Krishnamurti - The brain, meditation, compassion in science

Krishnamurti Subtitles

BR74S7 - The brain, meditation, compassion in science
Brockwood Park, UK - 17 October 1974
Seminar 7

0:01	This is J. Krishnamurti’s 7th seminar with scientists at Brockwood Park, 1974. David Bohm: Remember, we decided yesterday to have a meeting with some part of the school in the library at two o’clock, I remind everybody once again. Now, then I think the next speaker will be Professor Maurice Wilkins.
0:16	K: Could I... Sir, if I may ask, before Professor Wilkins begins, a question.
0:24	May I ask a question, sir, concerning yesterday’s...? Unfortunately, it was not possible for me to be there at his talk in the evening. May I ask him a question?
0:34	DB: Yes.
0:35	K: Sir... Karl Pribram: Yes.
0:37	K: ...you were... It is reported to me, perhaps accurately, that the brain is never still.
0:46	KP: That’s right.
0:48	K: And the whole of the brain is... moving, living, active. Is it ever still?
0:56	KP: No.
0:59	K: Never?
1:02	KP: Not the neurons; they’re always beating.
1:08	K: Yes, but thought as a movement, which...
1:12	KP: There are various states, and some of these states do not involve any thoughtful activity.
1:22	K: No. What I’m trying to get at is, sir...
1:27	KP: Yes.
1:28	K: May I...? In meditation – if you know something about that; I don’t know how much...
1:33	KP: Yes. Yes, I know.
1:35	K: ...if you have ever done it – which is, all wounds are healed; all movement of the self has come to an end – self with its arrogance, vanities and achievements – the whole movement of thought as the me.
2:07	You...?
2:08	KP: Yes.
2:11	K: The ending of that is part of meditation.
2:16	KP: Yes.
2:19	K: In which thought comes to an end.
2:26	It is possible.
2:27	KP: Oh yes. But that’s also true in sleep, which is a different thing. Yes.
2:33	K: I just want to...
2:35	KP: Sure.
2:36	K: That’s also true in deep sleep...
2:38	KP: Sure. Right.
2:40	K: ...which I went... which we talked the other day; that’s what I was trying to convey. Now, can... is there a quietness, a stillness of the brain, not as a movement stirred by thought?
2:59	KP: Yes, the activity, the electrical activity which is...
3:03	K: Goes on.
3:04	KP: It goes on but it is a very slow, quiet...
3:07	K: That’s all. Therefore, it can... that very activity and vibration – whatever you... – can come, very slowly, to an end.
3:15	KP: Well, it doesn’t come to an end; it becomes...
3:18	K: It becomes very quiet, very slow.
3:20	KP: ...quiet and very cyclic; very... very repetitive, very…
3:23	K: Yes, that’s…
3:26	KP: You see?
3:29	K: Therefore, in meditation, where there is no concentration – this is different from usual meditation – ...
3:39	KP: Yes.
3:41	K: ...no experiencing...
3:43	KP: Yes.
3:45	K: Is the brain, with its movement but rhythmic, quiet...
3:52	KP: Yes.
3:53	K: ...it is no longer... I’ll put it round... yes.
4:07	Has it got a different – forgive me if I use ordinary language – a different quality of energy?
4:14	KP: I would say...
4:16	K: You understand?
4:19	KP: Yes.
4:20	K: That’s what... George Sudarshan: In deep sleep?
4:25	K: In deep sleep, as well in deep meditation.
4:26	GS: Deep meditation.
4:27	KP: Deep meditation. A different quality of rhythm; the rhythms are different, therefore qualitatively, yes, it is different. It is very different.
4:35	K: Yes. You see, therefore...
4:37	KP: The configuration of the energy is different, you see. We have to really talk in terms of the organisation of energy, not just the amount of energy.
4:47	And the organisation of the energy is very different in one state of consciousness than it is in another state of consciousness; and electrical recordings simply tell us...
4:58	K: But consciousness is its content.
5:00	KP: Well, yes, in...
5:02	K: If the content is...
5:04	KP: Quiet. Yes.
5:06	K: ...dormant or made very, very, very still, consciousness as we know it becomes something different.
5:16	KP: Becomes different.
5:17	K: That’s all I’m...
5:18	KP: That’s right.
5:19	K: Therefore, the vibrations or the movement of... rhythmic movement slows down and has got a different quality.
5:24	KP: Very much so.
5:25	K: That’s all I...
5:26	KP: Yes.
5:27	K: You see, this is... May I go on? This is very important because... I think – forgive me for saying – that meditation is tremendously important for human beings.
5:45	Not the meditation of control, suppression, practise and...
5:47	KP: Right. No.
5:49	K: ...you know, the routine...
5:50	KP: I was saying last night to remember that hypnosis, for instance, is very different. Hypnosis is...
5:56	K: Yes. In hypnosis, the whole thing becomes tremendously active.
5:59	KP: That’s right.
6:00	K: No, but that’s...
6:01	KP: Just the opposite of meditation.
6:02	K: Yes. It’s the opposite of meditation; that I understand that. I’ve watched it in some friends who were being mesmerised and... If you’re interested in it, I’ll tell you later about it. Is this...? May I...? I have seen, sir... A man came to see me in Benares. He was a poor man, just a loin cloth, and he said, ‘I want to show you something.’ There were several professors round – we were sitting on a veranda – and this man said, ‘I’ve shown these things to the viceroy, to the big people and so on, and I would like to show you something.
6:43	But I’m not going to mesmerise anybody — especially you, sir, because you’re a religious man,’ etc., etc., etc.
6:50	So there was steps going down and a rose... – what do you call it? – where there were roses, and a driveway went round it.
7:04	A rose bed, large rose bed; driveway went round it. And he said, ‘Please... bring a newspaper.’ There were eight of us there, professors of Cambridge and so on, all that.
7:21	And he sat on the other side of the rose bed, other side of the driveway, even, and they put the paper there.
7:32	And he said, ‘Just look at it.’ And you saw – literally, sir, I’m not exaggerating – this paper becoming smaller and smaller and smaller and disappear.
7:46	You know all these things, sir. In India, we’re all crazy people. (Laughter) Now, and also I’ve seen on other occasions people mesmerised, hypnotised, their brains have been... their talk and, you know, becomes extraordinarily active.
8:09	The deep sleep and deep meditation are the same.
8:14	KP: They can’t be exactly the same, but...
8:18	K: No, of course, I’m...
8:20	KP: We haven’t studied enough of the different parts of the brain to see what the difference is between deep meditation, but superficially they are very...
8:29	K: Deep, in the sense, the same... there is great quietness, great... a sense of renewal, a sense of freshness, a sense of youthful... – you...? – the brain seems to become young, if I may use... because it is no longer wounded, hurt, striving, pulling, building a fence round itself and so on, therefore it has got a beauty, a freshness, a youthful...
9:05	That’s all I want... Sorry, sir. Maurice Wilkins: Could I ask Krishnamurti a question about the nature of meditation?
9:15	DB: Go ahead.
9:18	MW: So far as I can see from reading what you have said about it, I mean, is it really much the same as the kind of transcendental experience which one may get in looking at nature, at art, or through certain aspects of religious experience?
9:49	K: Sir, I don’t know... the word meditation... How you mean it and... I may mean it differently. Art, from what we know, is putting things in their proper place – art means that, surely?
10:10	The dictionary meaning. Right sir? – fitting things into their place. Now, meditation I think is different from the observation or the seeing of a tree, being with nature.
10:27	It has the same quality but the thing here is different because the observer is non-existent.
10:44	Because the observer is the observed. And in meditation it is going beyond both — the observer and the observed.
10:55	I don’t know if you... if makes any sense of what I’m saying. Sir...
11:02	KP: In that sense, it’s transcendental.
11:04	K: I won’t use the word transcendental because that’s been misused. May I...? Do you want to go into this, sir?
11:14	MW: Yes, please.
11:19	K: There are so many different kinds of meditation. There’s the Zen meditation. Zen meditation, that word comes from the Sanskrit word dhyana which means to meditate.
11:38	That went to China and they couldn’t pronounce dhya, so it became zya, zen.
11:47	And in that meditation – from what I have been told and people who have spent years at it – there is concentration, the attention to breathing so as to quieten the mind, control.
12:08	In the Indian meditation, there are several kinds.
12:15	I haven’t done any of them, so I have been told, I’ve watched them, I have talked to people who have done years and years of practising meditation.
12:25	Also, it is based on control and going beyond thought.
12:32	That is, to end thought: to control it, to suppress it, to sublimate it — all still in the field of thought.
12:54	I don’t know if I’m conveying something. I... For me that... all those kind of meditations are not meditation, because they imply control.
13:05	The control is the controller – you...?
13:12	The control and the controller are the same. And therefore they... it has no meaning when they say, ‘I’m going to control my thoughts.’ That only creates conflict between the thinker and the thought.
13:34	So that kind of meditation in which there is control, or there are other kind of meditations which are repetitive: you will take a word – or a mantram as it’s called in India – a phrase, a good sounding phrase and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.
13:57	The very sound of it... First you repeat it loud, then gradually you repeat it silently and as you repeat it silently, you kind of go beyond yourself.
14:12	All those are mechanistic – if I may use that word – forms of meditation.
14:22	To me, meditation begins with the understanding of the self, the me, and that can be understood in my relationship with others.
14:35	You...? In relationship, I discover what I am: my responses, my aggressiveness, my violence, my possessiveness, domination, attachment — in relationship.
14:47	And to be aware and to give attention to that responses is part of meditation, so that as one observes oneself in relationship, all the responses, aggressive and all those responses, quieten down.
15:09	That is the basis, so that there is righteous behaviour – if I can use that word – a behaviour not with motive, convenience, a behaviour based on reward and punishment and so on, so on.
15:28	And then the understanding of thought (laughs) – I don’t know if you want to go into all this, if you are interested in it – and in the understanding of thinking, there is no entity as the thinker.
15:47	There is only thinking. Not, ‘I think.’ Because the I is not separate from the thought, so the thinker is the thought; the observer is the observed, the experiencer the experience and so on.
16:10	And can thought with all its movements, with all its activities, with all its demands and so on, so on, come to an end?
16:25	Not suppress, not control, not transcended, but just coming to an end.
16:33	Which is thought as time. And all that is part of meditation. And out... in that meditation there is something sacred.
16:55	Have I conveyed anything, sir, or is it all sheer nonsense?
16:57	MW: It is helpful but still somewhat elusive.
17:01	K: Somewhat...?
17:02	MW: Elusive. Questioner: Could I ask, is meditation an instinct?
17:08	K: No, no, no – just a minute – he says, ‘Elusive.’ Sir, unless one does this – not that I’m inviting... please.
17:23	Sir, behaviour is very important. How I behave, without a motive of reward or punishment.
17:41	And behaviour – which is conduct and so on and all the rest of it – shows me what I am: my vanity, my arrogance, my this and my that and all that.
18:03	And can that... all those attributes, all those qualities of arrogance, [be] put away without effort?
18:15	Because the entity who is aware says, ‘I am arrogant.’ Arrogance is the entity not, ‘I am arrogant.’ I don’t know if I’m...
18:29	David Shainberg: What’s the putting away process?
18:34	K: It disappears. When I observe something attentively... Say I’m arrogant, because I have achieved a certain fame, a certain nonsensical reputation or that I’ve written a book and I feel... – you know, all the rest of it – I feel arrogant, because I have a certain knowledge, certain importance.
19:01	Arrogance is a form of exclusiveness, is a form of pleasure in power.
19:17	And when I’m arrogant it goes... certain forms of violence with it.
19:25	I discover, or there is discovery of all that, and to remain without suppression, without escape, without sublimation, to remain with that arrogance without any movement, with what is.
19:42	And then you go beyond it. The mind... it’s finished. Am I conveying anything or...?
19:58	DS: Would you say then, in some way, you know that... How do you...? I mean, I think... what’s... The feel of your being there with it, is knowing that it will...?
20:10	K: Ah no! No, no, we are... It’s rather difficult to go into this, sir. Sir, you know what arrogance is?
20:21	DS: Yes. Well... (laughs) (Laughter) K: Most of us know.
20:30	Now, can you look at it, first be aware of it, without condemning it, without justifying it?
20:45	And also, can you be aware that the word is not the thing. Has the word created the feeling or the feeling exists before the word?
20:58	KP: It just is.
21:02	DS: The word... the feeling creates the word.
21:05	K: No... Go... I have to find this out. Not... Don’t... You follow? I say, ‘I’m arrogant.’ I’m aware of it. Is the word...? Why do I call it arrogance? Because I have known it and I have called it in order to recognise it?
21:32	Therefore, is the word... does the word indicate or sustain or nourish that feeling or is that feeling independent of the word?
21:45	Are you interested in...?
21:47	DS: Yes; I think it’s both, somehow or other.
21:50	K: So, I have to... Now, can my mind remain with it? With all its fullness, not with, ‘I want to get rid of it. It’s superficial, it’s deep,’ all its causes; why I’m vain or... just be with it, as it were.
22:15	Because I see all the implications of arrogance: violence, sense of superiority, division, conflict, a form of ruthlessness, attachment and the fear of losing it, pleasure and pain — I’m aware of this whole feel... of this whole map of arrogance; the mind is watching it.
22:47	And remain with it, without a movement away from it. All that is part of meditation.
23:04	And keep on, move, move, ‘til the thing is clean, healthy, whole.
23:11	Whole means also – the word whole means – healthy, sane and also holy, sacred.
23:19	That’s all. And penetrate; penetrate in the sense that you don’t exercise will to penetrate, it moves.
23:29	When you open the door, the air comes in.
23:33	Q: Is this...?
23:35	K: That is all meditation, sir. I mean, this is...
23:38	Q: Is this an instinct?
23:39	K: Instinct?
23:41	Q: Well, there’s a behaviour you can strive for, you can try to do something, and there is something else which is a natural thing you will do, unless you’re frustrated.
23:49	K: I don’t understand this, sorry.
23:51	Q: Well, there is a certain... I may try to do something. I may want to do something and I try to do it and strive to do it. There might be another thing which is... if I’m thirsty, I drink; I don’t necessarily think about it.
24:06	Is this meditation an instinct, a natural...?
24:09	K: Oh no. No.
24:11	Q: It doesn’t require effort?
24:12	K: No sir, it... No, I... One has to go into this question. Why...? What is effort, sir?
24:22	Q: What is effort? It’s somehow... you separate yourself from the thing you want to do.
24:28	K: No, what is effort?
24:29	Q: You try to will.
24:30	K: I... As he was saying last night, this morning I am lethargic, lazy; I make an effort to get up, because I think I must not be lazy, I must not be lethargic, I must not be slothful, therefore I must get up.
24:49	That’s effort.
24:51	Q: That’s effort.
24:54	K: I must beat... I must be superior to you intellectually, verbally — I make an effort.
25:04	I must make my life into a success. That’s an effort. So we are educated to make this tremendous effort to be something all the time.
25:21	Which is part of arrogance. And can that arrogance come to an end? Because if I’m arrogance, there is no love in arrogance. That’s all. Probably, this all sounds nonsense, but...
25:39	Q: No.
25:41	K: Have I, Professor, sir, have I explained a little bit or it is still elusive?
25:54	MW: Well, it is still elusive but I think it’s a little clearer; a little less elusive. (Laughs) K: (Laughs) Sir, this is a tremendous problem, you can’t... it isn’t to be discussed in a few minutes or a few hours; it’s one’s... spends a whole life in it.
26:10	It is a thing one has to give one’s life to understand, as you have given your life to understand mathematics or physics or biology or that, this is... this is...
26:21	(Pause) DB: Yes? Bryan Goodwin: You say that one has to give one’s life to studying this...
26:42	K: Not studying. Ah, not studying it, sir. One’s...
26:46	BG: I’m sorry, it’s the wrong word. Yes. To achieve that...
26:53	K: And is it possible for a human being not to be violent?
27:01	We have evolved from animals and all the – you know? – all the business of violence.
27:09	Can we be free of violence?
27:12	BG: Well, I would think it was possible but very difficult.
27:20	K: So to go into it, you must give your thought, your feelings, your inquiry; you must go...
27:29	you must investigate it, in yourself. It may take a day, it may take a week or a month but you must give it that month.
27:40	BG: I can appreciate that. It would be a primary activity.
27:49	K: What sir?
27:52	BG: It should be a primary activity.
27:58	K: Which?
28:00	BG: Well, self-realisation.
28:03	K: I don’t know what you mean, self-realisation.
28:10	BG: Well, to become... to be transparent, to achieve or to reach a state of grace in which you’re transparent.
28:20	K: Yes, surely.
28:22	BG: Yes. And one can do this while one’s engaged in other activities of the world such as...
28:34	K: Why do...? Why...?
28:36	BG: One can reach this state of grace while one is also engaged in the ordinary activities of the world, such as studying physics?
28:47	K: Are you saying, sir, can you have this grace while living in this world?
28:53	BG: Yes.
28:54	K: Obviously, otherwise what’s the point of it? What’s the point of having it in some retirement as a hermit and... you follow?
29:05	It’s my daily life. Fritjof Capra: No, I think – if I may say – he was not asking whether one can have it, but whether one can achieve it.
29:14	K: I think so, surely; otherwise it has no meaning.
29:16	BG: I think the confusion was, you said, ‘You have to give your life to it, the way you would to physics.’ K: I see, yes.
29:27	BG: And the question is whether one can do it along with physics, if you’re...
29:28	K: Of course, of course. I’m sorry if I... my question... I’m sorry, sir, if I took away your time.
29:42	DB: Is everybody satisfied?
29:44	KP: Can I say just one thing about it? There’s nothing antithetical between doing physics and doing what Krishnamurti is talking about. You know, like the thing about the papers and one’s feeling when people steal things and one’s anger... All of us, in our academic activities all the time, we can do the kind of thing we’re talking about, if we take advantage of what’s available to us.
30:05	GS: Is this a hope or a statement from practise?
30:12	I’m serious; I mean, it sounds flippant. I mean, do you think it could be done or do you know it could be done, from practise?
30:23	KP: Yes. To the extent that I can do it, which is a small extent, I believe that it can be done.
30:30	GS: Can be done.
30:32	DB: Well, then, perhaps we’ll go on then with Professor Wilkins’ talk.
30:47	MW: Well, I actually feel at some disadvantage after the...
30:54	Krishnamurti’s discussion, but I think the... what I am concerned with is this question of what we may be able to do about it, as scientists.
31:13	And it may help to make my position clearer if I begin by brief autobiographical notes, that from an early age I came into science through what might be termed a fascination with nature, with looking at the stars, the crystals in the rocks, the interference of light waves and, looking back on this now, I think that this was probably somehow a matter of what some people call a sense of oneness.
31:58	K: Yes sir.
32:00	MW: That, on the one hand, one had a kind of glorious isolation in this scientific activity, that one has – as people now say – stopped the world, but on the other hand, I had a deep feeling that one must communicate this, share it with other people, and with ordinary people not just other scientists.
32:33	And, as an example, I saw – it was before the war – that wonderful person J.B.S.
32:41	Haldane, who wrote outstanding articles on popularising science in the leading working-class newspaper of the time.
32:53	But I was also very much aware of a kind of dichotomy between what one might call thought on the one hand and feeling on the other, between, say, art and science.
33:11	Although I was fascinated by science, I was also repelled by analytical thought.
33:24	It was somehow symbolised by the mechanisms of a clock.
33:31	And I had a profound conviction, somehow, that thought was dead – this was why I was interested in what Krishnamurti has written on this topic – that on the other hand, from thought, there was the world of life and love.
33:56	And I found Kierkegaard’s very vivid and illuminating view... expression of the negative aspect of analytical thought helpful, that, as he put it, the only reality was an ethical reality, not material reality.
34:18	I suppose this was another way of saying, in a way, as so many Christians have said that, ‘God is love.’ He ridiculed scientists for looking down their microscopes instead of looking up to God.
34:35	I might mention, I’m not a Christian. And I had all these thoughts while I was in the middle of an intensive career of research on neucleic acids and things like that.
34:52	Kierkegaard, of course, went to rather possibly ridiculous extremes but they interested me, that he regarded the scientist’s search for truth as a kind of obsession and neurosis.
35:04	He said that a scientist isn’t after truth, that truth is after the scientist. He made good jokes like that, but it seemed to me that they were telling jokes.
35:16	And I have thought too that, in a way, scientists are like overgrown school boys.
35:23	I think it is one of the properties of boys in their teens that they often become obsessionally interested in something for a few years; all their interests canalise on this.
35:36	And I think it is probably a mistake for me to talk like this because I think I have done it once or twice in the company of scientists, and I find afterwards they avoid me.
35:48	(Laughter) I think I cause offence. To say that scientists are adolescents that never grew up is not a nice thing to say, but...
36:04	KP: I thought that was well known.
36:09	MW: (Laughs) But has it been put forward. I...?
36:14	KP: It has.
36:16	MW: Where?
36:17	KP: In fact, there are some analysts who say it’s because boys never got to see girls when they were adolescents and it’s a frustration; the curiosity is really displaced frustration.
36:29	I think that’s going a little too far but it has been... And the observation that scientists are really quite young...
36:35	FC: I think Freud said that about Leonardo da Vinci.
36:37	KP: Yes, something like that.
36:39	MW: Well, I would like to go into that more then. It’s... But, of course, Kierkegaard failed to see the positive aspect of science, the element of spiritual enlightenment that scientists were seeking for, initially.
37:05	Then, of course, I found that Jung’s picture of how thought, thinking and feeling were two aspects of a whole, which one needed somehow to build.
37:22	This was very helpful – I mean, these ideas being of course derived from studies of Eastern ideas.
37:31	But it still seems to me that the scientific community as a whole is somehow trapped, is mesmerised in this world of thought.
37:42	The very success has made that trap all the deeper and I still don’t know really how conscious we are of how much of a trap we’re in.
37:56	But after these general remarks, I mean, what can we try to do about it?
38:04	And I got interested in these questions in the last few years, in working through with people, mainly young people in the British Society for Social Responsibility and Science – and you’ll pardon my doing a little propaganda for my organisation – and I think in a way that this working through this type of activity may be somewhat comparable to – I’m not well up in these matters but my superficial acquaintance with the history of St Francis is roughly an example there – that I gather that St Francis was rather special amongst Christians, that he had a love for nature and that his love of God expressed itself in a love for nature, animals and man.
39:04	And this seems a little bit similar to the aspects of a scientist loving nature — loving it and inquiring into it in the same way that a religious man might wish to inquire into the nature of God.
39:23	But, of course, I mean, how many scientists are like that now? It seems that there are only pale vestiges of this spirit left in science and I think, to a large extent, Kierkegaard’s criticisms are only too true, too applicable today to our present condition.
39:46	But then how do we proceed?
39:54	And I think, it seems to me at least – a little bit sort of following the example of St Francis – that one would have to somehow involve oneself in practical issues, that whatever kind of harmony we may attain in ourselves, in our lives and works, must of course be related and expressed, somehow ultimately, in a social organisation, that this must extend out into the overall social organisation in the world, in fact, into the world of politics.
40:46	Krishnamurti has emphasised the need for us to be conscious of our conditioning.
40:54	And this is, it seems to me, an important question: how much aware are we of the extent to which we are conditioned by our social organisation?
41:10	And I think one important aspect of this conditioning is, I feel, the extent of the social, economic pressures which condition us.
41:26	Yet I think that – an example, that most of us will probably agree – in our acquisitive society, that this society engenders avarice and greed and exploitation and misuse of power.
41:45	Of course, all... if we hold this view, of course, this presupposes a certain view of man, that one will find the conservatives will have a somewhat different view from, say, the socialist.
42:01	And the conservative will, in a way, say that greed is the only incentive which man can respond to, that we must be realistic about the practical... about the limitations of man.
42:25	And, of course, when one talks about politics, we all feel very disillusioned about these matters and say that it is a disgraceful muddle and we know that setting up new political systems often leads to little progress, that if we replace an acquisitive society by something else – say capitalism by socialism – we find it doesn’t prevent the misuse, the gross misuse of power.
42:55	But I feel that we must see beyond this disillusionment because ultimately we have to face the political realities; we cannot be a microcosm separate from the rest of the world as a whole.
43:13	And in a way we must accept that the social organisation, although setting up this is not sufficient to attain a satisfactory state, it is at least a necessary thing.
43:34	That, as in this discussion of not being able to – Krishnamurti said – not being able to teach love, yet we agreed we can at least remove the obstacles to its development.
43:46	And I think this is where the social organisation is so important.
43:55	But clearly to build a good society we need a much wider view of man than the views commonly held by, for example, materialist socialists.
44:11	And I think without a better social system our more personal transformations cannot lead very far, and therefore I make a plea for greater – and here I was going to say effort – a greater consciousness of the economic, political constraints which are very real and will continue to be real.
44:41	For example, if we criticise nationalism we must see that there are very real economic and political factors which have brought it about, and that these are as real in causing wars as the more personal elements of individual psychology.
45:08	And if we study these matters in history, I think it’s very illuminating. I’ve been reading history lately because my daughter at school isn’t taught well and was unhappy about it, so I thought it would do me good to get a little education too and I found it very illuminating.
45:30	I mean, one can see that how in, under feudalism, there was much oppression in the name of God’s will, the divine right of kings, and because it fitted in with a requirement of the technological, economic factors at the time.
45:45	And then one saw Newton, who showed that it was possible for man to obtain knowledge by reason and observation not simply via God.
46:00	And then I was glad to find the history books really do all seem fairly well agreed on this, that these scientific ideas did... were important in producing considerable social changes, that because man – individual man – was able to obtain knowledge, then individual man had an importance; he must be allowed to develop his potential.
46:29	And this, of course, fitted in with the development of the merchant and manufacturing class, replaced the land owners and similarly these pressures from them was the changes about social theory.
46:48	And so, as a result of this, you had progress towards the French Revolution and the oscillating progress between authoritarianism and democracy, liberty, equality and fraternity.
46:59	I mean it, you know, sort of went up and down and up and down but there still was a gradual change in the last two hundred years, three hundred years.
47:11	And so I think in a way here that we can argue that knowledge has led to improvement, in so far as I think one can trace a definite relationship between the science – as exemplified in Newton – and the development of ideas of social equality.
47:32	And I think these remarks point a way to how we can change science; I mean, the question that was put earlier was, ‘How can we bring compassion into science?’ That I feel one of the factors here is to become more conscious of the social, cultural, political relations of science, how the social, cultural, political situation affects the science and how the science, in turn, affects the social, cultural, political situation.
48:13	And then, to be more specific, what expressions can this take, what particular forms?
48:23	Well, we can, of course, be opposed to elitism in science — we don’t want to be people separate from the community at large.
48:34	We do want to bring science to people, to ordinary people, not necessarily with much education.
48:45	We don’t want to leave science in the hands of high government committees who have their secret meetings and produce their reports.
48:54	This, I think, is not the way to go. That we may, for example, find what they do in China useful, that the academics should be sent out in the fields for a year; maybe they can’t appreciate what it is like to work in the fields or the factories if they don’t actually go out and experience it themselves.
49:18	It may help them. We can appreciate the extent of the brainwashing in our education, how all the subjects are taught as separate disciplines which produces a particular type of mind, which doesn’t ask questions anymore; doesn’t ask questions about our political system, doesn’t ask fundamental questions at all.
49:43	And, of course, as I mentioned China, we’re aware too that there are very undesirable aspects in Chinese education; so out of our education, I think you get a crippling of the mind by the fragmentation of thought, inculcated throughout the whole educational system.
50:05	And I think if we can bring this to our students, I think we’ll find a good response, at least I do.
50:12	I think the young people are all right, they’re not ruined yet; the old people, most of them, are beyond hope.
50:22	And, I mean, what actual practical things can one do? Well, one can quote certain examples. They may not be very good ones. But the young people in our Social Responsibility Society, they went into the factories, to the trades unionists and the trades unionists said, ‘Oh, we don’t like you academics, you’re only a nuisance with your radical politics,’ but then they said, ‘Well, look, science can be useful to you.
50:53	You have your difficulties in your working condition, you have pollution in the air.
51:00	Here we have instruments, you can measure this for yourself.’ And finally, in the p.v.c. factories, they got the factory workers to go and monitor their own atmosphere and they found that things weren’t what they ought to be and they got things changed.
51:19	And this wasn’t just a matter of setting up the class war in the factory, it brought science to these people and I was told that they thought science is fine, you see, it has some relevance to our lives, and they went home and they looked at a Horizon programme on the television and got interested in science, so I’m told.
51:40	This is one example. And then one can uncover war research which goes on – and this will mean one will have to be aggressive and one will get oneself in unpleasant situations – war research in universities, which people don’t like to face up to.
52:00	And one can be a little more positive if one goes into things like alternative technology, where one tries to put a positive ethic into science and technology, where one will get more directly in contact with nature, a more ecological view, and develop technologies which may, for example, be especially relevant to developing countries.
52:28	And then one can try to study the relations of art and science – which, of course, in general leads to the most awful rubbish – but sometimes something may emerge from this and I think some of the funny greenhouse things that young people live in today – recycling their own wastes with a windmill on top – it may be, in a strange way, that this is a new kind of thing which is meant by some sort of coming together of art and science.
53:01	So I think my general point is that one’s personal transformation may take place through an involvement in these things and that this may be relevant to what Bryan Goodwin said about the initiation process for scientists, which may get us out of our academic isolation, in which I think there’s no hope for us.
53:33	Julian Melzack: I’d like to just make two comments really.
53:49	One concerns really a tension which I think we’ve all been experiencing this week between... Well, we’ve called it different things. Ullmann called it holonomy versus autonomy. Fragmentation versus wholeness is too pejorative for the fragmentation people, so we won’t use that way of describing the dichotomy.
54:10	But Professor Wilkins sort of touched on something that I found interesting, at the very beginning of his paper: he said when he was young what motivated him into science was, among other things, when he sort of looked up at the stars and experienced a sense of oneness.
54:24	Well, I’m wondering whether there is perhaps two different ways that, as it were, we’re programmed from birth – if you want to use that sort of description – or two different ways that people are disposed towards experiencing that sort of event.
54:41	In other words, Wilkins said he experienced a sense of oneness. Well, now...
54:48	MW: Well no, I don’t think I did; I mean, that was in retrospect I analysed it... (inaudible) JM: I see. Well, the point... Well, when I did that as a young person, I mean, what I experienced was quite, almost contradictory to what you described.
55:01	I mean, I experienced a sense of aweness which did a great deal towards separating me from what I was looking at.
55:09	KP: A great sense of all-ness?
55:11	JM: Aweness. Awe. A-W. I was in awe of what I was looking at.
55:15	K: Awe.
55:16	JM: Awe. Sorry.
55:18	KP: That separates you? Awe.
55:20	JM: Yes, yes.
55:21	MW: Yes, but I don’t think that’s...
55:22	KP: It’s difficult, really...
55:23	MW: Awe is okay, I had awe.
55:24	JM: I certainly didn’t – yes – but I certainly didn’t experience, even in retrospect or at that time, the sense of – well, it’s your word – oneness with what you were looking at.
55:36	And, I think... I mean, this was almost... I was going to say pre-theoretical; I mean, we all bring to bear certain theoretical lenses on what we observe, we have to, but it’s almost something that conditions the sorts of lenses that we bring to bear and maybe we really are disposed towards looking at this kind of distinction in a very fundamentally different way.
56:02	And maybe this is why some of us are having trouble understanding some of the others. Well anyway, I want to make one more point before I stop and that’s what you said about compassion – and we’ve talked about this at great length earlier on – and I still feel, I’m afraid, that I cannot agree with what Wilkins said.
56:22	I mean, I think towards the end of I think last session but one, I sort of saw the issue but now I’m not so sure.
56:31	I mean, it’s difficult for me to see, for example, that when someone like – well, take any one of us – say Pribram for example, sits down at his desk and works on his model, how compassion is going to help him hone that model down, to have more and more and more explanatory power, that is to say, to do the sort of job that the model was originally designed to do.
56:52	I agree, of course, that when one, as it were, sets about applying what science has given us to the world then one must do so compassionately, but the actual quest for knowledge and succeeding in that quest, when we’re doing our particular area of work, it seems to me that compassion cannot be, as it were, generated out of that activity itself but rather must accompany that activity when one applies the results of the activity to a relevant part of the world.
57:27	That is, what I’m saying in more formal terms is that compassion of course is compatible or consistent with science but I think, for me anyway, it’s a mistake to think of it in terms of something that we can generate out of science.
57:39	Of course it’s compatible and we all want…
57:42	Q: (Inaudible) MW: Yes. Well, in reply to that I have found people in our Social Responsibility Society who are interested in, say, uncovering war research in universities and practical matters like that and yet they say, ‘Well, when I teach quantum mechanics I can’t bring social responsibility into my lectures on quantum mechanics,’ and this is a fragmentation which seems to be equivalent to what you’re saying.
58:14	But I think this is not the right way to look at it, because if you teach quantum mechanics in the wider perspective, you discuss the nature of the truth in quantum mechanics, its origins, where it may go, the extent to which this is an expression of something arising out of our present cultural traditions within science, which themselves have all kinds of roots.
58:49	If we present quantum mechanics in this wider perspective, then it embraces the element of human relationships and embraces the question of compassion, and there’s no separation.
59:07	JM: But look, I’m afraid, that sort of... I understand the semantics of your remarks, but for me it still has no teeth. Now, let me explain – try to explain – because I think it’s an important issue. Let’s say – let’s not use the bomb example because it’s used too much – say that somebody who’s working in cancer research suddenly discovers a way to trigger the immunological response which will prevent the cells from multiplying the way they do when cancer starts.
59:36	And he’s terribly interested and he does it in, you know, in a way that will... well, it’s both rigorous, let’s say it can be formalised in terms of an axiomatic system, etc., etc., and the result will be, the practical result will be that we’ll discover a way to, broadly speaking, cure cancer and we do this by triggering the... etc., etc.
1:00:01	Now, a by-product of this might be that we could use the very same discovery to, as it were, do the opposite effect: that is, we could suppress the immunological response so that we could by, let’s say, spraying a certain area of the world, make all the people in that area get cancer.
1:00:25	Now, should the person who is working on this very theoretical problem be concerned with the possible repercussions of his discovery, that just in the same way, should Einstein have been worried about the bomb?
1:00:40	Need we even mention that he needn’t have thought about the bomb when he was thinking in a very abstract way about space and time and about the sorts of things that led up to his axiomatisation?
1:00:50	I mean, of course one wants to exercise compassion in practically applying those sorts of theoretical discoveries but in the process of making the discoveries, my claim is, it seems that compassion is not so much out of place but it’s sort of totally irrelevant when one is working on that sort of problem.
1:01:12	And when you say, well, I’m being fragmentary, well, perhaps I am but I cannot see how saying, ‘Well, I want to be more holistic,’ will help me in a particular bit of research.
1:01:26	MW: Well, I don’t think it will help you on a limited scale but I think in the long term it probably will help you.
1:01:34	You see, this thing about Einstein and the bomb, I mean, Rutherford was... they say Rutherford said that he could not... it was ridiculous to consider the energy of the nucleus finding useful application, something to this effect.
1:01:53	And my own theory is he wasn’t so silly, he was very well aware, at the back of his mind this would take place.
1:02:01	But he was living in a golden age: Cambridge colleges, the Backs, academic science, the brotherhood of the scientific community and all that, so he kidded himself.
1:02:15	JM: About what? You see, I mean one goes to an institution like SLAC, say, at Stanford and one sees this brilliant work being done on discovering particles and discovering how they interact.
1:02:27	Now, you might say, or one might say, following a... ‘What the hell’s the point; I mean, there’s lots of money being poured down the SLAC two mile tunnel, for no really good reason.
1:02:37	Compassion isn’t relevant, therefore let’s stop that sort of research.’ Well, why not say that sort of research is helping us to understand better the ultimate constituents of the world.
1:02:47	DB: Now... Yes, I knew some of this... I think I would like to say, you know, something of... I have some experience in this domain too, that the... for example, as Oppenheimer knew quite well, he worked on the atomic bomb project and also worked later on the hydrogen bomb project.
1:03:02	Now, the atomic bomb project you could justify because people felt it was necessary to defeat Hitler but later, during the hearings which were on Oppenheimer – they were held in the United States Senate or somewhere, I forget exactly – they asked him, you know, why he went back to this work and he said that the techniques were so sweet that he couldn’t resist them.
1:03:24	(Laughs) Now, I’m trying to say there was an example of lack of compassion in science, that there was some satisfaction he was getting out of it, which overweighed every other consideration which must have been in the back of his mind.
1:03:36	JM: But that was a practical application.
1:03:38	DB: Well, no, because also they were discovering ways of doing it. You see, I think that Maurice Wilkins here is pointing out that, to a certain extent, the straws were already visible in the wind, that there might be some dangerous applications of this and people just simply didn’t consider it seriously because they were really finding science a great thing to do.
1:04:06	You know, as you were saying, the scientific brotherhood. So it’s a question of the amount of sensitivity there is to all these factors.
1:04:18	You see, I think that, at some stage, scientists slowly fell into this thing because they did not... they were not sensitive to the changing meaning of what they were doing.
1:04:30	K: Yes sir.
1:04:31	JM: But do you think that fission and fusion should have been swept under the...?
1:04:35	DB: Well, I don’t want to discuss that point, because I think that until we settle this point... You see, that other point is a side issue – ...
1:04:40	JM: Well, no...
1:04:41	DB: ...exactly what they should have done – until their state of mind was sufficiently sensitive to see what was the right thing to do.
1:04:46	Q: Quite.
1:04:47	DB: Well, I think that Sudarshan is next.
1:04:48	GS: I wanted to say two things. One, that in a certain sense, when one is deeply involved in a fundamental problem – I have never done anything very practical so... you know, I mean, like making a bomb or deciding to make a particular chemical – but when one is deeply absorbed in the thing, there is no question of compassion being something that you have to worry about either having or not having, because at that time there is nobody else; not that you are excluding other people, not you are elitist – you may be with a lot of people – but at the time you’re working on a basic problem, there is no-one else except that particular problem with you.
1:05:28	But there are a number of ways in which compassion fails scientists, even at these levels.
1:05:35	I am more familiar with the American university system. In the American system, the workload of a professor is estimated in terms of: one, the number of classes that he meets which is organised by the university; second in terms of the number of research papers that he publishes; third, in terms of the amount of money that he is making flow through the university; third, perhaps international conferences and other positions of influence that he’s wielding.
1:06:07	There are, however, a number of other teaching duties that a professor has, which are simply not taken into account. For example, explaining a point to a fellow teacher who is not able to see; talking to a man in another department who simply wants to know what is meant by wave particle dualism or somebody who wants to know how to integrate E to the power of minus X squared, from minus infinity... (inaudible).
1:06:31	This kind of thing is not counted as part of your job, nor the activity in which you, sort of, sustain somebody else who is doing basic work, who does something and brings it to you – like a puppy brings a little stick back to you for approval – and if you don’t take time out to approve this kind of thing then, of course, you are not doing your compassionate job.
1:06:55	The reason why there is not more understanding about science in the general public and even in the university community itself between various people, is that this activity is neither encouraged nor is there compassion for the man who is doing it.
1:07:10	You... Everyone wants to feel that he is doing a useful piece of work, something relevant, but there must be some feeling within the university community, in the academic community, that this activity of explaining science to other people, of presenting new insightful ways of presenting material, is there.
1:07:28	And instead of that, scientific communities seem to be preoccupied with not even truths – as Kierkegaard’s quote seems to be very appropriate – not even truth but how you present things in such a fashion that you have gotten there ahead of another person, not even how you have got.
1:07:47	And therefore, this lack of concern for this aspect of the thing both hurts you and your not taking aware of it hurts other people.
1:07:56	So it seems to me that compassion has a very important place even in basic science, in the fact that you think it is something that you should communicate with people.
1:08:04	Not in the actual doing of the things but in – after having done it or after having understood it – being able to communicate it.
1:08:11	DB: Yes. Well, I just want to know one point: the word compassion means com-passion, to feel together, you see, and to feel all together. Now, if scientists don’t feel all together their work has no meaning. You see, the scientific brotherhood was a kind of compassion, in the sense everyone felt working together and, you see, without that I think science would not have been possible, in this deep sense.
1:08:36	But anyway, now, who was the...? You were the next. David Peat: Well, I’d like to ask something else connected with this. This is the point at which you approached the problem. I mean, you mentioned a crystal. Suppose you were concerned with this very abstract or maybe a beautiful problem of approaching a piece of work, you’re not concerned at this point with the practical applications.
1:08:56	Now, it may be argued that whether you have compassion or whatever you have, you may arrive at the same result; the end result of knowledge seems completely independent, maybe.
1:09:04	But, at this point, before you concern yourself with the brotherhood of science or the implications of what you’re doing, it seems to be important the way you’re approaching the problem, the way you’re...
1:09:16	Can you use compassion – the word compassion – at this point... (inaudible) ...between you and the problem, you and the thing you’re looking at, which may be a crystal or it may be a brain?
1:09:25	How do you approach this abstract thing with compassion?
1:09:28	HT: It’s not abstract.
1:09:30	DB: (Inaudible)... I think, Pribram’s next.
1:09:32	KP: Yes, I think that, perhaps somehow, I don’t know if I can verbalise it very well but in the process of making science, whether it be construction of a model or in the laboratory where – in my case, I just don’t work alone but have people working with me – a sense of compassion, aside from the practical things that we’ve been talking about, applications which you’ve distinguished, it makes me wonder whether the particular way I’m going about solving the problem is unique; whether – as we talked, for instance, about the model – whether formal logic of an Aristotelian kind and its derivatives, linguistic knowledge of... linguistic logic, would be the only kind of logic.
1:10:33	You see, if you approach a model and constructing it in a compassionate fashion – or whatever that word means in general, not just the particular compassion – if I’m aware of, let’s say, what a psychiatrist has contributed to the ways of thinking, and even though I may be impatient with the kind of thinking that psychiatrists usually do, if I’m aware of it, at least I can take that into account, that there are other ways of thinking and so on; and that then has an input in the actual construction of the model.
1:11:13	Now, in our work – and this is what I wanted to come to – the job of my science, as I see it, in part, is to understand what compassion is, you see?
1:11:26	JM: That’s a very different thing from what Wilkins was talking about.
1:11:30	KP: Oh, I know. But I want to say that maybe that, in our science, is even more important or more obviously important because what we’re all about is to try to find out what is it that emotions are, what thought is, what compassion is and all of these behaviourally derived feelings and perceptions and thoughts; and in the process of doing that, of course, then I can listen to Krishnamurti very, very well and say, ‘Gee, he’s got a tremendous input, just as well as the brain scientist has.’ And notice that he listened also to, ‘Is the brain really quiet or is it beating in a certain rhythm or just...?’ It’s important to him, somehow, to know what the brain scientist has to say, and it’s important to me to understand compassion from these other ways because that way I learn more about how the brain works.
1:12:30	JM: You mean if it delineates the subject matter afterward that you’re going to, as it were, begin to work on, to analyse?
1:12:38	KP: Yes.
1:12:39	JM: So it gives you the raw material?
1:12:40	KP: Yes. I think it’s much more intimately connected, much more obviously interconnected.
1:12:45	K: Aren’t the scientists concerned, sir, as compassionate human beings, with war?
1:12:56	KP: Of course. Yes.
1:12:59	K: Are they really?
1:13:00	KP: Yes. I mentioned it last night. In fact, some of us...
1:13:03	K: I’m just asking. Are they really concerned? Then they could stop the production of all the armaments tomorrow.
1:13:08	KP: Well, no, I don’t think they could. Any more...
1:13:13	K: That means...
1:13:14	KP: Not individual scientists.
1:13:16	K: No. That means they are either supporting the government…
1:13:20	KP: Yes.
1:13:21	K: ...or are anti-government.
1:13:22	KP: But I can turn that around with a mirror...
1:13:24	K: Of course. Of course, of course.
1:13:26	KP: ...and say, why... you know, you’re concerned also and you’re certainly...
1:13:30	K: I’m concerned, as a human being...
1:13:32	KP: That’s right.
1:13:33	K: ...to stop war.
1:13:34	KP: That’s right. But...
1:13:36	JM: That’s the key phrase: you’re concerned as a human being. Now, we all agree with Wilkins that we should all be compassionate and try to stop the sorts of things we all want... but not qua scientist.
1:13:44	K: As a scientist, sir... Please, as a scientist, aren’t you concerned...
1:13:49	KP: Yes.
1:13:50	K: ...about killing?
1:13:51	JM: As a human being, I’m concerned about killing.
1:13:52	K: No, as a scientist, you are a...
1:13:54	KP: No. No, I’m concerned as a scientist. Last night I made the point that, in fact, we do not have animal brains inside of us that are...
1:14:03	K: Yes, exactly.
1:14:04	KP: ...that are covered by some cortex which we have to suppress this, but that wars are due to rational, disrational functions.
1:14:11	I’m concerned as a scientist. But I also have limitations unto my power to do anything as an individual, just as you do.
1:14:20	See, I could say to you, ‘Why don’t you go and get into the seat of government with your techniques and change those...?’ K: (Laughs) Blasted people.
1:14:28	KP: That’s right. And you say to me...
1:14:31	K: That’s not my dharma; that’s not my duty. (Laughs) KP: But... That’s right, you can’t quite... I mean, you as an individual, and I say the same thing, as a scientist...
1:14:39	K: No. I am asking, sir...
1:14:41	KP: ...I must change my science but that’s as far as I can go.
1:14:44	K: No, no. I am asking, as a scientist, being compassionate, isn’t it your responsibility, as scientists, as human beings, as compassionate people to say, ‘Look, let’s stop this horror’?
1:14:59	KP: Yes. It’s...
1:15:01	K: As a scientist, as a group, as a brotherhood of scientists?
1:15:04	KP: Yes. Yes.
1:15:06	K: Are they doing it?
1:15:07	KP: To some small degree. We just heard Professor Wilkins and his group are doing something about it, but we’re not that powerful.
1:15:15	K: I am not sure, sir. You have got the world in your hands, as scientists.
1:15:21	KP: Ah, I think you’re...
1:15:23	JM: (Laughs) (Inaudible) KP: I’m afraid that... No, I think that isn’t quite a realistic view. The military...
1:15:28	K: No. You see, I mean, this is – used to be, I don’t know how far it is still – pro-government, working for government or anti-government.
1:15:36	I mean, in Russia all the scientists have the best of everything: best of foods, best of clothes, best of houses, everything; their children can have property – you follow?
1:15:53	– the whole thing is... If they said, ‘No. This is monstrous to...’ KP: They would be sent to Siberia and the government would go on just the same...
1:16:03	K: But... Yes sir, but... you see...
1:16:05	KP: ...using whatever has already been produced. There might not be any future products but they would use what there is already.
1:16:11	K: Therefore, they are held.
1:16:15	FC: I wanted to expand on what Sudarshan was saying about compassion in the daily activities of a scientist.
1:16:24	And he was talking about compassion in communicating the knowledge to other people, non-scientists, and I think one can even go further back to knowledge, to the knowledge itself.
1:16:36	I think there can and has to be a component of compassion even in the knowledge.
1:16:44	I think it’s not enough to have just rational knowledge of a scientific theory — that’s necessary.
1:16:52	And when you do research, when you work out your theories mathematically or with other methods, there is... this component doesn’t appear very much, but then once you have a result, then there is also a kind of insight which is non-rational and which is, in a way, compassionate.
1:17:13	And very few scientists – this is what I was mentioning when I gave my little talk – that there is this great disparity between the rational, theoretical knowledge, let’s say, and experiential knowledge of scientists — they don’t experience their theories.
1:17:32	But if a scientist does this and then teaches – gives a lecture, say, or a talk – you feel this very strongly, this component of compassion comes over very strongly.
1:17:45	And I think those talks that have this component of compassion, those teachers can really communicate the results to non-scientists.
1:17:56	The others, who don’t have this compassion, can’t.
1:17:59	DB: David Shainberg.
1:18:00	DS: Yes, I wanted to add a few points because it seems to me Professor Wilkins raised some...
1:18:08	an interesting point, psychologically. But I wanted to first say, in psychiatry there’s a problem really that’s been developing along these lines, namely that we know that, among American physicians, the psychiatrists have the highest suicide rate of any group of physicians.
1:18:29	K: Quite.
1:18:30	DS: And a lot of people are becoming quite concerned because why is it among ourselves...? Here we’re supposed to be interested in suicide and in patients with mental illness, yet among our own we have so little concern.
1:18:43	I mean, there are people committing suicide all around us, among our colleagues and there’s no concern.
1:18:49	K: Analyser needs to be analysed.
1:18:51	DS: Right (laughs). The other thing, of course, Dr Globus and I were talking about last night, which is that those of us who do any writing, in psychiatry or in...
1:19:00	– I don’t know if it’s true in other sciences, but especially I’ve noticed it in psychiatry – that you can write papers continually and people will inevitably either not read them, and if they read them they don’t recognise you the fact to tell you or respond to it in any way.
1:19:16	I mean, it’s like you’re sort of talking into the wind. I’ve had the experience of writing things almost with an oppositional flavour just to see if they’re dead and if they’re going to respond.
1:19:27	And this, I mean, is among the intimate colleagues whom you would expect some response from. Now, I think the issue, and my feeling about it, as I’ve listened today a little bit more about this issue of compassion in science, really goes to what Professor Wilkins was saying, that if scientists truly are obsessional school boys, then we can look at this in a psycho-dynamic way, a little bit deeper.
1:19:52	Namely, we have to ask the question: are scientists really interested in investigation, in understanding the world, or are they interested in saving themselves through their science?
1:20:04	Now, I mean, if they’re truly obsessional school boys then they’re being scientists in order to prove that they exist.
1:20:12	Therefore, if you take that away from them... In other words, they’re really doing science because it’s some sort of pleasure-invested mechanism and they’re attempting to raise themselves up as powerful human beings in trying to prove that they’re either better than the next guy, then all of this really becomes absurd because in a way it really is an obsessional mechanism, whereby they are – how shall we say?
1:20:37	– they aren’t really professional because their work is their way of proving that they’re better than everybody else or their way of saving themselves.
1:20:46	So in a way when we take that away from them – or when their whole process is invested in that way – then you can see that they would panic because what you’re really suggesting is...
1:20:58	I mean, there can’t be any compassion; that’s not compassion. I mean, that’s activity which is invested with idealisation and what I call a kind of neurotic compulsiveness which is not really coming from a deep self-interest.
1:21:12	In other words, that... Krishnamurti said the other day that if they told him to stop talking, he’d say, ‘Okay.’ And I really wonder how many scientists we could say, ‘Well, look, stop doing science tomorrow and be a human being.
1:21:25	Do you really need your science, or do you want it?’ I think that’s the issue.
1:21:32	K: Quite.
1:21:34	KP: I agree; very nice.
1:21:37	JM: Well, I still remain unswerving. (Laughs) (Laughter) I mean, Capra mentions the compassion component in knowledge. Well, I mean, you know, to be impolite, I just find that ridiculous. What is this component? Now, you try to expand it by talking about teaching. Well, of course one could be compassionate in teaching, and hopefully we all are or will be compassionate in our... in the teaching process, which is what you were mentioning.
1:22:04	But, you see, I was trying to focus in on the actual doing of science.
1:22:10	Q: Process.
1:22:11	JM: Yes. Now, that fancy equation that you mentioned to Bohm – I mean, whatever it is; I didn’t follow it – now, how could compassion be a component part in trying to, whatever it is, solve the equation or whatever you do with that thing, transform it, or...?
1:22:26	GS: Could I make... briefly respond? It is not in the thinking up of the equation, but in communicating to you I would... should not use exactly the same words that I would use to communicate with Shainberg.
1:22:37	JM: Oh, I agree. I agree.
1:22:39	GS: Yes, it must be part of my obsession or my responsibility, to sort of nest this and find images so that I can sort of communicate with him.
1:22:50	I must, sort of, put myself in his place; I must find out what... how will I put it so that he will see the thing — a sort of impedance matching.
1:22:57	JM: Yes. Well then, I... Sorry, could I just be two seconds more?
1:23:01	DB: Go ahead.
1:23:02	JM: I agree with, but that’s the teaching process. Now, the thing is, if we want to, as it were, hone down compassion to be applicable to knowledge itself – which is what Capra was suggesting – then it seems to me a whole lot of very bad things follow: one thing, we’re going to, as it were, create an elite; we’re going to sort of put ourselves up as some sort of superior beings – in virtue of our being scientists – that we could, as it were, spread this thing that we call compassion more smoothly over the rest of the people we come into contact with, which is a very bad thing — no-one wants to be elitist.
1:23:36	And... I mean, the conclusion, I think, is this: that compassion applies to being human not to being a scientist. And that... and we have to make this very crucial distinction. We all agree that we have to be more compassionate, that we ought to be more compassionate, but not qua scientists, any more than qua politicians or qua anything but qua human beings which, as it were, puts an umbrella over all the various types of things that we all may be doing and other people may be doing.
1:24:05	FC: Can I just answer very briefly to how I see there is this component of compassion in knowledge.
1:24:15	Again – and this is very difficult to put in words and I probably won’t... I probably can’t – but there is... I’ve made the experience that there’s a definite difference between understanding a theory or a scientific model – I’m talking here mainly about physics, fundamental physics, where this is particularly strong – there’s a definite difference in understanding a model rationally and understanding it more experientially.
1:24:47	In all my research in physics, all the results or the results of my colleagues lead me to a view of the world where it is absolutely impossible for me to make a bomb.
1:25:00	It’s... This is for me, would be absolutely ridiculous and perverted, and the understanding of my science would make it impossible for me.
1:25:09	But it’s not the rational understanding – because I can use the mechanisms and can use the theories to make a bomb, if I work hard enough on it – but it’s more the experiential understanding of it, which implies a certain world view, a certain philosophy and so on.
1:25:24	And this for me is part of science; I don’t separate the two.
1:25:27	JM: (Inaudible) DB: You want to say something?
1:25:30	JM: No, I just say... I mean, again, but there’s the Baconian view and there’s the Newtonian view, and Oppenheimer was a Newtonian and so am I. I mean, you know, if...
1:25:38	It’s... I mean...
1:25:40	DB: Right. I think that Ullmann’s...
1:25:42	MU: Well, I’d like to offer an example that I think... where I think the course of history, at least in a small sector, might have been different if the scientist in question had more compassion.
1:25:54	Yesterday, I mentioned the fact that I thought Freud’s approach to dream interpretation was wrong and I think what was wrong with it was the absence of compassion.
1:26:08	That is, he approached dreams very much as the scientist that he was and the consequence of this, I think, is that we are left with: one, an elitist point of view about dreams — dreams are the special property of highly trained psychoanalysts as far as their capacity to provide information, that highly trained psychoanalysts practically have a monopoly on dream interpretation.
1:26:42	And there are two important consequences of this: one is that a whole dimension of dreaming, I think, is left out, namely the way in which social hypocrisy, contradiction and fraud and myth enter our dreams, because this was of no interest to Freud; this was beyond the pale of science.
1:27:13	And secondly, the fact that I think the general public feels rather mystified about what their dreams are all about.
1:27:23	I have a feeling, for example, that a proper study of dreams where compassion is included would not be divorced from a concern with the socio-economic, political scene and how it may be relevant to the science of dreaming.
1:27:44	And I’ve come to the conclusion that every dream element has not only personal reference but social reference as well and that social myth is used to reflect personal myth in our dreams.
1:27:58	And this is a whole dimension, I think, of scientific dream theory that was completely by-passed and omitted.
1:28:08	So inspired by Dr Wilkins’ Society for Social Responsibility, I’m organising the SRDPD T: the Society for the Return of Dreams to the People who Dream Them.
1:28:25	(Laughter) HT: I’d just like to ask Julian, are you a scientist?
1:28:36	JM: I don’t... I mean, I’m a mathematical logician; I suppose that makes me...
1:28:43	HT: Are you a human being?
1:28:45	JM: Yes... (Laughs) Well, I hope so.
1:28:47	HT: Because just now you said... you spoke about being a scientist and being a human being as if these were two different things, as if we do science by going into a room and putting a lock on it and saying, ‘Right, I’m a scientist now.
1:28:59	I’m no longer a human being. I’m going to do my science in this particular way.’ We don’t do it... We’re doing it now; we are discussing things with each other. We do it all the time. We do it when we are talking to each other over breakfast, we do it in snippets. It comes to us in bits when we are thinking and more often it comes to us because our compassion has let us be free with someone else; it has allowed us to discuss things with other people.
1:29:28	So instead of being resistant to new ideas, we have allowed new ideas to come in to our heads and, of course, then we may take them away and examine these new ideas at our leisure but, in that way, compassion is absolutely essential.
1:29:42	If that wasn’t there, I don’t think that I would be able to begin to understand anything.
1:29:46	JM: Could I reply, because he addressed it to me?
1:29:48	DB: Yes. Well, are you replying to him?
1:29:50	JM: Yes. Well, of course, I mean, one doesn’t want to juxtapose being a scientist with being a human being. They’re not of the same order. I mean, my whole point was that being a human being is so all-embracing, that... and it’s for this reason, that this is where compassion is – as far as I’m concerned – more meaningfully applied than the actual job of being a scientist.
1:30:12	Now, as far as being receptive to other people’s ideas, of course one is, but then one doesn’t have to use the word compassion with all its important overtones to describe what receptivity towards new ideas are.
1:30:24	I mean, I could write you a computer programme that will emphasise a greater receptivity on the part of whatever physical manifestation of that flow chart may be...
1:30:34	(Break in audio) to, as it were, be disposed to grabbing more input.
1:30:39	HT: Would I understand it?
1:30:40	JM: Sure you’d understand it, if you understood a bit of basic...
1:30:43	HT: If.
1:30:44	JM: ...mathematic... Yes, now...
1:30:46	HT: Some people might not.
1:30:47	JM: But... Yes, but...
1:30:49	HT: So we might use a word that, as we sit around here and we talk about compassion that we’re beginning, all of us over here, to understand the meaning of.
1:30:57	JM: But okay, let me give you an example. I might, I mean, in another possible world, I might hate you. Right? I’m very... Yet, in spite of that hatred, which it seems to me would block compassion, I could still get you to understand what you want to understand.
1:31:14	I might sit down with someone I intensely dislike and therefore the possibility of compassion would be, you know, precluded, because the presupposition of compassion would be precluded and I might get him to understand what he wants to understand.
1:31:27	HT: But if you hated me, I might just walk away and... (inaudible) JM: You might walk away, but if you wanted to learn what I had to offer – and let’s say there was no other vehicle through which you could get that knowledge – you might say, ‘Well, in spite of him hating me and maybe vice versa, I’m going to sit here and learn what he has to say and therefore I’ll learn that bit of knowledge,’ and it seems to me that that... this is what I was getting at.
1:31:48	I mean, even in teaching – of course I agree with Capra that it’s much better if one lectures in a compassionate way and uses things like eye-contact and, you know, there are various strategies where you could manifest...
1:31:59	FC: That’s not what I meant.
1:32:00	JM: I know, I know.
1:32:01	FC: I meant compassion towards the knowledge, not towards the audience.
1:32:02	JM: Well, okay, then I still... then I don’t understand what you mean about... But anyway, the point...
1:32:08	HT: No, it’s exactly what you’re saying. If we did get together, in spite of our hating each other, it would be because of a compassion for the knowledge that we were interested in.
1:32:20	JM: Not a compassion for.
1:32:21	DB: I think there’s some trouble with words.
1:32:22	JM: Can one be compassionate towards an inanimate object? That’s an interesting question.
1:32:26	Q: Stop making it inanimate, yes?
1:32:27	JM: What?
1:32:28	Q: Stop making the object inanimate and you will have compassion for it.
1:32:30	JM: But knowledge, is knowledge animate? Can I pinch it, will it squeak?
1:32:33	DB: You want... Do you have something?
1:32:35	Q: Yes. I wanted to raise a dilemma that I see coming in connection with the notion of transformation, and arising from what Professor Wilkins has said.
1:32:49	I think it’s fairly clear that there are immense latent powers in the psyche that...
1:32:57	– or the entity or the soul, whatever you want to call it – which in fact can be released in the process of transformation and that these powers can be used to help improve the food supply, that is to actually assist the growth of plants, to construct buildings, to make newspapers disappear, as Krishnaji mentioned.
1:33:22	There are psychic powers, esoteric powers, which are associated with the process of freeing oneself and allowing power to flow through oneself.
1:33:36	And this raises the problem of application in a form which is rather similar to those which we’ve faced before in science: applying power either for good or for evil.
1:33:50	Now, the power we’re talking about that comes with transformation, can be applied again for good or for evil. And I wonder whether – this is really a question for Krishnaji – how would you attempt to bring about transformation of the individual, so that the power released will be used for spiritual growth and development and not for material advantage?
1:34:21	K: I was going to ask Professor Wilkins or enlarge his point: what is the relationship of the transforming or transformed individual with regard to society?
1:34:39	You know, this has been a problem, I think, for many, many people.
1:34:49	Many have said, ‘The world is hopeless. You can’t improve it’ and withdrew. Others said, ‘You can do something about it,’ and plunged into the world. This is all famous instances... And others said, ‘I will transform as many as I can.’ He takes the responsibility of working with the people who want to be transformed, who want to be... see the whole compassionate... the whole of life as one unit, not separate units and so on.
1:35:33	So what is a Westerner or an Easterner, who is transforming or is being transformed, to do with society?
1:35:45	What can he do?
1:35:47	MW: You’ve got to try and change it.
1:35:55	K: Yes sir. That’s... Try to change society with all it’s... all the things implied in society: government, politics, economics, business, personal relationship and so on.
1:36:09	What...? What...? Say for instance, suppose I am transformed, what is my relationship to society?
1:36:23	Who will listen? Each person is so concerned with his dogmas, with his science, with his personal views and prejudices and...
1:36:35	Sir, I have, personally, I’ve talked for fifty years.
1:36:43	More. And there are a few who listen, who are good enough to listen. But it doesn’t transform the world; it doesn’t stop wars.
1:36:58	It doesn’t stop butchery, it doesn’t stop violence, it doesn’t bring about harmony in the world; on the contrary, the thing is increasing more and more and more.
1:37:10	I am not saying I am bitter or disappointed — I go on; I don’t care.
1:37:19	MW: But if you have more... if you can increase consciousness...
1:37:26	K: Of course; that’s the whole point.
1:37:29	MW: ...then this is the only thing one can hope for.
1:37:33	K: That’s what I wanted to get at. That is, I think if one changes radically, then one affects the consciousness of the world.
1:37:51	And that is the most important thing.
1:37:55	KP: This is where we have our problem, isn’t it, because we keep...
1:38:02	You ask me, as a scientist, to get rid of wars and so on and I say to you all I can do is...
1:38:09	K: Yes sir.
1:38:10	KP: ...my little thing, and then I reflect it back: ‘But with the power you have, you should be able to stop wars,’ and you say, ‘But I can’t do more than change world through my consciousness.’ K: No, it’s my job to go round the world preaching, talking.
1:38:21	It’s my dharma, my duty, my responsibility.
1:38:25	KP: And my job is to be a good scientist.
1:38:27	K: But do it, you know, with that feeling, with that... (Laughs) KP: But can we somehow do more than that? And that is an issue, I think, for this conference. Is there anything beyond that, that a group like this can, over years – not necessarily tomorrow, but over years – accomplish, other than our own small circle?
1:38:46	K: Sir... Sir, look, sir...
1:38:49	KP: Yes.
1:38:50	K: I saw some years ago a mother whose son was killed in the war... was wounded in the war.
1:38:59	She took me and with great difficulty, I went to the ward and saw the child, the boy... young man. He had no arms, no legs, no eyes. And the mother said, ‘Look. Talk about compassion, talk about goodness, talk... Look what you people have done to me.’ And you cried with her; you held her hand, but it doesn’t...
1:39:35	The son is finished.
1:39:39	KP: That’s right. That’s right.
1:39:43	K: And we all sit around and say, ‘Yes, we are scientists, we are compassionate, we are good people, we have... (inaudible)’ There is a problem there.
1:39:57	And therefore some say, ‘World is hopeless. It’ll take million years some progress, to make human beings human beings.’ And if we... it’s our responsibility to transform ourselves and therefore affect...
1:40:24	inject into the consciousness of the world. That’s all.
1:40:27	DB: Yes. I mean, I think, you see, that if scientists are transformed, they’re in a particularly important place.
1:40:38	K: (Inaudible) That’s what I feel, sir.
1:40:40	DB: More important than most people.
1:40:41	K: Scientists should transform themselves (laughs).
1:40:43	DB: I think that Robin is next. Robin Munro: Well, it’s going back a bit but I was wondering whether... I wanted to raise the question of whether one could understand compassion through science. I rather feel that this is the wrong way of going about understanding compassion. I feel it’s something that must come from something broader, as a human being. But then, as one does science, it will affect what one does and the way one does it and maybe help, you know.
1:41:11	It’s related also to the question of whether compassion is built into the knowledge of science or whether it’s somehow something broader than that.
1:41:18	KP: Now we’re getting there. As far as I’m concerned, Krishnaji is a scientist. Now, he isn’t a scientist in the sense that, let’s say, a quantum physicist is a scientist because the science hasn’t gotten far enough, but science to me is knowledge.
1:41:36	And there is a way of approaching the problems that we’ve heard expounded here, with the same types of tools – although they are radically different in the way, you know, the form that they will take – that science has used in the last two or three centuries.
1:42:01	K: Sir, isn’t it that we are losing our feelings? You understand, sir?
1:42:05	KP: Oh, but feelings should be part of science. I don’t see why... I don’t see why...
1:42:10	K: I... Sir, I... But, I mean...
1:42:13	DB: Are they?
1:42:14	K: Are they? That’s what I... We are losing...
1:42:17	KP: Well, they’re not today but they...
1:42:18	DB: But why not?
1:42:19	KP: Well, because the science, behavioural science, just isn’t very far along.
1:42:20	DB: Well, no.
1:42:21	JM: Yes, I agree with you.
1:42:22	KP: I mean, that’s... I’m talking now about science, not the compassionate part...
1:42:24	DB: But I don’t think that behavioural science is going to put any feeling into people at all.
1:42:28	JM: You see, this is another fundamental difference that we have around this table. I mean, some of us feel that it’s all right to say that, in principle...
1:42:32	KP: Yes.
1:42:33	JM: ...science, one day, when knowledge advances sufficiently, will be capable – using it’s own conceptual scheme which could, later on, using bridging hypotheses, be translated into more ordinary language – but science could throw a great amount of light on the sorts of concepts like... the typically feeling concepts, feeling, compassion, etc., etc.; that there’s nothing in principle wrong, although it hasn’t as yet occurred.
1:42:58	K: Sir...
1:42:59	JM: There are other of us, like Professor Bohm and perhaps you, that say, ‘No, there’s something in principle built into science which fundamentally prevents it from ever tackling these problems.
1:43:10	K: Sir, I am not talking of science or...
1:43:12	JM: Well, that’s what...
1:43:13	DP: Could I...?
1:43:14	DB: (Inaudible).
1:43:15	DP: I’ve been waiting to make a point. (Laughs) K: Sir, let me finish. I... I am not talking as a scientist or anything. A woman is... a wife, a girl, a lover or... is dying, dead.
1:43:28	And you say, ‘We’re compassionate; be... let’s become passionate...
1:43:35	Gradually, knowledge will become...’ etc. In the meantime, what will you do with her? Talk about...? That is our problem. Not future, day after tomorrow. What will you do with that person? In your laboratory, in your physics, whatever it is, what are you going to do with that man, with that woman?
1:44:02	JM: Well, in a sense, I’m agreeing with you, and we’re both disagreeing, I think, in this particular point, with Professor Wilkins. I mean, nothing that we have qua scientists will help...
1:44:11	K: Ah, no. I don’t think he is disagreeing. No, I don’t think... He is with us. I don’t think he was…
1:44:16	JM: Well, how could the knowledge we have qua scientists, qua scientists help us calm the woman?
1:44:19	K: No. What I want to say... What I would I would like to point out, sir... What I would like to say is...
1:44:23	DB: (Inaudible) ...wants to say something.
1:44:24	K: We are thinking in terms of time: ‘Gradually, we’ll... everything will be right.’ DP: Well, could I...?
1:44:29	K: No...
1:44:30	DP: Well, I’ll try and... I went to say something and I maybe... I’d like to put my answer.
1:44:35	K: Yes sir. Yes sir.
1:44:37	DP: This was at the... We’re asking what we should do, what scientists should do about responsibility. Well, these questions have been asked, about how... what about war, what about this, what about that? And I felt there was a point which I felt was essential – and maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s a nonsensical point or a stupid point – ...
1:44:54	K: Go ahead, sir, go ahead.
1:44:55	DP: ...but maybe we could look at it. This is the point of contact with the knowledge, the knowledge acquisition or whatever; the point of contact with the crystal or with the differential equation.
1:45:05	How do you contact it? If you face it, if you bring all these things, or you’re a Marxist or whatever, or if you bring your preconceptions, if you bring – as David Shainberg says, if you’re approaching this thing because you want to support yourself, because somehow you want to make yourself bigger – if you approach it in that way and you acquire that knowledge and then you come back from it, and what’s going to happen when you go out into the world and use it?
1:45:29	And is it possible, at the point in which we all experience as scientists, is it possible – and you’ll probably say this is irrelevant – is it possible to approach something in this sort of... in a way which doesn’t carry with it all these needs and requirements and all this baggage that you bring to it?
1:45:47	And if you can approach it in that way, and maybe acquire that knowledge, then somehow that knowledge has to lead to an action, has to lead to action, and if you can lead to action then you can help that woman.
1:45:58	But it’s no use asking how to help the woman if you haven’t done this first. What’s the use of the knowledge if you’d acquired it...?
1:46:04	K: I agree. But you see, I am trying to say something, sir, which is: is transformation a matter of time, a matter of evolution, a matter of gradual process or is it something immediate?
1:46:21	DP: If I see this thing, you...
1:46:23	K: Wait, wait, sir. No... please. Is it immediate? This is really a fundamental problem. If you say transformation is a gradual process, then I’m not interested.
1:46:34	DP: Oh, if I...
1:46:35	K: I – wait sir – I am suffering.
1:46:37	DP: Well, I’m trying to answer you.
1:46:39	K: No sir. Please, just listen, sir. I am suffering; my son is dead. And what do you say? ‘Well, my friend, you’ll gradually get used to it. There is reincarnation, there is comfort, there is Jesus; there is this, there is that. Gradually, you’ll get used to it.’ But I am not interested in that – just a minute, sir – I’m not interested in gradually. I want to end that suffering now. Is it possible?
1:47:08	DP: Well, I tried to say, maybe... that if I approach this thing...
1:47:14	K: Not ‘if’.
1:47:15	DP: No, when I approach it; I approach it.
1:47:17	K: I’m not interested in ‘if’, ‘when’...
1:47:19	DP: All right.
1:47:20	K: ...conditioning. I am suffering.
1:47:22	DP: Yes! Yes! Then my answer is, ‘Yes.’ K: What?
1:47:26	DP: The transformation is now; it’s at this instant.
1:47:27	K: Have you done it? Then it’s no good talking to me in a conditional suppositions. I want to... I am suffering. My son is dead. Answer... How do you help me instantly get over my beastly loneliness? (Pause) DP: I can’t help you tomorrow; I know that.
1:47:52	GS: In this particular context, the only thing that you can do is to feel compassion for that person at that time — you cannot do anything.
1:48:00	You may then... I mean, in the case of extreme grief – I have had people who have lost their very near loved ones – ...
1:48:07	K: Yes sir. I’m sorry...
1:48:09	GS: ...there is very little you can do.
1:48:10	K: Of course, of course.
1:48:11	GS: You are paralysed by shock. But the very fact that you are affected by the thing, that you are with them, is the best thing that you could do.
1:48:16	K: No...
1:48:17	GS: After some time, you start talking to them.
1:48:18	K: Look Sudarshan, sir, that brings up a question, which is: can my habits, can my prejudices, can my arrogance and all the rest of it come to an end instantly?
1:48:33	Not gradually.
1:48:34	GS: I don’t know about small problems but big problems, great losses have a purifying effect.
1:48:42	At that time, when somebody loses a loved one, you don’t ask the question, ‘Do I like this fellow? Do I not like this fellow? Is it an important loss or unimportant loss?’ K: (Laughs) No, of course...
1:48:50	GS: You immediately feel compassion.
1:48:52	K: No sir, I’m asking – because we’re talking about transformation of the individual and his relation to society – is the transformation a matter of time or is it instantaneous?
1:49:10	I think this a tremendous problem. (Pause) I am educated or one is educated in terms of time: ‘Gradually you’ll get over it, Old Boy.
1:49:25	You will have... get used to it, you will...’ – you know? – plough through it and analyse it, reanalyse it and go on and on. But is there a way of ending it instantly? I think there is, otherwise we won’t...
1:49:38	GS: I wanted to bring up something which is related but not immediately related.
1:49:51	I may be branded as the only war monger amongst this peaceful assembly. Many people have talked about the bomb, about the war, as if these are the only or the most important things.
1:50:01	I travel a great deal. I travel in many countries and I see... I have opportunities to come in contact with a wide variety of people: the aesthetic, well-heeled elite, all the way down to very poor people.
1:50:17	And I am always surprised at the calm assurance with which people have decided what are the world’s problems and try to solve them.
1:50:27	It seems to me that the worst problem in the world – that I feel most acutely about – is the inequality of the distribution of the opportunities of the good earth.
1:50:36	K: Yes sir.
1:50:37	GS: It has never, never made me feel at all satisfied that there is a law which says that because I work in the United States, I am entitled to fifty times the earnings that I would if I were doing exactly the same thing within my country.
1:50:53	And all the people who talk about peace and happiness and well-being and brotherhood do not talk about the fact that when there’s tremendous potential differences, there is a spark is almost inevitable to pass.
1:51:08	How can we talk about a peaceful, harmonious world when there is such a strong iniquity with regard to distribution?
1:51:15	K: Absolutely. Quite. Quite.
1:51:18	GS: There are occasions in which I feel quite convinced that I would be willing not only to contribute to the creation of the weapon but actually use the weapon, in defence or in offence with regard to a country.
1:51:28	If I was in a place where people are absolutely starving and I find that somebody else happens to have a lot of food and it is illegal to take possession of that one, even at the risk of being shot, that I would...
1:51:39	I’m sure I would feel no compunction at all in going and breaking in and taking the thing out. With regard to controlled violence in the name of helping the large society, we condone violence of a certain kind which is legalised and with regard to society as a whole.
1:51:58	We have judges and we have courts of law which take away people’s freedom, in the name of the fact that, without that, other people would be deprived of their freedom.
1:52:07	There is an excellent book – it’s a children’s story really – called, A Star Trooper by Robert Heinlein, which contains detailed discussion – I mean, he’s a war monger – detailed discussion of the justification of violence and the man who is teaching the trooper tells that violence is to be controlled, it is to be employed for social purposes, but purpose of a star trooper is to create unlimited amount of destruction within a limited amount of space, limited amount of time, for a well-defined purpose.
1:52:38	Now, I feel that much of the problem of social action is in not being so clear amongst the various people as to what are the things which are most essential.
1:52:49	I’ve lived for a long time on the east coast of United States and the east coast liberals, as a rule, have certain pet projects which are sort of socially accepted projects, which are the things about which they are going to be concerned.
1:53:01	It is fashionable to be concerned about the Vietnam war because obviously it was wrong, but it was not that fashionable to be concerned about Biafra.
1:53:11	It is certainly not fashionable to be concerned about the school rebellion in Boston because that is happening in Boston.
1:53:20	When it was happening in Little Rock, that was, of course, something about which everybody was concerned because you are really not involved with regard to the thing.
1:53:27	And it is very difficult for me to be so upset about the creation of the bomb or creation of the weapon when I see that the society, the liberals themselves are contributing to the society which is keeping up these iniquities with regard to the thing.
1:53:43	How do we produce a certain amount of fresh air to get into these discussions of what themselves are the questions?
1:53:50	Where does one have an audience at the present time to talk about the fact that the wealth distribution throughout the world is so iniquitous and, until it is settled more reasonably, there could not be permanent peace at any time?
1:54:02	Who is interested in this problem? Where could one talk about it? The moment you talk about it, you are branded as a radical, a revolutionary with... I’m a very great conservative. I mean, [I] simply say that it seems reasonable that all people should be having approximately equal opportunities.
1:54:19	But there seems to be no place to talk about it.
1:54:21	KP: Oh, but that latest meeting of the Population Council that was the topic of discussion. In fact, all of the Third World did in fact make the point that you’re just making, in that population control by itself was not the issue but a more equitable distribution of wealth would go a long way toward automatically getting down to zero growth, because it always has happened whenever a population has become sufficiently self-supporting and all this.
1:54:50	So those things are being aired. Once the problem is seen, I think the human mind, I mean brain goes about solving the problems.
1:55:01	The issue...
1:55:02	JM: Go about talking about it; I don’t know about solving it.
1:55:06	K: Sir, Aldous Huxley received a letter from Poland or Czechoslovakia, I’ve forgotten. He showed me the letter. He said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t preach peace, preach war because that’s the only way we shall be free.’ (Laughs) DB: Yes, and I think that this recent conference on population, and it was commented in most of the papers, that nothing is going to be done about it.
1:55:30	You see, that... You know, in other words, that there was no real agreement to do anything.
1:55:35	KP: But things are being done.
1:55:36	DB: I think that Fritjof’s...
1:55:37	FC: I feel the same frustration as you do. One thing I’ve found that you can do is, in teaching, that you create this awareness for the finiteness of the world, for the finiteness of resources and therefore for the need to distribute them equally, and you can do this in...
1:55:55	I wanted to bring this up this afternoon in the discussion with the staff here, to find out whether this is done here, as I think this would be the ideal place.
1:56:05	K: We have talked about it, sir, here.
1:56:06	FC: Yes.
1:56:07	KP: But I would...
1:56:08	FC: And I’ve found – can I just finish? – I’ve found that this can be brought in, in any subject. For instance, I brought it in when I was teaching mathematics, when I was teaching about exponential functions and then I brought in, quite naturally, exponential growth and, you know, questions of resources and so on.
1:56:22	And I think it’s very important that this is taught to students at all levels, in all subjects and all ages.
1:56:30	DB: Is that just relevant to his question?
1:56:33	KP: Yes. I might just urge a caution there, that you do not... although some of the immediate concerns are finite, most of them are infinite when we use our heads properly, and that we can make new sources of energy and the human brain has always responded to such challenges, and these cries of doom are just exactly the thing that’s going to limit everything, and that the better way of teaching perhaps might be to show how to solve the problems, having recognised them, rather than crying doom and that we must constrict.
1:57:09	It’s a...
1:57:10	FC: But it’s obvious that the world is round and finite and that the more people there are in the city, the worst gets the air you breathe.
1:57:18	I mean, it’s obvious.
1:57:19	KP: I don’t see any great constraints out here, with millions of people on our doorstep.
1:57:25	BG: Go to London or Birmingham.
1:57:27	KP: Well, you don’t have to be in London if you don’t want to.
1:57:31	BG: Some people do.
1:57:32	DB: Can we have some order.
1:57:34	JM: A little story, apropos of what Capra was saying. I mean, again, I’m not agreeing with him. A very good friend of mine who teaches philosophy at Harvard, suddenly became very, very socially conscious – burningly so actually, fanatically so – and in the philosophy faculty at Harvard he usually teaches courses on things like probability and philosophy of science, general methodology, etc.
1:57:59	The year that he became this fanatic, he used to come into his classroom and say, ‘I’m not going to talk about probability today; we’re going to talk about relevant social issues,’ and this went on and on and on, and they couldn’t get rid of him because he had tenure.
1:58:16	He was a full professor. But had it not been for that, they would have certainly got rid of him.
1:58:20	K: (Laughs) Yes. Of course.
1:58:22	JM: And also, I mean, they tried anyway to get rid of him by not upping his salary in relation to the other full professors. My point is that, qua human being, he could have done something, by going out into the world and doing the sort of thing you were suggesting, but not qua scientist.
1:58:35	Qua scientist, as a teacher even of probability theory, he could have, as Capra does, used certain anomalies in the world as examples to illustrate certain probability ratios and how they work and function, but he couldn’t solve the problems in doing his probability theory or in doing his philosophy of science.
1:58:51	And that I think has a bearing on what Wilkins was saying.
1:58:54	DB: Bryan Goodwin.
1:58:55	BG: I’m a bit puzzled by the turn of direction that I think Dr Sudarshan introduced into this discussion...
1:59:05	(Laughter) which is, that he seemed to be implying that violent political action is a method of resolving differences.
1:59:15	Now, I had understood from the discussion previously that non-violence should be the rule in personal relations; we should not have divisions, we should not make comparisons, otherwise we will get into conflict.
1:59:31	How can one resolve this contrast between personal relations and political relations?
1:59:38	I really am very confused about this now. I don’t see how you can practise non-violence personally and violence politically.
1:59:45	GS: May I respond? First of all, I mean non-violence, like transcendental has been used in a number of different contexts and so I am not sure...
1:59:57	One could have a person who is your adversary, with whom you have to deal with in a manner which makes use of Newton’s law which says that if conditions are not going in the right fashion that you want, you change them and you have to apply force.
2:00:15	At the same time, you do not have hate the person, you simply have to destroy the means with which he is controlling the thing.
2:00:22	(Laughter) Now, it is very nice for a person... I mean, Professor Wilkins talked about Lord Rutherford and that sort of reminded me about something, about some other passage written about somebody else, that if you are at the top of the heap, it is very easy to be pleasant.
2:00:42	K: Yes sir.
2:00:43	GS: If I were a professor at Oxford, probably I would even be less aware of the problems of modern science than I am at the present time because in a certain sense you stay there and surrounded by, I mean, stone walls on all sides and therefore there is very little of the waves from outside that would come in.
2:01:00	Now, for someone who is living in a reasonably well to do circumstance, one can say, ‘I don’t want to compare,’ but if I were starving and I am seeing that somebody else is doing very much better – a typist in the American embassy is making five times the salary of a senior administrator in the government after twenty years of service – then you would start saying, ‘Well, there is something a little wrong because, you see, my earnings are not enough to make me buy enough food for my family, but here is somebody else whose skills are much less, who seems to have taken this more as a joke, is able to do very much better.’ At that time, if you don’t make a comparison something is seriously wrong.
2:01:42	You may not say that, ‘I want to be more powerful than that particular person,’ but the bare necessities of life have to be maintained.
2:01:50	And it is... I mean, the Internal Revenue Service makes comparisons. It says that I earn $50,000 so I have to pay $20,000 of tax. It doesn’t ask the same tax from somebody else. It doesn’t say, ‘Let everybody pay in the same amount.’ Q: May I turn your remarks to Krishnaji, because...?
2:02:06	KP: And I have not come back... finished with the... (inaudible). What I am saying is that it seems to me not being conscious of iniquities and not lending a hand to the side which is lagging, is itself a form of very passive violence.
2:02:22	You don’t actually actively do anything; you’re only not lending a hand to the person who is drowning. It is certainly violent.
2:02:30	Q: Are you finished? May I turn the remarks to you, Krishnaji, because I see some very deep incompatibilities here between what I understand you to be proposing for personal relationships and what you seem to be agreeing with, with respect to political action?
2:02:46	K: Yes sir, I think it’s fairly... Psychologically, we were talking; psychologically, in my relationship with you, why should I compare, why should I be violent? There is no need... There’s affection, there is love and all the rest of it. But I do compare between my clothe and your clothe, this cloth and that cloth, between rich and poor, the social injustice and all that.
2:03:06	There I have to do something. I go about talking and say, ‘Look...’ I point out – etc., etc. – I do something. It doesn’t mean that I am violent, it doesn’t mean I am antagonistic. But I say, ‘Look, do look at what is happening in the world.’ Q: But taking action is being responsible, that we’re all agreed about; it’s the question of the violent component in your action which is divisive.
2:03:31	K: Of course. I wouldn’t personally enter into some kind of violence.
2:03:38	KP: But you understand, if it occurs, why it occurred.
2:03:46	K: Obviously; I mean, this is happening in India, sir. I don’t have to go miles away.
2:03:51	KP: You see the difference? Again, the...
2:03:53	Q: But you would not encourage political...
2:03:56	KP: See, again, the paradox.
2:03:59	Q: No, no. But now, wait, let’s pursue this. What political action do you advise?
2:04:02	K: No, no, no. No, no. Wait. Sir, I go to a village. I go to Rishi Valley in India. There’s a village a mile away. All those people are employed in the school. They have not enough food. The school children have enough food. We have talked a great deal about it in the school. What do we do with those children... with those villagers who have not enough food? In the immediate vicinity, not miles away. So they are giving them food, sharing, and all kinds of things are happening there. German people... German government is giving money to that valley and all that. That’s all I can do. What can I do?
2:04:45	JM: Why don’t you join a group who is... I mean, what would you say to this? If someone invited you to join a group, the purpose of which was to foment the sort of revolution that took place in China, on the assumption that then people would be better...
2:04:58	K: I don’t think I would join it. I don’t join any group, any...
2:05:01	JM: Well, would you condone that group? I mean, let’s say...
2:05:03	K: Ah, nothing... I won’t even say, ‘Do, don’t do.’ I have nothing to do with it.
2:05:06	JM: Well then, maybe there isn’t any compatibility, if he’s not...
2:05:09	BG: Can I ask... I think some people in India buy grain and store it, to sell at a profit.
2:05:15	K: What sir?
2:05:16	BG: Some people in India buy grain, buy up grain and store it, in order that they can sell it at a great profit.
2:05:22	K: I know; don’t tell me.
2:05:24	BG: Well, would you be willing to break into a store, such a store?
2:05:30	K: This is a well-known question. We’ve... a dozen times; I personally wouldn’t.
2:05:35	JM: Your boy’s starving, he needs grain. He’s really... He’s starving to death and there’s a grain... locked up in the cupboard there.
2:05:40	K: I don’t know what I would do under those circumstances. I haven’t got a son. But this is a hypothetical question which cannot be answered.
2:05:50	DS: Before you had a wife, though, you had... (Laughter) DP: Yes, right. (Laughs) KP: Well, she was so miserable that...
2:05:58	DS: She’s hungry!
2:05:59	KP: ...he wouldn’t go steal the grain for her, that’s for sure. (Laughs) Right.
2:06:02	DB: I think it’s five minutes to one now, so we should finish it soon.
2:06:09	MW: Could I?
2:06:10	DB: Yes, just a...
2:06:11	MW: Could I just say one thing about... I mean, I would agree with Julian Melzack very much that the responsibility of the scientist must in no sense be seen as something special that the scientist has, which sets himself apart from other people.
2:06:37	I agree with you there, but I think if one can see the scientist as a human being, then I think the responsibility must come out of that whole and the... but one must recognise the scientist is special, in that he has special knowledge; that his knowledge has made a very special impact on our whole culture and civilisation.
2:07:11	And so he is a kind of a channel for something to go through and he has to accept this, he must live with it and I think he must try to do what a decent human being would try to do in this peculiar situation he finds himself in.
2:07:36	JM: Well, I mean, we agree up to a point then but I think, as the discussion has shown this morning, when we’re... when our interest is focussing in on a problem, like the sort that you mentioned: someone in great agony or in grief or something, science as such can’t deal with that problem.
2:07:57	K: No.
2:07:58	JM: It just can’t. Now, I would... I mean, my point – I didn’t make it clearly, I suppose – that a) science shouldn’t be knocked for that reason, that, I mean, in a sense, science is not that practically orientated, at least most of the sciences that we work in; but also the scientist who becomes responsible is doing so qua human being and perhaps – I mean, in light of the remarks that were made about the lack of practical impact that a scientist, qua scientist not qua human being, could have on these sorts of situations – there are other groups of people who could have more of an impact, again, qua people.
2:08:37	I mean, I think politicians ought to talk about compassion and I think it’s more pressing that they talk about compassion more than scientists talk about compassion, because what they do is much more intricately bound up with dealing with other people than the sort of work we’re doing.
2:08:53	So that, I mean, if one wants to make distinctions between activities – always keeping in mind that all these various types of activity descriptions fall under the larger umbrella of being people – then there are priorities where the scientist won’t be all that high up.
2:09:11	I mean, I think there’ll be other groups of people who could do a lot more for the sorts of issues that Krishnaji and other people have mentioned. I mean, we can’t help a person in grief, qua scientist, but then again a politician, qua politician, might be a little bit better able to help a certain person in grief if, for example, the grief could be eliminated or alleviated by giving that person a home or more food or something.
2:09:32	They could do it; we can’t.