Posted on: 30 Mar 2021
[An online spiritual discussion was conducted on March 27, 2021, in which several devotees participated. Some of the questions of devotees answered by Swāmi are given below.]
[Śrī Anil Antony asked: Pādanamaskāram Swāmi! Can we say that awareness gets the special property of knowing due to prāṇa or the oxygen inhaled through the lungs? A robot does not breathe in prāṇa and hence, perhaps, it does not acquire this special property of knowing.]
Swāmi replied: Robot need not inhale air (oxygen) because you are supplying the energy directly to it. In the case of human being, the energy is not supplied from outside. The human being takes food and the food is digested and oxidised by the inhaled air (oxygen) or Prāṇa so that energy is released in the human being. Hence, knowledge is not connected to the air inhaled. Knowledge is the talent of knowing or feeling. If you treat such feeling as the extra merit of the human being, you can agree to such extra merit as the extra gift given by God to the human being. If you consider such feeling is nothing but a mechanical transformation process of the information stored in the chip to the screen of mind, human being is not different from robot. In any case, there is no issue of any contradiction. What I mean to say is that if you feel that feeling is extra in human being, let it be the special gift from God to human being and if you feel that the feeling is also a mechanical scientific process let it be so.