Two students at UCLA discuss the origin of life.
Peter, who has recently discovered the Bhagavad-gita, a spiritual text from ancient India, introduces its persp
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Two students at UCLA discuss the origin of life.
Peter, who has recently discovered the Bhagavad-gita, a spiritual text from ancient India, introduces its perspective of the origin of life to his friend Mark.
Mark begins to question the "scientific" position presented by his university biology professors.
Mark's UCLA biology professor presents the current scientific doctrine that life is simply a combination of chemicals, and that life occurs at the moment when some, yet to be discovered, special life-producing combination of chemicals, occurs.
The Bhagavad-gita, on the other hand, describes two different energies, the living spiritual force and matter.
The Gita explains the living force is completely separate from matter and matter only appears to be living and conscious because of the presence of the living force, the spirt, the soul, within it.
Consciousness, according to the Gita, is the symptom of the presence of the spirit soul within the body, and once the spirit soul leaves the body there is nothing anyone can do to bring back the consciousness or the life.
Science, on the other hand, can not explain consciousness, can not explain the different manifestations of living and non-living items, can not explain what happens at the time of death, can not explain why a dead body can't be reanimated by adjusting its chemical combination, etc.
So Peter's friend, Mark, contemplates both explanations, from the Gita and from his university professors, of life and consciousness.
This is a a very interesting film produced by Yadubara Prabhu of ISKCON Cinema in the 1970's on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles.
While some of the clothing and hairstyles may be a little dated now, the subject of the conversation between Peter and Mark is timeless and ever-fresh.
