Bulletin No: 2017.32 - Thursday, 7 September 2017

Conversations With Daaji
Kanha Shanti Vanam

Wednesday, 6 September 2017

This morning Daaji left early to conduct a Heartfulness workshop for IAS officers, returning just after 9 a.m. During breakfast he had a discussion with a few abhyasis about various recent activities of Heartfulness and Brighter Minds, and then the topic moved to evolution and consciousness.

Creation, human evolution and consciousness

Q: Saheb, if we look at evolution in the Darwinian sense, first we have the origins of matter, then the oceans and then life emerged out of the oceans on this planet, and much later came human beings.

Daaji: Yes, that is the physical manifestion, but when we look at the whole thing from the spiritual perspective it is a different story. The souls of human beings came first as a part of the first Super-Mind of God. The currents of Purusha and Prakriti descended from the Kshob and our souls with that. What are soul mates? Those souls that descended from the Source in the same instant – even a few milliseconds later as everything expanded from the Source and they would not have had that same connection.

And it is still expanding. The creation of the universe is still going on at a speed at which we cannot even conceive. I once tried to observe it in meditation. I wanted to observe that first wave of creation, but when I tried I was completely gone – it was not possible to be conscious of its movement.

How we view human evolution also changes. In the physical sense, we are supposed to be evolving, developing our mental capacities, our brains, but if we look at human beings from the time of Creation onwards, our consciousness has been gradually degrading, so that now it is hampered by so much heaviness in the form of samskaras.

As consciousness keeps degrading with the outward manifestation of the universe, more and more chakras will be added to the human system. The original chakras are not the lowest ones in the human system, but the highest. Our degradation is not the natural expression of God, but it is our own creation. God has given us the potential and our purity or lack of purity is of our own making.

Even if we go back a few thousand years, to the time of Patanjali, he identified five Yamas and five Niyamas. Now we can add more, because our negative tendencies are more complex than in Patanjali’s time.

Also, if you observe the functions of the subtle body, they are also omnipresent. For example, pure Buddhi is there in everything – in the plant kingdom vines know how to send out tendrils to wrap around branches and poles; amoebae know how to orient towards sensory stimuli like light and sound. We see intelligence manifesting everywhere in life. But where can this Buddhi evolve into its deeper form? Where can it manifest as intuition and eventually wisdom? It manifests wherever an evolved being has mastered the sixth limb of Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga, Dharana, the art of holding and germinating in the mental womb of the heart. This we commonly understand as listening to the heart.

So you see, how we view evolution depends on whether we are viewing it from the perspective of the physical world of matter or the causal, spiritual perspective. Both are interlinked of course but our focus determines what we see.