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by Swami Krishnananda
All descriptions concerning the origin or creation of the universe are intended to clarify philosophical and psychological situations which arise due to an inborn belief that the world must have an origin, and must have a creator. This is a hypothesis which cannot itself be explained by any rational process of investigation. Why should it be necessary for the world to have a creator outside itself? Why should anyone create a problem and then try to find a solution for it? Has anyone seen God creating the world? But how is it that people everywhere speak of the creation of the world as if they have witnessed God working at the beginning of things. The circumstance actually involves two facets, namely, (a) belief in the word of the Scripture, which narrates the story of creation by God; (b) a necessity felt by inductive logic and the natural manner of human thinking that everything that is visible must have come from somewhere and that all things must have been made by someone as a cause preceding an effect.
Taking the first issue, namely, the descriptions and explanations in the Scriptures, it is no doubt true that the Scripture of every religion, except those that do not bring in a God into the picture, speaks of God creating the world out of His own Will, not because He has a desire but it is His Nature automatically operating, as the sun shedding light without any desire to do the work of shining. Firstly, therefore, it has to be accepted that God creating the universe does not imply an action like some human being working, because God is timeless Being, and no action is conceivable where time is absent. Hence it is fallacious to take the creation theory literally, as if God is some large man thinking and working like man only. Creation is like the four-dimensional realm of modern physics appearing as a three-dimensional world of empirical experience. And no scientist will say that four-dimensional existence has createdEthe three-dimensional world. The electrons or the atoms do not createEthe stone of which they are the internal constituents. This would land us on the question: Is the world really there? For, if a stone is really there, it should be visible to the microscope which sees only a pressure of electromagnetic force commensurate with the entire structure of the universe. In this light, the world and God would be two names for one and the same thing, and any question regarding creation by God would fundamentally lack scientific basis.
The renowned philosopher, Acharya Sankara, says that theories of creation are not intended to describe an actual historical process of the world coming from God, as if God started manufacturing things in some ancient time, but that these stories of the procession of effects from God at the top are indicative of a higher truth that God alone is, inasmuch as the logical relationship between effect and cause negatives any difference between the two, thus merging the effect in the cause, that is to say, leaving God alone to Himself with no world whatsoever as a product externally created.
The infinity and the omnipresence of God, which is accepted by everyone, precludes the possibility of a world being there outside God. An appearance of a reality cannot be regarded as something created by reality. Hence all problems arising in respect of desire, playfulness, constraint and the like on the part of God, get ruled out and the question contradicts itself, since the necessity for the world to have a cause outside it is a hypothesis characteristic of the three-dimensional way of human thinking in which it is shackled.
The idea of pleasure and pain is a product of what may be called parochial thinking, without the consciousness of any reference which one may have with other factors that range beyond human perception. Pleasure and pain do not exist as if they are things hanging somewhere in space. These are names given to conditions of experience undergone by a particular degree of consciousness when the atmosphere which it regards as existing external to itself in space and time is either reconcilable or irreconcilable with its present condition. It is a pain for a human being to be dipped within the bowels of the cold waters of the Ganga, but a delight to the fish swimming within it pleasantly. Man never thinks the same thought throughout his life. Todays pleasure is tomorrows sorrow. These facts are not unknown in human history. Apart from the psychological considerations, there is a scientific and a metaphysical error in thinking that pleasure and pain are existent in objects, as it were. A cool breeze in summer is pleasant, and the same thing is unpleasant in winter. A fourth or fifth cup of pleasant milk causes nausea. The rich people of the world know the sorrow caused by their wealth. People who crave for having children know the troubles of family life and social tension. Why go so far? Since pleasure and pain are conditions of particular circumstances of individualities in relation to reality outside, any excessive harping on the tune of lifes sufferings may require a more impartial adjudication.
The horror of the big fish swallowing the smaller ones and the apparent unjustifiability behind the survival of the strongest, or, we may say, the fittest, is inseparable from the basic psychological defect which Alfred North Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,Ewhich means to say that human judgements of what look like local events and occurrences do not take into consideration their vaster relationship to the universe as a whole, such that every event is a universal event, and it is not the big fish that swallows the smaller one but the evolutionary impulse of the cosmos adjusting itself in terms of its internal components for a purpose that transcends an existing situation. Evolution is not a pain, even as no one regards as pain the growth of a child into a mature genius. The whole difficulty arises because of the thought that God is outside the universe and handles things as a carpenter operates on his tools. This unfortunate weakness of human thought raises the frightful bogey of questions which have as much reality and meaning as its own intrinsic worth. Evolution is not for anybodys pain or pleasure, because, there is no anybody" outside the process of evolution. The Infinite seems to proceed from the Infinite, and return to the Infinite, all which can suggest nothing more than that the Infinite is just what it is.
If we insist on finding a reason behind the sufferings of life, whatever be their nature and detail, it has to be accepted that the justice of the universe which is a single organism cannot permit illogical and, therefore, unjust occurrences within its internal constitution. Life in the world is seen to be a little complicated by the operation of the law of action and reaction, called Karma. This is a principle according to which every action produces an effect with an equal force. Bondage is considered to be the reaction produced by actions which defy the fact of the unitary structure of the cosmos of which all individuals are inseparable parts. This principle of reaction to action arises only when this intrinsic inseparable connection of the individual with the cosmos is forgotten and the former indulges in attitudes or actions with the false notion that it is an independent actor or doer, consequently inviting the nemesis of reaction. The universe is the shadow cast by the wishes of its contents, and it is what these wishes are and what they sweep away from infinite existence with the winds of the forces moving towards their fulfilment. Since the acceptance of the fact of creation implies the fact of pleasure and pain in life and suggests a cause behind the effect, it would follow that there are endless causes behind endless effects moving in a cyclic fashion, which system operating in the time-bound world is called by different names by the religions of the world; and the Indian tradition calculates this cycle of an endless revolution by its concept of the Yugas or temporal ages known as Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, in the descending order of knowledge and virtue. All this would explain why no man tied down to the present cycle alone can know why anyone has any particular experience, pleasurable or miserable, since the causes behind effects visible in the present cycle can originate from earlier cycles, and therefore it cannot be said that there is an undeserved pleasure or an undeserved suffering. Nothing can come from nothing, is indeed sound logic.
There is no precise saying as to when a lower species evolves into the higher one. Since personal agency in action cannot be attributed to sub-human species, all evolution below the human level is supposed to be a spontaneous fulfilment of the vast purpose of Nature. The progress of the sub-human organism, or the rise from the lower condition of the soul to the higher, is considered automatic as a spontaneous action of the universal Nature in the case of all beings who are free from the egoism of personal agency in action. Personal effort comes into relief only at the human level wherein consciousness becomes self-consciousness, an individual affirmative urge, whereby this centre of affirmation is severed from the supporting hand of the universal Nature and self-effort on the part of ones own individual self becomes the well-known drudgery of life. The animal nature when it rises to the human level will, in the natural course of things, take higher births, gradually, provided right thinking harmonious with the total universe motivates its thought and action. The sufferings of animals, as with sufferings of human beings, in whatever way they be called, are already touched upon in their essential causational circumstances, in what we have considered already above in a different context. There can be no devil engaged in inflicting sorrows on anyone, even as there cannot be a world external to the omnipresent reality. Human thought has to learn a little of the art of the vision of things by superhuman insight before whose glowing radiance the world will shed its cloak of all darkness and misfortune.
The Epics and Puranas are there only to dilate upon the secret hints and hidden truths embedded in the body of the Vedas. The gospel of the Vedas does not contradict the Epics and the Puranas. People who speak of a difference herein are mostly those who have not made a thorough and entire study of either the Vedas or the Epics and Puranas in their true spirit. The hells and heavens of the Puranas are gradations or degrees of expression of reality, all which is corroborated in the Vedas in a more concise and pithy form. The meaning of the Vedas is too hard for the ordinary mind to grasp, and a mere grammatical or linguistic translation of them cannot be said to convey their real message. The Vedas are supposed to be interpreted from the subjective, the objective as well as the universal points of view and not merely as bodies of words which have just a dictionary meaning. The Epics and Puranas are elaborations of truths which are already embodied in the Vedas in a loftier form.
What is known as Satan may be regarded as the centrifugal urge of the cosmos, an impulse to move away from the centre to the periphery or the outer circumference as space, time and objects. God is the Centre of the Universe, and everything that is divine, the opposite of the so-called Satan, is the centripetal urge, an impulse that directs itself towards the Centre of the Universe. Neither God nor Satan can be viewed anthropomorphically. But man has an inveterate habit of converting God into a widespread man and visualise Satan as the quintessence of wickedness, again viewed as some person existing somewhere. Nothing of the kind is called for in the broad daylight of clearer thinking. Our earlier analyses above would be sufficient clarification of whatever one may think God is, Satan is, or their supposed relationship is. We are not puppets at the mercy of anyone, as we are integral parts of the universe; call this, if you would like, mans relationship to God. With this awakening, the idea of the devil, or Satan, vanishes into thin air.
The duty of man, then, is an inward collaboration with the structure of all things, the law of the Universe; we may say the Universe is more a large area of a law operating than a thing, an object or substance. The terms Sattva, Rajas and Tamas imply the threefold condition of the constituents of the Universe, and the injunction to cultivate a tendency to Sattva is the highlighting of a requirement on the part of everyone to move towards larger dimensions of universality, that is to say, cosmical being. This naturally implies a rise from Tamas, or unconscious motivation and existence, and Rajas which is the impulse of consciousness to diversification and distraction of attention in a multitude of ways. Sattva is the integrated perspicacity of the total reality, or the wholeness of being, which is the final aim of all things and towards which it is that everyone, and everything, anywhere, seems to be eagerly moving inwardly as well as outwardly.