Two kids sometimes tease a third kid by making the latter catch a ball that they keep tossing to each other.

In recent intellectual history, empiricism and rationalism are like the two teasers; we humans are like the teased; and our attempts to comprehend the world are like catching the ball. At its inception, modern science aimed to explain the observed world – the ball was with empiricism. But as science developed, it adopted increasingly the language of mathematics to come up with intricate theories. Mathematics, especially its abstract fields such as calculus, relied primarily on the rational coherence of theories, not their visual representability. As science became dominated by mathematics-laden theories, the ball went to rationalism. It claimed that the working of the equations alone mattered; the non-representability of the underlying concepts didn’t.

Put in simplified terms, empiricism manifests today as relativity, whereas rationalism manifests as quantum physics. And humanity is struggling to understand which of these violently contradictory branches of science explainsa the actual nature of reality. Both explain some things and fail to explain some things, thus leaving humanity like the child struggling to catch the ball of truth.

Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (15.07) cautions that the fragmented soul struggles in this world, being driven by the senses and the mind. The same verse points to the solution when it declares that we are eternal parts of the Absolute Truth, Krishna. The more we live according to our spiritual identity by learning to love Krishna, the more we realize that the knowledge that really matters is the knowledge of trans-material reality – the spiritual realm that is our ultimate destiny. By diligent devotional practice, our spiritual cognition awakens, and we gain reliable and relishable understanding of ultimate reality. Thus, we finally catch the ball of truth.

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