Namonamah,
Vaibhavjee, Dr. Nutanjee,
Thanks.
But I insist: Laws of nature cannot be broken.
Our (not just as individuals, but also as humanity as a whole!) knowledge of the laws is tentative, so precariously founded on emperical evidence. And often we are not cognizant of the various cases and subcases that are part of the law. Often, we are not careful enough and make a parody of the law. An example in the physical sciences comes to mind. Newton's third law (we even don't bother to add "of motion"!) is often stated simply as "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction", and this statement is accepted more often than not! There are at least two points on which it is incomplete and therefore misleading. One: the fact that action and reaction act on different bodies. Two: that the action and reaction are "opposite" as vectors, that they happen along the same line but in different directions. But if this is not appreciated, we could come to the erronius conclusion that if A does "good" to B, B does "bad" to A (and there will be enough evidence to support it too!!). At different stages of learning and in different educational mileux such firm "understandings" are not uncommon, and in the absence of dialogue often remain undiscovered.
Newton's laws of motion themselves underwent a correction a hundred years ago, 2 centuries after being published.
These corrections due to Einstein are still tentative.
What we take as laws of nature are probably only vague descriptions of partial facets of ONE LAW which will probably be never understood completely.
This law is Parameshwar, and various partial facets are just individual Ishwar's, probably not even that! And the way we describe them is just like we call somebody "vivek". Just a name, for ease of use, and not really based on inherent characteristics.
So, the question arises: can we go against THE LAW of nature? No! We can only act, and in some cases we are fortunate enough to perceive results. And since we have not understood THE LAW at all, we can atmost
collect evidence about it: collect it and keep it. However much we accummulate, this evidence will always be too little and too thin to draw any conclusion. It only helps us form tentative opinions about the small, insignificant facets we call
laws of nature.
Can we go against these individual laws of nature? No. We can only act, and in some cases we are fortunate enough to perceive results. We can at best try to analyze what laws combined to give us the results. If we find that our actions are not getting the results as per stated laws of nature, we just have found more evidence that our understanding of the laws is ridiculously little. One more example of "Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti".
We should appreciate that if there are laws of nature, every such law will come into play for every action performed and for every inaction, and the result is a sum-total of results of all such laws. Because of this, it makes sense to talk of ONE LAW of nature; the unfathomable, "Toohi Nirankaar".
That plants grow upwards can just mean that the law of gravity is not the only law.
I wish to differentiate between STATED LAWS and COMMANDMENTS(RULES): Laws are stated in the form "If you do this, such and such will happen. If you murder, you could be put to death" If you accept the price you can go ahead and do whatever you want. You can't break it. Against this, commandments, like the Christian Ten Commandments (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_commandments) are of the form "You MUST do this" or "YOU must NOT do this", and are based on some authority. If you respect the authority, and if you don't obey any commandment, you have broken the commandment. If you don't respect the authority (not even by force), the commandments are anyway meaningless to you. Like the "Savinay kaaydebhang"/Civil Disobedience" movement of Gandhiji.
Hope I have put my interpretations faithfully!
Thanks and regards.
Milind Khadilkar
