Meditation on a cherry tree

My thesis on instincts ▪︎ Invention and discovery are not the same ▪︎ Srila Prabhupada's Trojan horse: Darwin’s theory ▪︎ Taking the bull by the horns ▪︎ It is philosophy as Prabhupada liked it ▪︎ Everything comes from India ▪︎ Greeks and Romans disputes on cherries ▪︎ Adishekar das, sankirtana leader for French Yatra ▪︎ The old days preaching ▪︎ My definition of a preacher ▪︎

I I told this devotee of Krishna that the word instinct is inappropriate when it comes to describing human behavior, because it misleads us; it implies that animals are at the origin of our species. Not only did he reply that this is how our civilization has always expressed itself culturally, which is true -just take a dictionary to figure it out- but he delivered me another argument; a massive one: Prabhupada expressed himself thus, too, period!

Or how to mix concepts and ideas for better formatting the brains for mainstream propaganda. I mean, intuitive reaction and instinct are not the same thing, unless we share with Darwin and the like their theory of evolution.

Just like the words invention and discovery are not the same, although they are used indifferently in many cases. Maybe the word 'indifferently' is not the right term in the English language, 'likewise' or 'in an equivalent way' would be more appropriate. We will see that in the present writing exercise.

I should write it in bold: Humans are not endowed with instincts like animals. It’s difficult to get this truth into people’s heads, as formatting is so effective. Literature, philosophy, and science have long taught that we are born with instincts —which is wrong. As a devotee of Krishna, I’ve learned this.

The Hare Krishnas theoretically are supposed to understand better than others that repeating "we have instincts" is incorrect. Yet when I correct them, they dismiss me. If Srila Prabhupada used the term, they argue, then so should they. Anyone who challenges this is dismissed as nonsense. He even blocked me.

Damodara, like most people, conflates tropism with instinct. A drive, a mental inclination, or an urge is not an instinct. Why doesn’t he use those more precise terms instead of "instinct"?

He reads many books on psychology, yet he fails to grasp that Western intellectuals make no distinction between animals and humans: they claim humans evolved from animals. And the neo-woke crowd insists on this origin.

Yesterday, I climbed a cherry tree to cut off some branches. During this activity, many thoughts and flashes popped up, independently from my will. I am trying to convey here, after exploring and synthesizing them, the fruits of this speculation. First of all, no instinct guided me to make this job; I had to consult some manuals to be sure of what I was doing. Of course, I had to be careful not to fall from the tree, but this fear is was nit programmed, it was a rational response to danger: I don't want to die. It is a universal principle of self-preservation.

One of Trojan horse that Prabhupada liked to bring out to highlight the strength of our philosophy, was the inconsistency of Darwin’s theory. This "evolution from animal to man" he writes in SB, "is incomplete because the theory does not present the reverse condition, namely evolution from man to animal. [---] Darwin's theory is stating that no human being existed from the beginning but that humans evolved after many, many years is simply a nonsensical theory. [---] We don't believe to all this nonsense; neither there is any basic principle." 

As a disciple and a preacher, I became very interested in this philosophical aspect of life, its origin and evolution. For this I had to take the bull by the horns, in an arena full of Darwin’s supporters, that is to say materialists who believe that life comes from matter.

On the cherry tree, I had a nice souvenir of an anecdote from the ancient Greeks. I want to write it down here, but I have to make a parenthesis before. Please, don't mind, it is philosophy, just like Prabhupada liked it. So, bear with me as I try to make my point. Thank you.

Many things can be put forward about what "Prabhupada said", and I do not deny that he also used the word instinct as Westerners do. Nevertheless, what I retain, especially from his teachings regarding this point, can be illustrated by a verse from the SB which starts like this: “The living entity in another type of body sees only by instinct.” (3.31.19) It is about a fetus praying to the Lord and acknowledging his fortune for having acquired a human body. Other species, like animals, can function only because of instincts, instead of their brain. That reduces their freedom, if any, unlike us. Then, in the purport, Prabhupada explains that the evolutionary process of the 8,400,000 bodies is gradual. There is systematic progress from the lower species of life to the higher. The human form being the highest. 

Stop an instant here... These three last sentences, in which I am paraphrasing Prabhupada, can be interpreted in a Darwinian meaning: bodies are transforming themselves by physical stimuli. We, as Vaișņavas, understand that it is done through the intermediary of consciousness and Paramatma. The Bhagavat Purana is a literature from India. The origin of scientific evolution takes its roots there. One of my credo is: everything comes from India. It was my personal reaction as a “constitutional preacher” to the dogmatic allegation that Greeks invented philosophy, art, reason, democracy, and the cherry tree. In Europe, Greece is considered the cradle of civilization. (I feel obliged now to explain myself on my understanding of a preacher. I put a note at the end of this essay.)

In this arena, where I fight knowing well that the spectators do not share my values, I see devotees sitting on the bleachers, astonishingly. They are upset with me when I say for example that Westerners have no scientific understanding of the soul and consciousness. (In this context, Westerners mean the ancient Greeks and Jews.) That’s why they concocted the biological process of evolution, not grasping the difference between animal and human, as explained in this verse of Srimad Bhagavatam. 

Remember, we are using the grammar tool of Western culture; the word instinct does not exist in Sanskrit as such. In this verse, (3.31.19), there is no equivalent for it, it was added by Srila Prabhupada. When we quote the SB, we are like in an arena filled up with supporters culturally averse to its content.

Discovering and inventing are like synonyms, sometimes. I used to read in educational books, and still do today, like in the video below, that the first men invented fire, that is, the prehistoric men who lived in caves. The smarter ones prefer to say: the first men discovered fire. Whether they use one or the other term, it is the proof that these persons have stepped out of the field of reason on this matter. The facts are simple; no one has ever invented or discovered fire or drinking water, whether Indians or Greeks. Naturally, Krishna created all the phenomena, but Westerners don't talk like that anymore. "Science makes God unnecessary. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator." Stephen Hawking

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I was in primary school in France when I learned that Romans discovered the cherry tree. The teacher had given us a free composition to do, and I had written a story. I described myself climbing a cherry tree during the Summer holidays, and eating the fruits with my friends. During this game, the children were fearless of the wind blowing in the branches, and one of us fell. We learned the next day of his death. She had liked it so much that she would have given me the best grade in the class, but as there were too many spelling and grammar mistakes, she gave me the second place. I read my fiction story aloud in front of the whole class. (By the way, I know my English is deficient, so I am doing my best.)

Now that I am an old man, I was mulling over all of this while cutting branches. For cherry, French say cerise. Cherry comes from cerise. I learned later on that it is originally a Greek word, and not Latin or Roman. These two civilizations were constantly fighting each other for the most sophisticated and intelligent position. Athens posed as the queen of the civilized world, and accused their neighbor of having shamelessly copied its art and philosophy. The Greeks took the Romans for oafish creatures. They used to call barbarians all other nations.

One of their controversies about the discovery of the cherry tree was reproduced in a book, the Banquet of the sophists, in the 4th century BC. Here is my translation of the exchange: 

Larensis, a Roman citizen, exclaims, “Hey, Little Greeks! You think you invented everything, but you don’t know that it was Lucullus who discovered the trees of Cerasonte. And it was he who called thus the fruit cerasium, after the very name of the city.” The Greeks replied that “many generations before this Lucullus, there was already mention of cherry trees and their fruits.”

It is like saying the Arabs invented our present numbers or the zero, as one can read in textbooks or dictionaries. It is what I have been hearing all my life, although it is wrong. After collecting this knowledge from India around the first millennium, it was introduced to Europe, along the way Arabic philosophers were introduced to the Sorbonne. Then, the French began to speculate like them and write philosophy. The rest, we all know. However the Arabs did not invent philosophy, they got inspiration from the Greeks, which in turn got theirs from elsewhere. In fact, there was no such a thing as a Greek's nation before Alexander of Macedonia. Only two towns are prominent, Athens and Sparta. Of the two, Athens counts really for something. It is all about propaganda and finding a cultural identity for nations who have no ancient historical roots, like France, Germany or the US.

Westerners are proud, as peacocks doing the wheel, that Greece (supposedly having invented everything…) is at the origin of their sciences. But, again, the Greeks discovered nothing of their own. For example they had no scientific understanding of the soul. Nothing. The information had reached them through Pythagoras, and subsequently the gymnasts and the great Plato developed it. Greeks plagiarized their knowledge from other civilizations; Egyptians, Iraqis, Iranians and Indians (nothing from China, curiously. Buddhism came there much later.) We deduce that the ancient Greeks derived their knowledge of the soul from the Hindus. For the Bhagavad-gita and the Puranas are the only ancient works that explain in great detail what the soul is and how it evolves through millions of species.

"For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain." (Bhagavad-gita 2.20)

From the bleachers where the Vaishnavas sit, a woman calls out, "That’s just bla, bla, bla—you’re talking nonsense!" Another shouts, "Who is this idiot?" 

I apologize for the interruption, but it’s worth noting that some devotees act like karmis, showing little regard for their so-called standards of purity in words and deeds. With that aside concluded, I’ll proceed. The cherry tree may have been named after a town called Cerasonte in Anatolia, but this doesn’t mean it originated there. Such assumptions about classification and origin lack scientific grounding. Yet, they expose the flaws in the historical and scientific philosophies forced upon students from elementary school to university. As a devotee of Krishna, I saw this as a golden opportunity to preach Krishna Consciousness. You may not like hearing this, but the meaning of preaching —or what it truly means to be a preacher— is widely misunderstood within our movement.

Many believe that simply copying and pasting teachings or distributing books qualifies as preaching. They treat the parrot as their symbol of transmission, insisting on rigid adherence to principles—even when it leads nowhere and yields the bitter fruit of hypocrisy. Take, for instance, the initiation vow to engage in sex only for procreation: it sets devotees up for cognitive dissonance. Most won’t attempt to refine or evolve the philosophy and principles. Instead, their idea of preaching boils down to building a worldwide movement on sectarian ideas. That’s the unfortunate reality.)

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* My definition of a preacher, and where I speak of a flashback which lasted less than a tenth of a second.

Srila Prabhupada was a preacher, he didn't care much about varnasrama-dharma. His heart was filled with the teachings of Caitanya Charitamrita. Farms were a necessity, for the masses, it was a consequence of spreading the sankirtana movement through every town and village. Temples and properties are the ferment of politics. He had a bad experience in India, before coming to America, therefore he didn't like politics. Life is easier and more pure as a traveling monk.

 Those who are sitting on the bleachers do not make distinction between a sankirtana devotee —a preacher to be more precise, and a temple or a farm devotee. When Adishekar got angry at me, which he often did, I mean, getting angry, he warned me that I will end up planting cabbages in New Mayapur as a punishment. (Years later, he became the Sankirtan Leader for the French yatra.)

He was a tough guy. In those days, the traveling sankirtana was romantic and austere. Summer or Winter, four slept in a van in the middle of a field, preferably next to a river. While one cooked the meal, rich and delicious, with chapatis, another gave the class; the oldest. That was Adishekar. We used to distribute books door to door in villages, dressed in dhoti, shaved head and sikha. We could spend most of our day alone, although we were always two. Around two o’clock, we will take prasadam together. One day, during a hot and sunny afternoon, I saw a beautiful cherry tree full of fruits, on an open property with no one living in it. I could not resist. I thought to surprise the devotees, and I started to collect some, filled with happiness and enjoying the moment. Adishekar was passing by with the van and saw me. He was furious. He chastised me for wasting my time like that. I don't feel like talking more about it, but the devotees didn’t eat any cherries that day. ■