Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #3 – Do You Believe in Miracles?!
Dhanurdhara Swami January 13th, 2025
Do You Believe in Miracles?![1]
When something miraculous happens, we have two mutually exclusive choices to explain it. Either its cause is supernatural or within the scope of known natural laws. For example, the famous magician David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. His audience was blown away, but when later it was discovered how he did it, it was clear that it was just a brilliantly orchestrated stunt.
But does that mean that all “miracles” have an explanation within the laws of nature? In this post I will explain at least some miracles in my own life that don’t seem to have a natural explanation. You can be the judge about which approach provides the best way to understand them: Are they miracles, events not explicable by scientific laws, or just natural occurrences?
The mystic jaundice doctor
In Vrindavan, there was a simple sādhu named Shyama Sakhi who cured jaundice by chanting mantras and pouring water over the afflicted. As the water turned yellow, the jaundice would wash away, so he claimed. Many people I knew gave testimony backing his claim. Despite their claims, I remained skeptical until a visit to Bangalore one summer when I completely lost my appetite and began to sleep all day. I was forced to immediately accept medical help because in three days I had a non-refundable ticket for the forty-eight-hour train ride back to Vrindavan for an extremely important meeting. The doctor checked me thoroughly and pronounced his diagnosis: “You have a very severe case of jaundice and must rest for a minimum of three weeks!” I wasn’t happy when he also nixed my travels plans. The train ride was much too dangerous for someone in my condition, he emphatically informed me. By providence, that afternoon I met a local person visiting our ashram who was informed of my condition. He told me of a simple middle-class housewife who could cure jaundice. I was desperate and I made an appointment to see her that afternoon. I remember this very ordinary housewife splashing water over my eyes. The water turned yellow, and soon I was free of jaundice. Within a day I was eating samosas and was able to return to Vrindavan as scheduled! Seems like a miracle to me.
The mystic rasagullā
In 1974, my college roommate invited me to visit him at ISKCON Dallas during my summer break from graduate school. We had met devotees four years earlier together. While he immediately joined, I hesitated. Despite my own conviction in bhakti, I was unable to make the decision to become a “devotee.” In those days, for a man that meant shaving up and moving into the ashram. By fortune, however, just a week after I arrived in Dallas, Śrīla Prabhupāda was also visiting the temple. He invited all the devotees to his room to distribute prasādam to them. I remember waiting on a long line for my turn to enter. The whole time I was fervently praying for the strength to fully surrender, but still the obstacles seemed insurmountable. I concluded that despite my desire to join, that there was just no way I could become a devotee. When my turn came, I walked respectfully into Śrīla Prabhupāda’s room, paid my obeisances, stretched out my hand and received a rasagullā directly from his hand. The minute I bit into it, all doubts were gone and I decided to stay and move into the ashram. I was shocked. How did that happen? Certainly, those without my faith could offer so many natural explanations based on their study of psychology. I know my mind, however. The change was just so sudden, so beyond my reasoning at the time, and the transformation so timed with that one bite, that the only plausible explanation is the inconceivable mercy of God’s devotee.
The miracle of coincidence
I have written about this several times. I met devotees at a Sunday feast in Los Angeles, became inspired, and the next day with my friends headed up to San Francisco on Highway 1 singing Hare Krishna. Our first stop was a Chinese restaurant. When we left the restaurant, the devotees were right outside chanting in a lively kirtan. We joined in. That evening the only place we could find to sleep was the parking lot of a football stadium adjacent to Golden Gate Park. There was only one Hare Krishna Center in the whole city. Somehow the back door of that storefront temple opened to that parking lot and by coincidence we parked our car directly under their window! The rest is history, so to speak. I became a devotee.[2] An excerpt from an article where I describe this incident:
“Basically, I argue that if one carefully studies his own life he will find a synchronicity between certain events, or ‘meaningful coincidences’ as Carl Jung defined it, whose probability of occurrence was so small that it was far more likely that the cause of those events rests beyond any random occurrence under the laws of nature. What makes those events even more improbable is the link between those external events and our inner life, as if those events were personally directed towards helping us grow.”
In summary, the best explanation for the preponderance of the occurrence of mutual coincidences in my life, and a devout life in general, is so far beyond the explanation of chance, that the best explanation for them rests outside the laws of nature.
The miracle of fine tuning
This is a big topic and a more general one, but it involves a miracle in our life, nonetheless. Basically, the universe is extremely fine-tuned for the appearance of life. Many favorable, but unlikely, conditions, are met. The probability of all those conditions happening by chance is likely under 1 in 10120. The conditional probability of life arising by chance should be set close to zero. So yes, the existence of a fine-tuned universe supporting our existence itself is just a miracle. And the best explanation is God.
Do You Believe in Miracles?!
[1] This is a relatively famous quote spoken in 1980, but perhaps not for someone born after 1965 not in the USA. Anyone in my audience also know the source?
[2] https://wavesofdevotion.com/2016/06/13/an-original-argument-for-the-existence-of-god/
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