Superstition, science, and faith: beyond the duality of the subject and the object || IIT Kanpur (2020)
Questioner: In any scientific experiment there is a subject and an object, but usually the subject is biased due to his conditioning to some extent. We sometimes see scientific studies contradicting each other as they are reported by scientists having different conditionings. Nevertheless, the general belief is that science is objective and this leads to scientists becoming self-righteous, arrogant, judgmental, and sometimes even insane. My question is, is there anything that is objective, universal, and always trustworthy?
Acharya Prashant: The relationship between the subject and the object needs to be understood. Usually, the subject operates in its lowest state, and that lowest state of the subject or of the consciousness of the subject you could call as belief or superstition. What happens in this state? The subject sees an object, and the subject certifies that the object definitely, absolutely does exist because the subject is seeing it. In other words, the subject is taking his own perception as absolute. The subject is saying, “I am seeing that object and that object exists, and that is absolutely certain because I am seeing the object.”
Things don’t stop here. The subject goes on to say that whatever the subject perceives about the object, whatever the subject even feels or imagines about the object, is bound to be true, and is therefore not available to the investigation. This is the lowest state of the relationship between the subject and the object. This relationship is called consciousness. This is the lowest state of consciousness. You are looking at an object, and looking at that object, you get certain ideas about that object—or those ideas about that object have come to you from tradition, or stuff that you have read from somewhere, or stuff that you have somehow cooked up or concocted—and whatsoever is your idea regarding the object, you are placing absolute certainty in it. You are saying, “There is no need to inquire. There is no need to experiment. The thing is this way because I feel it is this way.”
