At the three day Convention on Vedanta in the West at the Vivekananda Monastery and Retreat in Ganges, Michigan (August 7-9, 1987) we had three three-day panel discussions. One was on The Spirit of Harmony, one on the Spirit of Service, and one on the Spirit of Inquiry. On the Spirit of Inquiry panel I had occasion to point out that war did not arise out of science but that science arose in the age of war. I also pointed out that the use of science in war was a political problem rather than a scientific problem, and was related not to pure science (the inquiry into the nature of the world), but to applied science-which in the monastery we called misapplied science.
In 1983 when Ananda Chaitanya and I were on a four-month lecture tour through India, people would ask us after our talks on Advaita Vedanta and Modern Science, "Can you give us some advice?" I would reply, " Yes, don't run after our technological civilization and come over the waterfall with us." Our technological civilization is headed for disaster. I explained that although India's technology runs on sunlight, our technology runs on Arabian oil which will soon be gone. In India the plowing is done by animals. The animals eat the rice straw and the people eat the rice, and the whole thing runs on a replaceable energy source- sunlight. I told them that if India can control it's population they can go on like this for another ten thousand years. In the United States, on the other hand, we run on fossil fuels which are destined to run out, and which are not replacable in the next few million years. And when the oil and coal run out we will be forced back to village life.
There has always this problem in my my mind: If Sri Ramakrishna and Holy Mother came for the next fifteen hundred years, why did they live in the village? Why didn't they join the main-stream? If we are all going to live in cities and run around in cars and planes, why did Thakur and Mother live in the village? In the short time frame this appears to be a problem, but in the long time frame we might all be in the village. If we are all going to the village, Thakur and Mother are in the main-stream.
The notion that our technology is going bankrupt is not, of course, a universally accepted view. Some think we will find more fossil fuels. Some think we will run on atomic power, (fission), or on nuclear fusion. But uranium is also a fossil fuel built in by a stellar explosion some five billion years back and not replacable in the life of the planet. And even if the technological problems of hydrogen fusion can be solved, the control of the machines may still require four times the present water resources of the United States.
I had to remind our listeners in India that although it may look very glamorous that in California we raise rice at eight man-power-hours per acre per year, whereas in India it's eight hundred man-power-hours per acre per year, our farms don't pay for themselves. Ours run on oil. The seeds are sown by plane and the crop is harvested by machine and they both run on oil. But there is another side to this statistic: In the United states, for ten calories of energy that go into a farm only one calorie comes back, whereas in India for ten calories into a farm a hundred calories come back. Your farms are a going concern (they are not going bankrupt) and if you can control the population and continue to run on sunlight, you can go on like this for another ten thousand years.
Email SRV