This mind blowing and rich conversation between Biologist and Author Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and Indian Philosopher and Author Acharya Prashant explores various interesting topics such as Consciousness, Scientism, Enlightenment, Reincarnation, Suffering, Prayer, Sentience , Compassion and Self Knowledge.

What really excited me was the conversation on consciousness. When we say something is conscious there is prior assumption that something/someone should show certain signs or behavior, which resembles are own behavior. And what difference does it make for me to call something as conscious and something is unconscious. But have we even questioned that are we conscious? Without exploring the one who is calling himself conscious how do I know I am conscious in the first place. Here comes the importance of Self knowledge, knowing oneself, if I don't know myself then how can I know the reality of my own claims.

This conversation is an invitation to reflect and question what we already believe in and consider it to be true.

Two years ago, I became vegan when I saw the cruelty involved in the dairy industry. Before that I was vegetarian throughout my life and had been a dairy consumer since birth. I was taught that a cow is like our mother, who gives us milk willingly and lovingly. As a kid, I believed it and never questioned it until recently, when I was made to see the reality. After watching this insightful conversation between Indian philosopher and author Acharya Prashant and PETA Foundation President Mimi Bekhechi, I gained better insights into human nature and conditioning.

Compassion is our nature. As kids, when we don't yet get conditioned, we never think of being violent towards animals or anyone. It is highly likely that a kid will start playing with animals if left with them; it is the kid's natural response. But as we get older, we get conditioned to see them as food, something to be consumed, separate from us. Violence was taught to us. Looking away from others' suffering becomes our default mode, and that violence doesn't remain concentrated on just animals; it spreads into all of our relationships with others and with ourselves. One extension of this violence is the climate catastrophe, which essentially stems from our ignorance towards our own suffering and towards the suffering of others.

So Do we need to learn compassion or simply need to unlearn violence which we learned from outside and became conditioned to? The deeper question still is how do we normalize the violence to the point that we stop seeping it as violence?

The conversation forces us to look within at the very source of violence and address it to bring any meaningful change.

Emmy Noether: Mother of modern Algebra

Emmy Noether, a German mathematician, is known for her remarkable work in abstract algebra and Noether’s theorem in theoretical physics that connects symmetry to the nature of physical laws.

Before Noether, physicists knew about the Energy and momentum conservation laws, as they were experimentally observed. However, it was Noether who proved why this happens, and it directly flows from symmetry using rigorous mathematics.

In mathematics, she developed foundational concepts in abstract algebra, what are now known as Noetherian rings, which impose finiteness condition that is important and makes proofs and structures solvable.

In cryptography and coding theory, the modern algebra that is used is built on her mathematical framework. Today, due to her lasting contribution to the field, she is remembered as the mother of modern algebra.

But very few know the hardships she went through in her life for being a woman.

In 1907, Emmy completed her doctorate in Invariant Theory in mathematics from the University of Erlangen, under Paul Gordan. She was the second person, and the very first woman to earn a degree in mathematics at this University.

After completing her doctorate, she assisted her Father Max Noether and her phd advisor and continued her research without any salary for 7-8 years, purely because she was a woman.

In 1915, she was invited by Felix Klein and  David Hilbert to the University of Göttingen, which was the best university in the world for mathematics that time, to complete her Habilitation*.

However the senate refused it simply because she was a woman. Therefore she had to taught under Hilbert’s name for the next 4 years unpaid and uncredited.

In 1919, after Germany became a republic she became an independent University lecturer. However she was still paid very little, as an untenured, unofficial associate professor.

In 1920s, she did the foundational and groundbreaking work in abstract algebra, despite her work she was never fully paid. In 1933, when the Nazi came to power in Germany, she was dismissed from her position for being Jewish, and then emigrated to the USA and joined a position at Bryn Mawr College. In 1935, at the age of 53, she died suddenly from complications after a surgery.

On her obituary, Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to New York times:

“In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered, methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians.”

Emmy Noether’s decade of unpaid, unrecognized work is a reminder of the struggles that societal discrimination imposes even on genius. Though few records left about how she herself felt about the difficulties she faced as a woman but her life tells its own story that despite all these hardships she rose above the level of gender identity, and proved herself a mathematician first.

In today’s scenario, we come across gender based guidelines and laws for equal diversity and opportunity supporting women. But are these law sufficient to eradicate the gender bias in a human being? Maybe we have not asked the deeper question - Before the society sees her a woman, does she herself first identify as a woman or as a human?

Before identifying ourselves with a gender role given to us by society, it is worth pausing to think about what Acharya Prashant says that A woman has a female body but she is not a woman, she is a human consciousness first.

*Habilitation : A post-doctoral qualification, after PhD, required to be allowed to teach as independent faculty at a German university, without it ,one could not officially hold a Professorship

अष्टावक्र गीता - श्लोक 15.2

मोक्षो विषयवैरस्यं बन्धो वैषयिको रसः ।

एतावदेव विज्ञानं यथेच्छसि तथा कुरु ॥ 2 ॥

Yesterday, while traveling on a bus, I was looking at the shops around me, which were filled with goods, and at the people who had tattoos on many parts of their bodies. Then a massage parlor came into view, and my friend started telling me that these days, many massage parlors have also opened around our old college in Delhi. Seeing and hearing all this, a kind of restlessness arose within me: What are we really doing?

The restlessness is within, and we are trying to get rid of it by adding/removing things to the body and the mind, and this entire system has been built for that very purpose. But can any amount of physical or mental indulgence ever truly fill it?

I too have done all this extensively, so perhaps the restlessness arose a little more intensely. Then I tried to understand it through what Acharya Ji had explained while explaining Ashtavakra Gita verse 2 from Chapter 15—that attachment (rāga) toward objects is our bondage, and dispassion (vairāgya) is liberation.

I understood that in order to remove the inner restlessness, which I experience but do not understand, I go out and seek happiness in objects. Happiness provides temporary relief, but rasa gives a deep experience of temporary freedom from sorrow, and through rasa I develop a deep attachment to the object.

Once attachment/rasa develops toward an object, it is not easy to show its futility, and that becomes my bondage.

The first object of the ego is the body itself, which it considers to be under its control, and as much as I understood, a deep attachment toward it becomes rāga. Then whatever the body experiences, the ego strongly identifies with it. If the body receives pleasure, the ego immediately becomes delighted, and if the body experiences pain, it immediately becomes restless.

The ego begins to think that the cause of its restlessness is the body and the mind. Then the solution appears to be to add or subtract something from the body, to satisfy the body through various kinds of indulgences, and to bring pleasurable experiences into the mind because the mind is disturbed.

But it never occurs to the ego that the disturbance is not in the body but within the ego itself.

Its gaze remains sharply fixed on the objects; it continues its desire-driven observation of them, unwilling to honestly turn its attention toward itself.

Once it starts seeing the problem in the objects (in this example, the body and the mind), it creates every possible means of indulgence merely to fill them (the body and the mind), which today has taken the form of consumerism.

If the ego feels restless, it commands the body to go shopping, watch a movie, get a massage, go on a trip somewhere—and for this, we have created countless options.

Now if one thing does not remove the restlessness, there are thousands of other things available to indulge in, so keep chasing them for an entire lifetime.

And every indulgence has a carbon emission; this very consumerism is now manifesting itself as the terrifying reality of climate change.

The solution to the problem was simply to understand one's own restlessness and to see the futility of all the methods we have discovered to fill it.

Self-knowledge is the only solution, but leaving that aside, we tried everything else.

So what began with a little attachment ended up destroying everything; that is why Acharya Ji called rasa self-destructive. We are all externally connected with one another, this self-destruction has now become destructive for all other living beings as well.

The problem is not in the objects (not even in the body and the mind). Objects are neither good nor bad in themselves.

The problem lies in ego itself, which prefers living in its own stories rather than seeing the truth about itself.

The body and the mind, just as they are, are very beautiful. They are instruments of nature and know how to do their work. I have no need to interfere with them.

The next time restlessness arises, I will ask this very question:

Whose restlessness is this? And am I truly understanding it, or am I merely trying to fill it?

# Echoes of Emptiness

The incompleteness that I experience is not due to lack of an object (in the context of this chapter a person) but due to lack of understanding from where this incompleteness arises.

The incompleteness is existential and understanding of it is the only way to reduce it. Bringing another incomplete human being in my life without understanding my own incompleteness will only mount to more suffering.

If one wants to form a relationship with anyone it should be the relationship of understanding, arising from one’s own inner completeness.

. [https://www.amazon.de/dp/9369896570/?bestFormat=true&k=truth%20without%20apology&ref\\\_=nb\\\_sb\\\_ss\\\_w\\\_scx-ent-bk-ww\\\_k0\\\_1\\\_10\\\_de&crid=2EDHI2GTABITX&sprefix=truth%20with\](https://www.amazon.de/dp/9369896570/?bestFormat=true&k=truth%20without%20apology&ref\_=nb\_sb\_ss\_w\_scx-ent-bk-ww\_k0\_1\_10\_de&crid=2EDHI2GTABITX&sprefix=truth%20with)

Echoes of Emptiness

The incompleteness that I experience is not due to lack of an object (in the context of this chapter a person) but due to lack of understanding from where this incompleteness arises.

The incompleteness is existential and understanding of it is the only way to reduce it. Bringing another incomplete human being in my life without understanding my own incompleteness will only mount to more suffering.

If one wants to form a relationship with anyone it should be the relationship of understanding, arising from one’s own inner completeness.

. https://www.amazon.de/dp/9369896570/?bestFormat=true&k=truth%20without%20apology&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-bk-ww_k0_1_10_de&crid=2EDHI2GTABITX&sprefix=truth%20with