About Us
The Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science (BVISCS) is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit educational organization located in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Our mission is to promote a more compassionate attitude towards the environment and nurture the development of the spiritual dimension of life in education, science, and society.
Since its inception in 1974, the Bhaktivedanta Institute (BI) has drawn upon insights from Bhagavat Vedanta, the distilled essence of the vast ancient Vedic wisdom, to address problems in modern science related to the reduction of life to matter, cosmological models, and the role of consciousness in empirical investigations of nature. Today, the BI comprises numerous autonomous institutes worldwide that engage in interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of science, philosophy, and religion.
The Princeton BVISCS, established in 2012 by BI founding charter member Bhakti Madhava Puri, PhD, uniquely derives insights from Hegelian philosophy, which complements the Bhagavat as affirmed by stalwart Vaishnava Acharyas (Spiritual Masters). For the first eight years of operation, BVISCS was situated right across the street from Princeton University. Still based in Princeton, the BVISCS continues the work that Dr. Puri has been dedicated to for over 50 years. Informed by the history and philosophy of science, servitor scholars from the BVISCS address questions concerning the origin, purpose, and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and self through the lens of Organic Wholism. The BVISCS strives to foster cultural and scientific progress beyond materialistic values and medical/technological advancement. Humans live longer and have fancier gadgets, yet suffer worldwide from an environmental and mental health crisis. We don’t know how to harmonize with our surroundings, and our minds have grown uneasy. Through publications and the Science & Scientist conferences, the BVISCS’s annual international conference series, we discuss Dr. Puri’s progressive work with other thinkers who are themselves engaged in relevant investigations across the sciences and humanities. If you discover a mutual interest in this work, or would like to attend our Bhagavat cultural programming, kindly consider reaching out.
Spiritual Culture and Science
A predominant conception of modern culture and science is that matter is fundamental and that life and consciousness evolve from it. This presumption implies that biology is reducible to physics and chemistry and that consciousness is an emergent property of the neurophysical activity of the brain. The concept of matter is understood as an existent static being comprised of individual parts or atoms related and unified in a manner external to them. This arrangement is what characterizes it as a mechanical system. Due to the lack of inner necessity, the parts of the system exist indifferently in isolation from each other, even though their collective work powers the system.
This mechanistic logic also dominates modern social structures, especially in business, where groups of people become compartmentalized from each other through an emphasis on cultivating highly specialized roles that are largely insulated from other distinct roles. Only leadership positions serve to coalesce (externally unify) the work of specialists to conform with the intentions of the overarching organization. Due to the massive amount of time and energy that most folks devote to their jobs in this kind of mechanistic setting, people in general become conditioned to seeing things narrowly. They often become upset or enraged when confronted with views different from their own perspective. This issue is compounded when technology with social media – that can serve as an “echo chamber” to unwitting consumers – becomes easily accessible and unconsciously used.
The study of the laws or principles that describe the movements and relationships of the parts of mechanical systems is what we call the science of physics. When physics is assumed to be the most fundamental science, and knowledge gleaned through it is presumptuously scaled up to chemical and biological systems, then we end up with reductionism. Reductionism is the belief that wholes are nothing but the sum of their parts. When applied to biology, reductionism leads to the notion of abiogenesis, that life comes from matter, i.e. that all living entities are just complex aggregates of material building blocks (atoms and molecules). Such a claim has never been scientifically validated, since no lab has ever been able to produce even a single cell by synthesizing molecules. As Dr. B Madhava Puri says, “with all our science, all the scientists in the world together cannot make a single blade of grass.” Rather, the law of biogenesis, that life and matter come from life, is observed by all conscious people, every single day.
Another issue arises when we hold physics to be the central science of nature. Classical physics gives rise to determinism, which holds that all past, present, and future activities throughout the universe are the mechanical effects of the physical event (an efficient cause) that created the universe. Since everything is presumably determined by objective mechanical laws, such that all living and nonliving activities rely on the same causal principles as colliding billiard balls (the efficient aspect of cause), all purposive (teleological: the final aspect of cause) and subjective influences like free will are considered extraneous. This undermines direct human experience. An unpalatable paradox such as this denies the very capacity for choice that allows a person to study science, become a physicist, and embrace classical physics rather than quantum physics, where the latter validates indeterminism. Resolving this discrepancy requires an understanding of the world that includes yet extends beyond mere static being and mechanical systems.
The Indic parable of the six blind men and the elephant describes each blind man, ignorant to the concept of a whole elephant, touching one part of the elephant’s body without considering its context. The tusks were mistaken for spears, the trunk for a snake, the ears were thought to be fans, the legs were confused for tree trunks, the midsection a wall, and the tail for a rope. When the six men reconvened and shared their compartmentalized experiences, the resultant mental image of the whole was utterly ridiculous in comparison to the actual elephant. This effectively contrasts true reality from the distorted abstract image produced by materialistic culture and science — where inert matter is presumed fundamental, purpose is denied, and free choice is considered an illusion.
Instead of an ossified world with isolated parts externally unified, the organic view, which is non-mechanistic, sees the world as a dynamic process of becoming whose constituents are fundamentally interdependent and internally related. This perspective views biology as the prominent natural science and considers that physics and chemistry should be studied in relation to biology. Becoming involves several moments that necessarily contextualize existence: the coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be of a thing, i.e. whatever exists is coming from something (formal aspect of cause) and is going toward something (final aspect of cause, being-for, purposefulness/teleology). These diachronic relationships coexist with synchronic ones like efficient causal relations. The mechanistic view is positivistic, i.e. it only accounts for positive existent objects, static being, abstracted from the context of their development. On the other hand, this organicist approach is comprehensive enough to encompass being as one of the moments of the dialectical development of becoming, along with being’s opposite or negation, nonbeing. Put simply, dialectic development entails the movement from thesis, to antithesis, then synthesis, where this dynamic process necessitates consideration of the negative as well as the positive. Without considering the negative, all assessments of developmental processes must remain superficial. A complete comprehension of life and consciousness must go beyond all immediate appearances, yet encompass them.
Making progress in this direction requires differentiating between negation and annihilation. The negation of 1 is not 0 or nothing; it is -1. The negation of existence is not a void; it is nonexistence, which is very real. The negation of an object is its concept. Concepts do not exist as singular entities in the world, rather they are universals that are the underlying essence of existent individual objects. If you and a friend go grocery shopping and they request that you hand them a fruit, you would be up against an impossible task. “Fruit” is a universal genus within which particular species like apples and watermelons are contained. Even then, you couldn’t even hand your friend “a watermelon,” because this phrase refers to all singular specimens of watermelon that one could possibly physically encounter. A critical evaluation of language reveals the underlying interdependency between objectivity and subjectivity, between things and thought. The point is that reality is fundamentally psychophysical, and for modern science to progress in a way that explores such truth requires adopting a wider scope focused on the various milieu of dynamic processes of becoming. This is the basis for spiritual culture and science. In truth, everything exists in a context of which they’re part and within which they serve a purpose. As the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel explains in Phenomenology of Spirit §20, “the truth is the whole.” In other words, a genuine understanding of something must consider the function that it serves in relation to its context or the whole of which it’s a part. A comprehensive knowledge of atoms and molecules must explain their unique role within the larger cell or organism. Proper self-knowledge must include the self’s relation to otherness, and how they’re both interdependent expressions of each other.
Current progress in cancer research – resulting from the development of 21st-century biology towards embracing the teleological view that recognizes all life as cognitive – proves the necessity of embracing this psychological aspect of nature. Psychology is what distinguishes life from nonlife. Living entities (cells and organisms) actively distinguish self from other during cognitive activities such as decision-making, cooperation, and problem-solving. Nonliving inert matter does not distinguish itself from other, although the self of a nonliving entity is passively determined by cognitive entities who utilize it for their own purposes. The degree to which cognitive/conscious capacities are fully developed depends on the functions that certain kinds of bodies can accommodate, where such bodies are themselves a result of cognitive activity. The science of spirit is concerned with the further study of this dialectic subject matter and its higher development.
A culture influenced by these spiritual principles emphasizes love and respect for all, humility, tolerance, cooperation, selfless service, and deep consideration of and surrender to the higher purposes belonging to the Organic Whole of which we’re all part. These qualities can be found in the timeless Bhagavat culture of ancient India.