A Scientific Attitude

The following contains excerpts from Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh’s handwritten letters.

A scientific attitude is one that follows logic. It seeks evidence to form opinions and allows room for analysis, errors, and formulating new hypotheses. In other words, when someone adopts a scientific attitude towards a problem, he studies it carefully, puts that knowledge into practice and draws conclusions from the results rather than from hearsay or common belief.

Sardar Bahadur Ji gave some practical advice on how to implement a scientific attitude in relation to a specific problem related to agriculture. He explains:

At present I would request you to adopt a purely scientific attitude for the solution or attack of the fruit, … which means, as in other problems, you should study the literature on the subject [and] contact the professors of this subject to know or learn from them as much as is already known. Split the problem into factors, making a hypothesis concerning each factor or one factor at a time, and finally test that hypothesis by experimentation with a view to change the hypothesis into a fact, or discovering if it was not supported by experiment, and framing another hypothesis and testing that again by experiment.

I think this is what people call a scientific attitude. This is the way you grow new (sugar) canes. If I may be permitted to say, however, that the scientific attitude and worry do not go together. When mind worries, it means that it is not attacking the problem in a scientific manner.

When dealing with problems or doubts in life, adopting a scientific attitude can help us to line up a series of measures that will help us find a suitable solution. Moreover, the best part is that this leaves us with very little time and energy for worry.

Even when it comes to the biggest questions of life, like ‘Who am I?’; ‘What is my purpose in this world?’; or ‘What lies ahead?’ rather than fogging our perception with concepts, why not adopt the same scientific attitude and derive our conclusions from experience?

There are many different levels of reality, most of which we are completely oblivious to, and through the means of scientific experimentation, we can unravel them layer by layer without all the resistance that we create for ourselves when we dwell on our preconceived notions and unnecessary worries.

Sardar Bahadur Ji continues:

Reality and unreality or permanence and change … go together; wherever there is unreality or change …, there is also at its back the reality or the changeless. Change does not take place in nothingness. It takes place in something. If the material world is unreal because it changes, then the whole molecular world is real because man is made up of molecules. If [the] molecular world is unreal because molecules break up, then the atomic world is real because atoms make up molecules. If [the] atomic world is unreal because atoms change, then the electronic world is real because atoms are made up of electrons.

So, wherever there is change, at the back of it, there is something real in which that change is taking place. If the ice form of water disappears, it becomes a liquid state, and if that disappears, it is in a gas state. So, if the world is unreal, we have also an unreal fact – our physical body. So long as we are in the physical body, we have a use for this world. If we can detach ourselves from this physical body and go into the astral body, we automatically go from the physical world into the astral world. And if we further detach ourselves from the astral body and go into our still finer stuff, we automatically go from the astral world into the world of finer stuff – step by step we are going from the changeable and unreal into the changeless and real. The reality is within us; we are based in reality.

Our body is the laboratory in which this enquiry is to be made and the reality is to be reached. Please have a scientific attitude, which means we cast off worry, and prepare yourself for the experiment.