It is so amusing to hear
how nonbelievers claim that they are being objective. In reality every one of
them is subjected to the particular combination of gunas he (or she) happens to
be under at his (her) current birth and at the present moment of life. Objectivity
means that there should be a proper, standard way of thinking; that the
observer should be strictly separated from the observable reality by the way of
detachment. In the case of the atheists however such detachment is impossible,
and the only standard they follow are their fluctuating thought patterns
dictated by the gunas. The state of the gunas predetermines their value
system and the value system sets their convictions. This is made clear by Srila
Prabhupada in his purport to Bhagavad gita 17.3:
"The word çraddhä, or "faith," is very significant
in this verse. Çraddhä, or faith, originally comes out of the mode of goodness.
One's faith may be in a demigod or some created God or some mental concoction.
One's strong faith is supposed to be productive of works of material goodness.
But in material conditional life, no works are completely purified. They are
mixed. They are not in pure goodness. Pure goodness is transcendental; in
purified goodness one can understand the real nature of the Supreme Personality
of Godhead. As long as one's faith is not completely in purified goodness, the
faith is subject to contamination by any of the modes of material nature. The
contaminated modes of material nature expand to the heart. Therefore according
to the position of the heart in contact with a particular mode of material
nature, one's faith is established. It should be understood that if one's heart
is in the mode of goodness his faith is also in the mode of goodness. If his
heart is in the mode of passion, his faith is also in the mode of passion. And
if his heart is in the mode of darkness, illusion, his faith is also thus
contaminated. Thus we find different types of faith in this world, and there
are different types of religions due to different types of faith. The real
principle of religious faith is situated in the mode of pure goodness, but
because the heart is tainted we find different types of religious principles.
Thus according to different types of faith, there are different kinds of
worship."
When Srila Prabhupada
speaks about “faith” in this purport he means not just adherence to particular
belief system or religion. Faith here means any type of conviction about
anything, including things usually viewed as purely secular phenomena such as
politics, science, philosophy, food, or clothes. Any material attraction we
have for any material object of this world is a result of the combinations of
the gunas. How do we define “material”? It is everything that we see as
separated from its origin, Krishna. It is everything that we want to enjoy
separately from Him.
Mundane scholars and
philosophers would like us to believe in their sincere quest for the Truth. We
believe that they are sincere, yes; they are wholeheartedly pursuing their
passions and use reason, science, religion, and philosophy to justify them.
This is how Nietzsche describes this situation in “Beyond Good and Evil”:
They all pose as if they had
discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the
self-development of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic . . . while
what really happens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration”
or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through
and made properly abstract – and they defend it with rationalizations after the
fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such . . .
It has
gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has
consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of
involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; [it is actually a diagnose of the
decease, a describtion of the particular combination of the gunas which control
the conditioned soul in question] and moreover that the moral (or immoral)
purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which
the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest
metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always
well (and wise) to first ask oneself: “What morality do they (or does he) aim
at?" Accordingly, I do not believe that an “impulse to knowledge” is the
father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only
made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever
considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far
they may have here acted as inspiring genii (or as demons and cobolds), will
find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that
each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the
ultimate end of existence and the legitimate Lord over all the other impulses.
For every impulse is imperious, and as such, attempts to philosophise.
Here you have it. As Schopenhauer said, philosophers make their
passions the axioms of their philosophies. They wrongly think that their
convictions and opinions are coming from above, that they are sort of divine
inspiration. The reality is much more trivial. Convictions are just another
aspect of the subtle body, of the field of activities:
The five great elements, false ego, intelligence, the
unmanifested, the ten senses and the mind, the five sense objects, desire,
hatred, happiness, distress, the aggregate, the life symptoms, and
convictions—all these are considered, in summary, to be the field of activities
and its interactions. (BG 13.6-7)
Depending on the modes, or as Nietzsche put it, the
morality they aim at, all humans have different opinions and tastes. Once this
is established they build their philosophy to justify them. For example, Krishna
says in Gita 2.42-43:
Men of small knowledge are very much attached to the flowery
words of the Vedas, which recommend various fruitive activities for elevation
to heavenly planets, resultant good birth, power, and so forth. Being desirous
of sense gratification and opulent life, they say that there is nothing more
than this.
That means that these people don’t know the Truth. They are
fully in the Maya’s grip. Nietzsche explains:
Suppose Truth is a woman, what then? Would’t have we not a good
reason to suspect that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, had a
poor understanding of women; that the dreadful seriousness and awkward
pushiness with which they have so far habitually approached Truth are clumsy
and inappropriate ways to win over a woman. It’s clear that Truth did not allow
herself to be won over and all forms of dogmatism are nowadays standing there
dismayed and disheartened, if they are standing at all.
Who knows the Truth then? Only those who are under Her
protection:
O son of Påthä, those who are not deluded, the great souls, are
under the protection of the divine nature. They are fully engaged in devotional
service because they know Me as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, original
and inexhaustible.
