidental and does not become incremental. To be incremental, it needs to be correlated with previous knowledge. So is the case with Eastern wisdom. A prepared person is one who approaches spiritual experience equipped with the background of a particular framework. The various approaches in Eastern wisdom are all such frameworks.

KB: “But wouldn’t that bias the observation? Having the background of a framework? Wouldn’t it predispose what we observe making pure observation difficult by endowing the observation with a preferred direction?”

Dr. BSR: Of course it does and that is inevitable. This issue of the framework biasing observation is in fact quite deep and subtle and it is good to go into it a little. First of all, consider attention. Attention can be pure or mixed. It is pure when it is total, so total that there is no vestige of previous imaging. The corresponding awareness then becomes choiceless. This gives rise to cognition rather than recognition. Attention is mixed when it comes with the baggage of previous experience. What one can do, therefore, is choose whether to keep the attention pure or mixed. When one can make this choice,  it leads to effective knowledge. Normally, one does not know how to make that choice as one is untrained. 

What Einstein told Heisenberg is that there are situations when it is possible to base one’s theory only on observable things. But there are also situations when that is not possible. So broadly, the theoretical framework determines what one can observe and this framework can also contain the null set of no experience whatsoever, leading to pure observation. In the case of human experience, there is always a framework built in by previous conditioning, unconscious and conscious. This framework filters experience and allows us to experience only according to its nature. In authentic spiritual practices, one first learns of this limitation and learns to overcome it and then it becomes a choice. One uses the framework knowing that it is limited to the level of a certain experience. And often one lets go of the framework itself after that different level of experience is reached. 

KB: This reminds me of the Buddha’s path to enlightenment. Before the final Nirvana, he reached several levels of trance as taught by the corresponding masters and then discarded all those to find the final all embracing enlightenment. 

Dr. BSR: Exactly. The Buddha himself puts it so beautifully in his, ’The Arian Quest’. After learning all that Alara Kalama and Uddaka Rama could teach, he realised that they did not lead to the ‘matchless peace of nirvana,’ that he sought and went beyond them. Now, it does seem to be a bias to project beforehand what that peace was that he was seeking. But that bias is more in the nature of goal seeking. With the support of the pull that the goal provides, one shoots towards and passes beyond the goal into that which is, the Absolute. And often one shoots beyond with such speed and haste that one misses out all the splendours of existence that are actually necessary to experience in order to reintegrate the ultimate experience with the phenomenal manifestation. Otherwise, the world, after the nirvana remains an inexplicable enigma, illusion or Maya. But anyway, the preparation that spiritual experience demands is of this kind. As is well known, advances in science have come about in two different ways, one by accumulating experience and letting new insights emerge and another by discarding all previous experience and starting out on an entirely new path. This is the difference between evolution and revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. A revolution brings about a paradigm shift. So also in spiritual experience, there is the traditional path of spiritual practice handed down over generations and there is the path that someone like the Buddha discovers by rejecting all previous paths. 

KB: It would seem then that when overly scientific people reject mysticism offhand, they would in fact have considered it if they could start out from first principles without having to accept the traditional frameworks. 

Dr. BSR: But in fact, when it comes to science itself, they don’t do so. On the contrary, they generally strongly discourage anyone who tries to start out on science without mastering the established framework. And this is not about being conservative. It is about not reinventing the wheel. The newcomer who wants to start off without mastering the established paradigm could be risking reinventing the wheel when he could be doing something more meaningful. So it is usually a balance between conservative and radical elements that is helpful for human progress. A rebel without a cause is a luxury that cannot be afforded in any serious pursuits and, therefore, both the maintainers of the existing paradigm and the paradigm shifters have their equally significant role in the economy of human progress.

So also in spiritual experience. But the overly scientific people miss this as they are too confined to their particular domain and field. Instead, if they could lift themselves and identify with a larger domain and field that encompasses both scientific and spiritual experiences, they would be able to understand and appreciate the similarity in the two complementary windows to experience. And I would say that this is true of the spiritual aspirant more than that of the scientific practitioner. Most spiritual aspirants are too eager to make sweeping assumptions regarding science without at all making the necessary preparations by mastering the scientific domains and fields. They are even more reluctant to do that than the scientists would about mastering the domains and fields related to spiritual experience. So in essence, this limitation is quite general in humans and can only be overcome by keeping the quest always in mind.

KB: Is this limitation inevitable?

Dr. BSR: No, not necessarily. It is more of a limitation by learned weakness. And that in turn is due to a host of limiting beliefs. Most people think that being open to spiritual experience automatically means they can bypass the intellect or that the intellect has a negligible role to play. They assume that spiritual experience is so superior to intellectual understanding that it is not necessary for the mind to grasp the experience or even to reflect it. This is an error akin to saying that because one is strong in the intellect one necessarily is strong in the physical. That need not at all be the case, rather the contrary is found to be more prevalent. Therefore, thier ideas on spiritual experience is most often exaggerated or overgeneralized. It is only by a right intellectual development, rigorous yet flexible not to exclude essentially non-rational elements, that it is possible to have a good grasp of the meaning of the spiritual experience.

KB: Ah, that answers a lot of queries I have had.