Q: How can any individual claim the apex of knowledge?
Krishna: People usually answer this Q answer from a spiritual point of view. Let me try to answer the Q from a scientific point of view.
Because this universe is based on scientific principles and run by science in reality.
To reach “Apex of knowledge”, we, as human beings have several limitations. What you think is real knowledge might be just your interpretation and need not be a fact.
Therefore, to overcome all human weaknesses in interpreting things science has set some rules. Scientific method … validification, falsification, improvement.
Our Universe is based on and follows certain scientific principles ... that is established science. If it is not, our universe would have collapsed by now. As it is working wonderfully, the universe has clearly demarcated what is science and what is not. If your study agrees with the universal science, it is undoubtedly 'scientific'. Nobody can challenge and provide evidence contrary to that. Universal science is settled.
While Science is what our universe works with and a settled one at that, science is also the process with which we try to understand things. It’s about explaining the world we see, developing models that fit the data. But fitting models to data is a complex and multifaceted process. In this process the universe itself is our guide. Human mind might not be able to comprehend fully and correctly sometimes because of its limitations, but there are processes called falsifications and corrections to set things right. It is because of the human mind limitations, we most often have only the best knowledge under the present circumstances. If we get things right, and if our data fits with the universal versions there won't be any falsification and it is theultimate knowledge.
If what we observe concurs with the universal principles of science, that itself is evidence that we got it right. If we can make things work using our new found knowledge ( inventions based on discoveries), that itself is proof we got things right.
Q: My son is an atheist. And I am worried. If there is no god or gods, then is everything permitted? On what should one base morality in the absence of immortality and God? If there are no strings attached, and if nothing exists after death, why not do immoral things? Krishna: Is God a moral police? No, every thing is not permitted when u live in a civilized society or have a good conscience. On what should one base morality in the absence of immortality and God? On your reasoning and critical thinking power. you do not do immoral things for some reward. U don’ t do them because as a human being u know such things would hurt other people like you or cause imbalances in peaceful societies. Stop worrying. your son will be okay.
Q: Do you stand for what you believe in or are you pleasing others? Krishna: I stand for what I trust, i.e., science based facts, not for what i believe in - I don’t blindly believe in anything - even if it annoys others. I have full confidence in my critical thinking abilities. Nobody has shown genuine evidence till now to prove me wrong. People tried but failed miserably.
That is how strong evidence based facts and critical thinking are! U simply can’t beat them!
Q: Why are palmistry and astrology considered pseudo-science?
Krishna: Because they don’t adhere to scientific method. Read here all the details…
Q:What are some ways to gauge a persons intelligence or lack of, within ten minutes of meeting them?
Krishna: Most people try to impress others immediately after they meet them. Therefore, they pretend to be a good/intelligent person and do what they think is right to give you a good first impression.
So you cannot guess anything right about a person immediately after you meet him. Don’t try to attempt it. You can rarely succeed.
You have to spend sometime with the person to get an accurate picture. Have patience. Only after a few days, after the ‘honey moon’ period is over, you will be able to really know what his personality is really like and whether he is intelligent or not.
People who attend job interviews will mostly get trained to paint a nice picture about themselves. If you yourself are not smart you will fall for their pretences.
I will never fall for ‘first impressions’.
Q:Is it true to say that in the modern world, everyone is a hypocrite without his own knowledge?
Krishna: What do you mean by ‘without his own knowledge’?
Okay, tell me this: A scientist discovers something for the first time. Isn’t that his or her own knowledge found by the same person? A thorough researcher who worked in a field for several years has his/her own knowledge and therefore is called a specialist or expert in the field. I have my own knowledge about the things I found for the first time and reported it to the world by publishing the papers! It is not a borrowed knowledge.
Or some might have confirmed my discoveries by reproducing the same results. These too have their own knowledge.
Oh, yes, all the others might not have ‘his or her own knowledge about the things I found’ but studied or read it and therefore have borrowed knowledge.
What I think is when you think about Several people answering questions are writing something on which they don't have first hand knowledge of, they might have borrowed or copy and paste knowledge if they are not experts.
But I don’t think experts here are hypocrites. They have their own knowledge and therefore, are highly reliable unlike ‘others’ or ‘non-experts’.
Q: Is being positive the right thing to do like some say?
Krishna: If I say being realistic is the right way?
According to experts, Suppressing or turning away from our difficult emotions is not healthy or helpful.
What happens is, it undermines our ability to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. This is associated with lower levels of resilience, lower levels of well being, and higher levels of depression and anxiety. And it also impacts our relationships and our ability to achieve our goals.
Instead of pushing negativity aside or forcing positivity, one critical way of dealing with a difficult emotion is to label it effectively. When we can label our emotions more accurately, it helps us understand the cause of those emotions and activates what’s called a ‘readiness potential,’ your ability to set goals and to make real concrete changes.
Being positive makes us expect too much. It is not a very effective tool and can be downright harmful in some cases, when you don’t get the picture right and anticipate more than you put efforts into a situation. That is like kidding yourself!
There are much better ways to get the benefits that positive thinking allegedly provides. Can you actually go through life without labeling what happens to you as good or bad? Yes, you can. You have to train yourself to do this. You have been conditioned to think of things as bad or good. You can de-condition yourself.
Think of our pain and suffering as being hit by two arrows. The first arrow, the inevitable pain of life, whether a difficult event, thought or feeling, is shot at us; we have little control over this. But then we shoot a second arrow at ourselves with our own reaction to the pain, amplifying and prolonging it. The suffering from the refusal or pushing away of this pain, the "it shouldn’t be here," the "I can’t stand this," but also the blaming, the ruminating, the "why me?" the "it’s always been this way and always going to be this way" stories: these are the parts we add. To put it simply: pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
Failures might occur in life. When they do, you should revisit your problem, analyse it thoroughly and realistically in an enlightened way and think you haven't found a proper solution to it yet and that's why you couldn't overcome it, then try to get one, increase your efficiency of the effort, plug the loopholes and go after it with all your might to defeat it.
That is the realistic way of doing things.
Q:I have hardly ever been in groups. I am mostly on my own. How do people get into groups anyway? Is there some magic genetic formula?
Krishna: Groups provide some sort of emotional support for the weak minded.
Groups provide support for the young and the weak bodied (they have an evolutionary advantage).
Groups are for extroverts who depend on ‘friends and family support’.
For people like us who don’t need any sort of external assistance, groups make no sense and we avoid them.
Q: What will be your first Q to a ghost if you see one?
Krishna: Why am I imagining something like this which doesn’t exist? Why am I hallucinating? What is wrong with me?
Q: Is black magic effecting humanity and our lives?
Krishna: Yes, definitely! It effects you psychologically. Black magic works only on mentally weak people, not because it actually works but because it affects their psychology. When you think it is working, you get scared, worried, get depressed and think everything negative happening in your life is because of it.
If somebody can control your mind and life like that it is because you showed them your weaknesses and vulnerability. Fear, uncertainty, greed and jealousy and of course ignorance are these deficiencies in your mental make up.
Just a few mantras, lemon and chilies or some kumkum and haldi or a doll or a few neem leaves cannot do any harm to anybody. A person who cannot control his own destiny cannot do any harm to others. No person has such supernatural powers as to cause harm to others just by wishful thinking. Realize that. Then nothing or nobody can effect you.
Thenoceboeffect has been seen in clinical trials. The opposite of the placebo effect, the nocebo effect can cause patients to develop symptoms when told there might be a side-effect of a possibly harmless drug. This may explain how a curse could have a real effect.
Some people try to earn money by cheating people and telling them they can do black magic on others. If you are a sucker, you believe them.
Science doesn’t accept black magic because there is no such thing actually. It just is a superstition. Your baseless belief that is effecting you mentally because you are not strong. So stop believing in it if you don't want it to work psychologically.
Moreover people kill others to get more powers, money etc. And they kill to stop suspected black magicians ‘that are causing harm to them’!
Q:My superstitious Mom in India asks me often to send money ($100) to religious Guru. I don’t believe in them. She is threatened by them something bad will happen. How do I say no without hurting her?
Krishna: Most of the time it is the psychology (something bad or good will happen) that really works.
Thenoceboeffect has been seen in clinical trials. The opposite of the placebo effect, the nocebo effect can cause patients to develop symptoms when told there might be a side-effect of a possibly harmless drug. This may explain how a curse could have a real effect.
Some people try to earn money by cheating people and telling them they can do black magic on others or harm them in some way. If you are a sucker, you believe them.
You can point to anything bad happened in your lives ( it happens most of the time - like cutting your finger, hurting yourself in some way, getting fever, losing money) and convince your mother that despite sending money, you couldn’t avoid bad things happening and therefore it is of no use sending money. Ask her why despite sending money, your guru is not taking care of you.
I would have told somebody who believes in such things that I have sent the money without actually sending the money. If nothing bad happens, they would have the psychological comfort that because I sent the money, nothing bad has happened. In case something bad happened, I would convince the person that despite sending the money, there is no effect of it and therefore, it is useless to send money as this doesn’t work. Both ways you can win.
Yes, there is a chance that your mother might find out that you didn’t send the money, then point out all the good things happened to you ( like getting promotion, winning a prize/award/money, getting rid of your cold very early) and convince her, despite not sending the money all good things are happening to you and therefore, there is no need to send money.
You can manipulate the psychologically weak in any way you want. But the difference between you and your manipulator guru is - you are doing it for a good purpose. So you won’t feel bad about it.
Q: How does soul enter in test tube babies?
Krishna: There is no evidence of soul in the first place according to science. When you imagine something in a situation, you can as well imagine it in several other situations that can exist.
You won’t get a fact based answers to these type of questions. Just perceptions, strange imaginations, stories, beliefs and what not.
Krishna: No! Everything a magician does can be explained using science. No body can have supernatural powers.
Q: Why should I not believe or believe in a so called pseudoscience such as palmistry or astrology?Is there a scientific way to prove them wrong without a doubt?
Krishna : Yes, of course! Why Astrology is Pseudo-science .
But your acceptance depends on your ability to understand the pseudo-science of astrology, your open-mindedness to consider it, critically analyse it and then coming to a conclusion. Let me see how well you can do that.
Q: How do I train my brain to think better?
Krishna: Critical thinking is the highest form of reasoning . If you can do that properly, you make less mistakes.
Read here how to train yourself to think critically …
Q: What videos on the net prove the existence of the supernatural?
Krishna : Videos don’t prove the existence of supernatural. Genuine scientific evidence does. Because videos can be concocted stories, photoshopped pictures, anecdotal experiences, strange perceptions, and misinformation. People who believe them are naive.
Q: Why is a suggestion better than forcing someone to do certain things?
Krishna: Each and every adult person has his or her own right to do and live life in the way s/he wants. We have no right to force things on others. If we have more knowledge than others, we can only educate them, suggest things and leave it to them to choose whatever they want to do.
But in our societies people ‘indirectly’ force others to do things in the way they think is correct. And if the latter refuse to do in that way, they will have to face the ‘consequences’. Some vulnerable people suffer and some like me don’t give a damn and become rebels nobody can touch! :)
However, there are certain life and death situations where you can ‘force’ other irresponsible people who refuse to see reason and endanger others’ lives . Like anti-vaxxers who refuse to get their children vaccinated and put the all the other children in danger. Several times governments and courts forced these people to get their children vaccinated.
And parents of young children can force their children to do certain things and not do some for the child’s own welfare as children are considered not ‘mature enough’ to take their own decisions.
Forcing or not forcing can depend on people, situations, and total well-being of the world we live in. You cannot measure everything with just one yard-stick.
Q: Do repeated coincidences happen at the 'hand of God'? Krishna : A coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances that have no apparent causal connection with one another. The perception of remarkable coincidences may lead to supernatural, occult, or paranormal claims.
From a statistical perspective, coincidences are inevitable and often less remarkable than they may appear intuitively. An example is the birthday coincidence which shows that the probability of two persons having the same birthday already exceeds 50% in a group of only 23 persons!
A rational mind thinks about statistics and probabilities in such circumstances whereas an intuitive person thinks about his beliefs!
Now come to your own conclusion.
Q: Why do scientists deny the existence of a spiritual world?
Krishna: We don’t deny it. We only think people should follow a neutral path, not a biased one. How?
During the pre-scientific era people don’t know why something happens and how the knowledge could be manipulated. So they invented stories based on their primitive understanding of the world and strange perceptions and did weird things.
If you still follow it, that means you still haven’t progressed in any way despite the scientific knowledge we have now.
Q: As a writer, do you find that you fall more deeply in love with other writers?
Krishna: NO!
These days you find some writers writing about all sorts of silly things that make no sense at all - propagating myths, beliefs, pseudo-things, strange perceptions, misconceptions and what not. Each write-up or story reflects how a writer perceives the world, interprets it based on his biases, fallacies, conditioning of mind etc.
Intellectualism and critical thinking are becoming rare. But when I find such writers who are intellectuals, my respect for them gets established.
Falling in love is a different ball game and involves more complex emotions a critical thinker can overcome.
So just because he or she is a writer, I don’t fall for him or her. It takes ‘much more’ than that to fall in love.
Q: What kind of planetary combination in Astrology gives extreme bad luck, and how do you overcome it?
Q; How do you think you would react if you saw a ghost lurking in your house in the middle of the night?
Krishna: My first reaction as a person of science would be asking myself, ‘Why am I hallucinating like this? What is wrong with me?’ Then I would take remedial measures to reduce my hallucinations.
Krishna: They don’t visit you at any time, because science says there is no evidence of ghosts.
You can imagine things and hallucinate them under certain conditions. While hallucinations can occur at any time, darkness brings fear and and the resultant creativity in the brain make you see things when there aren’t any in reality.
Q: What would happen when ghosts are scientifically proven?
Krishna: Several people have tried but failed to provide genuine evidence till now. All that they provide is anecdotal evidence, no true person of science can accept. If they can’t prove it, what would they do? Take the help of pseudo-science and try to justify their beliefs.
If you can provide ‘genuine scientific evidence’, then the world of science accepts that they exist. Until then, we remain skeptic, like this …
Krishna: Because it is pseudo-science. It is not a perception but evidence based fact. Scientists put it in the first three places in the list of pseudo-science.
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