Welcome to the Purely Prabhupada channel. This video series is called “Reality distinguished from illusion for the welfare of all.” My name is Kamra devi dasi, and I am a disciple of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada.
This is the fourteenth video of the series. It is called “The active principle.”
Sometimes we see in on the label of an herbal product that it is standardized to a certain percent of the “active ingredient,” or the “active principle.” But any good herbalist knows that the active principle of the herb is the entire herb, with all its natural constituents, some of which may be not yet discovered by science. In specialized fields of medicine, the functioning of the entire body is often neglected with attention paid only to the area of symptomatic distress. For example, a podiatrist may choose to operate on the feet of someone with dropped arches and neglect that there may be systemic calcium metabolism challenges that were at least partially responsible for the complaint. In nutrition, milk, fresh from the milk bag of the cow, according to Vedic wisdom, possesses subtle properties and nutrition that are unknown to science and which nourish the finer tissues of the brain to support spiritual understanding. The scientists and nutritionists do not have the entire picture of the benefits of natural milk. In my own past natural health care practice, I could potentially see twenty different people who had been medically diagnosed with asthma, for example, and they were treated for the symptoms with no good or long term result. Yet, iridology and sclerology would reveal different causes of the symptoms for each of them… There are areas of the brain, cells of the brain, that are individually named for the person who discovered them. But none of these cells can operate independent of each other, much as the discoverer will try to isolate their unique function. We cannot understand a disease pattern or the efficacy of an herb or the function of the brain without looking at the entire picture, the entire organism, the entire herb, the entire arrangement.
In the same way, we cannot understand the material creation without looking at the greater picture, the whole of creation. (Show picture) This material world is only a small corner of the entire creation. It consists of many planets, many galaxies, but it still is only a small, dark corner of everything that exists. Science only knows of this world of matter. The rest of the creation is available only through the great literature coming directly from the Lord, who is the active principle Himself, through a chain of pure and empowered self-realized souls.
We also cannot understand or realize the self, who we are, except in relation to God, Who is complete in everything. We can meditate, contemplate, speculate, but we will never be able to understand or comprehend ourselves until we become willing to accept that we are part and parcel of the Supreme Lord, that He alone is the active principle of all that be, and that our real nature is to serve Him. And this is the most important knowledge to achieve, and the most important practice in which to participate, in the entire cosmic manifestation.
All the teachers and text books of this world cannot show us this truth. This pure science of the self can only be revealed by teachings that come directly from the greater spiritual world. We have many of them available at PurelyPrabhupada.com, authored by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada, pure emissary of the Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself, Lord Sri Krishna.
