Good evening everyone.
Thank you, Lynne, for organizing this event and thank you all for attending this book discussion. Instead of the traditional book reading, I will give an overview of the book's theme and briefly tell you how it was written and published.
Anita's Legacy is an unusual book, not the standard fiction fare of today's market. While its human drama is quite simple, its underlying pattern of thought is not. Professor V. Krishnamurthy, a math professor, recently wrote a book on science and spirituality. In his select bibliography along with Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Paramahansa Yogananda, and many others, he also included my book. I was stunned when I found that out. I believe now, that there are many others who would benefit from the book, than the few I had imagined when I first wrote it.
My goal was for the reader to set aside the book after each chapter and ponder the deeper issues I had laid out in my writing. But this goal was not accomplished after Prem Kumar, my senior editor, revised the manuscript. With his touch, the story became so compelling that many people read it in one sitting. The hardest part for me was to remove about 100 pages recommended by Prem. He told me that the book should focus either on generating conflict in the human drama or on generating conflict in the inquiry but not on both. His initial reaction was that the book was quite unwieldy in its length and so it went through major surgery in his capable hands. The editing process was disconcerting, to say the least, but I am pleased with the result. I initially felt that the book would have a limited audience of 200 or so, but Prem disagreed with me. The overwhelming response from readers who have forced the book into its second print run have proved him correct. The first 2,000 copies are sold out and a second print run is under way. The last few copies of the first edition can be purchased later this evening.
Overview of the book's theme
There are many questions that occur to us in our lives: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is enlightenment? All these questions can be combined into The Question of First Cause: Why is there something instead of nothing?
Some seek an answer through Religion, some through Science, some through Philosophy, and some through fiction. Are the answers that result from these paths all different or do they lead to the same answer?
First, a few observations about The Answer. Does The Answer exist? Is The Answer the same for everyone? Is The Answer obtained through intellectual analysis alone? Is The Answer meant to be discovered only by special people but not by ordinary people? Anita's Legacy helps you find your own answer to The Question. It does this by challenging you to think about basic truths that are widely accepted so that you can separate out myth from reality, fact from fiction.
The myth of religion tells us that The Answer is the Supreme Being, called God, who created the world. God created humans, God created this and that, and He created it all for the enjoyment of human beings. Such a view is satisfying to our young mind but as we grow up we realize that this view does not scientifically support the existence of God.
The god of science tells us that God the creator cannot be observed or measured. And when we ask our priests for a proof of God's existence, they first tell us that we should have faith. "No," you adamantly tell them, "I want a scientific answer." They then fall back on the uncertainty principle of religion: he who knows does not tell and he who tells does not know.
The myth of science is a little more sophisticated. Scientists who pursue The Answer, excluding those who pursue it for practical purposes, tend to confuse reality with its mathematical representations. The mathematical representations are so complex that these scientists claim that The Answer is inscrutable to ordinary folks, and that specialists in astronomy, cosmology, and physics would determine it. The specialists propose theories, test them experimentally, compare them with observations, and eventually hope to arrive at The Answer in the form of God's Equation or a Theory of Everything.
What is not vociferously proclaimed is the fact that every theory is based on certain assumptions about reality. The history of science has clearly shown us that the fact that a theory produces tangible results in no way implies that its underlying assumptions are correct. In propagating its myth, science effectively shifts attention away from its assumptions, and much like religion, asks us to be believers, when in fact, most of its conclusions are based, in large part, on assumptions that change with time and are agreed upon by many but challenged by few.
Scientific writers like to believe that their works are impersonal, dispassionate, and objective. This is far from the truth. Their writings, like other human endeavors, are also subject to fads and fashions. The fads and fashions keep changing with the times, usually following a faith agenda set by some of the dominant figures in the field. The Nobel laureate Abdus Salam often told his graduate students, "When all else fails, you can always tell the Truth." Just like religion, science is also a product of faith.
Consider, for example, the notion of evolution. It is a widely accepted fact that evolution has been taking place for billions of years. The conscious beings we see around us are the product of billions of years of biological evolution. In the little that we know about human evolution, it is apparent that every time it has taken place it has happened because of "problems that needed to be solved." If we extend this observation, we can ask two questions: Is evolution happening because there is a problem to be solved? What is our role in evolution's purpose?
There are scientists like Richard Dawkins, however, who claim that there is nothing more to the cosmos than the interactions of blind physical forces. There is no inherent purpose to the universe or our own existence [The Blind Watchmaker], he says. Every living thing in the natural world has developed accidentally, that is, with no intrinsic purpose. The ultimate rationale for our existence is the preservation of DNA.
But this does not explain why physical particles would accidentally possess responsibility and moral conscience. How can inert DNA experience love, beauty, and friendship? What is it that sees and understands thoughts and memories? The answers to these questions point to the existence of consciousness, to the existence of soul.
I have no qualms at all about anyone's subjective beliefs. That is why, unlike Richard Dawkins and others, my book is classified as fiction. There is no universal premise that I have proved in Anita's Legacy. I believe that there is a Higher Intelligence operating in the Universe. You can give It many names, God, Great Spirit, etc., and the names differ in the East and West. But if the One in the East were different from the One in the West, then there would be Two, which I think is not the case. Our purpose in life is to figure out the problem that this Higher Intelligence is solving and our role in its solution. But does the solution have to be based only in science?
Those who are tired of the scientific culture that promotes the vision that our world is made up only of lifeless matter, turn to spirituality to seek help. Unfortunately there is much confusion even in that realm.
There are any number of spiritual gurus in today's marketplace who make us put on a glorious robe of spiritual discipline and expound on practices that enlighten us and our checkbooks. These gurus provide psychological comfort to many that eagerly look for a cause or doctrine to explain complex life experiences, a cause they are unable to find in organized religion. Oftentimes their preaching takes the form of training courses in instant self-improvement, seminars that profess to take participants to new levels of consciousness, or readings from their books and sequels adnauseam that make religious fanatics of yesteryear appear modest and humble.
I believe that the road to The Answer does not go exclusively through science. Nor does it go exclusively through religion. The road goes through both of them. But with so much confusion, how does one go about gleaning an answer for oneself?
Should we practice rites and rituals prescribed by our religious faith? Is that a path to enlightenment? Or should we be enlightened by spiritual teachers? Or should we follow the path of objective scientists?
Scientists follow the ritual of research by carefully observing things and applying reason to figure out absolute reality. Mystics, on the other hand, follow the ritual of meditation, believing that absolute reality must be experienced and that it is beyond description of natural language. At some level, both camps follow their rituals and the only justification for accepting them is the faith that they are true.
Faith is what moves mountains. Faith is what vindicates the rules of reason for the scientist. Faith is what points to the existence of a higher intelligence for the mystic. Refusal to admit that faith is necessary is something I find troubling. I am not talking about blind faith here but a faith that grows from our life experiences.
Faith is inherent to the human condition and is nurtured by the rituals that we practice. The ritualistic practice that, I think, is most useful is one where we worship God in living beings. A practice that understands that Religion and Science are for doing things, not for figuring out The Answer or for knowing God. Even if we did know, who would be the knower?
To summarize my overview I will leave you with two statements that form the essence of the book.
(1) Whether or not The Answer can be determined by any intellectual pattern of thought is not important.
(2) What is important is to follow a path that enriches the quality of human experiences.
Father Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest who started Sadhana, wrote, "The shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story." That is what I have tried to do with the ideas described in my book and the short story I'm about to relate to you expresses my view on enlightenment.
Once upon a time there were two men who set out to knock on the door of Knowledge. One of them had a big stick and the other had a little stick. The person with the big stick was proudly brandishing it all the time, sometimes fencing with it, at other times hurtling it towards the sun. Every night he would polish his stick so that it would be shiny and clean the next morning. He would draw a large crowd to witness how well he wielded his stick. The person with the little stick, in the meantime, was following the rituals of his life and working on the door whenever he got a chance. One day, the person with the little stick succeeded in entering the door, while his companion was still showing off to the crowd.
A small boy who saw this said to his father, "Papa, did you see that?"
"Yes, I did. He must be very spiritual and enlightened."
"But what about the other man, Papa? His stick is much bigger and he has so many followers."
"I feel sorry that they chose a guru who doesn't understand what enlightenment is. The size of the stick is not important. When one knocks on the door of Knowledge and it opens, then one should throw away the stick and enter inside. If you are too proud of your stick, you will remain unenlightened and never realize what to do when the door is open."
I'll conclude this portion by reading the last paragraph from my book.
"For many centuries, philosophers and scientists have engaged in a calumnious ritual of vilification that has propagated the dichotomy between them. In their relentless pursuit of truth, oftentimes by blatantly flouting conventional wisdom, their patterns of thought are in danger of being wiped out from our memories. But the ghosts of civilization's ancestors would not permit that. They would rise from the ashes to repair the breach between the mystics and the scientists. The ghosts of countless ordinary souls who nurture the cosmic consciousness into producing great souls.
By selflessly following the rituals of their lives.
By accepting the harmony in an unseen order of things.
By succumbing to the world, not conquering it."
How the book was written
Now I will say a few words about how the book was written and published.
I have thought about the ideas in this book for more than 30 years. My first conflict between religion and science occurred when I was 13 years old. At that time I had read a newspaper article in Madras about the microwave background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson. On that same day, my great uncle, Swami Vireswarananda, was going to initiate me with a spiritual mantra. He had just become the President of the Ramakrishna Mission and was visiting Madras. Sri Ramakrishna was born in 1836 and was a worshipper of the Divine Mother, the Goddess Kali. He embraced all religions and that was the part I liked best. But I used to have several arguments with my great uncle on scientific justifications for Sri Ramakrishna's religious beliefs.
And when I embarked on my career as a scientist -- actually, my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, this conflict stayed with me. I branched out into computer science for my Masters and it was then that I studied the incompleteness theorem of Godel. That spurred me even more into my inquiry. Still there was no resolution of it in my mind.
For a dozen years after that I spent time reading many books on the subject but not any single one that bridged the gap between science and mysticism. In 1994 my mother died of complications from breast cancer and I went back to perform her last rites. Having been absent from home for many years of my adult life, this was the first time I spent two weeks with my father. Much to my surprise, he showed me a manuscript he had been working on for 50 years on the very same conflict that I had on science and religion. It was a handwritten draft in two volumes -- one with scientific details on cosmology, and the other with philosophical details, primarily the Sankhya philosophy, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita.
I was amazed that he had spent his entire life on this topic. I made copies of both volumes and brought them back with me. They describe a fascinating and unusual view of first cause and I saw how the ideas fit into a larger landscape, not only in Hinduism but also in other world religions. One plus One became One for me, something that I had always believed.
Now came the daunting task of writing and presenting it. I thought about how my father's ideas would have helped me when I was struggling with these issues at a young age. I also thought about my mother, about how little she had known of the depth of my father's inquiry. So I decided that someone like my mother and the young me would be the primary audience. Since my mother did not have a strong background in science, I had to find a way to convey the concepts at an intuitive level without getting into details. The advantage of not having a commercial publisher allowed me to include equations and diagrams wherever necessary. My friend Jack in San Jose, who described Anita's Legacy as a 2-flight book (he read it on a round-trip flight from San Jose to Dallas), told me that he skipped all the equations and diagrams but still managed to understand the thrust of the inquiry. Having taught thousands of students, I suspected that this might happen, so you can now see the advantage of the fiction format.
To start the writing process I carried a research notebook to jot down ideas that occurred to me. I began planning an outline in May 1996 during a conference trip to Turkey. Then on my way back I had to go through Frankfurt. The plane landed at 8:30 at night and my connection was the next afternoon at 1 o'clock. Upon inquiring into prices of hotel rooms I was told that a Holiday Inn would cost $280. So I decided to stay overnight at the airport itself. I found a McDonalds on a top floor, bought a cup of coffee, and started working on the book's outline. Standing in the coffee line in front of me was a young German girl, whose head was completely shaved. At first I thought she was part of the Hare Krishna movement. I said hello and we talked for a bit. She told me she was not with the Hare Krishna group but that she had cancer, and that her mother was changing their tickets downstairs. I was saddened by her news and felt terrible for jumping to conclusions without all the facts. Soon she left with her mother but her name, Anita, entered into my research notebook. And it stayed there as I began to use it. I don't know her last name nor do I know what happened to her.
That is about as much preparation I had done when I started writing in August 1996. My children were younger at the time and after putting them to sleep I worked on the book at night. I had a new teaching assignment, teaching C++ for the first time. There were two large sections of 150 students and I was coordinating the instruction with Professor Albert Baker. Typically I work 60 to 70 hours a week, but with this new course for that large a student population it would take more time and effort. There were at least 80 e-mail messages every day from students. Fortunately for me, Baker's class was early in the day and so I had the advantage of attending his lecture, which helped me prepare mine. With Baker taking the lead in developing the coursework, I found time at night to work on the book.
During the first week of September when I sat in front of my Mac computer at home, a very old 2-FX, a strange process began to take place. My fingers started moving by themselves on the keyboard. I am a two-handed typist, using forefingers of both hands and my thumb and thus quite slow. Yet, this typing would continue at its own pace and I would work till 4 o'clock in the morning, getting 3 hours of sleep each day. This went on every night for two months till the final chapter was completed on October 30th. I did not know where the characters were going with the story - it's as if they knew what was going on and I just became their typist. It's hard for me to explain how this happened. I did not attempt to correct any of the pages but just went along with the flow of the narrative.
I read later about the Writing Muse and I am sure there was a Muse who took over my life during that time frame. Such power she wielded over me that I obeyed her every whim during those two months. There are half a dozen people who still tell me that "the first draft is the best of all the versions." These are my good friends in IIT Kanpur and they have threatened that they will not pray for my soul unless I complete the nonfiction version of the book. The advance they have offered is huge and plays upon my weakness, which they know well - free chai and samosas for life in the Hall 5 canteen at IIT Kanpur. And so the nonfiction version that I am working on is for an audience of six people.
There are two primary characters in Anita's Legacy, Major Kay based on my father, and Anita who is the inquisitive and precocious girl asking some simple but deep questions. Chris in the book is the voice of Chris Pirsig, son of the famous author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Chris, who rode with his dad, Robert Pirsig, on the epic motorcycle journey, was murdered in San Francisco in 1979. When I read Pirsig's book I had put myself in Chris's shoes and enjoyed the ride like millions of other readers. I was shocked to hear of Chris's death, and decided to make him a minor character in my book.
Alan gives a voice to Science and Joann, the major's wife, born in Ontario, Iowa, right where the book was written, is my favorite person who understands the ordinariness of life. I find that very special about her. Meg is confused and asks questions that many of us ask and surprisingly, some of my male readers have identified with her predicament. Anita is a difficult character to explain. To bring out her mystique in the narrative, Prem asked me to throw in many clues about the life of Hypatia of Alexandria. Linked to Hypatia's spirit, Anita's ultimate identity is revealed at the very end, although the discerning reader will guess it sooner.
The first person who dropped a bucket of cold water on my head was my senior editor, Prem Kumar. There is such a rush one gets upon completing a first draft and one always likes to hear how good it is and not how much it stinks. Prem lost no time in beaming me down to earth and stated three rules for fiction writing:
Rule number 1: Conflict
Rule number 2: Conflict
Rule number 3: Conflict
He worked hard and patiently with me as the book went through five revisions. Much of the discussion on religion and science is meant to generate conflict and make you question your deepest beliefs. Of course, one can always rewrite books and fine-tune them but one has to stop somewhere. I hope the present version has helped you in your own process of self-realization.
I am happy when I hear comments from readers who have enjoyed the book. A scientist in New Jersey liked it so much that he sent me e-mail, asking for my phone number, and talked to me for a whole hour. There are three comments I want to share with you. One is from Kathy Hanson of Ames, who I met last year when we coached a school team together. I had always been nervous whether my characters were real and whether people would relate to them. But Kathy told me, "Having been raised in Southern Illinois, I am amazed that your lead character resembles my grandfather so closely." I was relieved when she said that.
Another comment was from a doctor who had the same conflict that I had between religion and science. He enjoyed my book and said, "I wish I had this book when I was in high school with so many unanswered questions." He continued with a story about two babies who were born, premature twins I think, and one of them had to be placed in intensive care. He had checked the babies before he left for the day and they both seemed to be okay. He was not on call that night. However, around 1 o'clock in the morning, he woke up from his sleep, put on his clothes and went to the hospital. For what reason he did not know. As soon as he reached the nursery, the baby in intensive care suddenly had a cardiac arrest. The nurse frantically tried to get the doctor on call but it would have taken 5 minutes for him to reach there, way too much time. Fortunately for the baby, the doctor was there at the precise moment to take care of the situation. To this day, he still wonders what higher intelligence made him wake up and go to the hospital that night. People in medicine often experience such encounters.
Arjun Gupta, CEO of Telesoft Partners told me, "Fascinating book, Doc. Just as the bumblebee flies by defying the laws of science, your book defies the standard genres of writing. It's off the beaten track, yet so compelling and powerful. I read it on a plane trip from San Francisco to Europe."
How the book was published
Last year in March, my best friend in Ames, Professor Charles Wright, died in a tragic car accident. It came as a shock to me because much of the setting of the book's lead character was in Southern Illinois where Charlie is from. In fact, the tornado scene described in the book I heard firsthand from his mother Mary, who was 12 years old at the time. Both Charlie and his mother were avid bridge players and she told me this at a bridge tournament. Charlie's sad demise forced me to think about how fragile life is. I told myself, "Life is just too short. I had better put this book into production." In April Professor Ramesh Rao posted his pre-publication review on Sulekha.com, and sent the book on its journey into the world. I am amazed at its reception by readers everywhere. Viresh Publications is named in memory of my great uncle, Swami Vireswarananda.
I've decided to donate proceeds from sales in Ames to Professor Wright's scholarship fund that promotes careers for women in science and engineering. I donated $1,500 last year and hope to raise more money this year. Proceeds from sales elsewhere are being donated to the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta to a program that feeds poor children and expectant mothers. I've also contributed to a Blind Orphanage that was demolished in the recent earthquake in India.
For those who have not read the book, I hope it will challenge you intellectually and bring you many hours of reading pleasure. Copies can be bought here and I will be happy to sign them. I now request questions and comments and encourage readers to share their experiences. Thank you for your time and attention.
Copyright © 2001 by Gurpur M. Prabhu. All rights reserved. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the author.
More information about the book can be found on its website.
Transcript of Questions and Answers
Question: I enjoyed reading your book very much. But for me, the nonfiction aspects were more interesting. Should your book be classified as fiction or nonfiction?
Prabhu: That's an interesting question. We are brought up to believe that fiction should be written in some preconceived form, that we have to identify with characters, that they have to be well developed and so on. Most of this stems from our acceptance of the Aristotelian legacy of classifying things. My book, however, challenges traditional patterns of thoughts and beliefs. That's why its very format itself defies any classification in the standard book categories.
There are authors who write in specified formats in order to get published or to satisfy the whims of editors. My goal was different. I wanted my reader to get a unique experience. I wanted my reader to understand the ideas. The purpose of the story was to enable the reader to complete the book.
Question: There are many writers who use aspects of science as metaphors. Is the cosmology described in your book a metaphor?
Prabhu: Cosmology is such a contentious science, if one can call it that. Many statements are made but the underlying assumptions are not touted. The cosmology described in the book is not entirely a metaphor, but it is metaphorical in the following two ways. First, it encourages you to challenge conventional ideas that are widely accepted. Second, it tells you that we know so little about the universe and that we should always keep an open mind for alternative explanations and viewpoints.
Question: As a follow up, you mentioned in your book that the universe is contracting, not expanding. Please explain that.
Prabhu: What I stated in my book is that the evidence of the red shift allows us to conclude that distance increases with time. The conclusion that the universe is expanding is based on the cosmological assumption of isotropy and homogeneity, something that is too technical for me to address in a general forum. I will be happy to talk to you later about this.
Question: How do you think your writing would have come out had the setting been in India instead of the United States?
Prabhu: Good question, George. I'm not sure. When I began writing the book, my Muse took over the narrative and one reason I put it into print was because the first draft was written through me, as it were, in the short span of two months. I have spent 22 years in the U.S. and wanted to make the point that the One here and the One in the East are the same. I hope the intelligent reader is able to abstract out the setting and focus on the substance.
Question: Regardless of what others tell you, I really enjoyed the fiction format. But I would have liked more details on the scientific and philosophical ideas.
Prabhu: Thank you. I have taught thousands of students and observed that their attention span in a 50-minute lecture lasts for about 20 minutes. If I'm lucky. That's why I decided to keep the writing entertaining and provocative, injecting complexities in short segments. As for the details, some of them don't belong in fiction, but I plan to include them in the nonfiction version.
Question: Like the last question, I, too, enjoyed the fiction format, but would have liked more details about the characters.
Prabhu: My senior editor, Prem Kumar's, first words to me were, "Not everyone will like your book. You have to accept that." We both agreed that since the book challenged traditional beliefs, it should also be written differently. Hence, unlike standard fiction, where we are supposed to identify with characters, our goal was to draw the reader into the consciousness of the inquiry, not the characters. If we did both, we felt that it would dilute the content of the book. And besides, keeping the page count low saved us money on the production cost!
Question: Who are the six people you are writing the nonfiction version for?
Prabhu: You don't really want to know them. They're a bunch of diehards who would not recognize me in the clothes I'm wearing today!
Question: Is the higher intelligence continuously expanding as the universe expands?
Prabhu: This question is from my son who is in sixth grade. I'm not sure whether the manifested universe is expanding. It's a good question to ponder and the purpose of the book was not to provide answers, but to encourage readers to think about issues like this.