Yesterday, I had the privilege of representing ServiceSpace at Cal State University Bakersfield, on a panel titled "Science and Religion: Are they Compatible?" 

The story behind the story is always interesting to me. Bakersfield is where our own Trishna Shah grew up, and over conversations on ServiceSpace that she and her father had with family friends, the seeds were planted, and we got an invite. How is it that such an event even came to be? The story here is even more humbling - seventeen years back, a group of women decided that they wanted to celebrate what Gandhi stood for. In a very humble way, they would gather and invite community members to join them in celebrating Gandhi's life by engaging with his key ideas.

In the initial years, they would meet in small rooms in libraries. Over the years, this has now received the love and support of the community, and CSUB now hosts it. We had an audience of what seemed like 300 people. Seeing women my mother's age quietly work in the background doing humble things, from placing a beautiful lamp at the entrance in front of Gandhi's photo to carrying heavy crates of water for everyone, was deeply moving. I was in sacred company with this group of inspiring women, their beautiful families and the broader community that had emerged from their act of leadership. There are second and even third generation volunteers now, and Bakersfield has quite a beautiful Gandhi community today, with professors from CSUB actively involved in organizing yesterday's event. I learned that the name of this city came from a baker family who fed all who passed through it. A city rooted in generosity - how wonderful! Every minute of my stay here felt special, thanks to all the love I received.

Preparing for a talk like this is no easy task. I decided to forget everything I had read about Gandhi, and read him again. This involved getting my hands on his Collective Works, and searching it easily. That is easier said than done, for although his collective works are easily available in PDF form, I had to search close to a 100 PDF files one by one without the ability to search them all at once or easily jump around between them. I was griping about this to Rahul Brown, and he jumped to my rescue by making available his company's software (Infinote) which allowed me to do this search easily in Word and get started with the research. 

Parsing through what Gandhi had written or spoken about in 100 volumes was quite an experience, and a coherent view slowly formed. The big breakthrough came from a letter he had written in response to someone asking about faith cures, where he made the distinction between faith and natural healing. Gandhi's point was that the former usually involved superstition, whereas the latter required a scientific understanding of nature's laws. His understanding of these laws was remarkably scientific due to his experimentation and observation.

According to Gandhi, a "perfect mind" is needed for health, where no stray and harmful thoughts would come in. We now know that stress is a precursor to health problems, so Gandhi's pointing this out in the 1940s is truly remarkable. Can you imagine "thinking on demand" - how would our life be if we could develop such an ability? To get such a perfect mind, we would need a perfect heart. And a perfect heart, according to Gandhi, comes about with purification. How does one remove the baser instincts and purify one's heart? The ways are many, and Gandhi's way was Ramanama, or chanting the name of God. And yet, in a display of his depth and commitment to truth, Gandhi said, "It can be said with justice that possession of a pure heart should do equally well without Ramanama."

Commentators on Gandhi have not paid much attention to Ramanama as it appears specific to a religion, which is not universal. This is a serious mistake! Gandhi's whole science of purity was founded on Ramanama, and while those outside of his religious background may not connect with Ramanama, everyone, including atheists, understands what a pure heart is. The practice of getting to a pure heart is paramount in Gandhi's science and according to Gandhi, people should do whatever gets them to this purity. It could be a faith in their God, or a godless belief in doing good, but no matter how we define our practice, the practice itself is bound to verify the truths that Gandhi experienced.


Poems have a way of getting to the point much faster than prose can hope to achieve. So, I ended by sharing a definition of purity from Narsinh Mehta's famous poem, "Vaishnav Jan," which Gandhi loved. I wanted to play a meditative rendition of this song, and couldn't find any on iTunes. So, a request went out on Thursday night to my old friend from Stanford Neha Kumar, who had sung this beautifully at Stanford events, that I needed this recorded by Friday evening. After explaining where this would be played, I requested Neha, "The only requirement is that you meditate for 10 minutes before singing this." Neha wrote back at 12 AM that she would sit for 30 mins! :) This labor of love blew the audience away - many asked for a copy of the rendition. It is now on Youtube, and you can hear it below.

The panel discussion was lively. I made some points along the following lines. The duality between science and spirituality does not make sense. Spiritual seekers of all traditions can only get somewhere if they are scientific. I am using Gandhi's understanding of science - as an unwavering quest for one's deepest truth. The term "science" has currently been boxed into a physical bean-counting science which is a by-product of industrial revolution thinking. Much progress has been made since then, and the social sciences have revolutionized our conception of science with methods like ethnography. True ethnography, when carried out without political agendas or activist mindsets, and instead focused on authentic inquiry, produces results that have a much longer shelf-life than quantitative analyses. This is all the more remarkable as their sample size tends to be an order of magnitude smaller than quantitative studies. Although the ethnographers never use the "c" word, their primary tool is consciousness, used in the context of inductive inquiry, where theory is generalized from experience of reality, as opposed to deductive inquiry, where reality is made to fit a theory.

To a question on the relation of technology and spirituality, I shared Illich's work on the gaze, summarized beautifully (and independently) by Sri Aurobindo in verse:
The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze
And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face

What if we built technology that revealed our deepest spirit back to us? What does that mean? There's an idea worth reflecting on.

Someone asked about whether the effect of prayer could be scientifically verified. The other panelists didn't think so, but I disagreed. If it is a part of reality, then it must be scientifically verifiable. The issue is that of the tools being used. We are realizing that everything is connected to everything else. Although the physicists protest when their findings are appropriated by spiritual thinkers (like quantum entanglement), we are slowly learning that the reality we are in is not a linear function, and even our physical methods are pointing to this conclusion. Ancient spiritual teachers have already shown us powerful ways of using our consciousness as both the subject and the object of study. Applying their methods even today allows us to get insights that are confirmed by others, beyond a unique subjective truth. The innovation that is needed is that of language that helps these methods apply more broadly than the traditions in which they have been described.

Gandhi's grand challenge to humanity is to unite science and spirituality, for a divided perspective is not just misguided but also dangerous. Scientists without a pure heart have unleashed great misery on humankind. And spiritual seekers who have not been ruthlessly scientific (committed to being true to themselves) have often misled themselves and those that listen to them into dogmatism and self-deception.

Science and spirituality both need to be claimed as the birthright of mankind, for which, more than any titles, what is needed is a solemn pledge to not stop until the essence of things is fully understood.